Ken Wapnick at A.R.E.

As it happened, Ken Wapnick was scheduled to speak at a conference at the Association for Research and Enlightenment over the weekend of September 9-11 the year I was in Virginia Beach, 2005. It was an opportunity, I thought, to ask him what he thought of the state of A Course in Miracles since the copyright on the first published edition was rescinded.

I knew nothing about the litigation surrounding the copyright of the Course until 2001. I had just moved to Boston then, and looked online for a local meeting of Course students. That was when I learned about the litigation and that it had been going on for a couple of years.

Like many people, I was perplexed by what I found. The scribes had originally wanted to publish the A Course in Miracles anonymously, so how could there be, and why would there be, a controversy over the use of the words in the Course. First impressions, after the initial questions, were that the litigation was wrong and Ken Wapnick looked like the bad guy. Then, after understanding how the defendants were using the Course material they seemed like the bad guy. Then the defendants became the plaintiffs and, with help from others in the "Course community," the copyright was voided. When the Course was freed from copyright, it seemed right and inevitable; there were no bad guys, it was simply meant to be and everyone simply played his or her part. But I wanted to ask Ken what it was all about for him, what difference it would make to the the Foundation for A Course in Miracles.

I was not in a position to pay the roughly $350.00 fee to attend the conference. My idea was to go early in the day, or wait around for some intermission, or the end of one of the days of the conference, and perhaps I would see Ken and approach him to ask these questions. Maybe he wouldn't answer them directly. Maybe a hundred people had already asked him the same questions. But, if I was lucky, maybe someone would be there, right in front of me, asking the same questions and I would just listen.

Alas, with the devastation in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, and how that affected me, I did not go to A.R.E. that weekend.

From all that I have now read, it seems that the judge in the case, Judge Sweet, had taken the matter quite seriously. There were indications that he read the Course thoroughly, both the published and unpublished versions, and made his decision carefully. Of course, there would be differing opinions, but it seems irresponsible to say "a maverick judge, who displayed little public respect for <A Course in Miracles would invalidate the Course's copyright over the seldom used and dubious issue of 'prior distribution'," as one writer did1.

One wonders, or I should say I do wonder (I don't really know if anyone else does), if Ken Wapnick knew all along that the litigation would result in freeing A Course in Miracles for all time. Was he martyr or saint? Perhaps we will never know.

More recently, I have learned that the unpublished notes from the Course are distributed without contest now. This is a good thing because there is much more we can learn from the notes. The present distribution of the published and unpublished Course is a mess, but I believe that this will change.

1. 1. Gary Renard in Disappearance of the Universe