This month, reflecting on Kenneth’s love of music, with its central role on his spiritual path, and the Course’s use of musical symbols to remind us of its gentle process, we call your attention to several programs where Kenneth plays with the motif to explore forgiveness, healing, and prayer.

Kenneth encourages us in this program to recognize that we all sing the same ego song of misery and hopelessness in our wrong mind–our calls for love–but that playing sweetly beneath that in our right mind is the beautiful melody of forgiveness and healing that we also all share. It is through our willingness to hear both melodies within others, without judgment or condemnation, that our own inner music can shift from the ego's pain-filled dirge to the Holy Spirit's melody of compassion and love. We will then be able to be present to others without our own needs interfering with the flow of the harmonious notes through us that reflect our shared healing.

In this program, Kenneth discusses three major Course themes—prayer, forgiveness, and healing—which students have misunderstood from the beginning. In fact, Kenneth recounts that the Supplement to the Course, which is the focus of this program and gives it its title, came expressly to correct some of the mistakes their own little group was making around prayer and asking in the early days of the Course. With each theme, the correction is one that helps the student shift attention from addressing concerns only at the level of the world and the body–always the ego’s focus–to the level of the dreaming mind—always the Holy Spirit’s focus. The metaphor of the ladder, which Kenneth has used frequently in his teaching over the years to describe how learning the Course involves steps in a process over time of climbing or rising up, is developed in the context of prayer. Kenneth also emphasizes the central role of our inner Teacher in this process, using Helen’s changing relationship with Jesus to illustrate the process. 

Kenneth explores the contrast between the sounds playing within our mind, depending on which conductor we have chosen to direct our lives. We may begin our process with the Course believing that the sounds we hear are caused by the world we are experiencing. Over time, through the gentle practice of forgiveness, we come to recognize that what we hear within only reflects whom we have chosen to guide, or conduct, our thoughts. The choice of conductors is very simple–there are only two, the ego or Jesus. The shift to the gentle Conductor is the result of our willingness to allow our life as a body to become an instrument of healing, through the recognition of our shared purpose with all of our brothers and sisters.