A Conversation with Jeff Seibert: Winter 2022

Jeffrey Seibert worked closely with Kenneth and Gloria Wapnick at the Foundation for A Course in Miracles for decades. Jeff moved with the Foundation to its current location in Henderson, Nevada where he teaches streamed classes available through the Foundation’s website Foundation for A Course in Miracles. He continues to present Ken’s mind-healing message of A Course in Miracles forgiveness through the lens of his own forgiveness classrooms.

The Foundation has a new website with updated functionality as well as changes in content. Can you explain what led to those changes and what they will mean for students?

It’s a reflection of the Foundation’s updated mission statement that recognizes how really helpful Ken’s teachings are for anyone who genuinely wants to understand what this challenging spiritual document is telling us. We wanted to make it very clear that we are committed to continuing the work that Ken began and want to make it very available and accessible. Certainly, for those of us like you and me who see ourselves as students of Ken’s, there’s really no other teacher. I’ve talked in the past about how he helped me to remove the blinders that I had to understanding what these teachings are all about. I don’t know how I could have come to understand the Course more deeply without his clear and gentle but very direct teaching over the years.

We also were thinking about making a website that is clear in its focus on Ken’s teachings, so that it is accessible not just for today’s student but for the future student. As stated in the mission statement—so that the Course student of 2071 trying to understand would have a place to come to that is making it very evident that Ken is a teacher who can really help him or her understand the Course’s sometimes veiled message that turns our perception of everything in our life upside down, if we let ourselves truly hear it.

You know Ken often referred to Helen saying that the Course was really for only five or six people. Clearly the idea implied is that it’s not for very many people yet but for some time off in the future, maybe for fifty years from now, or even two-hundred years from now, as Ken at times seemed to suggest. But it’s for some time off in the future. And so, the Foundation has a responsibility to make sure we are maintaining and preserving Ken’s teachings in a way that will be clearly accessible to students who may come to the Course when we’re long gone. That doesn’t mean that the website won’t change over the years, but we wanted to make it very clear that the focus is on Ken’s teachings.

OK, thank you. I’ve been listening to the recently released audio class Weeding Our Garden and attended that academy class and remembered it being one of the most powerful classes of Ken’s I’d ever attended. In that class he talked about the Course being ahead of its time and I think he also said something later on—I haven’t gotten to it yet—about how the content of it will be here far into the future, we don’t know if the form will be exactly the same but the content will be.

Yes, and he has said this is not the final teaching that will come through but it’s what’s needed now, even if not many are yet ready to embrace its teachings at the deepest level,  and it may continue to be needed for quite some time given the state of the world and the obvious need for another way.

In the Western world it really is the only non-dualistic spiritual teaching of its kind, it’s completely unique.

Yes, other non-dualistic teachings with parallels to it have their origins in the East. The Course comes within a framework that allows people in the West to relate to it. Some people find it an obstacle that it came within a Christian context using Christian terminology even though it turns everything (in traditional Christianity) upside down, but Ken has said that is intentional because we need to learn to forgive ourselves for what we have done to distort Jesus’ message of love and forgiveness from two thousand years ago.

But it is for those five or six people in the sense that it requires some awareness that this is not a nice world. I have to realize my life is pretty conflicted, that my way of relating isn’t working; I need a better way.

Yeah, that awareness which is central to the Course is such a contrast to what people from a New Age perspective generally believe about consciousness evolving higher and higher. Certainly, on a global level, that doesn’t seem to be the way you can characterize what’s happening in the world in the present.

Right. So, the mission statement is on the website?

It’s on the home page. Foundation for A Course in Miracles. It says “Our mission is simple and singular. To present, protect, and preserve the teachings of Dr. Kenneth Wapnick on A Course in Miracles.  Not only for students of the present but equally for the troubled person of 2171, who has found the Course, recognized this is exactly what they had been seeking, and realized they do not really understand it.”

That was certainly my experience in 1985, 1986. I knew it was what I was looking for, but I didn’t understand it.

Absolutely. I found it much later than you did, and I knew that it was what I’d been looking for and needed but I also recognized I didn’t understand it for a couple of years until I really began to listen to Ken’s classes and read his books. And it strikes me that the recognition that I didn’t understand it was the real opening.

Exactly. I was very fortunate that within a month or two of having picked up the Course I met somebody who knew of Ken’s teachings and had some of his early audio tapes and books. At first, I was skeptical but as soon as I listened to Ken and went back to the Course it became so clear that he had an understanding that I really needed.

Yeah. I found myself just wanting to listen to everything he’d taught and kind of just hoping I would absorb it through repetition.

Yes, because as Ken says, we read it from the perspective of the body and we’re looking for something we hope will make this life a better life and Ken makes it so clear that that’s not at all what it’s saying.

No. But his work helps you begin to heal your mind about your life and the world and Ken left us such an incredible legacy of books, audios, videos (FACIM Online Store)—so many that I don’t even think I’ll have time to get to explore them all in my lifetime. But by continuing to immerse myself in Ken’s work, now when I read the Course, it’s a much deeper and really much more transforming experience than it was before.

Yes, I can remember early on after I’d come to the Foundation and joined the staff, I always had the opportunity to sit in on all of Ken’s classes. And he would say something, and it would trigger an awareness of a deeper understanding and I was actually foolish enough to have the thought: “Now I understand what it’s saying.” And after about three times of having that thought following one of Kens’ programs, I would realize again that I didn’t. So, I finally stopped thinking that now I understand it.

Right. It keeps evolving. It’s more like: “I heard it a little deeper this time.”

You know, I was rereading “The Obstacles to Peace” in Chapter 19 (T 19 IV.) the other day in preparation for the Tuesday night class I teach based on Ken’s teachings and I found myself loving it and thinking “this is so beautiful.” But it used to scare the hell out of me, you know? Of course, I haven’t gotten to the reference to “the hungry dogs of fear” yet.

(MUTUAL LAUGHTER)

But still, even the parts that graphically describe the real nature of our world, it feels very refreshing to hear it directly and nonjudgmentally stated that there is no real hope here, only in the mind outside the dream. It doesn’t mean I fully understand it yet but it has been a welcome shift.

Yes, you keep going deeper with it and realize that there’s still deeper to go. And it makes it clear that there is no point in looking for answers in the world.

Exactly. You have a new streamed class that you’re offering called “Encounters with Ken.” Could you describe it and what the thinking is behind the format you chose for this class?

Well as the title of the program—”Encounters with Ken”— suggests, the word “encounter” is reflecting the reference to a “holy encounter” in the Course but also the idea that we’re confronted with ourselves and our many false beliefs through this encounter with Ken’s teachings. So, the format is to watch a selected video, viewing a couple of segments each week over several weeks, depending on how long the entire video is. So, once we finish one video, we move onto another one from the collection of over fifty videos.

The focus is for all of us to come together to watch and listen to Ken teaching us. It’s been touching to hear—even though we’re all in our own location and you’re not really seeing anybody else—how many people have expressed having the sense of being together with each other and with Ken. That really was the idea behind it. And, too, we’re moving beyond the idea of just giving people excerpts to giving people the opportunity to hear entire programs. Not all at one time but in sections in each class.

So, in the “Encounters with Ken” class, we watch a segment of the video together, and then there is an opportunity for students to submit questions that have come up for them while listening to Ken and what that might have triggered for them in terms of understanding or coming to grips with the implications for practicing the principles. We spend some time doing that and then go back and watch another segment and conclude with another opportunity for people to ask questions and have them answered in real time.

I’m very pleased with the way people are showing up and participating. It seems like something that many people were ready for.

I haven’t yet had the time to attend live but am listening to the recordings and it seems like people are submitting written questions that you’re then reading and answering?

Yes, they’re submitting them through the chat feature during and after viewing the segment of Ken’s video and then I read those questions and respond to them pretty much in the order in which they were just submitted. It is in that sense happening in real time.

At this point as we talk in early January 2022, I have only had time to watch the most recent program. That said, I would have to agree that I had the same feeling that you mentioned that I was in a group of students listening to Ken and you in real time. Somehow it felt like a very intimate learning experience and I’m really looking forward to viewing and listening to more.

I wonder if you could address some of the other changes the Foundation has made to its website, such as taking some of the material from the previous website down. What was the thinking there?

There was so much there before that the sense for a lot of people was that it could be somewhat overwhelming. That’s not to say that the broad range of material was not helpful at some level for some students. But again, the vast array of offerings could be confusing and even overwhelming to sort through. So, we decided to simplify what is being offered. If you look at the history of the Foundation, you will see that things on the level of form and structure have always been changing. I know you don’t have the personal experience going all the way back to Roscoe but certainly our years there involved a constant transformation of the forms through which the teachings were being offered, how they were offered. Only the loving content remained constant.

I look at the current changes with the websites and the program offerings as a continuation of that process where the Foundation goes in one direction for a while, and then something happens that makes it apparent that there is now a need for a shift in direction, reflected in a change in the form.

There was a period of time in Roscoe when all of the formal teaching actually stopped and all that we offered were two-week “contemplatives.” Rosemarie (LoSasso) and I (Ken and Gloria were not directly involved with the students) would meet with all of the students who came for the contemplative right at the beginning and lay out what the theme and purpose of that particular program was—we would give them some readings related to that theme. And then we would send them off for two weeks with the guidelines of just being quiet and trying to minimize their interactions with others and see what came up for them. And then we would come together again at the end. If anyone had any crisis in the middle, they could reach out to us. So that was completely different from what we had been doing. The idea was to encourage students to turn increasingly to their internal teacher and reduce their dependency on any external teacher. And then that program went away.

After our move to Temecula in May/June of 2001, Ken once again took over all the teaching just by himself, for the first six months. He then invited Rosemarie and me to join him in the teaching again in the new year. So, it seems there has always been constant change in the form of what the Foundation is offering.

That’s very interesting. I wish I’d been around for those contemplatives. But I guess what you’re saying is that the Foundation and teaching is ever evolving to enable a deepening practice?

Yes. That is the goal.

That makes perfect sense.

Well, if it’s OK, I wanted to ask you about a couple of questions related to my forgiveness practice and classroom that came up while I was listening to last week’s “Encounters with Ken” segment from Ken’s video Darkness to Light that I heard a little differently.

First, Ken said something I’ve heard him say versions of before; that the reason why we find the choice to forgive so difficult is because it reflects the “tiny, mad idea” of separation as just a silly mistake which means that I’m a silly mistake. So, we don’t want to claim responsibility for our actual identity as decision-making minds.

It really struck me this time because I have a lot of really stressful things going on in my life—what else is new, right? 😊 —but there are a lot of decisions I have to make. Some important financial decisions and just a lot of things I have to take care of on the level of form that seem urgent. Earlier in this dream I don’t remember struggling this much with making decisions but I’m very aware now that not only are there no choices in form that seem to offer satisfactory solutions, but more importantly that everything seems fraught around the process of deciding.

Anyway, I was thinking about having trouble making decisions as reflecting that unconscious mistaken choice to take the “tiny, mad idea” of separation and run away from Love seriously in the first place. I guess the question is how do we make important decisions we have to make that are required of us on the level of form peacefully? Is it just trying to do it by mindfully choosing Jesus as my inner teacher?

I think it’s so essential, in order to allow our decision making to be a peaceful process, that as best we can, we keep getting in touch with the idea that if I’m in conflict in any situation that seems to be confronting me here in my life and struggling with how to decide, it’s really only a shadowy disguise that’s concealing the real conflict that’s in the mind. That’s what you always want to get back to.

I think the fact that you are finding it harder at this point in your life to make decisions may be a reflection of your growing recognition that you are getting more and more in touch with that hidden conflict, which the ego never wants us to really be aware of. In other words, the underlying content is coming closer to the surface in your awareness and so your ego is trying even more desperately to keep your attention riveted on the external problems. So even though it may feel like just the opposite, this difficulty can be an indication of the progress you are really making on your journey in uncovering the darkness that is covering the light and the love.

And so the process of choosing to make decisions here with Jesus means first recognizing where the anxiety and conflict is really coming from. It’s a conflict that comes from the whole unconscious ego myth that we’ve stolen this individual identity from Heaven and destroyed the Love and now God has come back and wants to take back what we have stolen from Him and destroy us. So, we make that imaginary conflict between ourselves and God real in the mind and then bury it. And so, none of us are usually ever in touch with that hidden conflict. But that’s really what’s fueling all our experiences here that seem so fraught with difficulty. They are all just shadows of that unconscious inner conflict that is not being addressed so long as we keep our focus on the external conflict and fear, whether it is about finances,  or health, or our relationships, or whatever it seems to be in form.

Rather than denying the conflict we experience here, or trying to minimize it, Jesus is telling us we can use it to get back in touch with the buried unconscious conflict that it must be a projection of. And it is that conflict we want to take to Jesus and ask for help to see that inner conflict as he does, that it is silly and not serious. And this is not just a magical formula that will take all our anxiety and fear away, but it is a step towards recognizing that, as Ken has so often reminded us, Lesson 5, “I am never upset for the reason I think.”

If we can be willing to let Jesus’ love begin to touch us, by being willing to drop all the chatter and judgments racing though our mind about the external situation even for just an instant, we will begin to see the impossibility of the ego’s assertion that we have destroyed love. And that can begin to loosen the grip of the guilt and fear we have made real in our mind, which will allow us then to approach the external situation with less of a  need to project guilt and fear and conflict on to it. So, it is never about figuring out how to make the right external decision, which instead can follow from first making the right internal decision for the right teacher, of peace rather than conflict, of love rather than fear.

Now, of course, sometimes problems in our life seem really fearful and Ken would always emphasize we never want to deny what we are feeling. But the goal is always to get to the content that’s underneath the external conflict and fear. And that’s where Jesus really helps us by saying look at what you believe you’ve done. Even if it is unconscious, just look at it with me, perhaps it’s reflected in your belief that things need to be difficult and you need to suffer, and realize it’s just not true–you have not destroyed love.  Jesus wants us to see that he couldn’t be with us offering a different way if that were true.

When we can begin to relax about what’s hidden underneath by being willing to look at it, it can take the conflict out of the current external situation. It takes a lot of practice, but the goal is more and more to recognize as soon as we can that, again, we’re never upset for the reason we think, which means the external problem is not what I am ever upset about. Not ever! The world was made so the conflict feels like it’s outside of us and then, as you say, there’s never any satisfactory solution because we’re not addressing the real problem, the root of the feeling that we have.

It’s possible to recognize that nothing here can really be that serious if it’s all part of the hallucination, the dream, and the underlying conflict with God is also part of the dream, the secret dream. It’s really a process of moving toward becoming a lucid dreamer as we realize the dream events can’t be the cause of my anxiety and upset, rather it’s the unconscious belief in our sinfulness and guilt where all our distress is coming from. But this takes a lot of willingness and a lot of practice.

If we’re able to step outside of our problem and look back at it from above the battleground we can realize that it’s not what it appears to be. But we’re very much invested in it and identified with it, and we can’t just deny that. And what Jesus is trying to help us recognize is that the nightmare that I’ve made up (in form) is really about the secret dream (of separation from God) we’ve all made up in our mind.

So, it’s always about looking. I think that’s what this program on the theme of moving from the darkness to the light is emphasizing, that you really have to get in touch with the darkness in the mind. It’s projected out to the world, but you can’t accomplish anything by trying to sort out the shadows. You’ve got to get back to the darkness we made real in the unconscious mind. And that’s what Ken keeps emphasizing, that it’s a process of undoing all the beliefs associated with that darkness in the mind.

It strikes me as you’re talking, too, that in a sense, if I’m at least making this connection that the trouble I’m having making these decisions in form really isn’t about the decisions but that connection to the fear that I made the wrong decision in the past, even if I’m still not peaceful about the decisions I have to make, I must be looking at it with Jesus or I couldn’t be making that connection. Because the ego would never have me make that connection. So, I’m not all the way to real peace but maybe part-way, looking with Jesus.

Yes, exactly! Because the ego would never want us to make that connection or question the cause of our experience in the world . That’s a big part of the journey back. It is a journey. I think we get frustrated because we say I’ve been practicing forgiveness for so long, for so many years, but I’m still not at peace so much of the time. But we’re still on a journey. We haven’t gotten to our destination yet of complete and total peace, and there’s still some trepidation about reaching our destination.

Yes. And as long as there’s still guilt in the mind, we might have those truly peaceful interludes where we’re outside the dream but most of the time we’re still in it.

Yes, so true! So, if we can realize, as Ken keeps emphasizing, this fear that we have is ultimately, as he’s saying, the fear of Love. The Course tells us Love and Oneness are the same and it’s really our fear of Oneness, in which my separate individual self that I identify with has no reality. So, we have to be gentle with ourselves and kind. Since we never really left home, we are only dreaming we are here, that’s why the outcome has to be certain. Because at some point we are going to wake up and it will become clear how foolish it is to look for anything here in the world. Especially when we realize that the idea of looking here is so that we don’t look at what we believe in the wrong mind, so that we don’t see the Love that’s really there that is all that we really want. Nothing else can possibly satisfy us.

Yeah. You know in that same program I think Ken was emphasizing the fine line between being gentle with ourselves and indulging our choice for the ego. And I started thinking about how I’m seventeen, eighteen years now into practicing the Course and in the dreamscape, it seems like the script keeps upping the stakes over time so that every time I seem to have made progress with letting go of anger in a long-time special relationship more and more issues come up that enrage me, as Susan. So, I was really inquiring within about that because I don’t feel like I’m indulging myself but I still get angry a lot and the anger can seem so extreme and raw.

I think that as we go deeper with this, we are just uncovering the depth of the anger and the rage that is there. In that video Darkness to Light the very first thing Ken talked about was Jesus telling Helen and Bill at a point when their relationship was really starting to get better that you have to look at the intense hatred that you have for each other. So, he was saying there’s more to come up.

It’s kind of horrifying. And hatred is exactly the word I would use because it feels so primitive and violent, reflecting that ego thought system of you or me, one or the other. And it really is this emotion that just seems to take over. And so, I suppose you just keep practicing?

You know we set ourselves up for disappointment and believing we are failing when we think that this process with the Course should be getting easier and gentler—not because it can’t be— but because what we are doing in this process is uncovering the depth and the horror of this thought system. The ego would of course want to say here’s proof that this Course doesn’t work, you’re not doing it right. But the fact is that we’re getting more and more in touch with how deep this goes because it does get projected out in our relationships and that’s how we are able to see it. But the intensity of it seems to get greater and we think, wait a minute. I thought this was supposed to be getting more peaceful but it’s going in the other direction. But that is part of the process and we’re far enough along now that we can look at this and have that perspective. We may still want to judge ourselves, but the truth is that this is really evidence that you’re willing to look more and more deeply.

It’s interesting that Ken says in the video that, after that statement of Jesus’ to Helen and Bill, their relationship took a turn for the worse and it never really came back out of conflict. Maybe on some level obviously that was the fear of looking but also, they were given the opportunity, if they were using it as Jesus was suggesting, to see how deep their hatred really went. But even then, the real hatred is for ourselves, and that self is the self we all share in the split mind, identified with the ego.

Yes, that deep self-loathing we have. I feel that, too. But that’s very helpful to remember that all of these emotions are really just part of the process, the journey home. Of course, we’ve just come through New Year’s again in the dream and a part of me wants to really accelerate my progress and recommit to healing my mind and letting go of this hatred. The ego was really joining the journey, I think, in retrospect, and of course all that unconscious fear that opposes that desire and declaration just sort of smacks you upside the head. It’s not like you can somehow conquer the ego.

Yes, any attempt to conquer or defeat the ego only makes it even more real in our experience. That is why it must be a process of simply looking with the loving presence of Jesus beside us and not trying to change the ego, as Ken was always emphasizing, but simply recognizing how much a part of us still wants to believe in its “power.”

And when you think about what the book says and what Ken teaches about undoing the blocks to Love’s presence, well, what does that mean? You have to recognize the blocks. They have to come up and be there for you to look at.

-Well, they are.

(MUTUAL LAUGHTER.)

But there’s no turning back.

Right. There’s no safe haven in the other direction, our substitutes for love no longer seem to help because we know too clearly what they are, and it’s too painful to stay here.

Yes, that’s even more horrifying.  Well, that’s really all the questions that I had for now. Is there anything you’d like to add about the Foundation or anything else?

I guess I want to add to what we’ve just been talking about and offer what is the hope in the darkness. This is why Ken has always emphasized that having a relationship with our inner Teacher is so important so that we do remember as often as we can that we’re not being asked to do this on our own. The deeper we go, the more and more important it is that we remember that there is this gentle, loving presence within—Jesus, Holy Spirit, or Ken. The ego would want us to believe that we are doing this alone but it’s central to the Course’s process to connect with that loving relationship within. To recognize as we’re uncovering this stuff the need to bring it to that loving presence that has no judgment at all even though we still continue to. And that’s so central that we are not doing this alone.

Yes, thank you for that reminder. And as the Course emphasizes and Ken emphasizes all the time it’s really about learning to trust. As you go deeper into this process it may not always seem as if that loving presence is there, at least that’s been my experience. But it must be true that presence is there for me if I am making the connection that my emotional reactions, however extreme, are not really about the other person or what’s happening in my body or my finances or the world around me, it’s just always about that fear of Love in my mind.

Yes, as you say, realizing that any recognition that I am not upset for the reason I think must reflect some awareness of that loving presence within, or I would not be remembering that. And yes, then trusting that what we truly need we will have. We get ourselves into trouble when we want to define what that should look like. But the help we truly need is always there, accessible to us when we are willing to turn to it. And the problems that seem to be confronting us in our lives, requiring difficult decisions to be made, are the means for uncovering the darkness within and so we may even be able to learn in time to be grateful for them.

That’s so important that we don’t know what it is we really need or what’s really in our best interests. Thank you again, Jeff. I’m excited about the new class “Encounters with Ken” and I know that people are already finding it very helpful.

Thanks, Susan. It has been good to have this time with you again.