This morning I am launching the TruthUnity Commentary Project, which adds helpful commentary in side boxes to the texts on TruthUnity, beginning with Teach Us To Pray. You are invited to be my collaborator in bringing new insight and understanding to classic Unity texts.
The first picture is of a handwritten margin note made in 1943 in an original edition of Teach Us To Pray. I don't know who owned this leather-bound, original edition, but the note is about the relationship between affirmations and the Silence. I found the note insightful and helpful to understanding what Cora and Charles originally wrote.
The second picture is the same note inserted into the online text of Teach Us To Pray. The original note was buried for 72 years in a dusty book. But the online version is now available to anyone reading the 29th chapter on TruthUnity and it will soon begin appearing in search requests in Google. Isn't that cool?
Could it be that there are thousands of insightful comments available to us today, buried for many years, as margin notes and commentary we have made in our own copies of Teach Us To Pray? Are they now ready to be uncovered, dusted-off and shared with the world? Is now the time that Google and Bing should crawl and compile the text of the margin notes you have made over a lifetime of study of classic Unity texts? Could your insightful comments and those of your friends bring life back into our understanding of classic Unity texts? Is it possible that you and your friends in Unity are your own best teachers? Does that sound interesting? Here's how it can actually happen ...
- Get out your copy of Teach Us To Pray. Have you made any special notes? Would you be willing to share them with others?
- Edit your note so that it is a paragraph or two, maybe 2-10 lines. Send it to me at mark@truthunity.net. Unless what you've written is really problematic, I'll post it in the the text on TruthUnity.
- For your first commentary, include a paragraph or two about you. And also send a picture. I'll set-up a page that links to your commentary so readers can know a bit about you and your story. More about that later.
So TruthUnity is now open to commenting by you and your friends in Unity, beginning with Teach Us To Pray. I don't know if it works for you, but I am excited to learn what our friends in Unity have to say about Teach Us To Pray and other classic Unity texts.
The plan is to provide commentary for other Unity texts and for the Bible. Annotations and commentary can make old books come alive. The bible has the Harper, the Oxford and the Interpreter's. Charles Fillmore and friends reinvigorated Bible study eighty-five years ago with the commentary and annotations of the Metaphysical Bible Dictionary. More recently, Ed Rabel and others wrote the manuals we now know as Metaphysics I and II. And we all got through high school English relying on the Cliff Notes.
There are 35 chapters in Teach Us To Pray. Each chapter needs 3-4 commentaries and those commentaries need to be diverse. To provide for that diversity, we will need at least 30 people each contributing 2-5 commentaries. Some commentaries will be insightful and profound, others will be crazy. I've given enough Sunday sermons to know that not every idea is divine. That's okay; from a ton of ore will emerge some beautiful diamonds.
The only rule is that the focus be conveying the spirit and teachings of the Fillmores. We're in this to find some fresh insights into what Cora and Charles meant to say. Everyone can spot a personal agenda, so focus on the text of Teach Us To Pray instead of some other non-Unity teaching or text. That's the only rule.
Each of you who collaborate will have a landing page like this. I'll need a picture and a bio and your bio may have all the personal point-of-view content. Here is where our many and diverse perspectives may come through. If someone finds your commentary thought-provoking, then that reader will naturally want to know more about you. That's important, because it adds perspective to Unity teaching. You'll also have a login to TruthUnity so that you can revise your commentary or change your bio.
The copyright will be the same as Wikipedia: Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike. That means others are free to pick up your ideas and build upon them as long as they credit you with the original idea.
Until now, TruthUnity has been a personal ministry for me. I am thankful for your support and encouragement. But this ministry, like the classic Unity content it publishes, belongs to all of us. No one person can or should set an agenda. Like the seventy elders who translated the Septuagint, we must now freely collaborate to bring the message of the Fillmores to a new audience in our media-driven culture.
So get out your personal copy of Teach Us To Pray. What have you underlined? What insights do you have? Are you ready to collaborate in bringing new insights into classic Unity texts? Are you willing to help others learn Unity teachings and principles? Please call or email me.
