Danish Translation Team Leader: Karl Boysen
Karl reading the Introduction to the Course in Danish
This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way: Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.
I was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, during the Second World War in 1941. I went through three formal educations and two informal ones. After my primary schooling, I spent four years in a big, dark factory to get my license as a blacksmith and machine tool worker. Then I studied five years to become a schoolteacher. Finally I learned to be a psychologist at the University of Copenhagen, where I spent thirteen years until 1981.
My two informal educational experiences began with the study of dreams and dream-psychology for three years while practicing privately as a spiritual teacher in Denmark. Then in 1992 I met A Course in Miracles. Six years later during a meditation, the clear meaning of two dreams that I had not understood when I first dreamt them nearly twenty years earlier suddenly came to my mind with vivid clarity.
Up to that time, I had been involved with three different women (not at the same time I have to say) including twenty years of marriage. Those women blessed me not only with many special relationships but also with my daughter, who is now 33 and deeply involved with the Course also.
On a day that is burned into my memory (April 8, 1993) I dared to complain about a draft Danish translation of the Course to Dr. William Whitson at the Foundation for Inner Peace. He startled me by replying, “If you feel so strongly about it, why don’t you translate it?” And so I started, working alone in a state of addiction and spiritual ecstasy. I worked as if I were drugged, feverishly translating a hundred pages a month and completing the first draft of the whole 1200-page book during that first year. At the same time I took care of my job as a psychologist in my private practice, doing workshops and running groups on dreams. I arrogantly believed that I could finish the job on my own in just a couple of years.
Then three people showed up out of the blue, telling me that they were my readers. Veteran students of the Course, they had attended a workshop in Roscoe, New York, with Dr. Kenneth Wapnick, who had qualified them as readers. They offered to help me get through the next challenging and difficult time with the translation.
At first, I was very resentful of their “interference.” But later I happily came to realize that I never could have finished this project alone. Even with their support, the challenge of introducing Course ideas to Danish culture remained very difficult. As I later came to see, the ego has a vicious ability to take over any experience of light and happiness; it slowly turned my first year of ecstasy into one of deep resistance. Every morning I had to overcome a sense of “No – I hate this. Can’t I do something else? Why did I ever say yes?” As if to further challenge my ego, two more people became involved with the process. As we went through three proof readings by the summer of 2001, arguments, disagreements and bitter fights in our relationships forced us to focus clearly on one idea: forgiveness.
After the translation process had ended, I was startled by the realization that it is one thing to know what the Course says, which I learned by painstakingly going through each and every sentence in the material seven or eight times. It is a completely different thing to look at your ego and actually forgive. For that reason, I believe that my experience with the translation process was the best and most fulfilling thing that I have ever done, especially considering the new friends that I met during the work, both my working team in Denmark and the support group in USA. By forcing us to ruthlessly scrutinize our egos on all levels, our collaboration profoundly changed everything for us on the translation team.
And now, after 20 years of practicing forgiveness, I think I’m starting to get an idea of what it is about. What has kept me on the track – and from going nuts!! – are my communications with Kenneth Wapnick, and in particular my ongoing translation of his “Journey through the Workbook of A Course in Miracles.” I simply am doing the workbook one more time together with Kenneth. It will probably be the last time, since this process is so time consuming; I do not know if I can complete the translation this time around. I’m 71, I started on lesson 1 in 2007, and these days in 2012 I’m working on lesson 135.
Another extremely important source of learning and experience is my work with training groups. I meet regularly with some 20 people in small groups all over the country – where the focus is on the very dynamics of the process of forgiving – a work that is very beneficial to us all, and one where I am as much a student as a teacher, as everyone else in the groups.
The most important lesson I guess I am learning is together with my daughter – born in 1968 – who has been deeply involved with the Course now for 12 years. This relationship seems – no wonder – to be the most difficult one, but at the same time seemingly also the one from which I am learning the most. But – based on experience – my conclusion after only twenty years of hard work is: True forgiveness is the thing if you want to be happy.
ET KURSUS I MIRAKLERDanish Hardcover Edition
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