Curtis Grubb

Why is almost nothing written about Jesus in his youth? Luke gives us one account — Jesus at fourteen, already prodigious among the teachers, already knowing: "Don't you know I must be about my Father's business?"

Then silence. Sixteen years before the ministry begins.

I've wondered about those years for a long time. What was he studying? What was he saying? What did he wish for? How did he live his daily life? Reading between the lines, he must have been practicing — quietly, in his own way. He knew the Law and the Prophets. He taught them with an eloquence that could only come from having lived inside them. He was the ultimate flowering of the thought and tradition of his own time. That doesn't happen overnight. It happens in the silent years.

But those years were never written down. And that silence left a gap — not just in scripture, but in the model of what a life of devotion actually looks like while you're living it. Before the teaching. Before the ministry. Before anyone knows your name.

What does a twenty-year-old do with the call to wake up?

Growing up, the dominant narrative was simple: go to school, get a job. That narrative is falling apart. The tools change — books, technology, whatever comes next — but the need doesn't. A young person still needs a way to return to what they are. The question is what materials they pick up.

I picked up A Course in Miracles. I believe it to be the most significant book of the last two thousand years. Believed to have been channeled from Jesus himself, it is profoundly poetic and prophetic in ways we have yet to fully appreciate. Its form is unlike anything that came before — 365 daily lessons that don't teach you a philosophy but undo the one you already have. It doesn't add anything to the mind. It returns the mind to its original state. Innocent. Free. Loving. It will be a great and timeless classic for countless generations to come, brought to life in their own ways.

I picked up the I Ching. Another foundational text — the bedrock beneath Daoist and Confucian thought — and yet, like the Course, entirely beyond religion. It's a tool for living in harmony with the underlying principles of existence. When applied to the way of the Course — forgiveness, releasing, self-realization — each hexagram becomes a mirror showing you where energy moves and where you're holding on.

And then I did something I didn't expect. I started building.

Not building as a career move. Not building as self-expression. Building as the practice itself. I wrote code that holds these two traditions — the Course and the I Ching — in a single daily practice. An app called The Way. Each day, a lesson. Each practice, a reading. The ancient and the immediate, meeting in the same space.

The act of building sharpened something in me. Writing code for this — choosing every word of every hexagram reading, discerning what was true from what was merely clever, sitting with the I Ching's counsel on its own presentation — all of it became a form of study not unlike what I imagine those silent years must have held. Not public. Not performative. Just a person alone with the materials, working carefully, letting the work change them.

I'm lighter now. Freer. More certain that this direction works — not because I've arrived anywhere, but because the practice keeps proving itself. All my energies get directed increasingly toward the Highest, and all else falls away.

That's what building as devotion means. Not that the code is sacred. But that the attention you bring to it can be. The silent years weren't wasted. They were the real work. And they don't have to go unwritten anymore.

The core of any spiritual teaching is letting go. The Course calls it forgiving. Lester calls it releasing. Different words for the same movement — the willingness to stop holding on to what was never real.

Both begin from the same place: you are already what you're looking for. Nothing needs to be added. Nothing needs to be achieved. The only thing between you and the recognition of what you are is your own mind — layer upon layer of conditioning, accumulated over what feels like forever, believed in so completely that it passes for identity. The whole spiritual path is simply this: letting it go before the body drops it for you. Nothing is accomplished through death. Everything is accomplished through release.

But how? That's where these two traditions become so remarkable. They don't just point at freedom — they describe the mechanics of what's in the way.

The Course works through forgiveness. Not the forgiveness of common understanding — not pardoning someone for a real offense — but the recognition that the offense was never real to begin with. What you thought happened didn't happen the way you think it did, because the one it happened to doesn't exist the way you think it does. Forgiveness in the Course is the undoing of the belief in separation itself. Every grievance, every judgment, every fear is a thread you can pull, and when you pull it honestly, the whole fabric loosens.

Lester works through releasing. Direct, almost startlingly simple. You feel what you feel — the grief, the fear, the wanting, the pride — and you let it go. Not by understanding it. Not by processing it. Just by opening your hand. Lester saw that the mind accumulates in layers — heavy ones at the bottom, subtler ones above — and that each layer released reveals more of what was always underneath. Your natural state. Innocent, free, loving.

What strikes me, practicing both, is how precisely they complement each other. The Course gives language to what separation is — its structure, its logic, its hiding places. It shows you what you're holding. Lester gives you the mechanics of how to drop it. The Course says: this grievance is a belief in separation. Lester says: can you let it go? The Course illuminates. Releasing acts.

Releasing is simple — just Be. All else passes away.

Releasing is deep. Thousands of years of conditioning, believed in absolutely, defended fiercely. But it all goes when brought to light. That's the shared discovery. Both traditions speak simply about the most profound thing a human being can encounter: the recognition that what you thought you were — the whole accumulated weight of it — can be set down. And what remains is not emptiness but fullness. Not loss but return.

I built The Way to hold these two traditions in daily conversation. Each day, a lesson from the Course. Each practice, a reading from the I Ching that mirrors the inner territory the lesson opens. But underneath that structure is this deeper convergence — the recognition that forgiveness and releasing are two hands opening the same door. One shows you the door. The other shows you that your hand was on the knob the whole time.

You sit with a question. Not a casual one — something you've been carrying. You throw three coins, six times. The coins land. A hexagram forms. You read.

And then something happens that's difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it. The answer is right. Not right the way a horoscope is right — vague enough to fit anything. Right the way a mirror is right. It shows you exactly what you were looking at but couldn't see. Specific. Unflattering sometimes. Precise in a way that makes you go quiet.

The first time this happens, you can dismiss it. Coincidence. Pattern-seeking. The mind finding what it wants to find. But it keeps happening. And the answers get stranger — not stranger as in more bizarre, but stranger as in more intimate. The I Ching starts answering questions you didn't know you were asking. It responds to what's underneath the question. It addresses the one who's asking, not just what they asked.

That's when it stops being a book and starts being something else entirely.

I don't have a theory for why it works. I've stopped needing one. What I can say is what it does: it answers you as part of existence in relation to existence. Not as an isolated person with a private problem, but as a movement within a larger movement. Your situation is not separate from the situation of everything. The I Ching seems to know this — to operate from this knowing — and when you consult it honestly, it shows you where you stand in the whole picture.

The accumulated wisdom in it is staggering. Thousands of years of watching how energy moves — how situations rise, crest, dissolve, and return. All of it distilled into sixty-four hexagrams, each one a landscape of being, each line a position within that landscape. It's not mystical in the way people expect. It's observational. Precise. Almost scientific in its patience. Existence moves in patterns. The I Ching mapped them. And when you throw the coins, you're not generating randomness — you're letting the pattern show you where you are.

There's a question beneath every consultation, whether you voice it or not: is there something in you that sees all of this — the thoughts, the feelings, the identities, the beliefs — without being any of it? Something unmoving, watching the movement? The I Ching speaks from that place. That's why the answers feel like they come from beyond the limits of thought. They do. Not from somewhere supernatural, but from somewhere deeper than the mind that asked.

I consult the I Ching for real decisions. When I needed to know whether to separate The Way from my personal site, I asked. The reading counseled a clean, sincere release — and that clarity was worth more than weeks of deliberation. I didn't manufacture that answer. I couldn't have. It arrived the way truth arrives when you make space for it.

This is why I built the I Ching into The Way as the oracle system. Not as decoration. Not as a novelty. As the other half of the daily practice. The Course lesson opens something in you — and the oracle shows you where it's opening, what's moving, what's ready to be released. One speaks to you in the language of forgiveness. The other speaks in the language of change. Together they say the same thing: let go, and see what's always been here.

The experiences that follow are beyond words. Not because they're dramatic, but because they're quiet. A steadiness. An alignment you didn't arrange. The feeling of being in tune with something you can't name but can no longer deny. The I Ching doesn't give you that feeling. It shows you it was already there.