Introduction: The World as Negative and Neutral

A Course in Miracles is unequivocal about the nature of the illusory world and body, speaking of the former as having been "made as an attack on God" (W-pII.3.2:1), the latter as a limitation on love (T-18.VIII.1:2-3). Furthermore, we read elsewhere in the Course that bodies are born into "a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die" (W-pII.13.5:1). Yet we are also told that the body (and by implication the world) is "a wholly neutral thing" (W-pII.294) and can be the "means by which God's Son returns to sanity" (W-pII.5.4:1).

These seemingly contradictory statements are what readers who are critical of the Course might state are examples of Jesus speaking out of both sides of his non-corporeal mouth, for how can the world be both negative and neutral? The answer to this apparent paradox lies in the process of correction or forgiveness that the Course sets forth. This is similar to what we read in The Song of Prayer about Jesus teaching us what also seem to be mutually exclusive ideas in A Course in Miracles: on the one hand we should ask for specific help of the Holy Spirit, and on the other hand we are taught repeatedly that there is only one problem (the belief in separation) and one answer (the decision for Atonement):

   You have been told to ask the Holy Spirit for the answer to any specific problem, and that you will receive a specific answer if such is your need. You have also been told that there is only one problem and one answer. In prayer this is not contradictory (S-1. I.2:1-3).

In other words, when Jesus looks at the overall process of forgiveness (or prayer), sometimes symbolized by a ladder (e.g., T-28.III.1:2; S-1.II), he focuses on different aspects or rungs of the journey he is leading us on, depending on his teaching emphasis at the time. In the passage from The Song of Prayer, for example, Jesus is saying, in effect, that when he is speaking to us on the level of our need-driven experience as bodies, he encourages us to ask him for help for what we think to be our needs. It is only when we are ascending the ladder that we come to realize that we have only one need, which is to learn that we have no needs except to forgive. As he tells us early on in the text:

But the only meaningful prayer is for forgiveness, because those who have been forgiven have everything (T-3.V.6:3).

Returning to the world, the theme of this article, the simple truth is that not only is the phenomenal world an illusion, but its making fulfilled an ego purpose. This is a concept of intention, largely untouched in most other spiritual thought systems, yet is a core premise of A Course in Miracles. This purpose is to establish the Son as a mindless (i.e., physical/psychological) creature with no awareness that he is in fact a mind, actively choosing to be separate from his Creator and Source. Since this mind is unremembered, the Son can hardly gain access to its decision-making ability in order to choose again. Thus is the original decision of the ego preserved and kept secure from all undoing, a correction that mindfulness would surely accomplish. On this level, then, the world hardly can be said to fulfill a positive purpose. We shall revisit this essential point in more detail in the next section.

However, there is another way of looking at the world. Once we believe we are in the world of bodies, in relationship with other bodies that either imprison us or make us happy, we need to forgive the original decision as it is expressed in these daily experiences of special hate and special love: guilt, projection, and attack. In what amounts to A Course in Miracles shibboleth, we learn that we forgive others for what they have not done (e.g., T-26.IV.1:6). Teaching us what this means constitutes the essence of the journey that Jesus asks us to take with him via his course. Learning the lessons of forgiveness, therefore, is a process that frees us from the ego's prison house of the body ("the rotting prison" [T-26.I.8:3]) and its special relationships—the citadels of hate. In the text, we read the following comforting words that integrate these two levels:

The body was not made by love. Yet love does not condemn it and can use it lovingly, respecting what the Son of God has made and using it to save him from illusions (T-18.VI.4:7-8).

A Course in Miracles, therefore, helps us to shift the world's purpose from prison or playground to classroom, the subject of our next two sections.

The World as Prison/Playground: The Special Relationship

We begin by returning to the all-important theme of purpose. Repeatedly in A Course in Miracles, Jesus tells us that purpose is everything (e.g., The only question to ask of anything is) "What is it for?" [T-17.VI.2:1-2]). Understanding the mind's purpose—separation or forgiveness—enables us to give meaning to any relationship, circumstance, or event. It is therefore beholden on us when we look at the world or body to consider their purpose.

As we have already seen, the workbook tells us that the "world was made as an attack on God." It is the projection of the mind's original attack thought of separation, wherein we informed the Creator that His Love, Self, and World were not enough, and that only the opposite of these would satisfy our hunger for individual existence. Yet the world is even more than that, for when one examines the ego's strategy (i.e., its purpose), one sees, again, that the world is really an attack on the Son's power of decision. When the ego made the world and caused a veil of forgetfulness to fall across the miscreating mind, followed by placing the separated Son in a body, the ego ensured that he will never return to the mind and choose differently: for the Holy Spirit by choosing against the ego. With no recollection of who we are and where we came from (the mind that dreams of separation), we are condemned to living in a perpetual state of mindless existence as bodies:

   The ego, which always wants to weaken the mind, tries to separate it from the body in an attempt to destroy it. Yet the ego actually believes that it is protecting it. This is because the ego believes that mind is dangerous, and that to make mindless is to heal (T-8.IX.6:1-3).

Herein lies the meaning of our being born into the body, for it becomes the preoccupation of the world: a source of pleasure or pain, giving rise to life's perceived purpose of maximizing what pleases us and makes us happy, and minimizing what hurts us and causes us to suffer. This is so on both the physical and emotional levels. Moreover, almost none of us has even the remotest clue as to the real source of the body's pleasure and pain, which is the mind's decision for the ego and its guilt:

Of one thing you were sure: Of all the many causes you perceived as bringing pain and suffering to you, your guilt was not among them (T-27.VII.7:4).

The importance of this idea that pleasure and pain are not of the body, and therefore are the same because they share the wrong mind's single purpose of making the sin of separation real, can be seen in the idea's rapid repetition in the first two obstacles to peace from Chapter 19 in the text:

The body does appear to be the symbol of sin while you believe that it can get you what you want. While you believe that it can give you pleasure, you will also believe that it can bring you pain (T-19.IV-A.17:10-11).

It is impossible to seek for pleasure through the body and not find pain. It is essential that this relationship be understood. … It is but the inevitable result of equating yourself with the body, which is the invitation to pain (T-19.IV-B.12:1-2,4).

The problem here, one that the ego so cleverly exploits, is that it is counterintuitive that the body does not feel pleasure or pain. Our experience has become such a powerful witness to the seeming fact that the body is the source of our feelings, not to mention that there is indeed a difference between pleasure and pain, tension and the relief from tension. And yet, Jesus is unequivocal in A Course in Miracles that this is not the case at all, that experience and perception lie (e.g., "Nothing so blinding as perception of form" [T-22.III.6:7]), for the body feels nothing, but simply acts out, as it were, the mind's decisions. Thus we read in this one telling and representative passage of the inherent nothingness of the body:

It [the body] does not seek to make of pain a joy and look for lasting pleasure in the dust. It does not tell you what its purpose is and cannot understand what it is for. … It suffers not the punishment you give because it has no feeling. It behaves in ways you want, but never makes the choice. It is not born and does not die. It can but follow aimlessly the path on which it has been set (T-28.VI.1:4-5; 2:2-5).

Another way of understanding the ego's investment in the bodily experiences of pleasure and pain, and our resultant obsessive fascination with them, is to examine our special love and hate relationships. What seems to motivate us here is the sheer pain of existence and the need to escape from it. This conceals the ego's underlying purpose of making the body real, for if the body were real, so too must be the thought of separation that gave rise to it, reinforcing the belief that the ego is our true self. Yet our experience is not the pain of our mind's decision for guilt, but rather of life as a body. The special relationship is the means of such release from pain, either through the ego's prison of special hate, or its playground of special love. Workbook Lesson 182 provides one of the clearest expressions in A Course in Miracles of our suffering existence in a world within which we feel so alienated and alone, and experience the need for the surcease from pain that life appears to engender. The opening three paragraphs, here abridged, say it all:

   This world you seem to live in is not home to you. … you feel an alien here. … No one but knows whereof we speak. Yet some try to put by their suffering in games they play to occupy their time, and keep their sadness from them. Others will deny that they are sad, and do not recognize their tears at all. … We speak today for everyone who walks this world, for he is not at home. He goes uncertainly about in endless search, seeking in darkness what he cannot find; not recognizing what it is he seeks. A thousand homes he makes, yet none contents his restless mind. … The home he seeks can not be made by him (W-pI.182.1:1,4; 2:1-3; 3:1-3,5).

These games we play, homes we seek to build, are our special relationships, and each and every one of them, regardless of its form, shares the one content of always failing. Seek and do not find is the ego's mantra (e.g., see T-12. IV), for the hell of separation is its unspoken goal for us, leaving the memory of Heaven buried beneath a decaying existence of depression, despair, and death.

To summarize this salient point, the ego has successfully convinced us that our problem lies in the alienation we feel in the world as bodies, alienated from each other and from our self; that we live lives, in Thoreau's evocative phrase, of "quiet desperation." From this pain-laden experience as bodies we have no recourse, except to seek relief from other bodies (read: anything in the world, including physical bodies, substances, material objects, causes, ideals, etc.). These, once again, constitute our special relationships, and each one will fail because each was chosen by the ego so that it would fail. This leaves us in a perpetual state of pain, yearning for relief and frustrated in the outcome of the not entirely unexpected failure: the hell that is the ego's salvation and its own warped understanding of healing. To reiterate this important point, despite the obvious differences in form, special love and hate relationships are the same in content—the mind's special relationship with the ego—for they share the common purpose of keeping us mindless.

When we believe we love someone, or find some food, substance, or activity that gives us pleasure, the world becomes a playground in which our needs are happily met and our existence becomes a joy. Until, of course, our desires are thwarted, which transforms the world into a prison that prevents us from freely partaking of life's "joys." Thus are we forever "trapped" in bodies, with no hope for escape, not even in death, for God's wrathful Will pursues us even when the body appears to die:

The ego wants you dead, but not itself. The outcome of its strange religion must therefore be the conviction that it can pursue you beyond the grave. And out of its unwillingness for you to find peace even in death, it offers you immortality in hell. It speaks to you of Heaven, but assures you that Heaven is not for you. How can the guilty hope for Heaven? (T-15.I.3:3-7)

And so there is no hope, which is the ego's goal that keeps us striving, never to achieve the impossible dream of genuine happiness and peace. Yet we do not stop our striving, which means that we can never avoid the hatred of ourselves and the world for the inevitable failures:

You see yourself locked in a separate prison, removed and unreachable, incapable of reaching out as being reached. You hate this prison you have made … (T-18. VI.7:5-6).

An earlier passage in the text describes exactly why our lives are programmed for such failure:

The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws that seem to govern it are the laws of death. Children are born into it through pain and in pain. … Their minds seem to be trapped in their brain, and its powers to decline if their bodies are hurt. … And their bodies wither and gasp and are laid in the ground, and are no more (T-13.in.2:2-5,7,10).

There certainly appears to be no hope, since our selves seem to be trapped in the body, and we know of no other source of help. This is why Jesus tells us that the ego thought system is fool-proof, yet he also tells us that it is not God-proof (T-5.VI.10:6). There is indeed help that can come to us from outside the ego's inner and outer worlds of separation and specialness. This help is found in the shift from recognizing that regardless of why the world of bodies was made (to imprison), it can nonetheless serve the purpose of being a classroom in which we learn from a different Teacher and a different thought system. The Holy Spirit teaches us, therefore, that we are minds not bodies, and therein lies our release from the pain of imprisonment. A Course in Miracles instructs us in learning how there is nothing outside the mind, meaning that this mind can learn how the body is not what it seems, and that Heaven and hell are nothing more than decisions the mind makes, based on what it wants for itself:

… the place you set aside to house your hate is not a prison, but an illusion of yourself. The body is a limit imposed on the universal communication that is an eternal property of mind. But the communication is internal. Mind reaches to itself. … Within itself it has no limits, and there is nothing outside it (T-18.VI.8:2-5,8).

Tired of the pain of our continual disillusionment, we are at last ready to learn the better way (T-2.III.3:5-6), allowing Jesus to teach us that the world is the place in which we learn the happy fact of salvation. This transforms the home we made in hate, a courtroom of judgment and punishment, into a gentle classroom of learning forgiveness.

The World as Classroom: The Process of Becoming a Happy Learner

We begin the section with this statement from the workbook, succinctly summarizing the inherent neutrality of the world, once it was made to attack. Now it becomes a classroom in which our new Teacher lovingly instructs us in how to see a different purpose for the world: forgiveness in place of condemnation, freedom instead of imprisonment:

Since the purpose of the world is not the one I ascribed to it, there must be another way of looking at it. … I see the world as a prison for God's Son. It must be, then, that the world is really a place where he can be set free. I would look upon the world as it is, and see it as a place where the Son of God finds his freedom (W-pI.57.3:2, 4-6).

The first and most important thing to consider in the process of seeing the world as a classroom is the desire to learn. The opening of Lesson 185 says:

   To say these words ("I want the peace of God.") is nothing. But to mean these words is everything (W-pI.185.1:1-2).

As Hamlet said, "Ay, there's the rub," because we do not always mean these words. To have the peace of God means a decision to give up the conflict that is the source of our separated self, the delusional conflict the ego believes it has with God. It is the right-minded decision not to be the special self we have striven so mightily to achieve and then preserve. In this context, it is also helpful to remember the first obstacle to peace: the desire to be rid of it (T-19.IV-A).

The first steps on our journey back are to accept that learning is in truth a process of unlearning, what constitutes true learning in the world (M-4.X.3:7). We cannot continue without recognizing our resistance to this process: we do not joyfully embrace a thought system or teacher that undoes the very core of our existence. The terror of nonexistence is too compelling, as the following describes:

Nothing more fearful than an idle dream has terrified God's Son, and made him think that he has lost his innocence, denied his Father, and made war upon himself. So fearful is the dream, so seeming real, he could not waken to reality without the sweat of terror and a scream of mortal fear … (T-27.VII.13:3-4).

Referring to the biblical story of his life, Jesus explains how our insane identification with an insane thought system follows from the need to protect our insane self:

Many thought I was attacking them, even though it was apparent I was not. An insane learner learns strange lessons. What you must recognize is that when you do not share a thought system, you are weakening it. Those who believe in it therefore perceive this as an attack on them. This is because everyone identifies himself with his thought system, and every thought system centers on what you believe you are (T-6.V.B.1:5-9).

Still another passage from the text, with a nod to Plato's famous cave prisoners, makes clear the need for time in which to learn our lessons:

   Prisoners bound with heavy chains for years, starved and emaciated, weak and exhausted, and with eyes so long cast down in darkness they remember not the light, do not leap up in joy the instant they are made free. It takes a while for them to understand what freedom is (T-20.III.9:1-2).

It is imperative, therefore, that in acknowledging our desire to be rid of the truth we recognize our resistance, thus accepting that our learning must occur over time. We are asked only to enter into the process of learning that, once begun by us, will surely be completed by our Teacher, with our willingness—one small step at a time. Two statements from the workbook emphasize this important aspect of our learning slowly, step by step:

We need to see a little, that we learn a lot (W-pI.161.4:8).

Do not deny the little steps He [God] asks you take to Him (W-pI.193.13:7).

It is in taking these little steps, learning a little each day, that we become the happy learners the Holy Spirit needs us to be in order to learn His all-inclusive lesson of forgiveness that undoes the ego:

   The Holy Spirit needs a happy learner, in whom His mission can be happily accomplished. You who are steadfastly devoted to misery must first recognize that you are miserable and not happy. The Holy Spirit cannot teach without this contrast, for you believe that misery is happiness (T-14.II.1:1-3).

Seeing the contrast between guilt and remorse may be helpful. Guilt keeps us rooted in the past; remorse lets the past teach us not to repeat mistakes that hurt us. The willingness to admit mistakes (remorse) allows us to choose again, as opposed to guilt that must always be repressed. This ensures that we will always repeat it—the content if not the behavior—the meaning of Freud's concept of repetition compulsion. By not choosing against this dynamic, we can never escape the ego's prison of guilt. It is only when we have the willingness to admit we were wrong, feeling remorse for the pain we caused ourselves and others, that we meet the condition for true learning: humility.

I am reminded of an experience I had several years ago. I am a most amateur clarinetist, who has always played much better in his head than in his fingers. Those readers who came to our Foundation's Roscoe home may have attended one of the annual Tennanah Lake Trio concerts, in which I was fortunate to play wonderful music with two excellent instrumentalists, Phil (1) and Nancy Blum, cellist and cellist/pianist respectively. I was well out of my league in terms of ability, and Phil, longtime cellist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, arranged for me to have some lessons with one of the orchestra's clarinetists, Lawrie Bloom. Lawrie was as fine a teacher as he was a musician, and patiently showed me how absolutely everything I was doing with my instrument was wrong. Everything!—how I put the reed in the mouthpiece and the placing of the ligature that holds it in place, my hand positions, my fingering, my lip and tongue action on the reed, not to mention the style of my playing.

Fortunately for me, I was able not to be defensive, but to be open to all Lawrie's corrections. This allowed me to begin the hard work of correcting my mistakes. The issue here was my attitude toward my learning, not the playing itself, reflecting the all-important theme in A Course in Miracles of humility vs. arrogance, magnitude vs. littleness. Arrogance, the ego's defense against its self-perceived littleness, never feels it has anything to learn, but stubbornly holds on to the need of being right rather than happy (T-29.VII.1:9). Humility, in contra-distinction, joyfully admits mistakes, knowing that they expose the mind's underlying decision for the ego. Without the mistakes, there would be no opportunity for correcting the fundamental problem. This enables us to become happy learners (T-14.II) who welcome their world as the classroom it can truly be. Under the gentle tutelage of the Holy Spirit, they unlearn the ego's lessons of sin and guilt that leads to remembering the magnitude of the Self.

To restate this, we need to recognize our need to learn, the need to recognize our mistakes in form that reflect the mind's mistake in content. How can we ever learn if we arrogantly assert that we have already learned it? As Jesus states in the workbook: "You will not question what you have already defined" (W-pI.28.4:1).

Speaking of the workbook, the core of its one-year training program lies in recognizing our need for correction. I have often taught that the true meaning of doing the workbook perfectly, a goal many students unfortunately have for themselves, is to do it imperfectly, and then forgive oneself for having done so. It is tempting for students, falling prey to the allure of the special relationship—form to the exclusion of content—to use any means to ensure that they comply with the letter of the lesson, trying to get it right in form, rather than its spirit, which is to learn from mistakes. How can we recognize our weakened desire for peace unless we see how consistently we defend against it? How can we learn from mistakes in our decision-making if we do not believe we have made any?

In this regard, I frequently poke fun at Course students purchasing alarm wrist watches so that they do not forget to think of God every hour, or six times an hour as we are sometimes asked to do. Illustrating that our good intentions are not enough and should not be trusted (T-18.IV.2.1-2), such behavior merely sabotages any learning that could have ensued. These otherwise well-meaning people truly think they are being "good" students, all the while having made the Holy Spirit obsolete as a teacher. This was Jesus' point in Lesson 95, the only place in the curriculum where he enters into such a lengthy discussion of this wrong-minded approach to our learning. My central point here is that our multitudinous "little" mistakes are microcosms of the one "huge" mistake of separating from our Source: the tiny, mad idea at which we are to remember to laugh (T-27.VIII.6:2). The problem is thus not the thought of separation itself, but our having taken it seriously by believing it has the power to destroy love. Whenever we choose our ego, we are reliving the original mistake:

   Each day, and every minute in each day, and every instant that each minute holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror took the place of love (T-26.V.13:1).

Therefore, the way we respond in our daily life will help us undo the ontological ego response. To feel guilty over the mistake, thinking of it as a sin, denying it by covering it over and pretending it never occurred, or by avoiding situations out of fear of sinning, is to prevent any healing from happening. This, then, is what Jesus says in the lesson. Space forbids a full quotation, but an interested reader can read it in its entirety:

You have seen the extent of your lack of mental discipline, and of your need for mind training. It is necessary that you be aware of this, for it is indeed a hindrance to your advance. … There may well be a temptation to regard the day as lost because you have already failed to do what is required. This should, however, merely be recognized as what it is; a refusal to let your mistake be corrected, and an unwillingness to try again.
   The Holy Spirit is not delayed in His teaching by your mistakes. He can be held back only by your unwillingness to let them go. Let us therefore be determined … to be willing to forgive ourselves for our lapses in diligence. … This tolerance for weakness will enable us to overlook it, rather than give it power to delay our learning. … When you fail to comply with the requirements of this course, you have merely made a mistake. This calls for correction, and for nothing else. To allow a mistake to continue is to make additional mistakes, based on the first and reinforcing it. It is this process that must be laid aside, for it is but another way in which you would defend illusions against the truth (W-pI.95.4:4-5; 7:4-5; 8:1-4; 9).

Translated into our everyday experience, the need for "mental discipline" and "mind training" is reflected in the daily practice of monitoring our ego thoughts, recognizing them as the defenses that they are. The point is not to feel guilty about them, but to bring them to Jesus for correction. Each time we find ourselves becoming annoyed, angry, guilty, fearful, anxious, or depressed, we need to be reminded that all these responses are defenses against remembering our true Self, which knows only the oneness of Heaven's love.

To reword this last discussion, without looking at the ego and its mistaken thought system, thereby forgiving it, we condemn ourselves to repeat it. And so the crucial element in our journey lies in recognizing the mistake for what it is. Since the ego thought system is unconscious, because we are mindless, we need to see the projections of this mistake, thus gaining access to our mind's decision for the ego. Read the following statement of this theme:

   Damnation is your judgment on yourself, and this you will project upon the world. See it as damned, and all you see is what you did to hurt the Son of God. … If you see holiness and hope, you joined the Will of God to set him free. There is no choice that lies between these two decisions. And you will see the witness to the choice you made, and learn from this to recognize which one you chose (T-21.in.2:1-2,4-6 italics mine).

The same goes for our feelings and experiences, as we see in this statement from earlier in the text: "I must have decided wrongly, because I am not at peace" (T-5.VII.6:7; italics omitted). Whenever we are feeling anything but the peace of God, a peace that embraces all people in its love, we know for certain that our minds have chosen the ego.

In summary, then, the world changes from prison to classroom when we learn that it is only our mind's decision that has consigned us to Heaven or to hell. We have to realize that we are no longer victims of the world, but only of our own desires and wishes. What freedom lies in that recognition, for we are no longer "at the mercy of things beyond [us], forces [we] cannot control, and thoughts that come to [us] against [our] will" (T-19.IV-D.7:4)! We close this section with the following excerpt from the first review lesson in the workbook:

How can I be the victim of a world that can be completely undone if I so choose? My chains are loosened. I can drop them off merely by desiring to do so. The prison door is open. I can leave simply by walking out. Nothing holds me in this world. Only my wish to stay keeps me a prisoner. I would give up my insane wishes and walk into the sunlight at last (W-pI.57.1:2-9).

Happily now, we leave the world of darkness and enter Jesus' forgiven world of light, our daily lives a shining compass, a stream of stars that lead us to our home.

Conclusion: "A Stream of Stars"

When we finally have learned our lessons, being joyously motivated to leave the ego's prison house, we have made the Holy Spirit's qualitative shift (T-5.I.7:6) that is the penultimate step for awakening from the ego's nightmarish hell of separation, specialness, and death. This change is brought about through forgiveness, wherein we recognize that we are not the miserable and helpless effect of our world and its special relationships. Leaving the dream of separate interests to share only the happy dreams of shared interests, we realize the intrinsic sameness of God's separated Sons. This lovely paragraph from the pamphlet Psychotherapy: Purpose, Process and Practice summarizes the qualitative shift, radiant in its purpose:

   Think what the joining of two brothers really means. And then forget the world and all its little triumphs and its dreams of death. The same are one, and nothing now can be remembered of the world of guilt. The room becomes a temple, and the street a stream of stars that brushes lightly past all sickly dreams. Healing is done, for what is perfect needs no healing, and what remains to be forgiven where there is no sin? (P-2.VII.8)

Our daily experiences are transformed into streams of stars that lead to the temple that is our lives, the classrooms of learning that end the dream. Thus our thoughts, feelings, and experiences fulfil their potential of becoming holy. Miracles have come to replace all grievances, forgiveness shines away our sin, and God's Voice is all we hear as He proclaims the truth of God's Son in the following words we pray to our Father:

   Forgiveness, truth's reflection, tells me how to offer miracles, and thus escape the prison house in which I think I live. Your holy Son is pointed out to me, first in my brother; then in me. Your Voice instructs me patiently to hear Your Word, and give as I receive. And as I look upon Your Son today, I hear Your Voice instructing me to find the way to You, as You appointed that the way shall be: "Behold his sinlessness, and be you healed" (W-pII.357.1; italics omitted).

FOOTNOTES:
1. Phil, one of the most accomplished musicians I have ever encountered, recently died of cancer after fifty-four years with the orchestra that is one of the world's finest. I shall always be grateful for his friendship and the privilege of having made music with him over such a long period of time. His patience with my playing was always very inspiring.