Collages by Vartika Sharma. Source image © Judith Collins/Alamy

Last spring, I flew across the continent to California and drove into the beautiful hills of Mill Valley to visit the independent publisher of A Course in Miracles. I wanted to learn more about this book, one of the strangest I had ever read. I had been in its thrall for months, and sensed that if I could understand how it had been written, I would understand everything. I would learn how to live and write anew, words would start flowing from my hands, and I would again be happy.

The Course is a thirteen-hundred-page spiritual text that was published in 1976, has sold millions of copies in dozens of languages, and has never been out of print. It was written by Helen Schucman, though her name does not appear on the cover. She felt it would be wrong, since she didn’t consider herself its author, merely its “scribe.”

I first encountered the Course in the weeks following my father’s death, a year before the pandemic. It was there on my shelves, but I couldn’t remember ever having bought it. I found its ideas exciting and novel, but almost too intense: some private, mourning impulse made me put it away.

Then, in the fall of 2022, I began to feel a mounting malaise and a grayish lack of purpose. I was disenchanted with the prospect of continuing to write novels, and fearing I was on the cusp of a depression, I went to my shelves to look for the book, sensing it would help me.

Within days of reading it, I started to feel better, almost radiantly lit up with spiritual purpose. Walking my dog in the park one afternoon, I spotted a nun—an unusual sight in my neighborhood in Toronto. We spoke and, under the spell of the book, I saw it as a message from the universe that I should contact her parish to volunteer. For a week, I really thought I would, until I really didn’t. Yet the Course was working to make me feel part of an amazing, suspenseful, cosmic mystery, and I began recommending it to everyone I knew.

In my uncertain state, I felt attracted to its grave authority and strange diction. (“How bleak and despairing is the ego’s use of time!”) The basic premise of the Course is that humans live in a world of illusion, reinforced by the ego, which puts us at a distance from God. The “Atonement” is the day that we (“the Sonship”) and God are waiting for, when that distance will be erased. “Miracles” are acts of love and forgiveness among people—gifts from God. These miracles temporarily erase “the separation” between us and the divine, speed up time, and bring us closer to the Atonement.

I was impressed by how Christian ideas about love and forgiveness had been translated into therapeutic language (“the ego,” “defenses,” sentiments like “anger always involves projection of separation, which must ultimately be accepted as one’s own responsibility”). I liked that the book implied that Jesus chose to be crucified, and that some major questions that divide religions, like what happens after death, were deliberately and democratically left unanswered, the text stating that people should believe whatever helps them live.

As I learned more about the writing process, the book’s tone—rapturous and eternal, but also anachronistic and Freudian—began to make more sense. It was 1965. Helen was nearly sixty years old and for almost a decade had been working as a research psychologist at Columbia-Presbyterian, when she became aware of a mysterious inner “Voice.” After she told her boss, William Thetford, with whom she was secretly in love, he, intrigued, encouraged her to write down what it said.

She later explained the process, which continued for seven years, as “highly interruptible”:

At the office I could lay down the notebook to answer the telephone, talk to a patient, supervise a junior staff member, or attend to one of our numerous emergencies, returning to the writing without even checking back to see where I left off. At home I could talk to [my husband] Louis, chat with a friend, answer the telephone, or take a nap, picking up afterwards without disturbing the smooth flow of words in the slightest. . . . It was as if the Voice merely waited until I came back and then started in again. I wrote with equal ease at home, in the office, on a park bench, or in a taxi. . . . There could be interruptions of hours, days, and on occasion even weeks, without any loss in continuity.

As a writer, I envied this, and in envying it, I believed it. I had experienced enough uncanniness in the writing of books to suspect that the spiritual realm participates somehow, though I couldn’t say how. But Helen’s effortless, yearslong relationship with the “source” was unlike anything I had ever read about or experienced. I figured she was either uniquely blessed, or else had unlocked some secret access to the divine. I wanted that same ecstatic power, that easy portal to God. My life, my mind, had become too predictable and too static.

As I researched more, a simple, vivid image of Helen Schucman and William Thetford appeared before me, and it remained near me like a postcard hanging over my desk. A prim and petite woman wearing oversize glasses holds a sheaf of shorthand notes. She is standing in a bright, book-strewn office in a posture of reading out loud. A man sits erect at his typewriter. He is tall, nicely dressed, and benignly handsome. She is standing close to him, maybe even half sitting on his desk.

I was amazed by the intense effect the book was having on me. The grandness of its vision was brightening my midlife certainty that my days would only grow dimmer and narrower. Its beguiling logic made me feel elated, lightheaded. After even a few minutes of reading, the world would start to feel dislodged from reality and new—a feeling I liked and welcomed. Dizzy, I copied down passages like these:

Each day should be devoted to miracles. The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning.

A message cannot be communicated unless it makes sense. How sensible can your messages be, when you ask for what you do not want? Yet as long as you are afraid of your will, that is precisely what you are asking for.

Where the ego perceives one person as a replacement for another, the Holy Spirit sees them joined and indivisible. He does not judge between them, knowing they are one. Being united, they are one because they are the same. Substitution is clearly a process in which they are perceived as different.

But my wonder was complicated when I soon discovered something upsetting: within a year of the book’s publication, Helen had begun to refuse to speak about it publicly. And by the time of her death five years later, she had fallen into a deep depression and a fury so intense that it frightened the few people who remained close to her. She began regularly cursing the Course as “that damned book,” saying she had always feared it would create a cult, and that she wished it had never been published.

Helen Cohn was born into an emotionally distant, upper-middle-class family in 1909. Her parents were half-Jewish, her father an atheist and her mother a seeker who dabbled in theosophy. As a child growing up in New York, she had unfulfilled spiritual longings and fantasized about becoming a writer, but felt herself blocked from both writing and reading.

In her early twenties, she attended NYU, where she met Louis Schucman, a fellow student, whom she married. After graduation, she loafed around and worked in his bookstore, fretting over what to do with her life, until she returned to NYU in her early forties to get her Ph.D. in clinical psychology. In grad school, she “worried incessantly” until her essays were returned, certain she had written something “dreadfully stupid, and the professor would laugh.” She received her degree in 1957, when she was almost fifty.

The following year, Bill Thetford—everyone called him Bill—was looking to hire a clinical research assistant at Columbia-Presbyterian. An acquaintance recommended Helen.

In a series of autobiographical interviews carried out the year after Helen’s death, Bill recalled that when he first met Helen, she seemed

rather strange. She was obviously very bright, but a bit scattered. I had the feeling that her mind was going around in circles. There were a lot of peripheral non-sequiturs, but I was aware that there was a core that was very solid. She did not find the job being offered to her particularly attractive. . . . The salary was not good, and there was nothing particularly appealing about the position.

Helen later recalled that upon meeting Bill, a little voice in her head said, “And there he is; he’s the one I’m supposed to help.” So she took the job. She may have also found him personally appealing. He was thirteen years her junior, and as Bill’s friend Carol Howe wrote in her biography of him, he was exceptionally humorous and charming. Although he was closeted professionally and had few “close relationships,” he was very flirtatious with both sexes and “was capable of giving anyone his complete, undivided attention, evoking a feeling of being valued and cared for.”

Prior to this, Helen had been working at the Shield Institute, where she was studying and helping children who had been born with severe congenital brain defects. At a time when it was customary to remove such cases from their homes and place them in institutions, she believed that each child had unique aptitudes and the ability to learn. She and her colleagues cherished the hope that one day these children would be able to function in society, attend public schools, and remain in the care of their families.

In an unpublished autobiography, Helen wrote that she found the transition to the new job difficult. The atmosphere was “ghastly” and “oppressive,” and she called it “the dullest and most difficult situation of my professional life.” Bill, who had started there a few months before, was no happier. “The stress level of the situation in which we found ourselves at Columbia Medical School had become unbearable,” he recalled. “We were living in a continuous state of anxiety among professional colleagues who seemed to be chronically hostile and paranoid.”

A few years after Helen was hired, in the summer of 1965, their department was transferred into a newly built research center, where Bill arranged for himself and Helen to have offices next to each other, at a distance from the rest of their colleagues. One morning, before another dreaded staff meeting, Helen went to fetch Bill. Suddenly Bill found himself “making an uncharacteristic, rather impassioned speech”:

I told her that even though I felt we could go on working this way indefinitely, I wondered if it was really worth it. “There must be another way of living in harmony rather than discord, of looking at all this differently,” I said, “and I am determined to find it.” . . . I was very surprised when Helen agreed with me and said that she would help me find another way.

Then, that fall, a strange incident occurred: Helen called Bill in the middle of the night, panicked, and told him about an inner voice that kept repeating, “This is a course in miracles, please take notes.” She asked him, “What shall I do? Suppose it’s crazy.” Bill told her to write down what she heard; she could read it to him the following day. “If it doesn’t make any sense, no one else has to know about it,” he reassured her.

The next morning, Helen appeared in his office with her notes and nervously read the words aloud. Bill sat quietly. He then told her it was astonishingly beautiful, and urged her to keep listening and writing. Helen was more uncertain. As she wrote in her unfinished memoir, she did not regard herself as “a good candidate for a scribal role,” and shortly after the project began, she stated her opposition to the Voice “silently but strongly”:

“Why me?” I asked. “I’m not even religious. I don’t understand the things that have been happening to me and I don’t even like them. Besides, they make me nervous. I’m just about as poor a choice as you could make.”

“On the contrary,” I was quietly assured. “You are an excellent choice, and for a very simple reason. You will do it.”

Helen realized this was true. So for the next seven years—often daily—she would visit Bill in his office and read out her notes while he typed them up. I suppose it was very convenient that their new offices were at a distance from anyone who might have wondered at their increased contact and intimacy. “Naturally, we did not discuss this with our colleagues,” Bill told an interviewer. “None of our professional associates were aware that this was going on.”

Scribing the first book—the “Text”—a fascinating, dense, theoretical laying out of Course principles, took Helen nearly three years. She thought she was done, but after several months passed, she told Bill that she felt a “Workbook” was coming. Over the next few years, she took down this second volume, more prosaic in tone and divided into 365 short chapters, with a lesson or activity for each day, designed to train a person in seeing reality the way the Course lays out. (I find the Workbook rather trite in comparison with the Text; Lesson 1 tells the reader to “look slowly around you” and say of each individual thing you see, “This table does not mean anything. This chair does not mean anything. This hand does not mean anything.”)

Bill called the book “a collaborative assignment,” for though Helen was the one who heard the Voice, she couldn’t revisit her notes alone as “she found the content of the Course too threatening.” Bill’s role, along with creating the typewritten manuscript, was, he said, “to offer the considerable support and reassurance needed each day for Helen to continue her shorthand notebook recording.” After all, “she kept feeling that maybe she was losing her mind.”

Yet despite her misgivings and self-described “periods of open rebellion,” Helen continued to listen and write, while Bill, surprised by the hundreds of pages of spiritual wisdom streaming out of his colleague, was deeply moved. “I did regard this as the answer to my question that there must be another way.”

I couldn’t resist telling my friends about the Course, which didn’t always go so well. Some were familiar with the book and told me about relatives who had been changed by it: an in-law revealed that it had cured her brother of a drug addiction; the friend of a friend’s mother who had recently died had done the Course three times and considered it her Bible. But most others, after agreeably purchasing a copy or flipping through mine, told me they found it “unreadable.” I had the book sent to my mother. The next time I visited, she asked me to please have it sent back.

One day, it occurred to me that a living link to Helen and Bill must still be alive. The book hadn’t been written so long ago, although it felt ancient. I soon set up a meeting with its publisher, Tam Morgan, outside San Francisco at the Foundation for Inner Peace. Sensing my anxiety about not making our meeting on time, Tam endearingly reassured me, “We do the very best to promote inner peace, so don’t worry. Traveling is traveling.”

Tam had inherited the role of publisher from her mother, Judith Skutch Whitson. She and her second husband had founded the Foundation for ParaSensory Investigation in 1972, after Judith thought she detected psychic abilities in her young daughter, Tam. A few years later, Judith met Helen and Bill through a friend. Helen liked Judith—she was a crop-haired beauty with the smile of a pageant winner—and she offered to let her read the unpublished pages of the Course, which until then few had seen. Captivated, Judith asked Helen if she could publish it. Helen was unsure. To be safe, she and Bill and Judith consulted the Voice, which gave its blessing.

The Skutches renamed their organization the Foundation for Inner Peace (Bill and Helen were uncomfortable with the word “parasensory”) and began devoting themselves exclusively to the Course. Judith, a born networker, spent over a year promoting the book around the world, and word of it soon began to spread. (The publishers have done very little advertising.)

In the early Nineties, the book received a huge boost in popularity after being promoted on TV by Oprah. Today, A Course in Miracles is considered by some to be one of the most influential modern spiritual texts. It has been translated into twenty-seven languages and is even used in some churches, including within the New Thought movement. It has spawned countless study groups around the world and is sometimes referred to as the Bible of the New Age.

At the height of a beautiful May afternoon, I arrived at Tam’s house (on time). It was a lovely, light-filled space; a cleaned-up hippie dream of bright walls, wicker and wood, totemic objects everywhere, and huge windows overlooking the valley and the trees. A swinging chair hung in the corner of the living room.

Tam was petite, white-haired, youthful-seeming, and gregarious. She wore a pretty, sleeveless flowered blouse and had a warm and confiding air. After putting out tea and chocolates, she invited me to look in her bedroom, which she had done over like a forest. The ceilings, the walls—every inch of it was covered in leaves and branches and moss, which she had nailed, screwed, and glued up. She had needed to make a comforting space for herself while caring for her dying parents, she told me.

Tam was a teenager when she first met Helen: “Even though Helen had an almost heavy New York Jew accent”—Tam’s family was also Jewish—“her demeanor was very British. Like, little white gloves. Sitting very, very properly. She was so bright. She had some very strong judgments and belief systems that were extremely critical. My mother introduced her to so many people, and Helen was the queen. And she seemed to really like that, being treated as the queen.”

But she didn’t want to be worshipped for the book, Tam told me. “She had no desire to actually practice the Course. It was uncomfortable for her. She didn’t want to be known for it, she didn’t want to be idolized for it, none of that. That was not her ego identification. Her ego identification was a fabulous child psychologist, fabulous intellect, colleague, and all the things that she did so well. She didn’t want people thinking she was nuts.”

When I asked Tam what the essence of the Course was, for her, she said it was about “changing your perceptions from fear to love,” and even more, a very strange form of forgiveness. “It’s not ‘I forgive you for what you did.’ It’s ‘I realize you never did anything.’ That this”—reality—“is a dream.”¹

Tam described Bill as “a very attractive man. Lovely, funny, bright man.” He and Helen were frequent guests in her parents’ house, and Tam recalled: “They couldn’t get away from each other. What’s the word I’m thinking of? . . . Inextricable. Bill had a home in Fire Island and he had an extra room built for Helen and her husband. And yet, as she said to my mother, ‘You know, I would have left my husband in a second.’ But that wasn’t Bill’s proclivity. But he deeply admired and respected Helen. Tremendously. When Helen started to have these psychic experiences, she didn’t wake up her husband. She woke up Bill in the middle of the night. As I see it, from a psychological vantage point, the spirit used being in love with Bill to create this special relationship of secrecy that a private affair would have had. She didn’t talk to Louis about the Course.”

Tam’s main contribution to the life of the Course was her involvement in the decision to formally permit translations. “Helen said, ‘Over my dead body,’ and it was her dead body. It felt like people needed it. They were translating it anyway.” Helen disliked the idea of translations because, Tam explained, “she really cared about the tone of it, the symphony of it . . . I liken it to the Kabbalah, where each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a resonant sound that goes into your soul and lights something up in there. It’s not like she never heard words or anything like that, but it was much more a vibration that she interpreted.”

“And remember,” she told me. “Helen never called the Voice Jesus. She called it the Voice.” I found this surprising, since nearly all Course materials say the Voice she channeled was that of Jesus of Nazareth, an idea that had appealed to me—that the spirit of Jesus would choose a middle-aged, secular, Jewish, midcentury, female psychologist to speak through. I asked her, “Then why do you think she identified the Voice as Jesus at some point?”

tam: Because she asked!

me: “Who are you?” And it said Jes—

tam: Yeah! Yeah! It was identified to her as Jesus.

After several hours of talking, Tam took me into the kitchen, where she encouraged me to try a “miracle berry,” a treat she had just discovered. She watched with anticipation as I tentatively took it in my mouth, then gave me a slice of lemon and scrutinized me as I sucked it. When I expressed surprise that the lemon wasn’t bitter, she announced triumphantly, “It turns everything sour sweet!” She gave me two more berries—three in total, like in a fable. Then she walked me out the door, down the path to my car, and sent me on my way, up to a nearby peak that she wanted me to visit, with the most beautiful views of San Francisco and the sea. I did find my way to the top of a mountain, but I don’t think it’s the one she meant.

Returning home, I felt more confused than before, and even further from understanding how this book had actually been written. Then I discovered that an unedited version of the Course—which included excised sections of Helen’s shorthand notes—had been taken and leaked on the internet in the Aughts. Although the official story was that Helen and Bill had made only minimal edits, the so-called Urtext revealed that significant cuts had been made to the first five chapters. The publishers responded to the sudden controversy by conceding that while some cuts had been made, they were insignificant. Helen’s biographer used the analogy of an unused tap: when water first flows from a rusty tap, at first it is contaminated, but then it runs clear. It was the same thing here: in the beginning, Helen’s channel to Jesus was rusty, but eventually the text ran clear—no edits were needed.

I was excited to compare the two versions. I know one of the purposes of editing: to shave away what is inconvenient about a text—often the author’s motivations for writing it—and tame unconscious tendrils, hiding its often banal or embarrassing origins.

I found the differences quite significant. While the official Course seems to be speaking to a universal audience, the unedited text sounds more like a direct address to Helen and Bill. It deals with pettier matters, name-checks their colleagues, delves into their personal psychologies, and refers to trivial incidents in their daily lives, such as whether Helen was justified in snapping at Louis. (Helen wrote that when Louis was asked about the Course, he would demur that it was “just not his cup of tea.”)

One of my favorite sections of excised text is this one, in which Jesus helps Helen buy a winter coat:

The reason I direct everything that is unimportant is because it is no way to waste YOUR free will. . . . You have to remember to ask me to take charge of all minutiae, and it will be taken care of so well and so quickly that you cannot bog down in it. . . . Prayer can be very specific in little matters. If you need a coat, ask me where to find one. I know your taste well, and I also know where the coat is that you would eventually buy anyway.

If you don’t like the coat afterwards that is what would have happened anyway. . . . You said you wanted something warm, inexpensive, and capable of taking rough wear. I told you you could get a Borgana, but I let you get a better one because the furrier needed you. . . . I cannot save you more time than you will let Me, but if you are willing to try the Higher Service, which also covers all lower-order necessities and even quite a number of whims within reason, I have very good use for the time we could save.

Kenneth Wapnick, a close friend of Helen’s and the author of her biography, Absence from Felicity, wrote about her shopping mania: “We would walk down Fifth Avenue, starting at Lord and Taylor’s on 38th Street, covering all the shoe stores until we hit 34th Street,” where she would often buy shoes that didn’t fit, “thereby necessitating yet another trip to exchange them.” Ken found it frustrating that Helen often refused to ask for Jesus’ help. If she had, the time they spent on Fifth Avenue “would have been greatly diminished.”

This way of wasting time was, for Ken, indicative of Helen’s use of shopping to defend against Jesus and the more important tasks He would have her do. Shopping was “a masterful defense, for it almost totally preoccupied Helen, succeeding in its purpose of keeping Jesus safely away from [her] attention.”

When Jesus and Helen were in sync, however, and it was the time for fun again, Ken could see that “it meant a great deal to her that she experienced Jesus accompanying her as she shopped.”

Ken first appeared on the scene in 1972, after Bill read an academic paper that Ken had published about the links between mysticism and schizophrenia. He was excited to have finally found a psychologist “who took the mystical experience seriously,” and a mutual friend arranged for Bill and Helen to meet him.

Ken was a slender, dark-haired, bespectacled man with a receding hairline and dimples. After receiving his Ph.D., he had taken a job as the assistant chief psychologist at a psychiatric hospital. But before accepting the position, he’d had a spiritual awakening, and eventually he decided to leave the hospital and become a Trappist monk. (He had been raised Jewish.) After five months at two different monasteries in Israel, he found that he was still thinking about that meeting he’d had with Helen and Bill. So Ken returned to New York and went to see Helen. At her suggestion, he read two sections of the Course, and afterward he told her, “It’s the first thing I’ve read that is as beautiful as Shakespeare, but it says something.” He changed his path one last time and spent over a year helping Helen prepare the manuscript for publication. Later, he would become one of the book’s most important teachers, even opening a Course learning center with his second wife.

Tam, still fascinated by what she’d witnessed in her childhood home, described the dynamic among the four key players—Helen, Bill, Judith, and Ken—this way: “Ken was one hundred percent doting on Helen. Talk about devotional love. Totally doting on Helen. And she’d go, ‘Ah, Kenny, you’re such a good boy!’ And then she’d shoot a dagger at Bill. Or she’d argue about something with Bill and get Ken to come and agree with her. And so, by the time my mother came in, that dynamic—their little holy trinity—needed a fourth, and it compelled my mother to take care of Bill. It was amazing to see Helen and Bill bickering! Ken wasn’t bickering—he was just placating. But Helen could create a bicker in a room well.”

When the arguing stopped, however, in those early days when they all still practiced the Workbook together, it was “totally different. Helen became a very different person when she was expressing the Course or listening.”

Another interesting focus of the unedited manuscript was its commentaries on Helen and Bill’s relationship. One excised passage acknowledges that “Bill is more prone to irritation, while you [Helen] are more vulnerable to rage.” It tells her to assure Bill that “everybody makes mistakes,” and advises him to see his “errors” as “completely trivial.” Meanwhile, Helen is told, “Don’t worry about your autism. It’s just a misused talent, which you really need. You have to tune out this world to see another.” Elsewhere, the Voice intercedes in their relationship, reproaching them for misunderstanding their sex lives as “a way of establishing human contact for YOURSELVES,” rather than for making children.

A Course in Miracles puts a lot of emphasis on what it calls the “special relationship”—pretty much any exclusive or intimate connection—which the preface describes as “destructive, selfish and childishly egocentric.” Yet, if such a dynamic is “given to the Holy Spirit, these relationships can become the holiest things on earth.” I imagined Helen telling herself that if she could keep sublimating her passion for Bill into something “given to the Holy Spirit”—like the Course—maybe her attachment to him wouldn’t be so “destructive, selfish and childishly egocentric.”

In some passages, it’s hard not to see the manipulations and longings of a heterosexual woman hopelessly in love with a gay man:

Tell [Bill] that homo sex is sinful only to the extent it is based on the principle of exclusion. Everybody should love everybody. It is wrong to deny the beauty of some souls because of body-structures of which you are afraid.

You were right in telling Bill to invite Me to enter anywhere temptation arises. I will change the situation from one of inappropriate sexual attraction to one of impersonal miracle-working.

I began to wonder if the Course was partly a way for Helen to talk to Bill about her feelings “through” a Voice she didn’t have to claim. In some way, that’s what all art is: a way of speaking to the world through a voice that’s not quite one’s own, an oblique voice the writer doesn’t have to take credit for, or at least not entirely; an offering the creator can profess—honestly—not to fully understand.

In Absence from Felicity, Ken writes about how once, when Helen avoided her scribing duties for an entire month, she became so sick and depressed that Louis, “always supportive though deliberately uninvolved with what was happening,” said to her, “Why don’t you go back to what you were doing; you always seem to feel better when you do it.”

The first time I read this, it seemed to confirm something I have always known; that one feels better when one works, and it’s all too easy not to. Yet now I wondered if it was possible that Helen felt happier when she was working on the book because it meant spending more time with Bill. Could that have been why, a few months after declaring the Text to be the completed transmission, she announced that a second volume was coming?

Maybe the project, all along, had primarily been a way of creating a special bond between her and Bill: pretending to be too upset to type it; requiring his encouragement; formulating passages to address problems he’d been having with his sexuality and his life, including his unhappiness at their dreaded staff meetings. I, too, have started projects to get closer to people I like, and there are all sorts of gifts of love. Was Helen channeling everything she knew as a psychologist and a woman into this book to help her beloved Bill, and to gratify herself with his nearness?

When I first started reading the Course, I had marveled enviously at how Helen had produced such a steady flow of words for years on end. Yet now I felt it would be pretty easy to call forth an endless stream of poetic jib-jab if it helped you keep the man you loved close. Even I could do that!

At this point in my research, the stories Ken told in his biography of Helen started to seem more suspect. Someone who would later make his living from teaching the Course and selling his own tapes, lectures, and videos would have obvious mercenary reasons to construct the story of Helen as a true, reluctant priestess, the project as foreordained, and Jesus as the book’s authentic Voice.

In his book, Ken described the months leading up to the scribing as full of signs pointing Helen in the direction of her task: dreams featuring disturbing, seemingly past-life scenes of power struggles between her and Bill, and even paranormal occurrences, one of which apparently took place during a work trip to the Mayo Clinic.

The night before Helen and Bill left for Minnesota, Helen had a vision of a church with turrets and towers, which she suspected was Lutheran and which she described in detail for Bill. She was convinced they would see it from the plane as they flew into Rochester. When they saw no such church, Helen became so upset that Bill drove her around the city to visit some twenty-five churches, but none of them resembled the one from her vision.

The next day, before their return to New York, Bill remembers waiting for Helen in the hotel lobby when he spotted a booklet titled The History of the Mayo Clinic. Flipping through it, he saw a picture of Helen’s church, exactly as she had described it. It had been demolished, and the present Mayo Clinic had been built in its place. When Helen entered the lobby, Bill showed her the pamphlet, saying, “Helen, you really weren’t out of your mind after all. Your church was there, but it’s no longer around. When you thought you were looking down on it as from an airplane, you were really looking back through time.”

Helen grew very emotional at this revelation. A few hours later, during a layover in Chicago, Helen noticed a young woman in distress. Helen approached her and learned that she had just left her husband and children. She and Bill arranged for her to sit between them on the plane. On the flight home, they asked where she was planning to stay in New York. She replied that she supposed she’d contact a Lutheran church and ask them for help. Bill recalled that he and Helen “exchanged glances. The message was clear to both of us.” Then Helen heard an inner voice saying, “and this is my true church, helping your brother who is in need; not the edifice you saw before.”

According to Ken, the trip was a turning point in Helen’s confidence in her visionary powers, allowing her, weeks later, to accept the task of scribing the book. It also convinced Bill of her great specialness. As he put it, “If it had not been for many of the extraordinary experiences that occurred during the summer of 1965, neither Helen nor I would have been willing to accept the material she scribed.”

I sympathized with some of this: when one is deep in the writing of a book, the whole world can feel meaningful, divinely patterned and plotted. But I found the Mayo Clinic story a little too neat. Turning my mind to Bill, I remembered a detail I had come across. Apparently he had been employed briefly by the CIA, a fact that most Course devotees were either unaware of or downplayed.

As I dug deeper, strange patterns began to emerge. I discovered that, from early in his career, Bill often ended up in positions of influence without the necessary qualifications, and many of his professional leaps had an aw-shucks, “how did I find myself here?” sort of quality, as if he fell backward into his path. I began to wonder if any of his unlikely promotions had been CIA machinations. Bill worked as a TA for the famed midcentury psychologist Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago in the mid-Forties. Rogers later regretfully acknowledged that he’d taken CIA money. Had they also required him to hire as a TA their promising young operative, William Thetford? Bill claimed, however, that he wasn’t “approached by a representative from the Central Intelligence Agency” until the early Fifties, when he went to work in Washington for a few years.²

I read through agency files that revealed that Bill had worked on Project Bluebird (which morphed into Project Artichoke, and then into Project MK-Ultra). Their main purpose—as Americans eventually came to know—was “devising scientific methods for controlling the minds of individuals,” including through the use of drugs and hypnosis, often without a subject’s consent.

Bill also worked with the CIA’s John Gittinger on a psychological assessment model called the Personality Assessment System (PAS), which was designed to predict an individual’s behavior with extraordinary accuracy. Gittinger’s colleague, Sidney Gottlieb, who headed MK-Ultra in the Fifties and Sixties, believed the PAS could help the CIA hire and handle agents, so he supported Gittinger’s work, channeling agency money to him through the cover of the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Bill later said he believed that Gittinger “had designed the most powerful descriptive and predictive system in the world for assessing personality,” and ranked it up there “with the discoveries of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.”

Bill claimed that he quit the CIA after leaving Washington, but there is reason to doubt this: he continued to work on the PAS for the rest of his career. “This made me somewhat uncomfortable, since it was still a CIA-supported endeavor,” he acknowledged.

[But] I respected John and his PAS so much that I felt compelled to help in its continued development. This took place primarily when I was at Columbia University, from the late fifties to mid-seventies.

Helen also spent much of her career working on the PAS, and the two of them co-authored and presented several papers on the system during the same years they were scribing the Course.

One key theme of the Course corresponds neatly with an argument made in a 1957 article titled “Studies in Human Ecology,” which was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and authored by fifteen people, including Gittinger and Bill: that illness, whatever its nature, is fundamentally psychosomatic. Similarly, the Course’s concluding section, “Manual for Teachers,” states that “sickness is an election; a decision. It is the choice of weakness, in the mistaken conviction that it is strength.”

This actually became the Course’s most contentious principle—especially controversial when the book was being preached to gay men dying of AIDS in the Eighties by one of the Course’s greatest popularizers, Marianne Williamson.³

If one reads Helen’s scientific publications, another overlap begins to emerge: between the early work she did as a psychologist and the material she “scribed.” Her obsessions, her favored technical vocabulary, are everywhere in the Course pages. For example, Helen wrote in a journal article drawing upon her work at the Shield Institute that an inability to cope with standardized tests is one of the outstanding behavioral characteristics of the mentally challenged. “No curriculum can be built on what a child cannot do.” One therefore has to study how each child learns and “use the results as the basis for determining what they can do.”

Meanwhile, the Course states,

There is nothing so frustrating to a learner as a curriculum he cannot learn. His sense of adequacy suffers, and he must become depressed. Being faced with an impossible learning situation is the most depressing thing in the world. In fact, it is ultimately why the world itself is depressing.

It is only the next sentence that would be out of place in a Shield Institute study: “The Holy Spirit’s curriculum is never depressing, because it is a curriculum of joy.”

In her book The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders writes that

The individuals and institutions subsidized by the CIA were expected to perform as part of a broad campaign of persuasion, of a propaganda war in which “propaganda” was defined as “any organized effort or movement to disseminate information or a particular doctrine by means of news, special arguments or appeals designed to influence the thoughts and actions in any given group.” . . . Further, the “most effective kind of propaganda” was defined as the kind where “the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own.”

At this point, I had rapidly become ensnared in a web of conspiracy-minded thinkers: a post from 2007 by someone named Jason Bishop III had no doubt that the CIA was behind the Course, and that the intention was “to infiltrate and dilute the American left with New Age ideas and inward-focused, anti-rational religious movements.”

I was shocked! I didn’t know what to think. Had Bill been tasked by the CIA with producing a new Bible? One that would influence the direction people moved in, for reasons they would take to be their own? A text that would speak to Americans on the periphery of religious belonging and steer them toward a new kind of American religion—one without sin, established authority, or compulsory collective rituals, offering merely an array of techniques to practice detachment from reality? But why? To pull people back from the call of communism? Or to turn citizens who believed in political action into ones who denied the importance of political activity—and even the existence of the entire physical world?

Now listening to recordings of Bill’s voice, I loathed him. When I saw A Course in Miracles on my shelf, I felt ashamed of my credulity. Helen seemed like a ninny, too. It was only four months after I’d met with Tam, but I felt years away from my dreamy, wishful musings about Helen and Jesus. Embarrassed, I stopped speaking about the book with anyone. I felt disgusted with myself when I saw, in the transcript of my interview with Tam, that I’d actually said, “But I kind of see it as, like, the Third Testament, perhaps?”

Perhaps Bill had handpicked Helen for the task of writing this new Bible because she seemed like the best person in their department to do it—knowing her PAS-defined personality type and her weaknesses. He was surely aware of her childhood dreams of becoming a writer. He likely also knew that she was in love with him, making her easier to manipulate.

An interviewer once said to Bill, “It’s interesting that you often use the word ‘assignment’ with regard to your and Helen’s involvement with the Course. Why?” Bill said, “Well, the events we experienced leading up to the Course’s dictation seemed to us to be a preparation for an assignment that somehow, somewhere, we had agreed to do together.” He was implying that it was an assignment from God. But was this wording a sly joke with himself; did he really mean an assignment from Langley?

“During the time we were working on the Course we seemed to actually increase our professional productivity and quality,” Bill told the same interviewer. “One confirmation of this is that when we completed the manuscript, we were both awarded tenure as professors.” Is this likely, given how distracted they would have been working on a 1,300-page transmission from Jesus Christ? Or did they receive their promotions as recognition for the completion of their “assignment”?

Strange, too, is that, right after receiving these most desired promotions, they both left Columbia, retired from the medical field altogether, and never again worked at universities. Bill fled for a life of leisure on the West Coast. This was in 1976, right around when Gerald Ford was instructing the Rockefeller Commission to investigate the CIA’s activities in the United States. Meanwhile, its $25 million MK-Ultra mind-control research program had recently become known around the world, creating an uproar.

That year, Congress heard testimony from that great supporter of the PAS, Sidney Gottlieb, who admitted that the purpose of MK-Ultra had been to investigate “whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behavior by covert means.” He also admitted he was protecting “prominent scientists, researchers, and physicians” who had collaborated with the CIA. Little more about the program can be known for sure, though, because an earlier CIA director, Richard Helms, had ordered a document purge in 1973, and almost all the papers relating to MK-Ultra were destroyed.

One detail started to shine out through all my research, adding to my troubled thoughts: during the years that Bill and Helen were working at the Columbia Medical Center, America’s most famous practitioner of therapeutic hypnosis, Herbert Spiegel, was also present, teaching a popular postgraduate course on the art of hypnosis, which frequently drew crowds of curious physicians.

In one demonstration, a woman who was experiencing stage fright before she was set to appear before one hundred psychiatrists explained, after she took the stage, that “the nice thing about self-hypnosis is that you can do it just like that! I sat down in the back of the auditorium, and in two seconds I put myself into a little trance and became relaxed immediately . . . all I have to do is the eye roll, and I’m off!”

The “eye roll” was a technique that Spiegel developed to test for hypnotic ability, which in some cases allowed a person to put themselves into a trance and then bring themselves out of it “in response to [their] own signal.” He also developed a zero-to-five scale of hypnotic ability, estimating that around 30 percent of the population was completely unable to be hypnotized (“Zeroes and Ones”), 15 percent displayed “extraordinary trance talent” (“Fours and Fives”), while the majority was in the middle.

For his 1982 book, The Inner Source, Donald S. Connery followed Spiegel around and documented his work. “Fives” were also capable of creating works of art in a trancelike state, such that when they completed the assignment, “there is little recognition that ‘I’ did it. ‘It’ just happened.” Reading this, I remembered an interview in which Helen said, “Where did the writing come from? Certainly the subject matter itself was the last thing I would have expected to write about.”

Did Helen write the book while in a trance? On the one hand, this is amazing to consider. On the other, it’s related to something most artists do, which is gradually tunnel deeper into a state of hyperfocus and ability, arriving at what is often called a state of “flow.” If Helen was taught the eye roll to put herself into a trance so she could write the book, it would certainly explain how she was able to produce 1,300 tonally consistent pages, and to effortlessly move between activities, turning the Voice on and off, like with a switch.

Artists, writers, and mystics in all cultures throughout history have received transmissions in a heightened state, invoking the muse, inspired revelation, or mere inspiration. These words are meant to suggest that the conscious mind, as we know it, is not the sole or even the primary creator. It is something I’ve experienced, too: the sensation of words unfurling from beneath my hands without my participation.

Connery writes that “many writers, from Shelley, Thackeray, and Wordsworth to Dickens, Goethe, and Stevenson . . . have spoken of their best work coming from some place beyond consciousness.” Perhaps in such heightened and receptive states, it’s easier for a universal or divine mind to speak. Maybe this creates art at its highest.

Yet there are drawbacks to being able to enter a trance. “Highly hypnotizable individuals,” Connery adds, are more likely to be “credulous and guileless,” and so “vulnerable to deception.” This is because the “personality traits that can get the Fives into trouble are also the qualities that are essential to the creative arts and scientific breakthroughs,” such as what Spiegel described as “an almost childlike approach to possibilities and new connections.” They might be inclined, as Connery puts it, “blithely to accept statements and viewpoints—as expressed, say, by a cult leader or an advocate of a conspiracy theory.”

Source image © H. Mark Weidman Photography/Alamy

I began to worry whether the Course worked by inducing a trancelike state in susceptible readers, emphasizing its themes with its strange rhythms, its repetitions, its near-nonsense, its certainties. If Helen wrote the words in a hypnotic state, could reading them induce one? That might explain why, whenever I lost myself in the reading of it, I achieved a dizzying feeling of lightness, a sense of the world being lit up with magic, but within hours of putting the book down, I could never actually say what it said. Were the people I knew who were repelled by the Course—who immediately saw in it gibberish, hucksterism, or even mental illness—“Ones”? Was I a “Five,” as I suspect Helen had been, and were the qualities that let me write fiction the same ones that allowed me to fall for this book? Was it possible that I had been drawn to the Course because it gave me the same feelings of spiritual connection and flow that, in my diminished state, I was not experiencing in my usual way—through writing?

Reading through Course message boards online, I began to see that I was not the only one who experienced the book as having a hypnotic, trancelike power. One commenter wrote that the Course made them feel “light as a feather on a heavy dissociation spree,” and that they now regarded it as “dangerous programming. . . . It seems really to be a course in mindlessness, relieving one from responsibility, conscience, and critical thinking.”

Someone named FireShadow said they tried the Course because many of their friends were into it, but “with all the focus on ‘nothing you see is real’ in the exercises, I think I became quite dissociative.” After perceiving in it “a malevolent intent,” they put it away for good. Another user wrote that, while doing the exercises,

My whole life felt like a dream, or like being drugged. At the time I thought it was a good thing; I saw it as my ego being tamed. But in retrospect it was clearly part of a brainwashing process. The program breaks your mind down to nothing, then fills it with the system’s ideas. . . . The whole thing works so well and so rapidly that it must have been devised by mind-control experts.

During the years that Bill and Helen were working on the Course, the CIA was excited about the potential of LSD. Operatives frequently took it themselves, and even covertly dosed one another. John Marks’s 1978 book, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, which tracked Cold War–era operations in America and abroad, told of a spy in the MK-Ultra program who “drank some LSD-laced coffee during his morning break.” Terrified, he fled the office and crossed one of the bridges over the Potomac, at which point he thought every car that passed him was “a terrible monster with fantastic eyes.” A colleague recalled, “It was a real horror trip for him. I mean, it was hours of agony.”

Yet apparently this was not that unusual. Agents “agreed among themselves that a co-worker might slip it to them at any time,” Marks reported. Perhaps Helen had also been dosed with LSD. Had Bill tripped once too often? Were both of them high when they were driving around Rochester looking for churches?

Just how nefarious was Bill? He and Helen had been close colleagues for nearly a decade before their work on the book began, so a genuine relationship must have existed. Yet, Marks wrote, agents were trained to operate “mostly outside the system of restraints that normally govern personal relationships.” He quoted one former officer from the agency who coolly said, “I never gave a thought to legality or morality. . . . Frankly, I did what worked.”

Another CIA psychologist told Marks that there was always a way of making an asset do what you wanted them to. He explained, “Sometimes one partner in a relationship wants to get into deviations from standard sex. If you have some control, you might be able to force your partner to try different things, but it’s much better to lead her down the road a step at a time, to discuss it and fantasize until eventually she’s saying, ‘Let’s try this thing.’ . . . It’s the same with an agent.”

Perhaps Bill thought nothing of leading Helen down the road, a step at a time, until she believed that she was an authentic channel for Jesus Christ, in part by fabricating destabilizing, seemingly paranormal scenarios like the whole Mayo Clinic trip. (Was the woman on the plane a plant? Was the brochure a fake, too?) Or perhaps he had secretly dosed or hypnotized her.

A former student of Helen’s at Columbia, Benedict Groeschel, who was a Catholic priest, once said that Bill was “probably the most sinister person I ever met,” though he refused to say more.

For months, I was obsessed with trying to come to the truth about Helen and Bill and the book—but I finally realized it was impossible. I gave up. If there had even ever been proof that Bill had brainwashed Helen on orders from Langley, it had been destroyed. Plus, Tam had insisted that Bill respected Helen. And I began to feel that it was wrong to condescend to Helen, who was by all accounts an intelligent and capable woman. If it was a CIA endeavor, why didn’t I recognize her as fully conscious and willing a participant as Bill, one who saw writing the book as part of her job? Maybe she’d asked her colleagues to hypnotize her into believing she was hearing the Voice of Jesus, the better to write something convincing and true. Wouldn’t this be an impressive choice, in its own way? Was it so different from writing while drunk or high?

Then I began to wonder how likely it was that anyone could successfully carry out an operation such as this one: to create and sell—in the millions!—a mind-control Bible. Even publishing houses, and it was their business, were unable to reliably manufacture bestsellers. To believe the CIA had this wild idea, and that it worked, surely represented an unwarranted faith in the agency’s control and power.

Finally, my worst suspicions fell away, and I was nearly back to where I started. After all, Helen continued to privately write sentimental poetry about her love for Christ even after the Course was published. Who was I to say that she didn’t really hear the Voice of Jesus? Plenty of Christians feel close to Jesus and might even hear his words. Maybe I reliably felt lit up with purpose and meaning after reading the Course because there was spiritual wisdom contained within—wisdom that was divinely received and, if taken in the right way, genuinely helpful.

Or maybe it was both things: a CIA plot and the Divine wedged its way in, somehow.

Or perhaps Helen was truly an inspired and angry prophet, and in some far-off future this will be the Still Newer Testament. A married woman in love with a gay man: mother and father of a new creation myth that births the next madness.

In Randall Sullivan’s 2004 book, The Miracle Detective, Father Groeschel recounts how, in 1969, his professor Helen Schucman let him in on an astonishing secret: she felt she was “taking dictation from a disembodied voice she knew only as the ‘Son of God.’ ” Several decades later, Groeschel had come to see her experience as not so strange. It was, he told Sullivan, “actually very common . . . St. John of the Cross nailed it. He said, ‘They’re calling the words of God the thoughts that they address to themselves.’ ”

In the final weeks of her life, Helen told Groeschel, who remained a close friend, that her mother had, for a time, been a Christian Scientist. (Bill’s parents had been, too.) This was a faith founded a century earlier by Mary Baker Eddy, an American woman whose religion involved many themes similar to those in the Course. After learning this, Groeschel began to see A Course in Miracles as “a fascinating blend of poorly understood Christianity . . . and poorly understood Christian Science . . . all of it filtered through some profound psychological problems and processes.” Yet, Sullivan wrote, what affected Groeschel most was

the “black hole of rage and depression that Schucman fell into during the last two years of her life.” . . . She had become frightening to be with . . . spewing psychotic hatred not only for A Course in Miracles but “for all things spiritual.” When he sat at Schucman’s bedside as she lay dying, “she cursed, in the coarsest barroom language you could imagine, ‘that book, that goddamn book.’ She said it was the worst thing that ever happened to her. I mean, she raised the hair on the back of my neck. It was truly terrible to witness.”

In this final phase of Helen’s life, Bill called her every day from California, although their conversations were superficial and brief. Ken, recalling this time, wrote that whenever she spoke about Bill, the Course, or even Jesus, “there would be a noticeable absence of any positive expression on Helen’s part, to put it mildly.”

Ken and the others assumed that Helen would die at the age of seventy-two, which was her conviction, “despite,” he wrote, “our past experiences of Helen’s unreliability regarding specific predictions.” In the end, however, she died of pancreatic cancer at the age of seventy-one, late one winter’s night, about three hours after Ken and Louis’s last visit with her in the hospital.

When Ken returned to see her body, he noted the “remarkably quiet expression of peace” on her face, so different from the “tortured disquiet” of the past few months. He wrote that he took this to mean that Helen had been correct in her belief that Jesus “would come for her personally” when she died.

Back at the Schucman home, in the early hours of the morning, returning one last time from the hospital, Louis asked Ken to remove all the copies of A Course in Miracles from the apartment. He wanted them gone that very night. He also said he didn’t want any mention of the Course in Ken’s eulogy.

At Helen’s traditional Jewish funeral, Ken spoke simply about her dedication to helping others, “a fact to which the great majority sitting in the chapel could gratefully attest.” Groeschel’s words were grimmer. He reflected after her death that “this woman who had written so eloquently that suffering really did not exist spent the last two years of her life in the blackest psychotic depression I have ever witnessed.”

After Bill decamped for California, he became happier and more relaxed. He also continued to study the Course regularly, attending daily sessions with one group of friends and weekly sessions with another. At night, he read books from his metaphysical library. A female friend moved in with him when he became too ill to take care of himself, after the worsening of a lifelong heart condition. An intimate remarked that, in these later years,

a more playful, lighthearted Bill emerged. It was as if he were finally reliving the childhood he never had . . . Defenses he had taken on, as an academic, an intellectual, and as co-scribe of the Course, began to fade. He shed those roles and became more carefree. Even his homosexuality had more spaciousness.

Bill died happy at the age of sixty-five, seven years after Helen passed. In the two days before his death, his friends recalled that he appeared almost ridiculously joyful. He was last seen by Judith walking out the door to take a stroll. Five minutes later, he collapsed. His biographer notes, interestingly, that “the autopsy later confirmed that part of Bill’s heart had, indeed, exploded.”

When friends asked me what I believed in the end, I didn’t know what to say. It was hard enough to untangle the delusions, the fantasies, that beset me in my own life, in which coming to the truth, or to the most true story, was a never-ending task. To try to make up my mind about people who had not been seriously studied, whom I had never met, who had a seemingly bottomless list of reasons to lie to each other and themselves, was impossible.

My salvation from my depressive feelings would have to come from elsewhere. But I loved thinking about Helen and Bill. I kept turning them around and around in my mind. They felt like creatures out of a fable. I just kept looking: at their office, at the space between them, at the book they had made, at their strange closeness, at their bitter, unresolved ending, at their love and their hate.

It seemed that in my confused, eager pursuit of the truth, I had done what Helen did, what Bill did, what every single one of us does, from birth until our dying: I had passionately distracted myself. But there was something else, too: it now appeared that life at its creative heights, or at its most spy-thrillery, was made of the very same stuff as life at its most uninspired. It was just this free and frustrating intermingling of everything all at once—poetry and politics, the real gods and the fake ones, all our most loving actions and all our most deceitful ones. It was all mixed up, like a pile of clothes in the corner of the room. The clothes that Jesus helped us pick out, and the ones we bought on our own.