Corrected HLC
The Scholar’s Toolbox
with Six Volume Concordance
Text
(in print) plus Workbook, Manual for Teachers, Use of Terms, Psychotherapy,
Song of Prayer on CD
An honest claim to genuine scholarship
-
an
extraordinarily precise reconstruction of the HLC with exhaustive six
volume Concordance
MPF: http://www.execulink.com/~dthomp75/2007
http://miraclesinactionpress.com/dthomp74/2008/index.htm
by Doug Thompson
I can’t really give you an objective, disinterested
and unbiased review of a book in which I was so heavily involved. I can,
however, tell you a bit about it and how it compares to other offerings. And I
can tell you truthfully. I do know what’s between those covers and how it
got there!
I will also publish an “objective unbiased"
review if anyone cares to write one for me!
What I can do is provide you a page by page comparison with the “Replica” such that you can see for yourself
exactly what was changed and read the explanations in the footnotes.
The Corrected HLC in book form is a coil
bound letter format book with the HLC in 250 pages. It has
36 pages of Preface
detailing the “Corrections”. It has 250 footnotes. It comes in a simple stiff
paperback cover or a laminated plastic cover. Due to the fact that we
have no budget, we print copies as we receive orders. When finances
permit, we do hope to print it in a more conventional form that will also be cheaper.
For a nominal extra charge it comes with a Concordance
on CD. The Concordance includes all six volumes of the ACIM canon and
over 1,000 footnotes. We are not ready to print the Sub-Urtext
Workbook, Manual for Teachers, Use of Terms, Psychotherapy or Song
of Prayer volumes yet because they are not fully proofed.
However, again, we felt that after three proofing passes they are “good enough”
that the CD Concordance based on them is far more useful than no Concordance at
all! We do include the original photocopies on CD in PDF files with a
convenient interface so that the user can quickly check any of the volumes
against the ‘original original.’
The original goal of the proofing was to produce an
accurate copy of the HLC in machine readable form so we could
generate an accurate Concordance. My background in Biblical Scholarship
has disclosed to me how utterly essential such a tool is to serious textual
study. Of course no Concordance is any better than the accuracy of the
text it is based upon. I knew that the CIMS(1) document I’d
been involved in publishing back in 2000 had some problems that needed fixing,
though I had no idea how extensive those problems were.
That is simply a proofreading job. Not
complicated, but decidedly tedious. We quickly ran into a problem.
Once we decided to fix the “obvious typos” such as spelling “yoke” like an egg
“yolk”, we ran into some that were not quite so obvious but which, with a bit
of research, proved to be just as certainly “typos.” And then we ran into
more and more suspected “problems” as we approached the text with more and more
care and familiarity and began to compare it to other versions and see how
often the Scribes had altered it themselves from one versions to another, often
inadvertently introducing errors. Applying a critical literary and editorial
eye, many things appeared as possible mistakes that might warrant correcting as
surely as “yoke” needed to replace “yolk.” From the outset I attempted to
interest the Course in Miracles Society (of which I was a co-founder) in the
project but those folks, apparently, had other ideas. I was able to
interest Robert Perry, Lee Flynn and Deborah Maltman and Gerald Merrick and
they became my editorial board to whom I constantly ran with “questionable
passages,” and whose critical analysis and determination not to let
mistakes creep in was of enormous assistance.
The methodology, it’s not “original” it’s just boring
old scholarship
I went through the HLC on a first
proofing pass and wrote down everything I suspected in any way might be a
scribal error, not just the “obvious typos” of which there were plenty, and
then I shared that list with several people, one of whom was Robert
Perry.
Once Perry was engaged in the process, there began a
year-long dialogue between Robert and myself during which we hashed over that
list, constantly expanding and refining it, while knocking some points off,
until we had a very solid list of suspected “errors” in the HLC
and proposed “corrections” that we both agreed on with the exception of one
single point. And that disagreement is footnoted too! This was the basis
for the “corrected” part of the Corrected HLC. Our
standards were quite rigorous: nothing gets changed unless there is persuasive
evidence that there is a genuine and inadvertent error on the
part of the Scribes, and nothing gets changed unless we all agree
unanimously on what needs fixing and what the fix is. Otherwise we just
footnote a suspected problem and leave it for future scholarship to resolve.
By inadvertent we mean an error they’d have surely fixed if they’d known about
it. Spelling mistakes, capitalization inconsistencies, bad punctuation,
bad grammar and inadvertent errors and omissions while copy typing were all
candidates. And, except for the most minor of punctuation changes, such
as changing semicolons to commas and commas to colons where appropriate, every
change would be documented, most with footnotes. Spelling standardization
was not footnoted, it was documented by listing the 32 words whose spelling we
altered. So “saviour” becomes “savior” and “no-one” becomes “no one” and
“towards” becomes “toward”. In many cases Helen and Bill used several
different acceptable spellings for the same word, toward and towards being one
example. For the purposes of a student looking the word up in a
Concordance, it seemed only reasonable that we render the spelling consistent!
All significant changes which could conceivably have
an impact on meaning were documented such that the reader can see both the
replica, or “original” HLC text, and our chosen correction, along
with the reasons for the correction. This is standard scholarly
practice. Scholarship is a community collegial affair; it is not done by
isolated individuals but rather by communities of scholars. Only by
making our work public in this way can other scholars check it, verify it, or
falsify it where we have erred. And only in that way can the whole
scholarly enterprise of generating ever more accurate work proceed.
So we proofed it and debated proposed changes,
comparing the troublesome readings against older and newer versions, consulting
grammarians and poetry experts, analysing the poetic structure where relevant,
combing the typescripts for similar textual structures that could give us
clues, and finally making the best determination we could, always knowing we
were not infallible, that we would inevitably err here and there, so always
documenting adjustments to the text.
After three years and ten passes there were still some
errors but there were not very many and it seemed to us more important to make
it available than to spend another year keeping it quiet and tracking down more
errors on our own. We were rather sure that as soon as we made it public
others would start finding the mistakes. We also knew that even though if
fell just a tad short of perfect, it was – and is – more accurate and therefore
more useful than any other edition of ACIM by several country miles. We
also know that as soon as we released the material and people started using it,
the remaining errors would show up! And so they have!
Raphael Greene prepared a “replica” and compared part
of our work to it, revealing a number of oversights on our part. Those
were corrected.
As the final verification we produced a “replica” of
the HLC typescript, somewhat more accurate than Raphael’s, with
every keystroke exactly correct, and generated a comparison with the Corrected
HLC. This document shows every change and does one thing our
documentation doesn’t, it shows where “towards” was changed to “toward.”
Our documentation just says both were found, and all were rendered
“toward.” It doesn’t record which were originally “towards.” Maybe
that should be footnoted, but the replica comparison provides that data.
Our documentation also does not show where we adjusted capitalization to
Helen’s conventions. The “replica comparison” does that for anyone who
wishes to know.
Can this work be improved! OH YES! We
don’t claim it to be perfect. We do know it is far and away the best and
most accurate available.
On the list of “improvements” under way is a footnote
for every Biblical reference and a clearer presentation of the reference system
in the Concordance. As the proofing is completed on the other volumes and
the Sub-Urtext, those volumes will also be made available. The
main perceived limiting factor at the moment is simply lack of money. A
huge amount of skilled labour is required to produce products of very high
quality. The dependence on amateur volunteers can reduce the need for
funds but as we’ve seen, it also reduces the quality of the work
catastrophically. I believe that one of the reasons for the pathetically
low quality and exorbitant error-rate in all editions of ACIM prior to this
one, and the one since, is the lack of any budget allocations to
proofreading. Money can be raised to print books, but not, apparently to
proofread what goes to the printer!
It seems relatively easy to come up with dollars to
print books and enormously difficult to come up with pennies to feed, clothe
and house scholars without whom there is nothing worthwhile to put in the
books!
Reference and then some
The Corrected HLC has two reference
systems. One is embedded in the text in bolded numerals in brackets that
look like this: (123). This is the original typescript page
number. Proofing absolutely required our putting those in while we were
finding and fixing mistakes and there seemed no good reason to take them
out! They do provide a ‘universal standard’ anyone can use and they are
very useful for checking anything against the original typescript. The
second reference system is a simplified version of the chapter, section and
verse system we’re all familiar with from the FIP Second Edition.
Almost all the vexing inconsistencies of that system which made it complicated
for veterans at times and unusable for novices have been removed. The
entirety of the six volumes has been rationally reduced to three tiers,
Chapter, Section and Paragraph. This simple reference system has a few
advantages over every other we’ve seen or contemplated. It can be used
with any extant copy of the HLC, whether it has our numbers
printed in its margins or not. Anyone can count the sections, there are
never more than 11 and anyone can count paragraphs within a section, there are
rarely more than 12. So a Chapter:Section:Paragraph reference can always
be used by anyone with any edition of the HLC.
The Concordance displays words with six words of context
before and after and both references so as to facilitate lookup in the original
typescript as well as any edition of the HLC one might happen to
have handy.