» apocalyptic prophecy The Spiral Path

19 Feb 2012

TBM 22: Why I Don’t Endorse "A Course In Miracles"

In the past few days, I’ve been busily researching the well-known text called A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, Publisher. A Course in Miracles: Combined Volume. 2nd ed. Mill Valley, CA: Foundation for Inner Peace, 1992.).

The Three Magi (felt panel (C) JAT)

I purchased this book at Chapters a few years ago. I’m not sure exactly when I bought it. It was probably in 2004 or 2005. In more recent years, I’ve made a habit of noting the date of purchase on the title page of my new acquisitions, and there’s no purchase note in my copy of ACIM, as it’s commonly known. But I picked up a copy when I saw it at the bookstore because I like to have primary sources on my bookshelves — books written by mystics rather than books written about mystics. I like to read for myself what famous mystics and channellers of the past have written in their own words.

You can tell a lot about a person’s internal brain architecture by reading what they’ve written or what they’ve “transcribed” in a mystical state.

Although no author is listed on the title page of ACIM, it was written between 1965 and 1972 by a New York professor of medical psychology named Helen Schucman. She was aided in this process by her colleague William Thetford, who was also a professor of psychology. (You can read more about it by googling ACIM, Helen Schucman, and William Thetford.)

Schucman was 56 years old when she went through a four-month period of “unusually vivid dream sequences” and “unusual waking experiences.” She gradually began to discern an inner character, a voice who spoke to her and identified himself as Jesus. At first she heard this voice only in her dreams. One day, however, she was sitting in her home when she heard the same voice say to her while she was awake, “This is a course in miracles. Please take notes.”

So she took notes. Lots and lots of notes. She used shorthand to write down what the inner voice was dictating, and her colleague Bill Thetford transcribed the notes onto a typewriter as she read them aloud. Apparently she at times needed a lot of reassurance from Thetford to keep going with this process. Thetford eventually edited the material with the help of a third clinical psychologist, Kenneth Wapnick.

I have a lot of concerns about this material. I have concerns about the state of Schucman’s mental function when she was hearing the inner voice. I have concerns about the motives of Bill Thetford, who coaxed her into continuing to “channel” even when she repeatedly expressed her uncertainty. (As a clinical psychologist, he ought to have known better.) I have concerns about the extent to which other people — including Thetford and Wapnick — oversaw and edited the raw material and helped popularize it through a Foundation created on the other side of the country. I have concerns about the report given by Benedict Groeschel, a Roman Catholic priest and psychologist, who knew Schucman well. Groeschel said that in the last two years of her life Schucman was suffering from a severe psychotic depression. (She died in 1981). If she were writing this material today, I would want to see her current brain scans and I would want to investigate through conventional medical means the possibility that at age 56 Helen Schucman was showing early signs of a dementia with dissociative features.

If you open up any page of A Course in Miracles, what you’ll find is stream of consciousness poetry that resonates with the words and the imagery of ancient mystical texts. It is apophatic mysticism in one of the purest forms I’ve ever seen — a sort of modern day Gnostic Docetism.

Here is an example (one of many, many examples) of the Docetic/Gnostic content of ACIM: “It should especially be noted God has only one Son. If all His creations are His Sons, every one must be an integral part of the whole Sonship. The Sonship in its Oneness transcends the sum of its parts. However, this is obscured as long as any of its parts is missing. That is why the conflict cannot ultimately be resolved until all the parts of the Sonship have returned. Only then can the meaning of wholeness in the true sense be understood. Any part of the Sonship can believe in error or incompleteness if he so chooses. However, if he does so, he is believing in the existence of nothingness. The correction of this error is the Atonement (Chapter 2, Section VII, para. 6).”

Sounds very lofty, very wise, very ethereal, eh?

Small paragraphs taken out of context in ACIM sound this way much of the time, which is probably why the text has been so popular with spiritual seekers who are fed up with traditional religious teachings. The book seems to have so many helpful insights! The problem comes when you try to paste all the paragraphs together. When you paste them together, you don’t have a coherent body of thought with a logical structure and a strong foundation in science. What you have is a circular stream of cliches, cliches that were robbed from other writers (albeit unwittingly) and pasted together in a hamster wheel of Wisdom (“Sophia” in ancient Greek).

A Course in Miracles will take you round and round in circles, but it won’t help you move forward along the Spiral Path because it’s not grounded in reality.

The “Workbook for Students,” which follows 666 pages of “revelation,” contains 365 lessons for spiritual students. Three hundred and sixty-five lessons! (Does anyone need that many?) In my opinion this isn’t a one-year course in miracles — it’s a one-year course in how to become dissociated from your own free will, your own thoughts and emotions, and your own soul’s inner wisdom.

I mean, come on, if you tell your biological brain for a whole year that “nothing I see in this room means anything” (Lesson #1), what do expect your biological brain to do with that? If you tell yourself for a whole year that “This table does not mean anything. This chair does not mean anything. This hand does not mean anything. This foot does not mean anything. This pen does not mean anything (page 3 of Part II),” what do you honestly think your brain is going to do? Your brain — whose job it is to follow the instructions you give it — is going to stop assigning meaning to anything.

Just as you’ve told it to do.

I don’t know about you, but I see one of the greatest causes of suffering in this world as people having too little meaning in their lives, not too much.

When I look at a chair, I see lots of meaning. In the chair I see chemistry and physics at work. I see God the Mother and God the Father sharing baryonic matter with their children who are incarnated here on Planet Earth — children who need all the help they can get! I see an important household item that adds to my sense of comfort and household beauty. I see a medical device, if you will, that helps support my back so I don’t get a backache. I see a product of economic health and well being. (I had to pay money for the chair.) I see the hard work of many people — the people who designed the chair, tested the chair, manufactured the chair, transported the chair, and sold the chair — all people who deserve to make a living.

I see relationships in the chair. And I feel grateful for these relationships.

Relationships are real. Relationships are the very foundation of everything that’s real and meaningful in our lives. I refuse to accept any spiritual or religious teaching that tries to force me to stop seeing relationships in the world around me.

Recently I spoke with a young woman I’ve been acquainted with for the past couple of years. When I saw her a few weeks ago, she looked distracted and unfocussed, and her affect was sort of “flattened.” I asked her how she’s been doing.

Terrible, she said. In the past two months, she’s been to eight funerals. One was the funeral of her elderly grandmother. But the others were all suicides. Suicides of “successful” twenty-something year olds.

I was shocked and horrified to hear her speak of friends she’s known since day care who are choosing to hang themselves.

People choose to hang themselves for a lot of different reasons, but it’s not something people tend to do when they feel there’s a way out of their sense of emptiness or hopelessness or depression. Seeking help from others, speaking about major mental illness, accepting appropriate medical treatment, and finding an ethical spiritual mentor are all ways that can help people restore a sense of faith and trust and love in their lives and in their relationships — including their relationship with themselves.

But telling people who are already suffering from emptiness or hopelessness or depression that their suffering isn’t real and is only an illusion . . . that’s just plain cruel.

This is why I refuse to endorse any of the teachings or methods of A Course in Miracles. In my view, the Course is just plain cruel.

+76

-4

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, apophatic mysticism, dissociation, Gnosticism, HDM Myths, healing, religion and mental Illness, The Blonde Mystic and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

01 Aug 2011

JR61: Sixth Step in Healing the Church: Be Honest About the Bible

A: I’ve been reflecting for the past few days on the suffering inflicted by Anders Breivik on everybody everywhere who’s capable of loving their God and loving their neighbours as themselves.

Several news reports have referred to a 1,500 page manifesto that Breivik posted on the Internet shortly before the Norway attacks. Apparently Breivik copied a number of sections almost word from word from the writings of several well-known far-right ideologues. (Which just goes to show, once again, that psychopaths are very good at “cutting and pasting” other people’s ideas, but not capable of coming up with original insights of their own.) Breivik’s manifesto has been compared to the writings of Ted Kaczynski, the U.S. Unabomber. But when I look at excerpts from Breivik’s diary and manifesto, and compare his actions to his beliefs, I don’t see a modern day European political movement. I see a very old ideological movement, one that fills up many pages in the Bible. I see the Book of Jeremiah. I see the Book of Revelation. I see the Book of Numbers.

J: These are all biblical books that give permission to psychopaths to carry out “Just Wars.”

A: I’ve noticed in news reports about Breivik that he readily admits he carried out the Oslo bombing and the camp shootings, but he says he didn’t break the law in doing so because he’s at war with the Norway government.

J: Inside our man Breivik’s head, it all makes perfect sense. Of course, the reason it makes sense to him is that he’s only using certain parts of his biological brain. He’s not using the parts of his brain that deal with empathy or relationship or common sense or compassionate humour or trust or creativity. If he were using those parts, he wouldn’t be capable of planning such a cold, ruthless, legalistic act of violence against others.

A: On the other hand, interviews with some of the camp survivors suggest these young people embody all the best of human potential — empathy and relationship and trust and so on. There was a really good article in Saturday’s Toronto Star: “Norway Tragedy: Inside the nightmare on Utoya” by Michelle Shephard (Toronto Star, Saturday, July 30, 2011). One 20 year old woman, Karoline Bank, is quoted as saying, “Yes, he took many people away from us, and every life lost is a tragedy. But we have gotten so much stronger over this. There’s not much more to say.”

J: Couldn’t have said it better myself.

A: People of faith will wonder why God allowed this to happen.

J: People of faith have to stop listening to people of religious humility. People of faith — by that I mean people who want to be in relationship with God now, TODAY, not at some vague time of future judgment — have to start being more honest, more realistic, about the motivations that drove the authors of many revered religious texts. They have to stop wearing rose-coloured lenses when they read the Bible. They have to stop making excuses for the psychopaths who wrote so many parts of the Old and New Testaments. They have to stop making excuses for the parts of the Bible that were clearly written by those suffering from major mental illness.

A: Like the Book of Revelation.

Christian theologians have long been desperate to endorse the violent imagery of the Book of Revelation as a central justification for orthodox Christian teachings about the End Times. But from the point of view of God’s angels, the prophetic visions recorded in Revelation feel like a psychopathic attack on God and also on the soul who lived as Jesus, an attack no different in intent than Anders Breivik’s systematic rampage against campers trapped on a small island. Like Breivik, who disguised himself as a police officer so he could ensnare more victims, the prophet who penned Revelation pretended to be a faithful follower of Jesus as he took direct aim at Jesus’ teachings about a loving and forgiving God. Shown here are the head and wings of a large 9th century BCE Assyrian human-headed bull found in the North-West palace at Nimrud (on display at the British Museum). Photo credit JAT 2023.

J: This is an issue of trust. People have to decide for themselves whether they’re going to trust what John says about humanity’s relationship with God, or whether they’re going to trust their own hearts, their own heads, and their own experiences about humanity’s relationship with God. Would a loving and forgiving God put a gun in Anders Breivik’s hands and tell him to go out and shoot people to “ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom [will] prevail”?*

A: God didn’t stop him, though.

J: Really? You’re sure about that? Because from where I’m standing, God did a great deal to stop him.

A: Sixty-nine people at the camp are dead, plus several more at the site of the Oslo bombing. They’re dead and they’re not coming back.

J: No, they’re not coming back. And their families and friends will grieve because they — the human survivors — have loving hearts. Their grief is unavoidable and is a measure of their wholeness. Yet one day their family and friends will cross to the Other Side, as all creatures of Planet Earth must do, and they’ll be reunited with their loved ones. So from God’s point of view, the relationships haven’t ceased. The relationships still exist, despite the death of the physical body, because love never dies. The form of the relationships has changed, but not the substance. The substance is real. The love can’t be taken away from any of these souls. Love continues beyond anything the physical body knows. Love is greater than anything the physical body knows. Love is the great mystery. It’s what guides God the Mother and God the Father in their decisions about when people are coming Home. But make no mistake — everyone eventually dies. God has never promised otherwise. This is the natural order of the universe.

A: You wouldn’t know it to listen to an apocalyptic prophet who promises bodily resurrection of the dead.

J: It’s a funny thing about psychopaths. A psychopath has a distinctive pattern to his logic and choices and behaviours, and one of the most distinctive features of psychopathy is the peculiar attitude towards death. They’re unable to trust anyone, of course — since trust is closely related to empathy and love and forgiveness — and this means they’re completely unable to trust in the idea that physical death is a natural, loving part of the soul’s relationship with God. Death without future punishment isn’t logical to a psychopath, just as life with present forgiveness isn’t logical to him. He’s incapable of feeling love, so he’s unable to conceive of a loving death. He’s also incapable of believing that God is smarter than he is, so he’ll spend a great deal of time and energy looking for “escape clauses” in the contract laws about death in the Abrahamic religions. If the clauses he wants aren’t there, he’ll claim to be a divinely-inspired prophet and add them himself. Egyptian attitudes towards death in the pre-Hellenistic period epitomize the psychopath’s fear of death.

A: You’re saying a psychopath’s attitude towards death isn’t unique to a specific religion or culture, but is instead universal because it’s biological. You’re saying that “escape clauses” come out the same way in different cultures because all human beings share the same basic DNA.

J (nodding): A psychopath is, by definition, a person who is cut off from the input of his own brain’s Soul Circuitry. This “cutting off” may have resulted, in rare circumstances, from a head injury or infection or poisoning or oxygen deprivation. But the vast majority of psychopaths are “self made.” High functioning psychopaths such as Anders Breivik are individuals who’ve turned themselves into psychopaths one bad choice at a time. This is why psychopathy doesn’t usually emerge in full-fledged form until adolescence. It takes a long time for a person to consciously undo the healthy connections God builds into the human brain.

A: It’s still amazing to me that human beings have that kind of control over the wiring of their own brains. But history bears out the truth of what you’re saying.

J: You’ll probably be shocked to learn, then, that within the annals of religious history there have been select groups who’ve intentionally incorporated the blueprint for “how to build a psychopath” into their religious doctrines.

A: You mean . . . these groups wanted to create psychopaths? On purpose?

J: It can be very useful, from a utilitarian point of view, to have a man like Anders Breivik on your side if you’re trying to acquire wealth, power, status, and “immortality.”

A: This immortality thing . . . this need to leave behind a human legacy of power and status for future generations to admire and imitate — is this a normal state of mind for a person who feels whole and healed and humble? Because it seems awfully narcissistic to me.

J: It’s normal and natural for a soul-in-human-form to want to create and build and improve the quality of life for his or her community. Persons-of-soul — angels — have a strong sense of purpose and mission and service. So you expect to see a community of Whole Brain Thinkers busily at work devising new ways to dig wells for clean water or improving ways to eliminate toxins from the environment or building new schools and medical clinics in underserved areas. Human beings are at their best when they come together in teams to bring healing to others in the face of suffering.

A: Healing instead of revenge.

J: A large number of people around the world have responded to the Norway tragedy by offering their hope, faith, and love instead of judgment, piety, and revenge. Some have found, for the first time in their lives, the courage of their own faith. The courage of their own trust in God. The courage of their own trust in each other.

A: That’s a powerful insight, to know you have the courage to choose hope, faith, and love.

Jesus said: One person cannot ride two horses at once, nor stretch two bows; nor can a servant serve two masters, as he will respect one and despise the other. No one drinks vintage wine and immediately wants to drink fresh wine; fresh wine is not put into old wineskins because they might burst. Vintage wine is not put into new wineskins because it might be spoiled” (Gospel of Thomas 47a-d). You can choose the path of redemption or you can choose the path of revenge. Pick one because you can’t have both. Photo credit JAT 2014.

J: To find that courage is to know redemption. I send my love to all who are open to the wondrous idea that humans — not just God — are filled to overflowing in their own souls with divine courage and trust and gratitude and devotion.

This courage is yours. It’s not God’s. It’s not your neighbour’s. It’s not your parents’. It’s not your priest’s. It’s yours. It’s part of who you are as a soul.

Claim it and live it. Be the person God knows you really are. Don’t be a bully and coward like Anders Breivik, who hasn’t the courage to love. (Though I forgive him.) Be open to a loving relationship with God, no matter what your religious background. Your neighbour is loved by God as much as you are. All your neighbours.

No other truth is acceptable.

* On July 24, 2011, The Globe and Mail published a Reuter’s article, “Excerpts from Norway attacker’s diary.” An entry from June 11, 2011 said, “I prayed for the first time in a very long time today. I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail.”

-1

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Bible, Book of Revelation, brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain-soul connection, Church of today, Divine Love, forgiveness, free will, Jesus Redux, life and death, psychopathy, redemption, Soul, the right to be right, trust, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

24 May 2011

JR43: The Case for "Mark Versus Paul"

Study of the Gospel of Thomas, which has strong links to the Q Source and the Synoptic Gospels, makes it easier to see what Jesus was actually saying and how Jesus’ teachings differed radically from Paul’s teachings. Ceiling mosaic in the original Queen’s Park entrance of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Photo credit JAT 2017.

A: Today, I’m shifting back into academic mode on the question of what Jesus actually taught 2,000 years ago — as opposed to what the Church says he taught.

I’ve had an inquiry about my academic arguments on the “Mark versus Paul” question — that is, on my thesis that Mark wrote his gospel as a direct rebuttal of Paul’s First Corinthians. To present this argument in its entirety would fill at least one big fat Zondervan text (as if Zondervan’s editors would publish such a thesis!) so all I can do at this stage is present a brief list of comparisons between the two texts. I’m aware that in order to build a case for each “talking point” in a complete academic format — a format that would be acceptable to a peer-reviewed journal — would require many months of research for each point and a long research paper for each. The work would go faster, however, if others were willing to help. If you’re interested in helping with this project, please contact me.

I’m going to present some of the major contrasts I see between First Corinthians and the Gospel of Mark. I’ll assume for this purpose that the extant copies of these two books represent with a fair degree of accuracy the original texts as they were written by Paul and Mark respectively, with the exception of Mark 16:9-20 (the very ending of Mark), which is generally believed to be a later addition.

If you want to see which researchers I rely on, please refer to the post called “The Author’s Research Bibliography” (http://jesusredux.blogspot.com/2011/03/authors-bibliography.html).

I use more than one form of biblical criticism — more than one analytical tool — in this comparison. I tend to start with traditional methods — socio-historical criticism, source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism — and then I cross-reference these arguments with recent scientific insights from quantum theory, neurophysiology, psychotherapy, archaeology, and recent historical findings. I also use my own personal mystical faculties, but I won’t apologize for this, since insights derived from mystical conversations are only a starting point, not an ending point. Other researchers get “aha” moments and call them intuition, or divine revelation, or just plain ol’ personal brilliance. Me, I’m being honest about where I get my starting point for this discussion. After that, it’s up to me to use logical human tools to make my case.

Fortunately for me, what Jesus and my angels pointed out to me leads to an extremely strong case.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no biblical scholars currently publishing on this topic. So this is original research you’re reading. You’ll probably wonder straight away how I — an obscure blogger from Canada who has no PhD and no publishing record of note — could see evidence of a book-to-book biblical feud that nobody else has seen. To this I must reply that the feud has been obvious “to those who have eyes and those who have ears” (Mark 8:18) since these two texts began to circulate simultaneously in the latter part of the 1st century CE. Christians have always been called to decide whether they choose Paul’s teachings or Jesus’ teachings (even if they haven’t been able to articulate the choice in scholarly terms). However, it’s only now that Christians are getting round to being honest about this fact.

If Mark had simply written about entirely different themes than Paul did, there would be no point in trying to show that Mark wrote his gospel as a rebuttal of Paul’s First Corinthians. But Mark didn’t write about different themes than Paul did. He wrote about exactly the same topics and inverted them. He also chose his words as carefully as Paul did. He never uses Paul’s favourite word: nomos (Greek for law, authority, unbreakable tradition). Nor does Mark use the words charis (grace) or elpis (hope). The words nomos, charis, and elpis are part of the vocabulary of apocalyptic thought. And Mark is trying to show, contrary to Paul’s claims about Jesus, that Jesus himself rejected apocalyptic thought.

Mark never uses the words nomos, charis, and elpis. But for a man who never uses these words, he talks about them a lot in his book. He talks about what it means for a person of faith to be in full relationship with God the Mother and God the Father.

Here is a point form list of some of the direct comparisons. I reserve the right to edit, modify, add to, and clarify this list whenever additional information comes to light in future. If information is suggested to me by other writers, I will so note the contribution(s).

Concerns of Form:

1. Viewpoint Character
In Paul: The viewpoint character is Paul himself.
In Mark: The viewpoint character is Jesus; the author (Mark) is not present; reference to “a certain young man” in Mark 14:51 may indicate an eyewitness to whom Mark later spoke about events surrounding Jesus’ arrest.

2. Narrator’s Voice
In Paul: The narrator speaks in first person (Paul himself).
In Mark: Third person narration.

3. Literary Genre
In Paul: Written as a letter; uses rhetoric, exhortation.
In Mark: Written as a biographical narrative interspersed with parables, sayings, and teaching actions (i.e. teaching chreia).

4: The Narrative Hook: “The Hero’s Journey”
In Paul: The hero Paul recounts highlights of his long and arduous journey to save the Gentiles; the focus is on important urban centres; the hero’s personal journey is a metaphor for the path of spiritual ascent (i.e. the vertical path that leads to salvation and eventual bodily resurrection).
In Mark: The hero Jesus takes many small trips around a small freshwater lake; the focus is on unimportant outlying communities; the hero’s journey is horizontal, not vertical; the path is not straight; bad things happen on high hills; good things happen near boats and water.

Theological and Social Concerns:

5. Relationship to the Jerusalem Temple:
In Paul: The physical Temple has been replaced by Jesus and “believers” (1 Cor 3:9-17; 6:19-20); the Temple is now purely mystical; it is more important than ever. (Note: the actual physical Herodian Temple was still standing in Jerusalem at the time Paul wrote his letter and Mark wrote his rebuttal).
In Mark: The physical Temple exists and is the centre of corruption in Palestine (Mark 11:12-24;12:35-44; 15:38).

6. Relationship to the city of Jerusalem:
In Paul: Jerusalem is still favoured as shown by the collection for the Jerusalem church (1 Cor 16:1-4).
In Mark: Jesus spends little time in Jerusalem; healing miracles all take place outside the city; Jesus’ friends live outside the city; Jerusalem is the place where genuine faith withers away (Mark 11).

7. Healing Miracles:
In Paul: No mention of healing miracles.
In Mark: Several healing miracles take place; the theme of healing is introduced early on and repeated until Jesus reaches Jerusalem.

8. People With Disabilities:
In Paul: No special mention of individuals with physical or mental illnesses or disabilities or special needs.
In Mark: Those deemed “impure” according to Jewish custom and law are healed, touched, spoken to in violation of purity laws.

9. The Kingdom of God:
In Paul: The Kingdom is a reality outside the self; it depends on power (1 Cor 4:20; 15:24-28; 15:50).
In Mark: There is no simple explanation of the Kingdom, but empathy is central to it (Mark 10:13-31; 12:28-34).

10. Relationship of Body to Soul:
In Paul: Influenced by Platonic dualism.; the flesh is corrupt (1 Cor 3:1-4; 7:8-9; 9:24-27; 15:42-49). Souls are in peril without belief in Christ.
In Mark: Holistic attitude toward the body; non-Platonic and non-Covenantal; flesh is not impure or corrupt; right relationship with God involves caring for the body. Souls live as angels in the afterlife (Mark 12:24-27)

11: Forgiveness:
In Paul: No mention of forgiveness.
In Mark: The theme of forgiveness is introduced early on (Mark 2:1-12); both God and humans can forgive (Mark 11:25).

12: The Definition of Human Virtue:
In Paul: “Foolishness” (morias) and unquestioning faith are the highest expressions of right belief (1 Cor 1:10 – 2:5); obedience, fellowship, holiness, “strong consciousness,” and the proper exercise of freedom are emphasized.
In Mark: Courage (ischys) and a questioning faith are the highest expressions of right belief (Mark 8:11-21); egalitarianism, service, forgiveness, and insight (suneseos) are emphasized.

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, faith, First Corinthians, Gospel of Mark, healing miracles, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Mark vs Paul, Mother and Father God, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings and tagged Mark vs Paul | Leave a Comment

23 May 2011

JR42: Harold Camping’s Failed Apocalyptic Prophecy . . . Like, There’s a Surprise

A: Well, it’s May 23, and the world didn’t end two days ago as prophesied by Harold Camping and his multi-million dollar non-profit apocalyptic Christian media ministry. The 200 million people who were supposed to be taken up into heaven in the Rapture are still here. Slightly impoverished after giving their money to Camping, but still here. All is well with the universe.

J: People are easily parted from their assets once they’ve lost their common sense.

A: I read the Globe and Mail on-line. Usually when I check an article there are a few dozen readers’ comments — 40 or 50 posts at most. Yesterday, by 2:50 p.m., there were 1,052 comments attached to an article by Garance Burke (Associated Press) called “Believers confused as Judgment Day doesn’t come.” I didn’t read the comments. But I thought it was interesting that a failed prophecy from a retired civil engineer in a different country would attract so much attention.

J: People have very strong opinions about religion and religious leaders.

A: Can’t argue with you there. So let’s talk about angels instead — souls who are not currently incarnated as human beings on Planet Earth. How do you and other angels feel about apocalyptic prophesies?

J (chuckling): Isn’t this a holiday in Canada? Wouldn’t you rather be outside barbequing or something?

A: It started raining again a few minutes ago. There’s been a lot of rain and cool weather this spring. All the more reason to sit down and do some typing.

J: Well, it’ll come as no surprise to you that angels are fully aware of the kinds of things that are being said about us by religious leaders in various parts of the world. You could say we have our own clipping service.

Most people have been conditioned to believe that apocalyptic prophecy is a rare and sacred gift granted by God. Few people realize that from the point of view of God’s angels, all claims from apocalyptic human prophets look like temples — temples to the glory of narcissistic humans. Nothing good comes from prophecies about the End Times, and your angels know it. They see the fear, contempt, and justification of hatred that pour into every aspect of your life if you buy into these unloving lies about God. This is one temple where your angels will always let you fall flat on your face. Shown in this photo are remnants of the temple pediment found during excavations of the Roman Baths at Bath, England (because all good Remnants must come to an end). Photo credit JAT 2023.

A: A man like Harold Camping is giving God bad press — telling people that God is so narcissistic and selfish that “he” enthusiastically plays Russian Roulette with his own children. Do angels care about this bad press? Does God?

J: Would you be happy if the people who claim to know you went around town saying you’re a controlling, manipulative, obsessive compulsive, right wing, politically conservative, Medicare-hating, gun-loving bigot who hates gays, people of colour, and women?

A: No. I’d know they were lying, and I’d forgive them. But I’d still be hurt.

J: Same with angels. Every day in every culture these lies about God are being preached. Angels not only feel hurt on behalf of God the Mother and God the Father, but they feel hurt on behalf of the souls who speak these lies while they’re struggling with human brain dysfunction.

You can be very sure that Harold Camping’s own guardian angels are now very relieved to have the whole thing over with and the lie of his prophecy revealed for what it is — not just among his own followers, but among all those who heard about it on the daily news.

A: Camping’s angels aren’t upset that he’s been embarrassed in front of millions of people?

J: Far from it. They know he’s hurt a lot of people with his narcissistic predictions. At the same time, they know that his harmful choices emerged from his dysfunctional human brain — not from his true self, not from his soul. They forgive him, but they also have to do the right thing by him and by others. They have to allow people to see the consequences of these kinds of abusive choices. If they protect Camping from the consequences of his own choices, and if they protect his followers from their own arrogance and stupidity, how will it be possible for human beings to learn not to make these kinds of choices? Tough Love is an angel’s expression of courage, trust, and faith in the ability of human beings to live their human lives in loving ways. Divine ways. Ways that don’t prey on other people’s vulnerabilities.

A: Ooooooohhh. I can just hear the response from readers. What you’re saying about Tough Love sounds perilously close to the idea of divine punishment — an idea that many liberal and progressive Christians reject as incompatible with the idea of a loving and forgiving God.

J: I can’t help it if some individuals want to reject the possibility of Tough Love from God and God’s angels. Usually the people who are most keen to reject this belief are the ones who are most interested in NOT having to learn from their own mistakes.

A: The narcissists.

J: Religious narcissists — and there are plenty of those — employ a number of psychological defences to try to shift responsibility for their own mistakes onto other people or onto other time frames. Religious doctrines such as Original Sin, Satan, Judgment Day, and the Rapture make it possible for the narcissists to stop blaming themselves for their own choices. They can shift the blame onto “conditions” that are outside their control. “Conditions” that make it easy for them to shrug their shoulders and say — with Godfather-like equanimity — “Hey, we can’t help being who we are. One day God will make us answer for our crimes, but not today. Today we have a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card and we plan to use it. Because we can. So screw you.”

Really, I mean, come on. Do people think God can’t hear that? Of course God can hear that. God forgives them when they say it, which is exactly what you’d expect from a loving and forgiving God. But forgiving somebody means you have faith in their true potential, their truest and most loving nature. Forgiving somebody means you don’t walk away from them when they’re in distress. Forgiving somebody means you do your best to help them better understand the choices they’re making. This usually means you have to let them experience consequences for their choices. That’s how they begin to recognize the harm caused by their abusive choices. Every loving parent knows this.

A: Loving parents also know you have to “choose your battles.” You can’t harangue your child about every little mistake, or he stops listening. You have to save your authoritative tone for the times when it really matters.

J: Guardian angels are no different. Their job is to help guide their human “foster children,” if you will, in the direction of greater compassion, greater balance, greater common sense. They have complete discretion and free will in carrying out this task. Sometimes they decide to help soften the consequences of a really poor human choice. Sometimes they decide to let the consequences build into one mega-consequence that hurts like hell. This is the reality. God has free will and angels have free will. Therefore, God and God’s angels are free to create consequences or not as they see fit. They aren’t bound by religious contract laws. Neither are they bound by laws of cause and effect. God is a heck of a lot smarter than the Law of Cause and Effect would suggest.

A: I don’t think religious narcissists actually want God to be smarter.

“His disciples questioned him: Should we fast? In what way should we pray? Should we give to charity? From which foods should we abstain? Jesus responded: Do not lie. If there is something that you hate, do not do it, for everything is revealed beneath heaven. Nothing hidden will fail to be displayed. Nothing covered will remain undisclosed (Gospel of Thomas 6).” This life-size Roman bronze hand is covered in sacred symbols — well, sacred to occult believers, anyway. It dates from 200-400 CE and was found at Caglia, Umbria, in Central Italy. It’s on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017.

J: True. Then again, that’s what narcissism is all about. It’s about human beings whose brains are so dysfunctional — whether from head injury, toxic substances, stress hormones, malnutrition, sleep deprivation, lack of social and emotional supports, abusive upbringing, or lack of education — that they start trying to cope by inventing inner myths about their own wonderfulness and superiority and breathtaking talent. There’s no room within the myth for somebody else who’s smarter or faster or stronger. Even if that somebody else is God.

Of course, this is why religious narcissists rely so heavily on the theme of humility. A person of humility — as opposed to a person of humbleness — can see in a logical and practical way that it isn’t very smart to go around proclaiming to be as smart as God, if not smarter. That’s no way to recruit followers who’ll willingly give you money and tell you how wonderful you are. So you don the sackcloth of humility, and you tell everyone who’ll listen that you’re just an empty vessel waiting to be filled by Spirit, by God’s inspired Word. That’s how the world acquires its apocalyptic prophets.

A: So it’s layers upon layers. A myth of personal superiority that has to be cloaked in another myth — the myth of humility. Then, when this isn’t enough to get you the reverence you crave, you add other layers, other myths, each more convoluted than the last to explain why you deserve to be treated as “special.”

J: This is what happens when people aren’t honest with themselves about their own abilities, their own intentions, and their own unhealed anger. The lies build and build on top of each other. After a while the lies can take on an entire imaginary life of their own. Such is the case with orthodox Western Christianity. Its official doctrines are largely a body of lies. Only when individual Christians choose to help their neighbours in love rather than piety do they walk the path of genuine spirituality and faith. These are the times when their guardian angels smile.

-2

Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), apocalyptic prophecy, Cause & Effect, forgiveness, free will, humility, Jesus Redux, Mother and Father God, narcissism, occult themes, psychopathy, religion and mental Illness, theodicy and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

28 Mar 2011

JR28: Paul’s Easy Salvation

A: You’ve said that Paul’s Temple teachings were very different from your own Kingdom teachings — so much so that when your great-nephew “Mark” read what Paul had written in the letter called First Corinthians, he blew a gasket and started work on his own version of your teachings. Why was Mark so upset about Paul’s Temple teachings?

J: Mark knew that one of my basic teachings had been about the Jerusalem Temple and the stranglehold the Temple and its priests exerted on regular Jewish people. It was much the same equation as Martin Luther faced when he decided to go public with his rejection of Papal and Vatican corruption in the early 1500’s. Luther didn’t reject the idea of faith in God — far from it. But he rejected a number of official claims made by the Church. He thought the Church was no longer representing the ideals of true Christian faith. So he protested.

A: This was part of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

J: Yes. But Luther was protesting from within the Church, not from outside it. He was an Augustinian monk and priest, highly educated and highly devout. He held a doctorate in theology. So he wasn’t easily dissuaded from the idea — once he saw it — that the Church wasn’t “practising what it preached.” I had the same problem with the Jerusalem Temple and the priestly hierarchy in my time. Once I saw the problem, I wasn’t easily dissuaded. Much to the chagrin of my aristocratic family.

A: You’ve said your mother was descended from the priestly bloodline. That must have given your family a lot of status, a lot of authority.

J: My family was somewhat on the fringes of the power and authority that priestly families were entitled to. This was partly due to the fact that my mother’s line wasn’t descended from the “first son of the first son.” We were related to the “junior sons,” so to speak — pretty good as far as pedigrees go, but not “the best of the best.” Another factor was our geographical location. I wasn’t born and raised in Jerusalem — one of the hotbeds of Jewish political intrigue. I was born and raised in the city of Philadelphia, on the other side of the River Jordan. It was a Hellenized city, but also quite Jewish in its cultural norms, so I was raised with a strange mix of values and religious teachings. That’s what allowed me, when I reached adulthood, to be more objective about trends in Jewish thought — by that I mean the blend of religious, political, cultural, and social ideas that were intertwined in people’s hearts and minds. I was far enough away from the Temple — physically and geographically — to be sceptical about the grandiose claims being made by the Temple priests.

A: In the Gospel of Mark, it’s quite apparent what the author thinks of the Temple. Mark shows you visiting all sorts of Jewish and Gentile locations to teach and heal, but the one place you don’t visit till the end is Jerusalem. Things start to go badly for you as soon as you get to David’s city. This is a strange claim to make if you’re trying to promote the idea that Jesus is the prophesied Saviour of the Jewish people.

J: Well, my great-nephew did think I was an important teacher, a rabbi who could help the Jewish people become free from oppression, but his understanding of my role was not the traditional Jewish understanding of who — or what — the Messiah would be. Mark was a very spiritual fellow — a free thinking Jewish scholar who made his own observations and his own decisions. He got a little carried away, I think, with the idea that I was an important teacher, but on the whole he embraced my ideas about the Kingdom and did his best to live them.

A: Mark wrote his gospel before the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE.

“Jesus said: Grapes are not harvested from thornbushes, nor are figs gathered from thistles, for they yield no fruit. A good person brings forth good from his treasury; a bad person brings forth evil things from his mind’s corrupt treasury, and he speaks evil things. For out of the excesses of his mind he brings forth evil things” (Gospel of Thomas 45 a-b). The photo shows a marble Mithraic relief, (restored), from Rome 100-200 CE on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. The Mithraic Mysteries, in so far as we know what they entailed, showed uncanny similarities to the teachings of Paul. The teachings of Jesus, meanwhile, explicitly rejected the occult practices and secret rituals of mystery cults. Photo credit JAT 2017.

J: Yes. And this is an important detail to bear in mind. Paul and Mark both wrote their comments about the Temple before the Temple was physically destroyed. This fact is important to bear in mind, especially when you’re trying to understand what Mark is saying. Mark was seriously — and I mean seriously — pissed off about Paul’s “moveable Temple.” For Mark, as for me, the only way to free the Jewish people to know God and be in full relationship with God was for us to confront the harm and the hypocrisy of the Jewish Temple — a huge, bloated, phenomenally expensive physical structure that had robbed people of their livelihood through high taxes and ongoing dues, payments, sacrifices, and obligatory pilgrimages. Herod the Great spent a fortune — a literal fortune — on his building projects. His children continued his habit of profligate spending on status symbols to impress the rest of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile, the widows and orphans and foreigners we were supposed to look after — according to Exodus — were going hungry and selling themselves into slavery because of their poverty. This was unacceptable to me and to many others. I certainly wasn’t alone in being outraged at the unfairness, the hypocrisy, the status addiction, and the corruption.

A: Chapter 13 of Mark has long puzzled Christian scholars. It’s viewed by reputable scholars such as Bart Ehrman as a “little apocalypse” because it seems to prophesy the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. They use this chapter as part of their proof that you yourself claimed to be an apocalyptic prophet. How do you respond to that?

J: Without wishing to be harsh, I’d say these biblical scholars need to refresh their memory on what the earlier Jewish prophetic books and Jewish apocalypses actually said about the role of the Temple in the prophesied End Times. It’s clear that highly revered earlier writers such as First Isaiah and Second Isaiah and Zechariah believed the physical Temple on Mount Zion (i.e. Jerusalem) would be absolutely central to the ideal future restoration of Judah in the End Times. Yet Mark uses imagery from apocalyptic texts like Daniel to turn these predictions on their head. Mark 13 shouldn’t be called the “little apocalypse”: it should be called the “anti-apocalypse” because of the way it intentionally subverts and repudiates the prophecies of Zechariah. Mark may be attacking Paul’s theology throughout his own gospel, but he uses well-known Hebrew prophecies to do it. Mark’s own Jewish audience would have understood these references. They would have understood that Mark was openly attacking traditional Jewish teachings about the future End Times when God would one day return and “fix everything.”

A: Traditional teachings that Paul continued to endorse in his letters (1 Corinthians 15).

J: Yes. Paul enthusiastically taught his followers about the coming End Times — a traditional Jewish teaching in itself — and on top of that he added a wonderful new theological guarantee. He promised people that if they gave themselves over fully to a belief in Christ, then God’s Spirit would be able to live inside of them in the “Temple” (1 Corinthians 3:16-17; 6:19-20). Paul took the sacredness of the Jerusalem Temple and made it “moveable,” an inner sanctuary of purity for the Spirit, just as the Essenes had already done in their Charter (1QS 3 and 1QS 8). He didn’t try to undermine the importance and authority of the Jerusalem Temple. He actually added to it (as the Essenes had done) by elevating it to an inner mystical state that could only be known to true believers who followed Paul’s teachings. This is a simplified version of Paul’s Temple theology, but you get the picture. He’s offering his followers the ultimate in “easy salvation.” “You no longer have to go to the Temple; the Temple will come to you.”

A: And once you have the Temple, you can access all those spiritual goodies that Paul promises (1 Corinthians Chapters 2, 12, and 14).

J: It’s a theology that’s very appealing to people who want all the benefits without doing the hard work.

A: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — your teachings are much harder to stick to than Paul’s are. It’s impossible to follow your recommendations for connection with God without making spiritual commitment a regular part of everyday life. Once a week on Sundays — or twice a year at Christmas and Easter — won’t do it. You ask a lot of regular people.

J: Only because I have faith in you. Only because I have faith.

-1

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Essenes, First Corinthians, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Mark vs Paul, Messiah, Paul's teachings, slavery and tagged Mark vs Paul | Leave a Comment

23 Mar 2011

JR26: Materialism, Pauline Thought, and the Kingdom

A:* For the last couple of days, ever since you introduced the idea that Pauline Christianity has always been in some ways a Materialist religion, my head has been spinning, and I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what you mean. I can feel that it’s right in the part of my self that’s intuitive, but the rest of my head hasn’t caught up to my intuition yet. So can we take it from the top?

J:* No problem.

A: How ’bout we start with some definitions? And by the way, I’d just like to comment once again on the fact that you’re a true philosophy geek, you know that? Your face lights up like a Christmas tree every time you get to talk about a juicy philosophical dilemma. I can sure see how you ended up being a radical theologian in your time.

J: I was a much more successful philosopher than I was a carpenter. Honest to God, although I had to work as a tradesman to pay for my room and board, I’m pretty sure some of my handiwork could have ended up on “Galilean DIY Disaster.”

A: Measure once, cut twice?

J: I’m not a natural when it comes to tools. I think like a designer, not like an engineer. I would flunk out of civil engineering, I’m sure of it. But redesigning the layout of a home so it supports a person’s soul needs — that I can do.

A: My father, the retired engineer and all-round handyman, would think you’re a wuss. But you’re so much like most of the other male physicians I know — great with healing, great with academic study, not so good with the toolkit. (For the record, my ex is a physician, and we socialized with other people who were in medicine. So I know — or rather, knew — a lot of the male physicians around here.) Anyway, back to the philosophizing.

J: Okay. Well, the philosophy of Materialism is based on the theory that matter — by that I mean baryonic matter — is the only thing that exists. It’s a WYSIWYG understanding of reality — what you see is what you get. What you see is atoms and molecules and measurable substances and Newtonian laws. Therefore, according to this theory, all things in Nature — including mind, thought, consciousness, even love — can be explained solely by looking at the small little parts that make up the whole. It’s the idea that macroscopic reality — the daily reality that human beings live and work and breathe in — is just a bigger version of the microscopic reality of atoms and molecules and gravitational forces, etc. Of course, as researchers in various scientific disciplines now know, there are huge gaps between the “macro” theories and the “micro” theories. At the subatomic or quantum level, the universe is a weird, weird place. At the other end of the scale — the cosmological or grand universal scale — the universe is also a weird, weird place. Only at the immediate level of reality, if I can call it that — the level where human beings happen to live a fairly safe and predictable Newtonian kind of life — only here is a Materialist philosophy even remotely justified.

A: How does Materialism understand God?

J: A person who embraces Materialist belief in the natural laws of “cause and effect” may or may not believe in the existence of God. Many, if not most, Materialists are atheists. Atheists, of course, believe that existence can be explained entirely on the basis of scientific research. No God is required. However, it’s entirely possible to be a religious Materialist, a Materialist who believes in God. Deism is a good example of this.

A: Deism is a belief system that says there’s a God, one God who created the universe, but that this God later stepped away from his Creation and doesn’t participate in an active way in our lives or our suffering. God is the Great Clockmaker who made a perfect timepiece and now lets it run without interference. However, there’s still an acceptance of the idea that God will reward virtue and punish vice in the afterlife. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson were all Deists . . . Tell me again why Deism isn’t the same as Pauline Christianity and Platonism?

J: It is Pauline/Platonic Christianity. Deism is what you get when you strip away later church doctrines about ritual and sacraments and prayer to saints (intercession) and belief in Marianism and belief in holy relics and belief in holy Crusade and belief in papal infallibility. Deism is Pauline thought in its purest form — a belief in the inviolability and perfection of Divine Law. Divine Law that governs “cause and effect” in the material world.

A: But Paul goes on and on in Romans about the inherent peril of “the law,” how knowledge of the law led him into sin.

J: Paul isn’t attacking all Law. He’s attacking the laws he no longer agrees with. Paul spends all his time in his letters talking about the “new and improved” Law — the Law that he himself is teaching. The New Covenant. It’s easy to forget that Covenant is Law — nomos in the Greek. Nomos was a complex idea that included both human authority and divine authority. When Paul talks about the “new covenant,” he’s talking about a new version of Divine Law. A new version of the Law of Cause and Effect. “If you do this (believe in Christ), then according to the inviolable Law of Creation, you must receive this (salvation plus a reserved parking spot in Heaven).” It’s a reductionist philosophy. Just as Materialism is a reductionist philosophy. Everything is reduced to a simple “cause and effect” formula.

“They asked him: When is the Kingdom coming?He replied: It is not coming in an easily observable manner. People will not be saying,’Look, it’s over here’ or ‘Look, it’s over there.’ Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is already spread out on the earth, and people aren’t aware of it” (Gospel of Thomas 113). Each autumn, this walnut tree yields its harvest to those among God’s creatures who need it most. They receive these gifts without any reliance on human prayers or covenants. There’s wonderful freedom in trusting God to do what God does best when you don’t take on the burden of believing you’re somehow responsible for maintaining the laws of Creation. Photo credit JAT 2014.

A: Just as Wisdom teachings in the Ancient Near East were a “cause and effect” formula: if you obey the instructions on the “virtue lists” and disavow the behaviours on the “vice lists,” God is required to reward you because the Law says so.

J: Paul, clever manipulator that he was, observed that there was a “niche market” of people who’d become disillusioned with the certainty of Wisdom teachings. Obviously there was something missing from the formula if slaves were still slaves and women were still being punished for being women. The Hellenistic cities of the Roman Empire were filled to bursting with resentful slaves and restless, intelligent women. Who better to target if you’re planning to launch a new religious movement? Slaves with money and women with money. You don’t need to slog through the trenches and carry out years and years of missionary work — you just need to get yourself some patrons with deep pockets. Paul doesn’t even deny his reliance on patrons.

A: One staggering fact that jumps out in the Gospel of Mark is the fact that you have no patron. Nor do you seem to want one. This would have shocked readers in 1st century CE Roman-held regions.

J: Part of my objective was to refuse to “play by the rules.”

A: In the end, so many of these religious debates and religious conflicts boil down to “the rules” — the law, the covenant, the nomos. But all these rules . . . they’re external. They come from outside the inner self. They pretend to be objective. They pretend to be based on observable realities from nature. Yet enforcement of them relies on brute force, on rote memory, and on loyalty to patrons or other important religious/political leaders . . . at least I think that’s right. Is that right?

J: Yes. The one thing Paul doesn’t want is for people to know how to tap into their own inner wisdom, their own inner guidance. He doesn’t want them to know how to hear God’s quiet voice in the still, clear night. He doesn’t want his “community of fellowship” to find actual freedom. He only wants them to believe they have freedom (exousia) through the proper use of conscience (suneidesis). He wants them to be willing slaves. Slaves who won’t rock the boat of authority.

A: This is really sick, you know that?

J: Of course it is. There’s a reason these teachings have spontaneously led to generation after generation of abuses — abuses against the poor, the environment, against other Christians, not to mention countless non-Christians. Also abuses against God. These abuses are the “weeds” that have grown from the “seeds” that Paul intentionally planted.

A: Is this why Paul never mentions healing miracles in the letters he himself wrote?

J: Yes. Paul can’t afford to have his community of hagiasmos and koinonia (holiness and fellowship) distracted by the idea that God is deeply committed to ongoing healing, communication, and relationship with all people through the Kingdom within. The Kingdom within, of course, is the core self — the soul. The good soul. That’s how God connects with all God’s children — through the good soul that everybody is. God can and does communicate by other means, too, but the one connection that can never be taken away is the soul connection. You can cut out somebody’s eyes so they can’t see any more signs (and, unfortunately, this has been done). You can cut out somebody’s ears so they can’t hear any more external messages. You can cut out somebody’s tongue so they can no longer speak the prayers they long to sing aloud. All these abuses have been perpetrated “in the name of God” at one time or another. But nobody can cut out the connection to the soul. You’d have to carve out the entire brain and central nervous system of a person in order to fully quench the soul connection, the body-soul nexus. Obviously this would lead to death.

A: Hey! It’s another thing to add to the Jesus’ Seminar’s pot for the question of “Why Jesus Pissed People Off So Much That He Got Himself Crucified.”

J: Paul works very hard to ensure that his followers believe in a Kingdom that’s on the outside — “out there” in the Materialist world of cause and effect. “Out there” where they have no control over any of it themselves. Even more brilliant, Paul insists the Kingdom of God isn’t here yet. It belongs to some maybe-not-so-distant Day of Judgment. So not only is the Kingdom a materialistic reality outside the self, but it hasn’t even “arrived” yet. [1 Corinthians 15]. This prompts regular people to be thinking about the future instead of the present. This encourages them to shift their focus, their attention, and even their relationships to the future. To the future “effects” of today’s “causes.” People are so busy worrying about the future that they can’t hear God’s voice today.

A: Therefore they can’t hear the guidance they long for.

J: The guidance they want and need.

A: I like your version of the Kingdom teachings much better.

* If you’re new to this site, A=Author and J=Jesus

+71

-1

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Cause & Effect, Gospel of Mark, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, Law (Nomos), Materialism, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, quantum theory, slavery, Soul and tagged Kingdom teachings, science & faith | Leave a Comment

20 Feb 2011

JR12: A Divine Love Story

Beauty. Photo credit JAT 2014.

A: You know, for the past two weeks I’ve been doing a lot of research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and after wading through the English translations [Wise, Abegg, and Cook]* of the Essene’s own teachings, I’m sick of them. Just sick of them.

J: Sick of the teachings? Or sick of the Essenes?

A: I’m sick of the teachings. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to go to dinner with anybody who believes in these teachings, either. The writings are so . . . so self-centred and narcissistic. So full of themselves. So full of hot air. They don’t say anything moderate or balanced about our relationship with God. They’re full of cliches and bluster and prophecy and big long strings of fancy-sounding words. But where is the love? There’s no love in them — no kind, respectful, trusting, compassionate, inclusive love. It’s just narcissistic bullshit. Did I say that already? I think I said that already.

J: Don’t forget paranoid. The teachings are also very paranoid.

A: Yeah. Enough with the evil Belial, for God’s sake! Enough with the final battle where the pure and virtuous Essenes will lead the armies of Light to victory! Get a life, people.

J: Or Pauline Christianity.

A: Say what?

J: If they don’t want to get a life, they could always get some serious, heavy-duty evangelical Christianity. Evangelical Christianity doesn’t say much that the Essenes didn’t say within their own brand of Community Rule.

A: Yeah, well, I’m not feeling the love from evangelical Christianity, either. Again, lots of narcissism, not so much trust in God. I can’t believe what these people are saying about God!

J: Which people? The Essenes or the Pauline Christians?

A: Both. I’m not seeing a lot of difference between them, as you’ve pointed out. This is not what you’ve taught me about God. I don’t see any resemblance at all. I don’t see any resemblance between your teachings and Paul’s teachings, or your teachings and John’s teachings. This is crazy! How did orthodox Christianity get so far from the truth?

J: I hate to sound like a broken record, but, again, it’s the mental health issue. My teachings have no appeal for narcissists. Or psychopaths.

A: Because there’s no “fuel” for status addiction. Narcissists and psychopaths suffer big-time from status addiction.

J (nodding): And as for people suffering from psychotic illnesses . . . they’re not in a position to take full control of their thoughts and feelings. They can’t. The illness interferes with their thinking and feeling processes. So they’re filled with fear and paranoid thoughts even before you add the religious paranoia. They can also suffer from narcissism on top of those biologically confused thoughts and feelings, as John did. But the main point is they’re not mentally or emotionally well, and their writings — if they write about spiritual or religious topics — always reflect their inner mental state. The writings of a person suffering from a psychotic illness sound psychotic. You have to step back from their writings and ask yourself . . . would an adult human being with a clean bill of health as far as the DSM-IV is concerned — and taking into consideration the psychopathy that the DSM-IV writers left out for bizarre reasons — would a non-paranoid, non-manic, non-depressed, non-psychotic, non-substance-addicted person write this? Is this writing the reflection of a person in a highly stressed mental state? Is this writing the reflection of a person who understands what compassionate love is? Is this writing the reflection of a person who understands what it means to trust in God’s goodness? Because let’s be honest — a person who writes all the time about the devil or Belial or whatever you want to call this imaginary evil entity is showing that he or she does not trust in God’s goodness. How can anybody say they trust wholly in God, then turn around and say God is too weak to prevent the existence of a devil? You can’t have it both ways.

A: Orthodox Western Christianity says you can. And another thing —

J (starting to chuckle):

A: Yes, I’m on a rant this morning. I’m sick of the way these writers — the Essenes and Paul especially — talk about women. I’m sick of the way they’ve just gone ahead and eradicated the Divine Feminine from everything. I’m sick of their pompous warrior-king Messiahs and I’m sick of their divinely appointed male priests and I’m sick of their testerone-soaked jockeying for the best places at the table. Me, me, me. Look at me — I’m special! That’s all these people can talk about. For religious people who claim to be serving God humbly and piously, they sure spend a lot of time bragging about their own status and putting other people down. Have you read what the Essenes say about people with physical infirmities and imperfections [IQSa]? It’s just plain cruel!

J: The difference between humbleness and humility. You and I have talked about that a lot.

A: It wasn’t very humble of early teachers such as Second Isaiah or the redactors of Genesis to go ahead and do a hatchet job on God the Mother — to just slice her out of the story of Creation. Even the Greeks, for all their crazy Homeric myths, had the sense to include strong female archetypes in their pantheon. Anybody with half a heart can see that Creation — the world of beauty and wonder and mystery all around us — is a Love Story. It’s a testament to the love shared by God the Mother and God the Father for each other, a record of their journey of love, growth, commitment, struggle, and faith. It’s a giant love story. That’s what you’ve taught me. That’s what I feel myself. It’s a painful story, but a truthful one. Everything around us talks about the importance of relationship, the importance of balance. How can religious people look at the world and see a Judeo-Christian Covenant? How can they think “it’s all about them”?

J: Narcissists always think it’s all about them. It’s how they view the world — through a very small lens of “I.” Me, myself, and I. It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re religious. The issue isn’t one of spirituality or faith or God. It’s simply a matter of biological brain health. Sadly — broken record again — it’s about the human brain and how people use the brain God gives them.

A: I notice that God gave women brains, too. You’d think that would count for something in the grand religious scheme of things.

J: Not to mention the thorny reality that 75% of the human sex chromosomes are X chromosomes — female chromosomes, not male. I’m thinkin’ that’s probably an important “Post-It Note” in the biologist’s Book of Creation.

A: I’m so glad I was raised in a family where I was taught that men and women are equal in terms of their intellectual gifts and in terms of their right to be treated with dignity, respect, and equality. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

J: I’ll second that. I wouldn’t be able to talk to you this way if your human brain hadn’t developed along the lines of dignity, respect, and equality. That’s what the relationship between God the Mother and God the Father is all about — dignity and respect as the basis of their mutual love and trust, despite their respective differences in temperament and talent and size. As above, so below. When human beings live according to the values and principles of their beloved Divine Parents, they can feel the love of God coming into their daily lives. When they reject those values, their biological brains become like big pots of quivering jello — lots of colour, lots of movement, but not much substance. It’s fun to eat, but 15 minutes later, you’re hungry again.

A: They feel empty inside when they reject the core values of the soul.

J: Which is all very confusing when it’s their time-honoured religious traditions that insist they reject their soul’s own values. They’re taught by their religious leaders to reject divine notions of equality amongst all life, to reject balance, to reject symbiotic relationships — to reject all mutuality. Then they complain because they can’t feel God’s love. They complain they’ve been abandoned by God. It’s a crock. It’s not God who’s abandoned them. It’s they who have abandoned God. They usually don’t realize that this is the cause of their feeling of inner emptiness. They think their religion is helping them fill the void. But unless they have an unusually mature, unusually intuitive religious leader, their church services are just making the inner bowl of jello bigger. There’s no substance because there’s a lack of will, a lack of courage, to teach the truth about God.

A: The truth that God is the God Who Is Two, not the God Who Is One. And not the God Who Is Three, if you’re a Trinitarian.

J: It’s a simple truth, seen everywhere in Creation. There’s no relationship when it’s only “me, myself, and I.” Relationship MUST begin with two. It can involve more than two — and, in fact, the angelic community of God’s children is so large, so much bigger than two, that I can’t give you a number that’s meaningful to the human brain.

A: Gajillions?

J (smiling): Yes. Gajillions of angels, both male and female. But no matter how many angels exist within God’s family, it’s still about relationship. It’s still about people — angels — knowing each other, respecting each other’s uniqueness, respecting each other’s differences, working together in a symbiotic way to make a “whole” that’s much larger than the component “parts.” The sense of Oneness that people long for in their relationship with God isn’t a sense of losing themselves in the infinite Mind of God. It’s the sense of Oneness that comes from combining your strengths with the strengths of your brothers and sisters towards a common goal. It’s not Oneness of identity. It’s Oneness of Purpose. It’s Oneness of Commitment. It’s family. It’s people with differences coming together to work as a Team to create something much bigger than each could create on his or her own. That’s what Divine Love feels like.

A: Habitat For Humanity. It feels like the charity called Habitat For Humanity. Where groups of committed people volunteer their time and their skills to help build safe, affordable housing for families.

J: Exactly. It feels just like that. Everybody has different talents. Some are good with plumbing. Some are good with woodworking. Some are good with designing. But all the talents are needed, and no one talent is more important than another. Everybody’s got a job to do, and everybody’s job is important.

A: Especially the guy who makes the coffee. Ya gotta have your coffee breaks while you’re busting your butt to get a job done.

J: Even angels take coffee breaks.

* Wise, Michael, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook, trans. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. New York: HarperCollins–HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.

+63

-2

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Christ archetype, dissociation, dualism, Essenes, gender and sexuality, humility, Jesus Redux, Mother and Father God, narcissism, Paul's teachings, religion and mental Illness, Soul and tagged Christ Archetype, religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

17 Feb 2011

JR11: More on John the Baptist

A: You said a few days ago [Feb. 6] that the man you knew as John the Baptist had been raised to believe he was one of the Essene’s two prophesied Messiahs. Tell me more about that.

J: In order to understand the history of John the Baptist, you have to understand the mindset he was raised in. Most normal people — by that I mean psychologically and emotionally well adjusted — can’t relate to the mindset. This is true regardless of what time period you’re looking at. By that I mean there were normal, well-adjusted people 2,000 years ago who were just as bewildered by John as normal people would be today. He was an extreme person — and his extreme nature brought out a lot of different reactions in people. Some people thought he was a hero. Others thought he was a dangerous provocateur The normal people thought he was a dangerous provocateur.

A: Yet you spent several years hanging out with him.

J: I did. I genuinely believed he had important things to teach me about God. He had a masterful grasp on the sacred writings of the Hebrew tradition. His recall was phenomenal. It was rote learning, pummelled into his brain by years and years of study. I didn’t understand for a long while that rote learning isn’t the same thing as insight.

A: You thought he had insight.

J: He was so different from other people I knew. He seemed so focussed, so pure in his devotion to his calling. He never had doubts. He seemed almost . . . almost invincible. His faith seemed as sturdy as a mountain. Unshakeable. Unmoveable. I found it fascinating. I wanted to understand how to get faith like that. Of course, it turned out he had no faith in God at all. He had faith in the teachings of his religious sect, the Essenes. Faith in sacred teachings is not the same thing as faith in God.

A: I learned that one the hard way.

J: As did I. As did I. The Essenes were a breakaway sect — one of several groups that all used the sacred Hebrew texts but in very different ways. There was no single form of Judaism then. And not just Judaism. There were too many different religions at the time to count — some Greek, some Egyptian, some Persian, some mainstream, some cult-like, some offering wisdom, some offering salvation, some offering healing. It was a giant mishmash of religious options. A giant smorgasbord. People think it’s bad today. But it was much worse 2,000 years ago. It was confusing as hell.

A: So a prophet with unshakeable conviction was very appealing.

J: People need certainty. Not in everything, of course, but in their relationship with God, they want clear answers. John seemed to have those clear answers.

A: What was John’s relationship with other religious groups? How did he view other Jews, for instance? I should probably ask something else first, though, just to be sure . . . was John a Jew?

J: Most definitely. He was a circumcised male. As far as he was concerned, the tribes of Israel were the chosen people, and he was one of their chosen leaders. He had no use for Jews who fraternized with the enemy — the enemy being a rather broad category that included almost every non-Essene on the planet.

A: How did John feel about Jewish groups such as the Pharisees? The Pharisees were interested in teaching people how to live according to the laws of the Torah. So was he more sympathetic to the Pharisees?

J: No. As far as John was concerned, the Pharisees were just another bunch of corrupt, impure, impious, unfaithful Jews. Anyone who rejected the Essene’s phenomenally rigid purity laws were inferior in John’s eyes. That’s why the Pharisees are not painted in a positive light in John’s gospel.

A: Nobody’s painted in a positive light in John’s gospel except for the Son of God.

J: And maybe John the Baptist.

A: Yes, he does “show” rather well, doesn’t he?

J: It’s John who makes the definitive identification of the Messiah.

A: So if John believed he himself was the Messiah, why did he write a whole gospel dedicated to making you into the Messiah?

J: Well, you know, that’s the tricky thing. John doesn’t really make me — the fleshly, earthly me — the Messiah. He uses my name. He uses some of my own writings. He uses some of the people and events in my life. But he doesn’t tell the story of me — the man who rejected Essene teachings and the legitimacy of the Temple. He creates a myth. He creates the man he eventually believed me to be. He creates an elaborate dream-myth of mythical overlighting to explain — largely to himself — why he himself wasn’t actually the Messiah. His gospel is his justification, his justification of himself and his actions. He created a tale of a human figure who was so divine — so impossibly elevated beyond the reality of human life and human understanding — that nobody — not even the most righteous Jew — could come close to his perfection. This got John off the hook. Because if nobody could come close to the perfection of the Son of God, then John himself couldn’t come close. Not even with his impressive pedigree.

A: What do you mean by “mythical overlighting”?

J: Ah. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier today — John’s extreme but troubled mindset. As I mentioned before, John suffered from a psychotic illness throughout adulthood. His delusions came and went. Like most people who suffer from schizophrenia, he had periods where he had difficulty separating reality from delusion. Unfortunately, this is part of the illness. John’s psychopathology made him vulnerable to delusional ideas about the nature of God and humanity. He came to believe that I had not really been a human being. Not in the normal sense of the word. He knew I’d had a physical body, but in his delusional state he decided that I’d been “overlighted” by God. “Taken over,” if you will, by the divine presence. “Bumped out” and replaced by pure divine consciousness. Sort of like being “possessed,” only instead of being possessed by a demon, it’s possession by the One God.

A: Oh. That idea is still quite popular with fantasy and horror writers.

J: And many New Age gurus.

A: Yeah, that too.

J: This is partly why John’s gospel was popular with later Gnostic Christians. Gnostic Christians had an elaborate, dualistic world cosmology where good and evil were doing battle, and sparks of the divine fell to Earth to be trapped in evil human bodies. John’s portrayal of an overlighted Messiah fit right in with that.

A: And of course there was the Docetic heresy, where people read John and decided that Jesus never had a physical body at all and was just pure divine light all along — a vision of divinity that could only be seen by certain followers.

“Jesus said: When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will kill you” (Gospel of Thomas 70). The experience of redemption comes from within when you accept your own potential to love and forgive and your own potential to be loved and forgiven. Redemption leads to so many internal emotional and spiritual changes that you feel as if you’ve been “saved.” But redemption isn’t the same thing as theological salvation. Theological salvation is something only God or the Universe can effect to remove the threat of future punishment, damnation, or karmic rebirth. When you focus on the negativity of the “salvation model” instead of the positivity of Jesus’ “redemption model,” the constant lack of love can alter the wiring of your brain to such an extent that you begin to suffer from neurological and psychiatric dysfunction (e.g. major depression, addiction disorders, dementia). Photo credit JAT 2015.

J: This is the problem with taking books that have been written by mentally ill people and labelling them “divine revelation” or “the inspiration of God.” John’s gospel isn’t balanced and isn’t truthful. It says all the wrong things about God. It’s caused no end of problems.

A: It sets the bar impossibly high for all human beings. How are we supposed to follow the example of a guy who’s the Son of God, and the living bread, and the gate, and the good shepherd, and the vine, and the light of the world, and the resurrection and the life. I mean, that’s a tall order.

J: Not if you’re God the Mother and God the Father.

A: Yeah. But John’s not talking about God. He’s talking about a man named Jesus. That’s a whole different kettle of fish.

J: It keeps people from trying too hard. If you raise the bar too high, people won’t even bother trying. That’s what John wanted, though. He wanted to raise the bar so he himself wouldn’t have to jump it.

A: That’s so selfish!

J: John was a selfish man. He and his brother James were raised to believe they were the chosen Messiahs. It was their whole life, their whole mission. They weren’t going to give it up. When circumstances forced them to give it up, they didn’t go down without a fight. John was still fighting for his birthright till the day he died. And the one thing he was determined to do was prevent anyone from following the teachings of “Jesus of Nazareth” as opposed to his divine “Jesus, Son of God.” If he couldn’t have the crown of glory, he was going to make certain I couldn’t have it, either.

A: You didn’t want it, though.

J: No. I didn’t. But John never accepted that. He was certain I was “out to get him” — that I was trying to take the crown of glory for myself. John was paranoid. And John was angry. And eventually he saw me as his enemy. It ended badly. Very, very badly.

A: What did he do to you that he would have to drag thousands — millions — of other people into his own self-serving fantasy of divine rescue?

J: He helped turn me over to the authorities. And then he stabbed me. Right in the lower gut. He thought he’d killed me, but he hadn’t.

A: Ah. That might make a person feel guilty enough to try to explain away his actions.

J: It wasn’t a very saintly thing to do.

-3

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, dissociation, Essenes, Gnosticism, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, John the Baptist, Messiah, mysticism, occult themes, religion and mental Illness and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

05 Jan 2011

TBM5: Keep It Simple, Keep It Sane

Over the years, I’ve observed that when I read a book about a particular religion or a New Age healing method, the first thing the authors want to explain to me is their cosmology. Each author seems to believe wholeheartedly that if I don’t understand the cosmology behind the religion, I won’t be able to benefit from the religion’s teachings. Hence I’m typically presented with a myth that reveals to poor unenlightened me the “truth” about the origins of the universe, the origins of God, and the origins of evil. I’m given names. Dates. Places. Lists of historical events. Lists of family descendants. Sometimes I’m given prophecies about future events. All this is revealed to me so I’ll better understand why I must follow all the steps required by the religion or the spiritual movement in my quest to connect more deeply with God.

These are all “top down” approaches to spirituality. The “top down” approach to religion, faith, and spirituality can also be described as the “fiction writer’s guide to the universe.” Any speculative fiction writer worth his or her salt can construct an elaborate Creation Myth. One of the best known speculative fiction writers of this ilk is J.R.R. Tolkien, whose lovingly crafted books about Middle Earth could easily be mistaken for religious revelation. The sheer scale of Tolkien’s cosmology is breathtaking, its impact, transformative. Yet it’s pure fiction.

So even though I’m a mystic, and even though I cut my writing teeth as a fiction writer (unpublished), I think it’s wrong for me to use a “top down” approach. It’s wrong for me to present you with a huge Creation Myth and expect you to believe it simply because I say so. That’s what religious leaders such as Christianity’s Apostle Paul once did. These religious leaders expect you to have blind faith.

Like many people today, I think blind faith is exactly what it sounds like — blind. Intentionally and wilfully blind. No different than putting on a blindfold and walking into a busy street in the arrogant belief that God will protect you from injury because of your faith. That’s not faith. That’s narcissistic pride.

I recommend a “bottom up” strategy of spiritual healing. This was the approach taken by the physician-scholar we know as Jesus of Nazareth. (Don’t worry, I’m not going biblical on you. There’s hardly anything in the Bible about Jesus’ actual teachings.)

Try to keep the table in your spiritual kitchen uncluttered. Take things one step at a time. Your brain has to change as you change, so don’t feed it too many new spiritual ideas at one time. Photo credit JAT 2020.

A “bottom up” strategy has many advantages. The first and most obvious advantage is that the “bottom up” strategy is equally available to all people regardless of gender, class, religion, socio-economic status, age, or physical health status. You don’t need special training or special credentials to access this strategy. Most of all, you don’t need pots full of money. (You’ll need some money, but that’s because everyone in the 21st century needs money to buy food, shelter, medicine, and other basic life necessities.) This is what I mean when I say you need to keep it simple.

A second advantage is that you don’t have to “check your brain at the door.” You don’t have to choose blind faith over reason. You don’t have to choose religion over science. On the contrary, you’ll need all the resources available to you inside your own brain and mind. You’ll be working your brain harder than you ever thought you could. This is what I mean when I say you need to keep it sane.

A third advantage is that you’re allowed to have a sense of humour and you’re allowed to make mistakes. (Maybe you take those two things for granted, but trust me when I say that fundamentalist religious leaders — teachers of the “top down” approach — have no tolerance for either humour or mistakes.)

A fourth advantage is that I don’t have to explain to you in gory detail each and every advantage of this strategy. You’ll figure it out for yourself as you go along. You’ll gradually figure it out at such a deep, unshakable, core level that the insights you achieve will be totally yours and nobody will be able to take them away from you. Ever.

Today’s thought is this: Spiritual leaders who insist on the “top down” approach are telling you that they believe in the “ladder of spiritual ascent.” They’re telling you they believe there’s a soul ladder where “bad” souls are at the bottom and “good” souls are at the top. They’re telling you this even if they don’t use the word “soul.” Listen carefully to the words these leaders use. Do they speak often in black-and-white symbols? Do they demand that you believe in black-and-white pairs of polar opposites such as good-versus-evil, male-versus-female, enlightened-versus-unenlightened, corrupt-body-versus-purified-mind? (You can probably think of many other examples.) Use your own experiences and your own common sense to challenge these claims.

Make a list of five pairs of polar opposites that you think might be impeding you personally on your own Spiral Path. Don’t make a list of 50 or 100 pairs, because that’s too much information for you to work with. You can start with a list that has more than 5 pairs on it, but take some time to reflect on your longer list, and whittle it down to 5 pairs (or as close to 5 pairs as you can get). This will be plenty for you to work on.

This is an example of keeping it simple. There’s no point sweating over a huge long list because your biological brain simply CANNOT deal with that much complexity and that much pain at one time. Don’t even try. Just pick 5 pairs (or thereabouts), and post them where you can see them every day. This will help your biological brain remember what your goals are.

Looking back on the beginning of my own spiritual journey, I would have picked these five pairs to work on:

Good souls versus evil souls (because I believed then what many spiritual writers were saying).
Worthy souls versus unworthy souls (because I’d fallen into the trap of believing I wasn’t worthy of God’s love and forgiveness, though I believed other people were worthy).
Humbleness versus humility (though I doubt I could have formulated a distinct definition for these two at the time).
Selflessness versus selfishness (at the time, I thought these two were polar opposites, and as a result, I allowed myself to become a co-dependent doormat in more than one relationship).
Perfectionism versus forgiveness (this pair kept me occupied for several years).

See why you should only pick 5 pairs? Just being honest with yourself about 5 pairs is enough to make anyone throw up.

Even one pair is pretty intimidating in the beginning. But you have to start somewhere on the Spiral Path of learning who you are as a soul, and this is as good a place as any.

As we shall see, this examination of your own polar opposites has a biological purpose, a definable, quantifiable biological purpose that will help you heal your biological brain. That’s what “bottom up” teaching is all about — it’s about starting with the tools you currently have (i.e. your biology) and maximizing the DNA you were born with so you can be the best person you’re capable of being. It’s about starting with the foundation God has given you (that’s the “bottom”) and strengthening that foundation through your own spiritual initiatives and your own hard work. Building outward rather than upward. Building outward changes and connections in your family, community, and workplace rather than building castles in the sky. Building outward with roads and schools and hospitals until you can touch the hand of your neighbour.

Maybe you think this sounds too simple, too sane, not very mysterious, and even kind of boring. All I can say to that is . . . the Spiral Path is anything but predictable.

(Chortle, chortle).

-2

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, dualism, faith, healing, My Spiral Path, mystic, Soul, soul blueprint, spiritual ascent, spiritual practices, The Blonde Mystic, theodicy and tagged spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

30 Nov 2010

CC46: Understanding God’s Relationship With Us

My New Testament professor once said in class, “Give me 15 minutes and I can find a proof text in the Bible for anything you want to justify.”

You’ll have noticed by now that I treat the Bible with a great deal of caution. For me and for many others, the Bible is a lot like a pit bull with a hair-trigger temper. One minute it’s wagging its tail at you, spouting happy thoughts. The next, it’s trying to rip your throat out.

I’m not one of those mystics who thinks the Bible is a lap dog that will always treat you kindly — an immortal, timeless lap dog whose eyes are always filled with serenity and bliss if you know the secret of looking at it the right way. Spiritual talk of secrets — secret knowledge (gnosis) and secret interpretations (symbolic readings of the Bible) — makes me very nervous. I’ll tell you why. It’s because spiritual leaders who say they can teach you how to unlock the secret biblical interpretations are making some powerful claims about God. They’re claiming that God isn’t a very loving God or a very nice God at all.

Take the example of the book called Song of Solomon (also known as Song of Songs). Here is a lyric poem about human love (eros). It’s filled with erotic imagery and metaphors that nobody can miss. Scholars think the poem (or collection of poems) was probably written in the 4th or 3rd century BCE. Despite the extremely obvious fact that the Song of Solomon is part of an ancient tradition of erotic love poetry written for a pre-Viagra age, the Song of Solomon started to be interpreted symbolically by religious teachers sometime around the start of the Common Era.

For about 2,000 years, then, theologians have been teaching the faithful to read Song of Solomon symbolically — as an account of the love between God and Israel. Pious and devout people are expected not to notice or respond to the explicit sexual content. And fourteen year old boys are not to read it late at night by candlelight.

If this is a sacred text about the relationship between God and God’s people, I’ll eat my hat.

I’m very unhappy that this symbolic interpretation can only be arrived at through some pretty twisted mental gymnastics. I’m also wondering why it’s only through a special secret scholarly key that regular people can see the “light of truth” hidden in this poem. As many mystics would have you believe, the majority of people — regular people who aren’t privy to the secret key — won’t be able to see and understand the wonderful “truth” buried in this erotic text. Regular people are too dull to see the “truth.” Their corrupt, inferior human senses make them too stupid to understand what’s actually written here.

And, of course, that’s the way God wants it to be! (according to Gnostic teachers). God, in God’s infinite wisdom, decided that most human beings are just too darned stupid and weak and untrustworthy to be entrusted with divine truth. So God hid it. God hid the light of truth in the deepest, darkest swamps, where regular people can’t find it, and then God chose a few select warriors to go out and find the light and guard it. Because God is too weak and stupid to protect it. God, Creator of all Creation, is too weak and stupid to parent trustworthy children. God is too weak and stupid to share divine truth with all children equally. God is too weak and stupid to tell the honest truth honestly. God is too weak and stupid to communicate clearly to all people without the help, aid, or benefit of that trusty band of “specially chosen warriors of light.”

Maybe it’s because God is too busy thinking lascivious thoughts about the luscious gazelles and wild does in the Song of Solomon.

I hope the last sentence creeped you out. I know it creeped me out. But don’t yell at me. I’m not the one going around claiming that Song of Solomon has an elevated message about the sacred love God feels for a few chosen children.

We have a term we use today for parents who engage in sexual conduct with their own children: we call them child abusers, and if we catch them, and succeed in convicting them in a court of law, we put them in jail. As we should.

The God I know is nothing like this. Nothing like this at all. The God I know and talk to every day as part of my mystical practice are my divine parents. God the Mother and God the Father are wonderful people. They’re kind and thoughtful and generous and funny. They’re extraordinarily patient. They always explain things in a way I can understand with my very human brain. If I don’t understand something, they don’t call me weak or stupid, but instead they always try a new tack to help me “put it together.” They love me as their child, but I know I’m not loved more than anyone else. They love all their children with as much ferocity as they love me. It’s the ferocious love that all loving parents know towards their children. It’s lifelong devotion, commitment, sacred trust. It’s safety. It’s eternity.

There are precious few passages in the Bible that convey this sense of God’s relationship with us as angels-in-human-form. The passages that do exist are almost buried under the holy mountain of piety, righteousness, law, fear, and obedience.

I say “almost.”

Beautiful things grown in marshes. These blue flags from the iris family grow in many wet spots in Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2014.

The really cool thing is that the truthful passages “somehow” survived all the cuts, revisions, and ruthless doctrinal choices made by narcissistic theologians in the past. “Somehow” the Letter of James made it into the Christian canon, although many influential theologians (including Martin Luther) were openly hostile towards this letter. “Somehow” the Gospel of Mark was preserved, despite the best efforts of the authors of Luke and Matthew to eradicate its message by “improving” on it. “Somehow” the non-elitist Psalm 116 got tucked in there among the more famous Royal and Zionist Psalms.

I just love the way these truthful messages are “hidden in plain sight” where anyone with an open heart and a lick of common sense can find them.

Even better, these passages say what they say in an open, honest way. No special training is required. No promises are made to you about the hidden truth that will one day be revealed to you if only you submit to blind faith.

Divine truth needs no embellishment. It’s beautiful just the way it is. Today. Not centuries from now, but today.

Which is pretty much what you’d expect from a wonderful, loving God.

+24

-3

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Bible, Concinnate Christianity, Divine Love, Gnosticism, Gospel of Mark, Letter of James, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Mother and Father God, mysticism, relationship with God and tagged Divine Heart | Leave a Comment

07 Oct 2010

CC37: More on Harpur’s "Pagan Christ"

I’m still feeling grumpy about Tom Harpur’s suggestions for Christians who want to find “the only way ahead,” so I’m going to talk some more about that.

Early on in my writings on this blog, I stated — in bold letters, no less — that I am NOT a Gnostic (March 6, 2010: Some Reference Books I Read & Recommend). Even though I’m a practising mystic, and even though I believe in a number of things that can’t be seen by the human eye (so sue me — even radio waves can’t be seen by the human eye), this doesn’t make me a Gnostic. It’s only sloppy thinkers who haven’t done their homework on Gnosticisms would insist on calling me a Gnostic. (Note here that I’ve used the plural form of Gnosticism because careful researchers know there’s no such thing as one single historical form of Gnosticism any more than there’s one single historical form of Christianity or one single historical form of Judaism.)

According to Gnostics of all traditions, this is what you look like: old, ugly, stained, and walled off eternally from God unless you accept the cult teachings that will grant you “escape.” Naturally, for the price of your human obedience, worship, and financial contributions, Gnostics will be happy to sell you the secret knowledge that blasts open the door to ascendance. Photo credit JAT 2021.

In order for a person to be included under the umbrella term of Gnosticism, he or she has to hold certain beliefs about the nature of humanity’s relationship with God. Central to all Gnosticisms is the idea that the soul is a tiny piece of God’s essence that is trying to find its way back to God. Immortal souls end up in mortal bodies, but this isn’t really a good thing, according to Gnostics, because our physical bodies drag the soul down into a “prison” of matter. The spiritual task for Gnostics is to recognize the spark of God/Christ/Divine that exists within, and to set about freeing that spark by raising their consciousness to a higher level. The goal is to seek “wisdom” and hidden knowledge (gnosis in Greek). This knowledge leads to transcendence.

If this sounds a lot like Plato’s teachings about the soul’s journey, it’s because Plato’s teachings and later Gnostic teachings have a lot in common. Most orthodox Western Christian scholars don’t want to admit it, but these teachings also strongly influenced the apostle Paul. The famous passage about life after death in Chapter 15 of First Corinthians is a fascinating blend of Jewish apocalyptic thought (future resurrection) and Platonic thought (incorruptibility of the divine): “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” (Cue Handel’s Messiah.)

Tom Harpur is quite up-front about the fact that he admires Gnostic thinking. On page 175 of The Pagan Christ, he says, “What’s really important is that Paul’s spiritual view of Christ (his Christology) and Gnostic Christianity held the early Christian movement up to a truly high standard of intellectual and philosophical excellence.”

Bear in mind that Harpur himself doesn’t believe there ever was an actual man named Jesus Christ who lived in1st century CE Palestine. He believes the gospel stories about Jesus should be read typologically, not literally. He believes the story of Jesus is pure symbol. An important symbol, but a symbol nonetheless. A myth, not a fact.

In fact, Harpur believes that all Scripture should only be read symbolically, not literally or historically. For Harpur, “the enigma of the Bible has been largely solved. Dark passages, cryptic narratives or events — all have been shot through with a new, though long-lost, light because of this awareness that the key to all Scripture is to be found in the doctrine of Incarnation (page 181).”*

And what is the long-lost light that Harpur sees in this symbolic reading of Scripture? Why, it’s the ancient wisdom of the Egyptian mystery cults!

Here’s where I have a really big problem with Harpur’s thesis. He recommends without reservation that Christianity of the third millennium reclaim “the wisdom expounded by the Egyptians, the Orphics, the Pythagoreans and Plato, as well as by St. Paul, the Gnostics, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and a host of others . . . (page 191).” (Can’t argue with the historical links that existed among these groups, although I would have added Manicheans and Albigensians.) He thinks the choice to reclaim this long-lost light will arm us “with the moral and intellectual courage to live our lives to the fullest for the advancement of all . . . (page 193).”

Me, I think such a course of action will demolish whatever moral and intellectual courage Christians have.

Why do I think this? I think this because I’ve lived through the devastating effects of ancient mystery teachings on the human brain, and although I’ve fully recovered from the effects of my Big Fat Idiot Stage, I’m alarmed when I see reputable scholars using their positions of authority to urge dangerous spiritual practices on vulnerable, less well educated people.

It’s irresponsible, and there’s no excuse for it.

Harpur is advocating a return to what is indisputably a cult psychology based on status addiction. He’s kidding himself if he thinks the leaders of these ancient cults were nice people who truly found divine wisdom and willingly shared it with all people. Pythagoras (of whom Harpur seems fond) founded a sectarian cult with strict rules where only a small group of chosen disciples were initiated into the secret knowledge and rituals. (That’s status addiction!) Hellenistic mystery cults such as the Orphic mysteries and the Eleusinian mysteries engaged in bizarre, ritualistic, occult practices that most people would find abhorrent today. Addiction issues and sexual misconduct were rampant in these cults. Later, especially in the Eastern Roman Empire, Christian monks, nuns, contemplatives, and mystics separated themselves from regular communities and engaged in self-harming ascetic practices so they could “imitate Christ” and be “closer to God.” (Again, status addiction.) Needless to say, addiction issues, sexual misconduct, and other forms of abuse continued to take place in monastic communities and continued to be blamed on evil forces such as demons, incubi, and the devil.

Is this what Harpur wants? Because this is what he’s going to get if he naively places these ancient mystery cults on a pedestal. Where he sees a “long-lost light” in these ancient teachings, I see only a “darkness of abuse” we’re well rid of.

As for Harpur’s claim that he wants to help bring science and religion closer together and “highlight Nature’s guiding role” in a renewed Christian faith, I just want to choke. There is no hard science in his book, but there are lots of superficial cliches and lots of references to the spiritual symbols seen in Nature. When Harpur says, “I never see the moon without being reminded of its reflecting the solar glory and its monthly telling of the story of our incarnation and ultimate resurrection (page 188),” I gotta say that don’t impress me much. (Cue the Shania Twain song.)

There’s tons of light and wonder and goodness and love in the natural world — the scientific world — that God the Mother and God the Father have created for us. But we won’t find it by looking backwards to the mystery cult teachings of people who believed in a status-ridden journey of spiritual ascent, and we won’t find it by pretending that all Scripture is “good” if only we understood how to read it symbolically! Christianity has been there and done that. It doesn’t work.

You don’t have to choose between mystery and science. Jesus understood this, as did Job before him. The back of the moon wasn’t visible until the space program revealed it. But seeing the moon through the eyes of science hasn’t lessened the sense of wonder and awe we feel when her silvery beauty gleams. Photo credit JAT 2021.

The only way forward for the Church, as I see it, is for us to come at spirituality from a whole new angle. We have to let go of “traditional teachings” and “infallible doctrines” that don’t line up with new findings in neuroscience, quantum physics, quantum biology, astronomy, and so on. Other fields of endeavour have had to let go of cherished beliefs that eventually proved false. Why should Christianity be any different?

Does it make sense to you that God would make special rules for the Church that hold us to a LOWER standard of scholarship than the standard observed by secular researchers in fields such as teaching, environmental science, or psychiatry?

Maybe it’s our unwarranted sense of entitlement — not the devil — that’s the source of our ongoing problems in the Church.

I think I’ll sign off now and go read Discover magazine’s latest special issue on The Brain. Although I don’t always agree with the scientific conclusions I find there, there’s plenty of good food for thought, and I’m grateful for that.

Happy Thanksgiving!

* In his glossary, Harpur defines “incarnation” as “the God within each of us — the ‘Light which lighteth every person coming into the world.'”

-2

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, Gnosticism, HDM Myths, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul, Plato, spiritual ascent, status addiction and tagged ethical mysticism, religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

22 Sep 2010

CC35: Would You Like To Super-Size That Stampede?

In last Saturday’s Toronto Star (Sat., Sept. 18, 2010), an article on page 2 stopped me in my tracks. Entitled “Believers fine with the Rapture, but what about Fido?” (written by Lesley Ciarula Taylor), the story described a new Internet-based business called “Eternal Earth-Bound Pets.” This business, founded by a gentleman named Bart Centre, already has 225 clients who have paid $110 U.S. per pet to have their pets rescued and cared for after May 21, 2011.

Why are these clients so confident their pets will need to be rescued after May 21, 2011? Well, because the Rapture has been prophesied for that day, and as every Rapture-believing evangelical Christian knows, that’s when “true believers” will be saved — taken directly up into Heaven, body and all, in the twinkling of an eye — and all the rest of the poor slobs on Planet Earth will left to contend with the dreaded Doomsday, currently prophesied to be coming soon to a sinful city near you on October 21, 2011.

Of course, since only the chosen among human beings will be beamed up to Heaven during the Rapture, there’s the dicey question of who will look after all those soulless pets, the pets that will be abandoned by their Christian owners when the “stampede of saints” comes next spring.

This painting of an angel with an incense censer was created by the circle of Bernaert van Orley in about 1535-1540. Originally part of an altarpiece, its purpose would have been to help churchgoers imagine the glory of heaven for the chosen. On display at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2018.

Enter Eternal Earth-Bound Pets. Mr. Centre, you go for it! I wish you luck in your money-making enterprise. I have no sympathy for orthodox Western Christians who choose to believe in apocalyptic bullshit like the Rapture. If their narcissistic, status-driven beliefs make them vulnerable to niche marketing schemes, that’s okay. Maybe some of these idiots will learn the hard way not to listen to religious prophets.

Of course, these particular Christians are listening to the teachings of Paul, and Paul was himself an apocalyptic religious prophet. Paul was going around telling people that Jesus was coming back “really, really soon,” and that people who gave over their lives to complete faith in Christ would not die, but would be saved, body and soul, and taken up into Heaven. (“Beam me up, Scotty.”)

Give me a break. Paul was making absurd promises to people. He was telling people they could escape death on one condition: they had to fully accept Paul’s teachings. Notice how he left himself “an out,” though. If they happened to die before Christ’s return, it was their own fault. They must have fallen short in their belief.

Too bad for you, buddy (said Paul). Your faith wasn’t good enough (said Paul). You should have tried harder to follow my own special brand of teachings (said Paul). Repent, repent!

Paul talks a lot in First Corinthians about escaping sin and death. But he never talks in this letter about healing miracles.

Ah, you say, what about Acts 20:7-12, where Paul heals the young man who fell out of the window! That sounds like something Jesus would have done!

True, but Paul didn’t write the Acts of the Apostles. Somebody else wrote it decades later, and, if scholar Barrie Wilson is correct, “Luke” wrote this book for the express purpose of bridging the doctrinal gulf between the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem (the Ebionites) and the followers of Paul (proto-orthodox Christians in Hellenistic cities like Antioch). It’s cheating to rely on the Acts of the Apostles for confirmation that Paul cared about physical healing for low-status people. In the seven biblical letters written by Paul himself, there’s nothing to suggest he cared a whit about the healing miracles ascribed to Jesus son of Joseph.

Paul wasn’t teaching people about the kind of everyday psycho-spiritual-physical healing that Jesus carried out during his tenure as a physician-scholar in Galilee. Jesus, after all, was interested in healing the physical bodies and physical brains of marginalized people (women, lepers, the blind, the deaf, the “possessed” who suffered from neurological and psychiatric disorders). Paul, meanwhile, was only interested in mystical teachings about spiritual wisdom, ritual purity, prophecy, mystery, spiritual powers, and spiritual authority.

Paul taught apocalyptic bullshit. Jesus did not.

If Paul were alive today, he’d no doubt be preaching the Rapture, and telling his faithful flock how to piously prepare for the “stampede of saints” so they won’t be Left Behind.

I’m looking forward to May 22, 2010, when I’ll be getting up and having my morning coffee and looking out my window at the beautiful world God the Mother and God the Father have created for all their children.

Even the four-legged ones.

-4

Posted in "Escape", apocalyptic prophecy, Concinnate Christianity, First Corinthians, healing miracles, Paul vs Jesus, prophets, spiritual ascent, status addiction and tagged Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

28 Jun 2010

CC22: The Trinity: A Perfect Shell Game

Then Job answered the Lord: ‘I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. “Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?” Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. “Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.” I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you’ (Job 42 1-5). As Job finally came to understand, it’s always better to listen to what God has to say about God instead of what theologians say about God. If you want to know God, you have to look beyond the limited scope of church doctrines on the nature of God; you have to be willing to look at all of Creation. Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001 – 2003.

If you’ve been reading my last few posts and you’re now hopelessly confused, then I’d like to thank you — it means you’ve been paying attention!

My last post (about the Law of Attraction) seems to contradict my earlier posts about prophecy and apocalypticism and the Church’s claim that we can’t change anything in our relationship with God because of original sin. But hey — that’s the great thing about orthodox Western Christian theology! It doesn’t have to make sense! Mutually contradictory doctrines are more than welcome in the pulpit — in fact, the more confusion, the better. That way, people in the congregation will always feel off balance and slightly stupid in comparison to the elevated seminarians who have humbly answered God’s call to preach the Chalcedon Creed.

And such a joy it is to be able to preach the mystery of the Trinity and the whole homoousios (one substance) thing!* Of course it doesn’t make any sense . . . but that’s the beauty of it! Our inability to understand the Trinity reminds us constantly that we’re weak and unworthy in comparison to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Obviously, if we weren’t so weak and unworthy, we’d understand the whole thing better, more like those specially chosen priests and ministers who are higher than we are on the ladder of spiritual ascent. But, alas, ours is not to wonder why, as the old saying goes. Ours is to obey.

The Church says that God is One, but is also Three, and we must obey the Church’s teachings on this matter. We must submit to a Trinitarian God. Even in the United Church of Canada, where a lot of people no longer feel comfortable with Trinitarian theology, General Council still requires that baptisms be carried out in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (all of whom are male).

It’s a neat trick, this God-is-One-but-also-Three thing. It’s a convenient way to play a shell game with the contradictory teachings in the Bible and in the Church’s own body of doctrines. By insisting that God is of one substance but three different natures, the Church can preserve its traditional image of God as a transcendent, monotheistic, unemotional King and Judge, while at the same time keeping the idea of God as interventionist Spirit, and God as Suffering Son. But don’t forget — God is all these things at the same time, so you mustn’t try to imagine that the Suffering Son is a different being or entity in comparison to the transcendent and unemotional King. And don’t forget that although the Son conquered the devil and original sin while he was here, you’re still suffering from the effects of the devil and original sin because, well, because, ummm, the End Times aren’t here yet, so the promise of salvation hasn’t been completely fulfilled yet. But don’t worry too, too much, because even as we speak, God is stretching out his hand from the future End Times (where all things have already been fulfilled), and is reaching into the present time through the actions of the Spirit and the miracle of prolepsis to bring some of that fulfillment into your life today.

Like, huh?

I have a better idea, one that’s much less complicated. Let’s try Jesus’ own teachings about God for a while, and see if we can do better in our ongoing efforts to forge a meaningful, sensible, joyous relationship with God the Father and God the Mother.

Jesus’ own teachings can’t be any worse than what we’ve got right now.

*If you want to read about the history of the debates that led to the christological and trinitarian doctrines still held by the church, a good introduction can be found in Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1984). An extremely thorough and erudite theological review of the relevant early doctrines is presented in Jon Sobrino, Christ the Liberator (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001).

-3

Posted in "4 S's", apocalyptic prophecy, Book of Job, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, humility, Mother and Father God, Original Sin, spiritual ascent, Trinitarianism and tagged spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

06 Jun 2010

CC17: My Firsthand Experience With a Modern Apocalyptic Prophet

That’s me in the red shirt during my Big Fat Idiot Stage in 2003. That’s Grace on the right in the light blue shirt (though she wasn’t looking particularly beatific during this shot).

Even to this day, I can’t believe I missed the signs of Grace’s major mental illness.

At the time I first met Grace in 1998, I was working in the mental health field. Every day at the office I met and spoke with people whose lives had been torn apart by major depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, and Axis II issues such narcissistic personality disorder. I’d seen people suffering from psychotic depression, and I’d seen some of those psychotic patients undergo miraculous recovery after proper treatment. So it’s not like I could claim ignorance.

Ignorance, no. But naivete . . . yes, I admit to a heaping dose of that. And compartmentalization. I made the near-fatal mistake of compartmentalizing spirituality, of separating spirituality from everyday life, of trying to place my spirituality — and Grace’s — on some sort of special pedestal.

In my naivete, I was trying to climb the ladder of spiritual ascent. At the time, I thought that was a good thing. Only later did I realize that the path of holy ascent can be likened to a Boston Marathon of spiritual narcissists all scrambling to beat each other to the top of the special pinnacle where only a few special people are chosen to be especially close to God.

Like Plato. And Paul. And my spiritual teacher Grace. Apocalyptic prophets, all. Supremely confident. Absolutely convincing in their sincerity. Charming and persuasive. Endlessly energetic and enthusiastic. Psychopathic as hell.

I met Grace when I went for my very first Reiki healing. A mutual friend, Francesca, had arranged the Reiki healing for me. I knew very little at this point about New Age spirituality, and even less about traditional Christian mysticism. But I was eager to embark on a more spiritual path in my life (not so surprising for a 40 year old woman), and I’d suddenly found a bona fide Reiki master in my own community! It seemed too good to be true.

Grace had a beatific face. True, she was obese, but that was only because she so enjoyed cooking for other people to make them happy. True, she could knock back 5 ounces of vodka in half an hour, but that was only because she had a high threshold for alcohol (and she never drank the day before a Reiki healing). True, her two adult sons used alcohol and cannabis heavily, but that was only because they were so friendly and sociable and couldn’t say no to their friends, and in any event they were loved unconditionally by their parents, regardless of their behaviour. True, she became heavily addicted to pornography, but that was only in the context of a loving, monogamous relationship. True, she had a violent temper, but that was only because . . . well, that was only because she was right and other people were wrong, and she needed to clearly express to other people that she wouldn’t tolerate their unfair criticisms of her.

What mattered most to Grace was her spiritual path. She had trained as a certified Usui lineage Reiki Master. She revelled in the language, the symbolism, of it. Handpainted symbols covered the walls of the room in her home where she carried out her Reiki healings. She lit scented candles, played gentle, reassuring instrumental music, spoke in a reassuring tone. She talked the talk of divine love from beginning to end.

She talked endlessly and sincerely about divine love. She talked about the wondrous gift of divine healing that could come to people through hands-on healing. She said loudly and often that “we are all One, we are all equal.” She constantly strove to update her knowledge through New Age books, Internet sites, and spiritual workshops. She took new courses. She taught new courses. She seemed like “the real deal.”

But Grace was all talk. That’s all she did — talk. She did not practise empathy in her own life. In fact, she was one of the most vindictive, most unempathetic, most controlling, most self-entitled people I’ve ever met.

That’s why I have to thank her. I have to thank her for teaching me so consistently and so painfully that you can’t trust a spiritual teacher on the basis of words alone. You can’t trust the teachings of a dysfunctional spiritual teacher. Everything Grace did was focussed on Grace. She said she cared about her students and her Reiki patients, but she didn’t. She cared about herself. She only taught spiritual teachings that made her feel superior to other people. She needed to be “the Master.” She needed to be one of God’s specially chosen messengers. She needed to make prophetic claims. She needed to be in charge of other people’s spirituality. This was how she coped with her dissociative disorder.

Don’t get me wrong — Grace was highly dysfunctional for a damned good reason, and I know that. She’s a survivor of an abusive childhood home, where an alcoholic father sexually abused his daughters, and an alcoholic mother humiliated the children. It’s to Grace’s credit that as an adult she managed to hold down a respectable job and stay in a stable marriage for as long as she did. But Grace was unable to accept that she had addiction problems and needed professional assistance. By the time I met her, she was a mess. And her “commitment” to her path of spiritual ascent made life worse — both for herself and for her vulnerable students.

I didn’t break off ties with Grace until 2005. I hope that in the past few years she has received the care she needed. Somewhere underneath all her vitriol was the kind and loving person God knew she could be.

Unfortunately, I never got the chance to know that person.

-2

Posted in anagogic mysticism, apocalyptic prophecy, apophatic mysticism, Concinnate Christianity, My Spiral Path, prophets, religion and mental Illness, spiritual ascent and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

31 May 2010

CC16: The Difference Between Mystics and Prophets

Washing the windows of the entrance pyramid at the Royal Ontario Museum is no easy task, and you shouldn’t try it unless you’re an expert and have the all the proper equipment. Teaching about the soul, the brain-soul nexus, and ethical mysticism is no different – it takes proper training. Going to a weekend energy-healing workshop doesn’t qualify you as an expert. Be patient, be humble, and take the time to overcome your own status addiction issues before you seek to become a mentor to others. Photo credit JAT 2017.

This morning, I happened to hear a radio interview with Mike Holmes, Canada’s famed “make it right” building contractor, teacher, and advocate for families in distress. Mike Holmes had been asked to speak about the home inspection business, and he was lamenting two current realities. First, many home inspectors have little or no hands-on experience in the contracting industry (so they don’t know what they’re talking about), and second, many home inspectors simply don’t care. The practical and ethical standards aren’t high enough, in Mike Holmes’s view, and this means that home buyers who rely on shoddy home inspection reports will end up with “lemons” — houses with major structural problems.

Anyone who has ever lived in such a house knows how stressful, how exhausting, how infuriating it is to be told there’s nothing wrong with your house, even as you watch your basement fill up with water after every rainstorm.

This is exactly how I feel about the “mysticism business.” Practical and ethical standards are pretty much non-existent in this field. And I’m not talking here about the charlatans and the New Age preachers who knowingly take advantage of vulnerable people. I’m talking here about the church.

The orthodox Western church has given itself prime credentials as THE “home inspectors of the soul” without having any solid knowledge, experience, or compassion to back this up. They hung out their shingle centuries ago, and it’s been hanging there for so long that most Christians just assume the church must know what it’s doing when it comes to “home inspections of the soul.”

But it doesn’t. When it comes to matters of the soul, the church is no different than the slipshod home inspector who tells you that a nice new coat of paint on your outside walls will fix your leaking basement. Just because a home inspector gives this advice loudly and often to all his clients doesn’t make it right. You can paint the upper walls as often as you like, and it won’t make a damn bit of difference to your crumbling foundations. The only way to fix the basement, of course, is to dig up all the soil around your house (even though it makes an ugly mess of your gardens for a while) and methodically repair the hidden cracks. It’s a lot of work. But in the end it’s worth it.

If you’re an earnest spiritual seeker who wants to know more about your soul, don’t bother asking the United Church of Canada for guidance. They have no official answers for you. They would prefer that you not embarrass them with your questions about the soul. The soul, you see, is perilously close to being a four-letter word in the United Church lexicon. It’s no longer uttered in polite company. Polite company — which includes professors of theology and United Church ministers and policy makers — wants you to speak about grace and Spirit and God’s justice breaking in proleptically.* But they don’t want you to speak about the soul. They want you to be part of a soulless church — at least, that’s what they’re implying.

Mike Holmes worked as a hands-on contractor for many years before he signed on to do his first TV show. (If I remember correctly, he grew up in a home where his father worked in the building industry. Mike Holmes’s children, now grown, have also been learning the ins and outs of home contracting and home renovation.) People who watch Mike Holmes’s TV shows trust him. They trust him because they can tell he’s not an actor — he’s a real contractor who knows what he’s doing. People learn a lot from watching his shows, because he’s also a good teacher and a dedicated advocate. He puts his money where his mouth is.

I’m not a home renovator (even though I wield a pretty mean paint brush!), but I do have a particular talent, and I’m trained in what I do. My particular talent is mysticism. My talent isn’t better than anyone else’s talent. It’s different, but it’s not better. Like Mike Holmes, I have a set of professional tools, and I know how to use them. I also insist that these tools be used according to the highest ethical standards.

In my view, few Christian mystics in the history of the church have used their talents ethically.

Furthermore, many of the men and women who’ve been traditionally revered as Christian mystics have not, in my opinion, been mystics at all. Rather, they’ve been apocalyptic prophets.

There’s a big difference between a mystic and an apocalyptic prophet. I know this because of my experience, training, and academic research. The church, however, often doesn’t make a distinction between mystics and apocalyptic prophets. The church tends to conflate them — which is kind of like saying there’s no difference between a real contractor and a TV actor who doesn’t know which end of a hammer is up.

This is why the church’s doctrinal garden is filled with the weeds of teachings based on mental illness (i.e. apocalyptic prophecy). This is why the church’s doctrinal garden is filled with ancient traditions from Plato, from apocalyptic literature, from Paul, and from later theologians such as Tertullian and Augustine of Hippo, all of which have choked out the original teachings of Jesus.

The church’s teachings on the soul are filled with weeds (as on the left). Many people seem afraid that, if they pull out the weeds, they’ll have no tangible mystery teachings left to sustain the spiritual roots of the church. In fact, when the weeds are pulled, what remains is the beautiful underlying structure of the soul’s courage and goodness. Gardens (and churches) are always healthier and stronger when the weeds are pulled. Photo credit JAT 2014.

Jesus was a mystic — a mentally healthy person capable of holistic thought, empathy, intuition, creative learning, logical thought, industrious actions, and advanced philosophical inquiry. Jesus was not an apocalyptic prophet — a mentally dysfunctional person demonstrating a consistent pattern of dissociation, dualistic thinking, narcissistic entitlement, anti-social behaviour, and a need to gain attention from admirers by making “divinely inspired” prophetic claims about the future.

Mystics are content to TRUST God, and have no need to make predictions about the future. Mystics know that God will do what God needs to do when God needs to do it. Mystics make no claim to having the keys to the future. Only those who don’t trust God insist on guarantees about what will happen and when it will happen. Bullies and narcissists are drawn to prophecy. Jesus was not a bully or a DSM-IV narcissist.

Mystics believe in the eternal soul in a positive, uplifting, holistic way, and they don’t try to scare the crap out of other people by making dire predictions about what will happen to somebody else’s soul. They believe that all souls are good because “God don’t make no junk.” Bullies and narcissists enjoy making threats about the fate of your soul because it gives them a twisted kind of high. It’s an addiction — not a very pretty one, but an addiction nonetheless — just like any other DSM-IV addiction problem.

Mystics (the real ones, anyway) are emotionally mature. They understand boundary issues. They understand that other people ARE other people. (Seriously dysfunctional people don’t see you as “real” in your own right, with your own distinctive personality — they see you merely as an extension of their own self-entitled needs, which is why they try to force you to comply with their wishes at the expense of yours.) Prophets love to give other people big, long lists of laws — required thoughts, required behaviours, which you’re expected to follow. Prophets tell you that their laws are divine laws. But most often the laws are designed to provide some sort of psychological relief to the prophet himself or herself. Usually, the laws entrench the “divine authority” of the prophet, and place the prophet in an elevated position. This is just narcissistic bullying in a more sophisticated form.

Mystics don’t talk about fearing God. Mystics talk about having a positive, mature relationship with God. Mystics don’t fear death. Mystics don’t believe in cosmic evil. Mystics don’t believe that human beings are more important to God than God’s other creatures. Mystics don’t believe that human laws are infallible. Mystics know that God is always listening and always acting in the world whether we pray for help or not.

Mystics trust in the fantastic goodness of God.

Apocalyptic prophets believe in their own power and their own status. They don’t trust anybody, especially not God.

Jesus was a mystic. He trusted God the Mother and God the Father. It’s time for the church to let Jesus’ teachings about God re-enter the hearts and minds of our community of faith in the twenty-first century.

It’s time for us to learn to trust our beloved God.

* If you don’t know what “prolepsis” means, then I’d like to suggest you’re a lucky person. You’ll sleep much better at night if you’re not wasting your time trying to embrace the scientifically impossible feat of time-travel.

-1

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, boundary issues, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, historical Jesus, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism, orthodox teachings about the soul, prophecy, prophets, religion and mental Illness, Soul and tagged ethical mysticism, religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

28 May 2010

CC15: On the Road to Jericho

Yesterday, I watched a rerun of Law and Order that was fascinating for its depiction of a righteous, devout, sincere Roman Catholic woman who was put on trial for murder after a botched exorcism killed a teenaged girl. Interestingly, the woman had been a nun before leaving the convent to follow her “gift from God.”

The assistant DA was sent to interview the woman’s former Mother Superior. The Mother Superior informed a surprised DA that the former nun’s intense belief in the devil proved that she was more obedient to her faith than other people, not less so.

In the show, everyone agreed that the woman’s faith was sincere. In court, she testified in a calm, persuasive voice that she had a gift from God, and that the archangel Michael had commanded her to beat the devil out of the rebellious girl. She had obeyed St. Michael. She had failed in her mission not because the divine command was flawed, but because she wasn’t strong enough to overcome the devil. The girl had died when the devil took her soul. She regretted her personal failure to save the girl’s soul, but she didn’t regret the attempt. She had cared about the girl, and she’d been trying to do the right thing.

Fiction? Exaggeration? Misrepresenting the facts in order to make good TV?

Not really. In fact, the show didn’t go far enough in showing the reality of this kind of religious mindset, and the damage these “sincere, devout, faithful” people cause with their beliefs.

Many “sincere, devout, faithful” people used to believe in creatures that were part man, part horse — the centaurs of Greek religion. Sincerity of belief has no bearing on the veracity of a belief. You don’t have to accept the Church’s teachings about “the devil” any more than you have to accept the ancient Greek belief in centaurs. Shown here is South Metope XXVIII, originally from the Parthenon in Athens, now on display at the British Museum, London. Photo credit JAT 2023.

Just last week, the Globe and Mail published a brief article about three cult members in Baltimore who have been convicted in the death of a toddler (“U.S. Cult Members To Be Sentenced For Starving Child,” The Globe and Mail, May 18, 2010). Says the article, “Prosecutors say cult leader Queen Antoinette told the mother that denying food would cure her child’s rebellious spirit.” What had the child done? He had refused to say “Amen” after meals.

The article also includes this eye-popping fact: the child’s 23-year old mother (who is already in a residential treatment program) made an unusual plea bargain “in which her plea will be withdrawn if the child is resurrected.”

If the child is resurrected?

Many members of today’s church would like to distance themselves from this kind of bizarre thinking, and would like to pretend that church teachings on the devil, on Judgment Day, on bodily resurrection of the dead, and on exorcism aren’t really real. But these teachings are real. And they continue to create terrible suffering in the world today.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying that the devil is real. I’m saying that the teachings about the devil are real.

The teachings are still official church law. If you’re a righteous Christian — a sincere, devout, faithful believer in the church’s teachings — you’re supposed to believe in all this apocalyptic b*llsh#t.

Mind you, apocalyptic b.s. is not new to the world, and it’s not limited to Christianity. Scholars aren’t sure when apocalyptic religious claims first surfaced, but they know that plenty of bizarre apocalyptic claims about God and the devil had been circulating long before Jesus of Nazareth lived. There’s a lot of raw apocalyptic material in Plato’s writings, but Plato wasn’t the only one to make dualistic claims about good versus evil. There’s a long track record for this kind of scary religious belief, and it’s found all over the world.

Why is it found all over the world? It’s found throughout history and throughout the world because — radical thought, this — because serious mental illness is found throughout history and throughout the world.

Human beings all share the same basic DNA. Part of our human DNA package includes a susceptibility to major mental illnesses such as unipolar depression, psychotic depression, bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia, not to mention addiction disorders, personality disorders, and psychiatric symptoms that are secondary to primary medical disorders. (For instance, sepsis — systemic blood poisoning — can cause sudden psychosis). Certain kinds of major mental illness are known to lead to certain kinds of recognizable — but highly dysfunctional — thinking patterns.

Apocalyptic thinking patterns are dysfunctional. I do not care that apocalyptic beliefs have been enshrined in many different major world religions. I do not care that I’m supposed to fully honour and respect everybody’s religious beliefs. I refuse to honour any religious belief — whether it’s Christian, Kabbalist, Muslim, animist, or whatever — if that particular belief system is founded on teachings that emanated from mental illness. So I don’t care what somebody’s revered prophet once said if that prophet showed clear signs of mental illness. Apocalyptic teachings are a clear sign of mental illness.

The human genome hasn’t changed much over the past few millennia, and that means that prophets who lived and taught 3,000 years ago had the same DNA as you and I, and they had the same vulnerability to biologically-based psychosis as you and I. The difference between then and now is that we finally have the tools to recognize these major mental disorders, and we finally have some good treatments for them — such as SSRI’s and olanzapine.

I have no patience and no sympathy for people who tell me that all religious traditions are equally worthy of respect. They are not. Religious traditions founded on dysfunctional, dualistic, good versus evil thinking are not worthy of respect. This means I believe that some aspects of the Christian tradition are not worthy of respect. I also believe that some aspects of certain other religious traditions are also not worthy of respect.

I’m not going to apologize for this. Religious leaders have a moral duty to reexamine the traditions of their respective faiths to weed out all teachings that originated in mental health disorders, teachings that continue to contribute to mental health disorders, teachings that create great harm in the world today.

The church must take responsibility for its past failure to work closely with scientific researchers who have been trying to show that bizarre, abusive behaviour is a medical, social, and educational issue, not a spiritual or religious issue involving evil forces.

The church needs to “grow up.” It’s not helpful to anyone — especially to those who have a genetic vulnerability to major mental illness, and are therefore easily traumatized by teachings about evil forces — for us to pretend that we can all happily and lovingly accept every “religious belief.” We can’t. Each world faith must start to take responsibility for its own doctrinal garden. Each world faith must begin to weed out the destructive teachings that have grown in its garden over the centuries. Each world faith must plant new seeds that can close the current and utterly inexcusable chasm between science and faith. Each world faith must begin to cherry-pick among its own teachings, and keep only those teachings and traditions that allow people to enter into a full, loving relationship with God based on the values of trust, courage, devotion, and gratitude.

This is what Jesus was trying to say 2,000 years ago. Maybe it’s time we listened.

________________________________________________________

On the Road to Jericho (Photo Credit JAT 2013)

Once upon a time, long, long ago and far, far away, there was a certain man who was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. He fell into the hands of robbers who were led by a man named Saul. They stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half resurrected.

Now by chance an orthodox Western priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. So likewise a universalist ecumenist, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.

But a woman who came from a distant land and had also once been beaten and left for dead by her kinfolk came near him; and when she saw him, she was moved to pity. She bandaged the wounds that had been bleeding for 2,000 years, and she took him to the local women’s shelter. There the little children knew him, and those who were like the little children knew him.

The man who was just a man happily died.

Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers led by Saul?

-1

Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, dualism, humility, mental illness, mysticism, Paul vs Jesus, Plato, prophets, religion and mental Illness and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “apocalyptic prophecy”