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09 Aug 2012

RS22: Freedom and Slavery

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have certainty, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I many boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own ways. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Cor 13: 1 – 8a). This short passage, long attributed to Paul, is so unlike Paul’s teachings and is so resonant with Jesus’ teachings (especially as seen in the Gospel of Thomas), it’s amazing Paul still gets the credit. Shown here are the Pyramids at Giza, photo credit Historylink101.com (Egyptian Picture Gallery).

A: Last time you said Paul’s religious masters feared contamination by the forces of chaos. You then defined the forces of chaos as the forces of Love and All Things Feminine. My first thought was to ask about the reaction from Christians who insist that Paul speaks eloquently about Love. Then I remembered that you yourself wrote the famous ode to love in First Corinthians 13. I also remembered the academic papers I’d read about the meaning of the word “love” (aheb in Hebrew) in Second Temple Judaism. At that time “loving God” meant “obeying God” rather than “liking God” or “being in relationship with God.” Love for God was a duty, a contractual obligation, a way for human beings to hold up their end of the bargain with God.

Why did Paul talk so much about love (agape in the Greek) if he didn’t believe in love?

J: Paul was not a man who was capable of love. What he meant by love was something much closer to the mindset you and I have defined as humility — turning yourself into an empty vessel — an obedient vessel — so you can properly receive Paul’s authority.

A: He doesn’t use the word “humility” in his letters.

J: No. He uses the words “weakness” and “foolishness.” But it’s still humility.

A: The meaning is the same.

J: Paul didn’t believe at all in the concept of love as I understood love. He believed in obedience. In orderly, obedient communities. In pyramids of mystical power where the people at the bottom of the pyramid “knew their place” and obeyed those who were higher up in rank and authority and supported them in their “great mission.” But he doesn’t use the word “pyramid.” He uses the metaphor of the body — the one body in Christ. Christ is the head. All the members of the community are part of this one body, which makes sense from a practical viewpoint, because a body can move more swiftly if it has two healthy feet. But make no mistake — the feet are still at the bottom of this pyramid of power. So slaves are loved in Paul’s community because they help bring order and stability to the community. But they’re still slaves.

A: Christians today read Paul’s speech about the one body (1 Cor 12: 12-31) as a rejection of hierarchical values in Hellenistic culture. But you’re saying it’s not a rejection.

J: It’s a different understanding of hierarchy. For Paul, it’s a superior understanding of hierarchy. It’s an attempt to reveal the real truth about hierarchy, the real mystical underpinnings of hierarchy that exist within all the worlds of Heaven. It’s Paul’s attempt to bring “the one true” hierarchy into the corrupt world. Again, alchemy. An attempt to bring order and harmony into the corrupt physical world by controlling the powers of chaos. An attempt to corral the behaviour of everybody so they’ll fit properly within the pyramid of power that Paul and his religious masters are trying to build.

A: When you say they’ll fit properly, how do you mean that? Do you mean that figuratively?

J: No. I mean that literally. Don’t forget — “The One True Religion” Paul was commissioned to spread was about 3,000 years old by the time Paul came on the scene. This group had already spent 3,000 years researching and experimenting with different ways to acquire power. Their early attempts were focussed on external tools — projects such as the Pyramids of Giza and subsequent wonders of the ancient world. Eventually, though, they noticed they were having problems with other people’s brains. People had an annoying habit of trying to find freedom for themselves and their families. Then they wouldn’t behave!

The Seekers of the Rock decided that all those busy human minds that were always getting in the way of the group’s goals were nothing more than fractured little bits of the universal Order and Perfection that Spirit had already created in pure form for the higher levels of Heaven. Order and Perfection were envisaged as a pyramid of perfect, exquisite, divine geometry. Each of the four sides at the base of the pyramid represented one of the immutable Divine Laws (as this group understood them). One side — the north side — represented vengeance — in other words, the Divine Right to punish lawbreakers. The south side represented knowledge — the Divine Right to control all knowledge. The west side represented “mass” — great weight, strength, force, inertia — or the Divine Right to build great armies to seize what was rightfully its own. The east side represented sacrifice — the Divine Right to demand sacrifice for purposes that cannot be understood by mortal minds.

The Seekers believed that if communities of believers could be gathered together in accordance with these four main principles, they could literally create a metaphysical pyramid that would be pleasing to Spirit. But, as with a physical pyramid built of carefully cut stones, a mystical pyramid can only be strong and whole and worthy of Spirit’s approval if each “stone” is properly placed in relation to neighbouring stones. The pyramid is built of many smaller stones. So all the stones are necessary if the pyramid is to achieve its purpose. If you remove some of the stones at the bottom, the whole construct might topple.

A: So, for Paul, slaves are like the stones at the bottom.

J (nodding): When the slaves know their proper place, and stay where they’ve been placed at the bottom of the pyramid, the Divine Rights of Vengeance, Knowledge, Strength, and Sacrifice will remain in balance, and Order is achievable. But if the slaves dare step outside the bounds of the pyramid and into the frightening world of chaos that lies beyond, Spirit will have no choice but to exercise its Rights. That’s when you get divine actions like the Great Flood. It’s a simple matter of cause and effect.

A: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

J: As I said, this bunch saw themselves as scientists in pursuit of order and harmony. Their relentless attacks on free will were highly logical, if completely inhumane. From their twisted perspective, they were “saving” the slaves from the dire consequences of their foolish desire for freedom. They were acting in the best interests of the group as a whole. “We’re doing this for your own good. This hurts us more than it hurts you. One day you’ll thank us for this.”

A: Something tells me Paul’s rhetoric on “freedom” is not what it appears to be.

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, Divine Love, First Corinthians, free will, Gnosticism, HDM Myths, humility, Mother God, mysticism, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, Realspiritik, slavery, spiritual ascent and tagged Paul vs Jesus | Leave a Comment

24 Jan 2012

TBM17: Learning to Understand Your Own Angels

This piece called “Dream Cloud” is carved from a single piece of boulder opal in an ironstone matrix. It measures 8 x 6 x 4 centimetres, weighs 1167.5 carats, and is believed to have been carved in about 1915 CE. My intuition tells me that the artist who created this piece had some divine inspiration along the way. “Dream Cloud” is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017

Learning to communicate with your guardian angels is a tricky, tricky business.

If you go into the New Age section of your local bookstore, you’ll find quite a few books about how to talk to angels. Most of these books are written by people who are in the early stages of their spiritual journey. They don’t yet have the knowledge or experience or scientific training to teach others how to understand the messages of angels. Therefore, a lot of information in these books is flawed.

However, some New Age books are well-meaning and contain the odd useful nugget. This is more than I can say for books about angels that are written by evangelical or fundamentalist Christians, who want to pummel you with the idea that your soul is filled with sin and your angels are part of a vast celestial hierarchy whose only purpose is to worship God. It’s pretty negative stuff when you stop and think about it.

There’s a history behind these traditional teachings I won’t go into today, but suffice it to say that conventional Christian theories about angels won’t get you very far on the Spiral Path. In fact, Christian theories will slow you down. You’re better off to start with a simple model based on observable facts.

Fact #1: Learning to communicate effectively with anyone — including your angels — takes time and practice and patience. It’s not something you learn overnight. It’s not something you learn at a weekend workshop. It’s something you have to work on bit by bit, day by day. In other words, you need to know from the very beginning of your journey that you won’t be able to understand your angels’ messages right away. You’re going to have to practise.

This doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Quite the opposite, in fact. What you’re trying to develop is a complex skill — a way of thinking and feeling and acting that’s holistic and grounded and peace-filled. Because it’s a complex skill, it takes time for you to develop it. But this is a good thing, right? All complex human endeavours take time and effort. People don’t learn how to become jumbo jet pilots by going to a weekend workshop. Cirque du Soleil artists don’t learn how to scale walls by going to a weekend workshop. And adult men and women don’t learn how to communicate effectively with their angels in a few short hours, either.

If you meet a spiritual teacher who claims to have had an experience of instant conversion to a state of full communion with God or God’s angels overnight, you should be very, very wary. The story in the Bible’s Book of Acts about Saul’s sudden conversion on the road to Damascus is exactly the sort of religious claim that should raise an alarm bell in the back of your head. The story of Saul (who becomes Paul) gives people the idea that God chooses certain special people and then swoops into their heads to instantly rewire their brains so they can serve as special receptacles for divine revelation.

Yeah, okay, so God is just going to dump a few terabytes of new data into your head from one minute to the next, and you’re not even going to get a migraine?

This is just goofy. Not to mention abusive. The story of Saul on the road to Damascus describes an abusive God who seizes hold of one man and forces him to instantly convert to a new vision of God. Saul doesn’t get a say in this conversion, according to the Bible. Instead, he’s forced by God to accept his “destiny.” His “fate.” His chosen status as a messenger of God.

And where in this story does Saul apply his own free will and make the choice to seek redemption?

Nowhere.

This leads us to Fact #2.

Fact #2: Learning to use your own free will is a real bitch. I’m not going to lie to you. A big part of your journey to understand your angels’ messages will involve the journey to understand your own free will.

See, this is another reason I’m suggesting you avoid traditional Christian teachings about angels and souls. According to these traditional teachings, you don’t really have free will. Well, you sorta do, in so far as you can choose to commit sinful acts. And, of course, you’re allowed to apply your free will to choose salvation through Christ. But, other than that, the Church says you’re basically an unworthy piece of shit who can’t choose redemption and can’t really forgive others and can’t be a good person unless God has chosen this destiny for you. But good luck trying!

Fortunately, a great many individuals have figured out the Church is wrong.

Among the people who understand the true potential of your free will are your very own guardian angels. All angels, whether in 4D form or in incarnated human form, live and breathe the concept of free will in its deepest grandeur. So you may as well know from the beginning of your journey that if you try to tell your angels that you can’t change because you don’t have free will, they’ll put on their angel earmuffs and loudly proclaim, “Sorry, we can’t hear you. La la la la la.”

Why are angels allowed to ignore your pity parties? Because angels have free will. And they don’t have to agree with everything you’re saying.

Which leads to the last point I want to highlight today.

Fact #3: All guardian angels are equally competent and equally well qualified to guide their respective charges. There’s no such thing as “defective” or “inferior” guardian angels. The angels who are watching over you are the angels who are best suited to you and your unique needs. Period.

I’ve read a number of New Age books in which authors claim you can break a contract with your guardian angels if you believe they’re not “pure” enough or “advanced” enough for you. According to these authors, you can insist on being teamed with a “better” angel or spirit guide, someone who’s higher on the ladder of spiritual ascent . . . like, say, an archangel instead of a plain ol’ guardian angel. Like maybe even Archangel Michael himself!

Hah!

You may have noticed that in my last post (Angels Aren’t Wusses) I described angels as being more like the crew of the star ship Enterprise than the winged, ethereal, transcendent beings of traditional Western art. This is because angels ARE more like the crew of the Enterprise. They come in many different sizes and shapes (think Klingon, Betazoid, Vulcan). They come with many different combinations of talents and strengths (think strong Klingon, empathic Betazoid, intellectual Vulcan). They come with absences of strengths, too (think gentle Klingon, non-telepathic Betazoid, weepy Vulcan — say what?). So angels always work AS A TEAM, with each angel offering his or her strengths, and each one deferring to others in areas where he or she lacks a strength or talent. (Not coincidentally, the same observation applies to human communities at their best — people with different “sizes and strengths” coming together to work as a team.)

No one incarnates on Planet Earth before a full and appropriate angelic team has been assembled for the particular individual who has chosen to incarnate.

Gosh, did I just say “has chosen to incarnate”? As in “wasn’t forced by cosmic forces beyond my control to be here living this lousy human life?”

Yup.

As I said above, all angels have free will. This free will extends to the choice to either incarnate for a while or to not incarnate for the time being.

Angels choose to incarnate for a variety of reasons, but all these reasons are positive and hopeful and courageous and loving. At the moment you may not remember or understand your own reasons for choosing to incarnate as a human being. But you did choose to be here. And your guardian angels support your choice and are doing far more than you realize to help you achieve your soul’s own purpose.

Next time we’ll talk about soul purpose, ’cause, as the Scotiabank’s TV ads say, “You’re richer than you think!”

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21 May 2011

JR41: City on the Hill: Saying 32 in Thomas

Model of the Acropolis of Athens, Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017.

A: Okay. Back to some exegesis from the Gospel of Thomas. This morning my copy of Thomas* opened itself up to Saying 32: “Jesus said: A city built and fortified atop a tall hill cannot be taken, nor can it be hidden.”

Stevan Davies’s notes on this saying, as usual, miss the point. Davies says, “This saying urges strength in defense while at the same time encouraging openness. You should not try to protect yourself by hiding your light, but at the same time you should be aware that attacks are likely. Ultimately you will be safe, above real danger, even if you expose yourself and your light to the world (pages 35-36).”

Granted, there’s not much context to go on here. This saying could be interpreted in a number of different ways. But I’m curious about your thoughts here.

J: I’m wondering in what way Davies can argue that a person who shows their light is “above real danger.” This is a reckless thing to say in view of the way reformers are treated in many parts of the world. Reformers need to know that attacks are likely, as you and I have discussed before. Reformers don’t have a special magical cloak that’s guaranteed to protect them from all harm.

A: Obviously you didn’t have such a magical cloak.

J: No. And I didn’t promise my followers one, either. It’s a fallacy to suppose that a person of faith will be protected from all suffering and all harm. Shit happens. Shit happens to everyone. The question isn’t how to be “above real danger.” The question is how to recognize real danger and how to handle it when it arises. Davies’s interpretation of saying 32 is pretty much the opposite of what I was trying to say.

A: Davies is implying in his notes that the fortified city on the hill is a metaphor for a person who has uncovered the secret of the Kingdom. He’s implying that knowledge of the Kingdom lifts a person above the fray. It kind of reminds me of the “shining city on the hill.”

J: Which tells you right off the bat it isn’t something I would have said.

A: You’re not big on the idea of Temples on Sacred Mounts.

J: No. I used metaphors from nature and peasant life to explain what the Kingdom feels like. By contrast, I used metaphors from the sphere of urban construction to explain what it feels like to be estranged from the Kingdom. Saying 32 is an attack on the people who choose to be like a fortified city on the hill. They choose to place themselves “above” other people. They choose to build walls around their hearts. Sure, everyone can see them up there, everyone can see their status. But they’re walled off from their feelings, from their compassion. They’re successful. They’re proud of their walls. They love to be noticed for their accomplishments. But they have no heart. And they have no relationship with God. They’ve made themselves invulnerable to pain. And this means they’ve made themselves invulnerable to love. They’re afraid of intense emotions, afraid of intense feelings like joy and grief and humbleness. They hide behind their walls and bemoan the cruel God who allows suffering. Meanwhile, they do nothing courageous themselves. They refuse to come out from behind their walls and engage in the task of coping in mature ways with the love and pain of living. They feel safe where they are, and they’d much rather blame God or other people for the emptiness they themselves feel inside.

Surprising as it may seem, inner emptiness seems like the better choice — the practical choice — for the majority of human beings. For those who’ve endured years of abuse and trauma, it’s often the only viable choice. They can’t make it through the day if they have to think about the pain they’ve endured. So they try to stop thinking about it.

A: Yet the pain always expresses itself somehow.

J: Yes. You can’t escape the pain. When you repress it, it finds a way to reveal itself anyway. Playwrights and psychotherapists make their living from expounding this truth. The pain must be confronted and transmuted — healed — into something deeper and more positive. Otherwise it will ruin your life and probably the lives of the people you’re closest to.

A: This is what Viktor Frankl taught. The idea that you have to find purpose and meaning and the means to go forward despite the most traumatic experiences imaginable.

J: A process that people need help with. If you don’t have a mentor to help you struggle through the emotional complexities of loss and suffering and eventual transformation, you’ll probably end up — like so many people — building gigantic walls around your heart. But there’s a cost for doing this. The cost is your ability to love.

A: You mean the person building the walls is no longer able to love.

J: Right. They can’t love themselves. They can’t love their neighbour. They can’t love their God. They can still function at a logical level, a practical level, but they wake up each morning and go to bed each night having no clear idea who they are or why they’re here or why they feel so empty and miserable. Life feels like a chore to them. A duty. A punishment they must endure. They feel very sorry for themselves.

A: I know a number of Christians who fit this bill.

J: The real tragedy is that once a person has finished building his or her fortified city on the hilltop, he or she “cannot be taken” — cannot let love in through the walls of logic and status. No amount of kindness or empathy or forgiveness or patience will breach the walls of intentional dissociation in another human being. You can’t “fix” such a person from the outside. If they don’t want to come out from behind their walls, you can’t make them do it, no matter how hard you try.

A: A lesson it took me years to understand.

J: The person who is like the city “built and fortified atop a tall hill” is NOT “ultimately . . . safe, above real danger.” Such a person IS the danger. She’s a danger to herself, her neighbours, and her community.

A: Why?

J: Because she thinks she’s in her right mind, in full control of all her thoughts and feelings and actions, but she’s not. She’s built a city of logic stone by stone, choice by choice, and she’s happy with it. She likes being dissociated from her soul’s own feelings. She chooses to live this way. But big chunks of her biological brain are miswired as a long term result of her intentional choices. She can’t make balanced choices anymore. She can’t because she’s worked very hard not to make balanced choices. She believes she has all the tools she needs in case of emergency or real danger. But she doesn’t have the brain tools she’ll actually need in an unpredicted crisis. So she’ll panic. She’ll freeze. She’ll think only of herself. Because that’s what she’s trained her brain to do.

A: You’re saying it doesn’t have to be this way.

J: I’m saying Darwin was dead wrong about survival of the fittest. The stupidest human beings on the planet are the ones who’ve made themselves into isolated cities on hilltops. And when I say “stupid” I don’t mean temporarily foolish or poorly educated. I mean less functional and less able to grasp complex issues and act on them with common sense, compassion, and integrity. Including many individuals with PhDs. These are the people you don’t want on your team when a genuine crisis hits. They’ll stab you in the back without blinking when the going gets tough.

A: Says the man whose own family and friends turned him over to the Romans when he made the going too tough . . .

J: Damn straight.

*For readers who haven’t been following our posts about the Gospel of Thomas, I’m using a book translated and annotated by Stevan Davies. (Stevan Davies, The Gospel of Thomas (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2004.))

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, Davies (Stevan), dissociation, Gospel of Thomas, healing, Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, spiritual ascent, status addiction, theodicy and tagged Kingdom teachings | Leave a Comment

25 Mar 2011

JR27: Paul’s "Temple" versus Jesus’ "Kingdom"

“Jesus said: I stood in the midst of the world. I came to them in the flesh. I found all of them drunk. I found not one of them to be thirsty. My soul was saddened by the sons of men for they were mentally blind. They do not see that they have come into the world empty and they will go out of the world empty. But now they are drunk. When they sober up they will repent” (Gospel of Thomas 28). Photo of Komombo Temple, dedicated to Sobek and Horus, Aswan, Egypt. Author Dennis Jarvis. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

J: Today I’d like to talk about the starting place for understanding the many differences between what I taught and what Paul taught.

A: Sounds good to me.

J: I’ve mentioned before that Paul and I had different motivations, different purposes behind our respective religious movements. One of the few things we had in common was a strong sense of conviction. Paul believed in his cause, and was willing to argue for it. I believed in my cause, and was willing to argue for it. We both had strong opinions. We just didn’t have the same opinions.

A: Part of Paul’s cause involved arguing against your cause.

J: Definitely. Paul rejected — even feared — my teachings on the nature of the Kingdom. He was sure my Kingdom teachings would lead to anarchy. Widespread civil and social disobedience. His fears were shared by others.

A: Why was he so afraid?

J: Well, Paul, like so many others then and now, had allowed his brain to become focussed — riveted — on the perfection of Divine Law. Of course, he thought it was Divine Law he was giving all his time, energy, and devotion to, but really it was human law, human authority. He didn’t see it this way, though. He convinced himself that he was doing the right thing in aggressively attacking me because he was protecting Divine Law. He believed that Divine Law justified — gave sanction to — his actions.

A: Where have I heard that before?

J: Rigid, perfectionistic thinking is a symptom of imbalance and dysfunction in the wiring of the biological brain. It’s common in bullies throughout the world.

A: Paul spends a lot of time in his letters telling the people of his churches that they don’t need to follow Jewish laws on food and circumcision. If he believed so much in the law, why was he dissing it? It doesn’t make sense.

J: It makes perfect sense if you understand that Paul wasn’t trying to protect the “praxis” laws of regular Jewish people — laws about “petty little daily practices,” as he saw them. To him these minor practices were nothing, they were of no consequence. He wasn’t interested in the small stuff, the things that matter to regular people on a day to day basis. He was after the big stuff. The End Point. The Omega. The be all and end all. He was after the Power.

A: What power?

J: The power that he and many others close to him believed was woven into the fabric of Creation. The power to command the universal Law of Cause and Effect.

A: That sounds seriously creepy. And not even very Jewish.

J: Well, as we’ve talked about, there were different schools of religious and philosophical thought that used the sacred Hebrew texts, and these schools fought fiercely among themselves. In the 1st century CE, there was no agreement on what it meant to be a pious Jew, just as today there’s no agreement on what it means to be a pious Christian. Most people forget that there was a civil war among Jews in Judea in the 60’s CE. Sure, the Romans came in eventually and torched everything in Jerusalem. But before the Romans sent in their troops, the Jews were doing a fine hatchet job on themselves. This mood of dissension among Jews was already brewing when I was teaching and healing in Galilee. It’s part of the reason I left my home in Philadelphia (modern day Amman) and went to Galilee. There was a measure of religious sanity that still existed there.

A: The Bible claims that Paul was a Pharisee.

J: In Philippians Chapter 3, Paul is very clever about the claims he makes for himself. He says that according to Jewish laws of bloodline, he’s a member of the tribe of Benjamin. Big deal. Lots of people could make that claim. He says that according to prevailing Jewish customs around religious authority, he’s a Pharisee — a sort of rabbi/lawyer/teacher who deserves to be treated with respect for his religious knowledge. Then comes the clincher: he says that according to “zeal” (zelos in Greek) he was an early persecutor of the church and according to “righteousness” he was blameless in his actions against the church. When Paul talks about “zeal” and “righteousness,” he isn’t talking about “beliefs” or “opinions.” He isn’t saying he was just really enthusiastic or really committed. He’s saying he had “the zeal” inside of him. He’s saying he had a piece of Divine Law inside of him, a spark of God inside of him that was guiding him, commanding his thoughts and actions. He’s saying he was a “vessel of humility” into which God had poured the divine substance called “zeal.” Zeal is a kind of love, therefore — a love for the Law. Devotion to the Law. Obedience to the Law. Adoration, even, of the Law. It sees the Law as a quasi-divine being. Sort of an embodiment of the Divine desire for orderliness in Creation. More than just a philosophical structure. An animated, conscious entity, if you will. Wisdom — Sophia — was also envisioned in this way as a semi-divine female being.

A: Plato talked about the Laws in this kind of weird anthropomorphic way.

J: Yes. And so did the Essenes. The Essenes were very much a fringe cult within Judaism. They had the most highly developed mystical rituals, the most “out there” beliefs about God and Creation and occult magic. They were also highly devout, highly wealthy, and highly powerful. They were a scary bunch. And Paul was greatly influenced by Essene teachings about God, the Spirit, the indwelling Temple, and occult ritual.

A: Would you say that Paul was an Essene? An accepted member of the yahad?

J: No. He wasn’t teaching pure Essene thought. But he was influenced by their thought. He also had strong links to another important school of thought that’s harder to track.* He blended ideas from Essene thought and Hellenistic thought to create his “new and improved” version of the Law of Cause and Effect. By the time he began his “mission to the Gentiles,” he was no longer interested in mainstream Judaism, with its focus on Mosaic Law. He’d “moved up” on the spiritual ladder of ascent, on that ever so narrow and hard-to-find ladder of spiritual hierarchy. He’d found an enticing and intoxicating blend of occult magic and hidden knowledge — the kind of hidden knowledge reserved only for a few select apostles. He was drunk on the idea that this new knowledge would lead him to power — power over evil entities.

A: What evil entities?

J: The corrupted versions of Law and Wisdom and Life — their “evil twins.”

A: Their evil twins? This is sounding like some of the “contemporary horror” dramas that are so incredibly popular in books and movies and TV shows these days.

J: Same old, same old. It’s just a dysfunctional, distorted version of the Law of Cause and Effect when taken to occult extremes. It goes like this: “Well, if there’s a Perfect Law, a semi-divine being who brings only virtue and righteousness to people of virtue, then, logically speaking, there must be an evil twin of Perfect Law — a powerful semi-divine being who sows vice and corruption in the world.” It’s a nice, neat, simple mathematical formula to explain why evil exists. Sons of Light versus Sons of Darkness, as the Essenes clearly formulated it. What could be easier to understand?

A: It’s so easy to see what you’re saying by looking at Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Romans is filled with paranoid, dualistic, judgmental thinking. Paul tells people in gory detail how they can fight the evils of Law, Sin, and Death, and overcome these evil cosmic forces through the power of Christ’s name.

J: Yes. For Paul, Mosaic Law had become the evil twin of the pure Essene Temple Law. Sin was the evil twin of Wisdom (implying by analogy to Wisdom’s femaleness that Sin was also female). And Death was the evil twin of Life. Paul called this evil trinity Law, Sin, and Death.

A: On my God. That makes a ridiculous amount of sense. It explains how Paul could go around telling people they wouldn’t die if they believed in Christ — a promise that soon proved to be a lie, because some of Paul’s followers had already died, and he had to answer for it in his letters.

J: It’s popular these days for theologians to make excuses for this kind of apocalyptic promise, excuses based on the naive assumption that people in the 1st century CE “just didn’t know any better” and “can’t be blamed for believing in salvation from death.” This, I’m sad to say, is hogwash. No balanced, mentally healthy individual is going to accept the idea that human beings can escape physical death and continue to live for centuries on Planet Earth the way their mystical forebears supposedly had (e.g. Methuselah). It’s just goofy. It’s what Paul promised his followers in the beginning of his mission, but it’s goofy. In his Letter to the Romans, he has to go through huge theological contortions to try to salvage people’s belief in him. It’s a pretty sad way to go, if you think about it.

A: Promises, promises.

J: You know what works best in the Gospel of Mark? The fact that there are no “Cause and Effect” promises. Everything’s messy. Everything’s unpredictable. Shit happens, but so what? It can’t take away your courage or your faith or your trust in God or your desire to help other people. Even shit can be turned into very useful fertilizer.

A: So your Kingdom is about turning shit into fertilizer, and Paul’s Temple is about the quest to stop shitting at all?

J: And you say I have a way with words.

* For more on Paul’s true motives and affiliations, please see “The Peace Sequence” (Jesus Redux 38).

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Posted in Cause & Effect, Essenes, Favourite Posts, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Kingdom teachings, Law (Nomos), Materialism, occult themes, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, Plato, spiritual ascent and tagged Jesus vs Paul | 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).

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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

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.'”

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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.

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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

14 Sep 2010

CC34: Pseudo-Enlightenment

My friend Linda is dying of cancer, but this isn’t the part I’m worried about.

Linda was first diagnosed with colon cancer three years ago, and she’s had a challenging course. The cancer has metastasized more than once. Most recently, a tumour was found in her brain. She’s definitely going to die. The people who love her are going to miss her, but she’s going to die, and that’s the reality of the situation. Her friends and family will grieve in different ways, depending on whether or not they believe she has transitioned to a loving afterlife in Heaven with God. But prayers and faith will not stop Linda from dying.

No one, no matter how devout, gets out of this life alive.

I’m not losing any sleep over the idea that Linda is going to die. It will happen when it happens, and nothing I think, say, or do will have any effect on the outcome. That’s up to Linda, her doctors, and her God.

On the other hand, I did lose sleep — quite a bit, actually — worrying about Linda’s mental state over the past few months. It’s not that I thought she was mentally incompetent in a medical sense. (Her doctors didn’t deemed her incompetent, even after the discovery of the brain tumour.) My concern was that Linda was starting to behave like a tyrant — an abusive, controlling, manipulative tyrant. A bully. A control freak. A nasty person. A cunning person. A person who’s not very nice to be around.

I’m not alone in this assessment. Linda’s behaviour became so verbally and emotionally abusive that in August she drove her own mother out of their shared home. Linda’s mother is in her mid-80’s, so this hasn’t been easy for the family. Linda’s mother moved out because she couldn’t tolerate the abuse from her daughter any longer. (Good for you, Kay!)

Linda has been relying on her network of friends to help her while she receives palliative care at home, but each time someone objects to her demands, she “fires” them. One by one she has cut off most of her oldest and dearest friends.

She has also fired several paid assistants. This is because they haven’t been doing a good enough job, according to Linda. Some have also been accused of stealing.

Despite her aggressive behaviour, she was not delusional until quite recently. (Delusional thinking appeared for certain only in the last couple of weeks). Until recently, she showed a truly frightening grip on her own mind, her own logic. Her memory was excellent in all areas where she wanted to exert control. Her ability to organize her environment was fine-tuned to the point of obsession. (She had a pre-existing diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, the symptoms of which were unfortunately exacerbated by her cancer treatments). She retained an ability to recognize and respond to social cues. She could be polite and friendly when it suited her.

All this was very upsetting. But I haven’t told you the worst part yet. The worst part is that Linda (a devout United Church of Canada Christian) has now come to believe she’s spiritually enlightened.

She believes that her battle with cancer has brought her to a point of heightened spirituality, a state of spiritual purity, a transcendent state of wisdom that her friends and family simply can’t understand.

She speaks often now of her “voice,” of her need to have her voice “heard.” Regular people can’t hear her voice. Only other spiritually enlightened people can hear her.

She thinks I’m one of the people who can hear her voice. But what I hear when I listen to her is the paranoid, grandiose thinking of a person who has suffered a psychotic break. Linda is psychotic. Under the stress of her illness and treatment, her biological brain has gone into “self protection mode” (sort of like the dreaded blue screen on a computer), and is refusing to accept external data and input. She’s now living entirely inside her own head. This means there’s no room in there for empathy. (Empathy requires you to reach out to other people, and temporarily place yourself “inside other people’s heads” so you can understand their needs.) Her brain is now a closed system. She’s stuck in an infinite thinking loop, which causes her to repeat a small number of ideas again and again, each time expressing them as if they’re new and exciting insights that have just occurred to her. To her, it feels as if she’s transcended time. She thinks she’s living in a state of enlightenment. But really her brain is “fried.”

No one who’s in a true state of enlightenment would ever treat people the way she’s treating people.

Linda’s doctors really dropped the ball on this one. They failed to arrange appropriate psychiatric care for her when it would have done some good. Now she has to live out her final days in a state of acute mental dysfunction. This sucks.

The honest truth is that some people will be relieved when Linda dies because she’ll no longer be able to abuse them.

If this isn’t a tragedy, I don’t know what is.

This is one portion of a large early 14th century CE (Yuan Dynasty) wall mural called “Homage to the Highest Power (west wall)” that originated from a monastery in Shanxi Province, China. It’s one of a pair of murals that expressed Daoist concepts of cosmic order. As part of the Royal Ontario Museum collection, the two murals underwent a significant conservation effort in the early 1980’s to remove earlier repairs that could have damaged the long-term integrity of the original clay, paint, and ink. I know this because I spent 8 weeks on the conservation project as part of a 1982 summer internship program. A properly trained conservator never tries to fill in the gaps by guessing what used to be there or trying to create perfection or wholeness where wholeness no longer exists. Hence, you’ll see many spots on these murals where bare clay is allowed to mar the perfection of the overall image. The bare clay spots mark areas where the conservators didn’t have enough documentation (e.g. early photographs) to support their beliefs about the original composition in those areas. It was more honest, in their view, to repaint only those sections where they were certain they were following the original intent and artistic conception of the unknown Daoist artists.

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Posted in afterlife, apophatic mysticism, boundary issues, brain's Darwinian Circuitry, Concinnate Christianity, dissociation, empathy, life and death, prayer, religion and mental Illness, spiritual ascent and tagged religion + mental illness | Leave a Comment

05 Jul 2010

CC23: Seeing God in Black and White: A Parable

Here is your class assignment for the day: using only two tubes of paint, one white and one black, you are to paint a full-colour picture of something beautiful.

Get to work, everyone! Now! And don’t complain to me that the assignment is unfair. If you’re truly righteous, pious, and devout, God will show you how to paint a full-colour picture using only black and white paint. If you fail, well . . . if you fail, you obviously don’t have enough faith in God. Don’t blame me for your failure. I didn’t make the rules. If you fail, it’s your own fault (you poor sin-saturated thing, you).

Pray, people, pray! Pray with all your might! If you pray correctly, maybe God will grant you the grace of being able to paint pictures in glorious, divine colour. Prove to me that you have faith! Pick up your paintbrushes and paint! Anyone caught cheating by bringing in tubes of red, blue, or yellow paint will immediately be brought before the Inquisition. Possession of any paints except Lead White and Carbon Black will be considered a shameful act of hubris, because only God is allowed to have coloured paints. Those other tubes you’ve seen at the store are the work of the Devil.

That’s right, class — everyone down on their knees. That’s better. And remember not to look up while you’re painting. Don’t look up at the trees or flowers or clouds or hills that you’re trying to paint. Such viewing is an unpardonable sin. You will paint beautifully coloured images based solely on the black and white words I’m about to recite aloud to you. Are you ready, everyone? Good. Here we go. In the beginning was the Word . . . .

Ah. A question. What is your question, child? You want to know what the colour red is? Well, as all the great mystics have taught, you’ll only be able to see the divine colour red once you’ve let go of all desire to know what red is. Once you no longer care what red is, perhaps God will open your eyes for you so you can see it. But until then, there’s nothing you yourself can do. No one can learn how to see red, or be taught how to see red. To claim this would be the height of human pride and arrogance! Be grateful you can see black and white, child! Some people can’t even see that.

If you tell me you can already see red and blue and yellow, it’s proof that the Devil has captured your soul, you poor thing. Resist, resist! Pray harder. Ask for deliverance from the torment of False Colour. Ask that you may be given the divine gift of Church-Approved Sunglasses to block out those dangerous visions of colour. Life is much simpler in black and white. Everything is less confusing when I tell you what to do. Naturally, I always have your best interests at heart, you poor, weak, inferior creature, you.

I promise to look after you, as Christ looks after us all! It’s the least I can do in this broken, corrupted, black and white world.

Well, the day is over, and I see that once again no one in my class has enough faith in God to produce a thing of explosive beauty from the paints I have humbly provided.

Lilies of the Field (c) Image*After

You in the back corner! Joshua, Yeshua, whatever your name is! You will be turned over to the Inquisition, and tried on charges of heresy for presuming to tell the class that all people can learn to see red lilies in the field if they listen to God with open hearts and not with closed minds!

As if God even wants to talk to regular people!

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Posted in "4 S's", Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, humility, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Original Sin, parables, prayer, spiritual ascent and tagged Jesus vs Paul, Kingdom teachings | 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).

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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

25 Jun 2010

CC21: The Law of Attraction in the Gospel of Matthew: God as the Great Gumball Machine in the Sky

Ya gotta love those Kevin Trudeau infomercials. The guy’s a regular pitbull when he’s trying to market his latest “no-fail” product. A while back, he was aggressively promoting his “Natural Cure.” These days, he’s hawking “the Law of Attraction” in a new and improved form that can be yours in a 10 CD package for a mere $297. He calls his latest course “Your Wish Is Your Command.”

Not long ago, Rhonda Byrne was selling essentially the same product through her book and video called The Secret. Before that, Joseph Murray was touting the “newly discovered” Law of Attraction in books such as The Power of Your Subconscious Mind. And before that, Ernest Holmes was proclaiming the wonders of “the Law” in his “landmark” book The Science of Mind.

What has this got to do with Christianity?

Everything.

The Law of Attraction, as recent writers have labelled it, is not a new idea. It’s an ancient idea. It’s an idea that serves as the foundation for a lot of ancient religious writings that are loosely lumped together by scholars under the heading of “Wisdom Literature.” Wisdom teachings purport to teach people how to recognize the inviolable laws of creation that, if properly observed, can lead to wealth, prosperity, good health, family status, and happiness.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, three books are generally considered to represent the Wisdom tradition: Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. Elements of Wisdom teachings are also sprinkled here and there throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, as in Genesis 2-3. Some of the Psalms have overtones of Wisdom.

Not to be outdone, the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament states in unambiguous terms that if you follow the laws and the prophets in righteousness, “all things will be given to you” (Matthew 6:33). In his wrap-up to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew has Jesus say, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:7-11).

There you have it in a nutshell. All you have to do is ask in the right way, and God will give it to you. Not only does God want to give it to you, but God has to give it to you, because the contract law says so. The contract law between God and God’s people is binding on God. So if you righteously obey all the divine contract provisions (as they are stated by your religion’s prophets), well, naturally, God is required to hold up his end of the bargain, and give you everything you ask for — wealth, health, and happiness.

There’s a special kind of law that governs all Creation, you see. As several religious traditions will tell you, including Western Christian orthodoxy, these laws are both highly secret and highly powerful. If you can uncover the hidden secrets of these laws, you can tap into their unlimited power. In this spiritual understanding (which, I’d like to emphasize, is not limited to any one religion) God’s divine creativity is considered to be a tap. It’s hard to find this sacred tap, and it’s even harder to figure out how to turn it on. But once you have the secret knowledge (gnosis) of how to turn on the tap, you can get whatever you want.

Mystics of all religious traditions frequently fall into the narcissistic mire of believing that (1) there is such a tap and (2) they alone know how to find and control said tap. These same mystics are usually delighted to share the information with their disciples for a price. Sometimes, as with people such as Kevin Trudeau, the price is mere money. More often, the mystic seeks to gather for him/herself a treasure considered even more valuable to a narcissist than wealth. That treasure is status.

The religious leaders of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) thought they had the Law of Attraction all figured out. It didn’t turn out too well for them. Photo credit 675px-Moái_de_Rano_Raraku,_en_Isla_de_Pascua, Wikimedia Commons.

A dysfunctional mystic can live quite comfortably as an ascetic, disdaining wealth, comfort, and personal possessions, as long as he or she receives a steady diet of status to feed an ongoing psychological state of status addiction — an addiction to status, as opposed to an addiction to psychotropic substances. The addiction to status operates in a person’s central nervous system like any other addiction. There are constant cravings. Getting a “hit” of status causes the brain to release dopamine in the same way that getting a “hit” of cocaine causes the brain to release dopamine.

The only way for an ascetic mystic to get an ongoing supply of status is to indulge in spiritual practices that “affirm” to the mystic that he or she is higher on the ladder of spiritual ascent than you are.

To be higher on the ladder is to have more status. It’s as simple as that. It’s as scary as that.

To be “in the know” about the “Law of Attraction” is to have more status. This ancient spiritual practice attracts psychologically dysfunctional people who are already addicted to the dopamine high of status. That’s why it feels so good to them when they try to follow these “righteous” teachings — they’re getting a hit of dopamine each time they tell themselves they’re cleverly invoking the “contract laws” of the universe (i.e. invoking the Covenant).

Be careful what you wish for — you might get it, and it probably won’t be what you thought it would be.

That’s because God the Mother and God the Father never give you what you ask for. They only give you what you need.

And you need an addiction to status like you need a hole in the head.

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Posted in A.N.E. Wisdom literature, Bible, Book of Genesis, Cause & Effect, Concinnate Christianity, Law (Nomos), Materialism, Matthew's and Luke's intent, mysticism, spiritual ascent, status addiction and tagged Wisdom literature | Leave a Comment

14 Jun 2010

CC20: Further Update on the Vatican’s "Sin Within"

Last Friday, on June 11, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI addressed 15,000 priests who were in St. Peter’s Square to mark the end of the Vatican’s Year of the Priest. In his homily, Benedict asked forgiveness from God and from affected people for the sins of the sexually abusive clerics in the Roman Catholic church. He also promised “to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again” (Nicole Winfield, “Pope Begs Forgiveness, Promises Action on Abuse,” The Globe and Mail, June 11, 2010).

While I’m quite certain that God the Mother and God the Father do, indeed, forgive Benedict for his own errors, and do, indeed, forgive the priests who’ve intentionally harmed the faithful in their care, I’m equally certain that hidden abuse will continue in the Roman Catholic church.

Many Christians want to make this a question of theodicy: how do we explain evil in the world while at the same time preserving our image of God as good and loving? If God allows abuse to continue in the church, does it mean that God is powerless and ineffectual? Impotent against the powers of the devil? Or does it mean that God is actually not a very nice person?

Many of the Christians I know would much rather blame the problem of evil on God and/or the devil than put the blame where it belongs: on the values and moral beliefs held by both individuals and by cultural groups.

The Roman Catholic church is a cultural group. It teaches particular cultural beliefs. (These comprise its theological doctrines). It has a consciously promoted schedule of active teaching. Its goal is to teach its people early on in life how they should conduct themselves in relationship to God, church hierarchy, and empire. Traditionally, it has punished members who question its teachings or its authority (the Inquisition). It has conferred upon itself the mantle of infallibility. It claims it is the one true church, the only legitimate path to salvation.

The Roman Catholic church has long held a vision of how society should be — how society should look, act, and “feel.” Its body of theological doctrines has been carefully cultivated so that only kind of garden can grow in its presence. The church has no one but itself to blame for this.

at the Vatican (c) J MacDonald 2011

The conditions in a garden dictate what kinds of plants will thrive there. A garden that has full sun, lots of water, and lots of nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, etc.) will grow very different plants than a garden that has shady conditions or low nitrogen or a high pH. If you restrict certain nutrients, you restrict which plants will flower abundantly. If you water some plants and not others, you control which plants will flourish, and which plants will live a miserable life of bare subsistence before dying a premature death.

Throughout its history, the orthodox Western church has been heavily committed to the lessons learned from gardening. Hewing closely to the principle that the person who controls the conditions of a garden will control the ultimate harvest of said garden, the church has intentionally chosen a specific blend of nutrients for its religio-political garden. The nutrients in this case are its doctrines. The doctrines are what “feed” the hearts and minds of the faithful. If you precisely control the “mix” of doctrines available to your people, you precisely control the rate at which people’s hearts and minds can grow. If you balance this mix with the precision of a master botanist, you can ensure that the people in your congregations grow just enough to offer you the occasional flower without ever getting big enough to overshadow you.

It’s a new idea, this idea that the introduction of particular belief systems can alter the physical structure and biochemical functioning of a person’s central nervous system and brain. I suppose I should amend that to say it’s a new idea among neuroscientists — unfortunately, it’s not a new idea among history’s power mongers.

Long before the advent of brain scanning technologies, would-be tyrants had empirically observed that people’s behaviour could be altered through the careful repetition of certain ideas. These tyrants didn’t understand the changes at a biochemical or neurophysiological level, and they didn’t need to — all they needed to understand was the result, the harvest of their ideological campaigns. Early orthodox Church Fathers understood this principle well.

Early in the history of the church, orthodox Christian teachers made a conscious decision to take an axe to the teachings of Jesus as represented in the Gospel of Mark, and to overshadow Jesus’ sunny, open “vineyard” with the giant magic beanstalk of spiritual ascent (a beanstalk seen later in the children’s fairy tale of that name). They’ve been feeding this beanstalk of “elevation” for the “elect” with their repeated assertions that the devil exists, that Judgment Day is coming (soon, very soon! — or at least sometime, maybe, we’re pretty darned sure, because it says so in the apocalyptic books), that the soul is tainted by original sin, that Jesus is your only hope of salvation, that Holy Mother Church is the only portal through which you can gain access to the gold at the top of the beanstalk.

This set of teachings was well established by the mid-3rd century CE. It’s not new (and it certainly didn’t originate with Jesus himself!). The problem with the church’s teachings is that their doctrines damage your biological brain. When you fully embrace these teachings as “divine truth,” your brain stops working the way God intends. Your brain responds exactly like the plant that’s been crippled because the gardener has intentionally withheld the water, nutrients, and care you need. Your heart and mind don’t really grow. You spend all your life sitting in the shadow of the towering beanstalk and feeling like crap. You feel like crap because all the truth — all the spiritual nutrients — about the actual nature of your relationship with God have been artfully concealed from you. You wouldn’t recognize the plants that grow in a sunny, lush, well-watered garden if they came chasing after you.

Such as forgiveness. Would you be able to recognize forgiveness if it entered your life? Probably not. Most Christian’s can’t. That’s because the orthodox Church has never taught people about forgiveness (which is why I’m somewhat sceptical about the Pope’s current pleas for forgiveness).

Why hasn’t the Church taught people how to forgive when it’s obvious from reading the Gospel of Mark that Jesus insisted on the message of forgiveness? The Church doesn’t want to teach people how to forgive, because once people catch onto the feeling of forgiveness, they’ll be able to figure out for themselves that divine forgiveness is the antithesis of “salvation” and “grace.” They’ll realize the church has been lying to them for centuries about their souls. The garden of orthodoxy might start to look like a thorny patch of weeds and thistles instead of the prophesied paradise!

It’s no mystery why some church clerics have been sexually abusing vulnerable people in their care. You can’t expect a human being’s brain to produce a harvest of compassion, integrity, inclusiveness, and enlightenment when all you do every day is try to fill that person’s brain with a steady diet of dissociation, lack of forgiveness, hierarchical control, and suppression of learning.

If Pope Benedict really means it when he says he wants to do “everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again,” the only truly effective strategy will be for him to call a Council along the lines of Vatican II, and embark on the painful path of rescinding some of the church’s most cherished doctrinal beliefs.

Somehow I’m not holding my breath.

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Posted in "4 S's", Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, forgiveness, Gospel of Mark, occult themes, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul vs Jesus, relationship with God, Soul, spiritual ascent, spiritual practices, theodicy and tagged religion + mental illness | 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.

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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

14 May 2010

CC10: The "Mind" of God

I’m really sick of hearing about “the Mind of God.”

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying that God the Mother and God the Father are brainless. I’m saying there’s a lot more to our Divine Parents than 100% pure mind power. Well, sure, you say, of course God is more than just mind power — God has a loving heart, too! And you would be right . . . except the church wouldn’t agree with you officially. Off the record you’d probably get some senior church officials to agree with you that God has both mind and compassion. And lots of regular Christians instinctively understand this. But none of the mainline churches, either Protestant or Roman Catholic, have yet been willing to reexamine their official belief systems about God’s “substance.” As far as the church is concerned, God is a transcendent and trinitarian being who values “reason and righteousness” above everything else. God is “oneness” with three different forms of expression. This “oneness” is serene and detached and highly logical — just the way Plato described God four centuries before Jesus!

This portrait of God is very convenient, because it gives people an excuse to ignore the reality that God has feelings. According to the church, however, God doesn’t have emotions. Therefore nothing you think, say, or do can make God cry. You can make God angry, says the church, but that’s different. God’s anger is simply his (its?) logical reaction to your disobedience. There is a divine books of laws, you see, and even God is required to follow those laws. It’s all very logical.

Hah!

Not only do I personally disagree with this assessment of God (because my work as a mystic has shown me a very different understanding of God), but I also think that Jesus himself was teaching his followers that God is more than pure, transcendent “Mind.” I think Jesus knew about the Platonic teaching of God as “One Mind,” and I think Jesus was trying to overturn this idea. I think Jesus was talking in a truly radical way about God as a “he and a she” who together watch over all Creation: Abba and Ruah.* Why do I think this? I think this because the Gospel of Mark says so.

Biblical scholars who study “the historical Jesus” have often tried to figure out what Jesus actually said and did that could have provoked such a strong reaction among both followers and adversaries. Some of these scholars see Jesus as an unextraordinary wisdom sage whose “golden rule” teachings weren’t much different from the teachings of his contemporaries.

Hah!

While it’s certainly true that “golden rule” teachings had been around for centuries before Jesus taught and healed in first century Palestine, it’s not true that Jesus’ own understanding of God was a rehash of ideas found in all major Ancient Near East religions. Jesus had a rare understanding of God shared only by the Jewish teacher we know as Job. It might be called “Modified Monotheism” — but it certainly wasn’t the monotheistic understanding of Judaism’s post-Exilic Yahweh, nor was it the monistic understanding of Plato’s Divine Truth. Jesus’ understanding of God was inflammatory in its first century context. That’s because Jesus thought of God as two people — a Mother and a Father — whose chief attributes were not transcendence, power, and Mind (as in both Hellenistic philosophy and in Second Temple Judaism), but instead were immanence, trust, and Heart.

True, there had been a minority religious voice in Judaism that saw God as immanent. But in the Zion Covenant that appears in the writings early Judaism (e.g. certain Psalms), this immanence meant something particular: it meant that God physically lived in a specific location on Mount Zion. Since God had chosen to live in the temple built on Mount Zion, great status was conferred upon the people of the Zion Covenant.

This idea of God living on a particular mountaintop was not unique to early Judaism. Other Ancient Near East religions taught the same thing, except that the holy mountain where God lived was, of course, a geographical site within their own political borders. Yet in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 9:2-9), Jesus rejects the idea of living on the holy mountain in the company of Judaism’s revered prophets Moses and Elijah, both of whom had followed a spiritual path of ascent. For far too long, Christian commentators have overlooked the significance of this passage in Mark. They focus on the fact that Jesus suddenly appears in dazzling white clothes, but they forget the fact that Jesus wants no part of the holy mountain.

For Jesus, who spent little time in Jerusalem (Jerusalem, not coincidentally, was the site of Mount Zion), the traditional claims of a male god who lived exclusively in a man-made temple were nonsense. For Jesus, the distinct male and female attributes of God were visible everywhere. So, too, God’s emotional attributes were visible everywhere you looked. How could people look at the wonder of all Creation and believe that God had no feelings?

People come to shores of Lake Minnewanka in the Alberta Rockies to feel the beauty of earth, water, air, and love painted by the hearts of our beloved Divine Parents.

For those biblical scholars who wonder why Jesus provoked such a strong response in people, they need look no further than his teachings on the nature of God. Even today, people are infuriated when you tell them that God is not a distant, unemotional, trinitarian “he,” but instead (and quite obviously) a “he and a she” who together infuse their love, courage, trust, devotion, and gratitude into everything they create. (Take the Son out of the Trinity, and what do you have? Abba and Ruah, except that in Jesus’ time Ruah was always feminine!)

That’s why I can safely say that “God don’t make no junk.” Our God is way too amazing to allow something so stupid as the “law” of Original Sin.

To our beloved Mother and Father I want to say to you today and always . . . you both rock!

* Abba is a masculine-gender Aramaic word for “father” or “papa.” Ruah is a feminine-gender Aramaic word for “breath, “spirit,” or “wind.” Because words in the English language don’t have gender, English-speaking people often forget that gendered languages give subtle shades of meaning through the choice of nouns. As in Romance languages such as French, Italian, or Spanish, the gender of the noun (that is, its status as male, female, or neuter) determines the conjugation of other parts of speech in a sentence.

Posted in anagogic mysticism, Book of Job, Concinnate Christianity, Divine Love, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Law (Nomos), Mother God, Paul vs Jesus, Plato, spiritual ascent and tagged Jesus vs Paul | Leave a Comment

04 Apr 2010

CC7: Radical Jesus in the Gospel of Mark

Today I’d like to talk about the Gospel of Mark.

As I mentioned above in my March 3, 2010 post, I think one of the biggest challenges facing the church in the third millennium is our theology. We believe our theology is an honest representation of what Jesus taught. Because we believe this, we don’t want to challenge our theological doctrines and beliefs. If it was good enough for Jesus, then it’s good enough for us, goes the thinking. And who can blame Christians for wanting to hang onto the teachings that Jesus taught? After all, isn’t that the point?

For me, it’s definitely the point. I discovered to my dismay, however, that what Protestant theology classes teach in Canada in the third millennium is Paul’s theology, not Jesus’ theology.

We’re so used to thinking that Paul was a faithful believer in Jesus that few Christians until recently have examined the gulf that exists between the teachings of Paul and the teachings of Jesus. If you want to read an exploration of the differences between Paul’s Christ Movement and James’ Jesus Movement, I recommend professor Barrie Wilson’s book How Jesus Became Christian (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008). Wilson bluntly shows that Paul was trying to found a new religious movement that was in competition with the early Jesus Movement of Palestine. Further, Wilson shows how the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles wrote these two books to bridge the gulf between the two religious movements, and make them seem like a unified religion. But they’re not. And they never were.

Why do I agree with Wilson? I agree with Wilson because I’ve studied what I believe to be the earliest layer of writings based on the teachings of Jesus, and when I compare what’s contained in this early layer with what’s contained in Paul’s uncontested letters, I see almost no theological similarities.

For the record, I believe the earliest layer of writings based on Jesus’ teachings to be (1) the parts of the letter of James that Jesus himself wrote (I’ll come back to that in a later post); (2) the parables and anecdotes written down by the beloved disciple Lazarus in the earliest version of the”Q” source (again, food for future thought); (3) the sayings written down by the apostle John in his unattributed “proto-Gnostic” Gospel of Thomas; and (4) the Gospel of Mark.

Of these early writings, the Gospel of Mark would have been written last, about 30-35 years after Jesus’ death, by a person we call Mark. We don’t know much about this fellow Mark except that he was brave enough to write a radical theological statement in Judea during the dangerous and tumultuous decade of the 60’s when Jews were fighting Jews, and Jews were also fighting Romans.

This fish plate, with a small cup in the centre (probably for sauce) comes from the Roman Campania and is dated 330-300 BCE. (This plate is on display at the Royal Ontario Museum, photo credit JAT 2017.)

Most New Testament scholars who analyse the different books of early Christianity will tell you they subscribe to the theory of “Markan Priority.” This is the theory that states that Mark was written before either Matthew or Luke, and that the authors of Matthew and Luke both used a “cut and paste” approach to Mark’s narrative by cutting out sections of Mark’s book, rearranging and changing those sections, and adding their own material. If you want to learn more about this fascinating bit of biblical history, I recommend the recent book by Pheme Perkins: Pheme Perkins, Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007). She provides a readable introduction to the main threads of scholarly research that every serious New Testament inquirer needs to know about.

(I didn’t find out about Perkins’s book until the second year of my graduate studies. I really wish I’d had it on Day 1. It would have saved me a lot of initial confusion!)

A lot of scholars and ministers don’t like the Gospel of Mark. (My New Testament professor, for one, doesn’t like Mark.) People think it’s too blunt and choppy. Fans of Luke, whose use of Koine Greek is more sophisticated, complain that Mark isn’t a very good writer. Others dislike the Christology of Mark. In Mark, Jesus is a confusing fellow. The apostles are confusing fellows. Jesus’ family members are confusing. Jesus’ female followers are confusing. The original ending of Mark at 16:8 is confusing. The Gospel of Mark is downright confusing if you’re looking for biblical evidence that conforms to orthodox Western Christian beliefs about Jesus.

Here’s a thought: maybe the Gospel of Mark is confusing because people have been shoehorning it into Paul’s theology, and have forced Mark to say something about Jesus that Mark himself wasn’t saying.

Maybe in the church of the third millennium we should allow Mark to tell us what he’s been saying all along.

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s Jesus is a Jewish Messiah — a very human teacher and healer — not a Saviour, as in Paul.

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s Jesus is not a monotheistic Jew, who believes only in God the Father, but is instead a quasi-monotheistic Jew who believes in both God the Father (Abba) and God the Mother (Ruah, Spirit, Holy Dove).

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s Jesus is not a wandering Cynic philosopher, nor an apocalyptic prophet, nor an illiterate Jewish carpenter. There’s a great deal of proof in Mark to indicate that Jesus came from a wealthy, literate family. Jesus was a physician-scholar.

Maybe we should be honest about the fact that Mark’s narrative shows a sophisticated understanding of psychodynamics. Mark’s cast of characters behave in realistic, believable ways. He doesn’t pretend that Jesus’ students liked or appreciated his teachings. He doesn’t pretend that Jesus’ family liked or appreciated his teachings. Mark tells the painful truth, because the truth was painful.

Mark’s biography of Jesus is short (relative to other biographies of the time, including those written by Matthew and Luke) for two reasons: (1) he assumed his biography would be read in conjunction with the parables and anecdotes contained in “Q,” and (2) he wrote his narrative with the intention of creating a long parable of the kingdom.

(These two points are my own thesis.)

The first point has more evidence to support it, since scholars have been working hard to reconstruct the contents of the early “Q” source, and they’ve already shown the links among Q, Mark, and the later gospels of Matthew and Luke. There is every reason to suppose that Q was circulating in Judea at the time Mark’s gospel was written.

The second point has arisen through my own work as both an academic researcher and a mystic. It’s my contention that Mark understood what many have failed to understand about Jesus’ teaching parables: the long kingdom parables, most of which probably originated in “Q” and were later cut-and-pasted into Matthew and Luke, only make sense when you listen with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, and all your strength to Jesus’ message about God (Mark 12:28-34). If you listen only with your mind, you won’t get it. If you listen only with your mind, and reject the input of your heart and your soul, the parables are almost gibberish. They’re illogical. They’re contrary to accepted wisdom. They don’t seem to be wisdom teachings at all. Therefore, they’re easily dismissed by those who’ve placed their bets on traditional wisdom.

Through the medium of a long parable, a teacher can say a lot of harsh things about other people’s religious beliefs, and not get caught. Jesus’ long kingdom parables hide the truth about God in plain sight.

This isn’t the same approach as the early Gnostics took. The early Gnostics believed in the existence of hidden, esoteric knowledge that could only be revealed to specially chosen initiates. They sometimes took steps in their writings to conceal their esoteric knowledge through the use of symbolism.

Jesus took no such steps. He wasn’t interested in hiding the knowledge, or making a “special club” of apostles to whom he would reveal his special secrets. He was forthright in his teachings about a loving Mother God and Father God who are not transcendent. (In Plato and in Paul, God was transcendent). A Mother Father God who are not unemotional. (In Plato and in Paul, God was detached from emotions like agape and forgiveness). A Mother Father God who are not pure Mind. (In Plato and in Stoicism, the Divine was pure Mind). A Mother Father God who do not choose some humans over other humans. (In most religions in Jesus’ time, Jewish and otherwise, the gods or God chose certain people or groups over other people). A Mother Father God who reject the pursuit of status addiction as the driving force of a loving human community (in dramatic contrast to the honour-shame values of Mediterranean culture in the 1st century CE). A Mother Father God who teach inclusive, egalitarian, relationship-oriented community life as the model for spiritual living.

These teachings are evident throughout Mark. But these teachings, then as now, were not popular with religious folk who wanted their religious accomplishments to raise them above their peers, to give them more status than others had, to take status away from others — to reveal how to climb the ladder of spiritual ascent.

This ladder of spiritual ascent was the darling of Plato and his many Platonic, middle Platonic, and NeoPlatonic followers, including orthodox Christians, who, from the time of Paul onward, have had a profound love affair with the doctrine of spiritual ascent — the belief that we have to climb the spiritual ladder one rung at a time to get closer to the Divine.

You have to remember here that Plato wrote about 400 years before Jesus. Plato’s idea of spiritual ascent was well known and deeply embraced by the Greco-Roman culture in which Mark wrote his breathtakingly radical book. So when Mark wrote a biography about a spiritual leader who rejected ascent, and instead embraced a horizontal path of service, Mark was pushing against the currents of his time.

When you carefully read Mark 9:2-9 — the Transfiguration — you’ll see that not only does Jesus reject the offer of staying on the “holy mount” and living in a tent there, but he comes down from the mountain and immediately makes himself religiously “impure” by touching and healing a boy who has epilepsy — a boy who in first century Palestine would have been seen as either “unclean” or as “marked by the gods” in the eyes of both pious Jews and Gentiles, a boy who would have been rejected and ostracized by people of status.

Mark’s Jesus is a human physician, trained in Torah, who thinks compassion, inclusiveness, courage, healing, forgiveness, agape, and service are the path to knowing God the Mother and God the Father.

Mark’s Jesus is a radical dude.

This topic is so big that one or more books could be written on it. I’ve barely scratched the surface here. But I wanted to introduce the idea that the Protestant church of the third millennium has some options open to it. One of these options is to courageously alter the theology we teach. We can alter our theological doctrines to better reflect what Jesus taught, and still have a biblical foundation for that teaching. We can reappraise Paul, and we can reappraise the earliest layer of writings based on Jesus’ teachings. We can reclaim the kergyma, or early teachings, of Jesus. We can have a church founded on teachings about our communal relationship with God the Mother and God the Father.

We can at last allow ourselves to accept the wondrous gift of God’s love.

Happy Easter Sunday to you!

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Thomas, Letter of James, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Mark vs Paul, Matthew's and Luke's intent, parables, Paul vs Jesus, Plato, spiritual ascent and tagged Jesus vs Paul, Mark vs Paul | Leave a Comment

14 Mar 2010

CC4: The Blonde Mystic

June 2014

Okay, so I’m a blonde mystic. What’s the big deal about that?

It’s not a big deal at all if you believe, as I do, that the call to be a mystic is no better than — and no more extraordinary than — the call to be a teacher or a police officer or a nurse or whatever. I have a job to do, and I try to do the best job I can. I’m no different than anybody else who feels drawn to a particular path. My path is a bit uncommon, but I take it seriously, just as teachers and police officers and nurses take their paths seriously.

I do not subscribe to the orthodox Christian view that says contemplatives and mystics have a “higher calling” than other Christians. This is the view that puts monks and nuns in a special category compared to other people.* It says this select group of people is closer to God, higher on the ladder of ascent, or chosen — take your pick. I think this traditional view of “spiritual ascent” is a big part of the problem with orthodox Christianity.

I usually don’t tell educated Christians about my daily mystical practice. I keep my practice to myself because I’m kind of tired of having other Christians make the false assumption that I think I’m better than they are. I don’t think that. I think we’re all in this life together, walking side by side, rather than trying to scramble up some sort of spiritual ladder (and mashing each other’s spiritual fingers in the process.) “Different” shouldn’t be a synonym for “better,” although the history of Christianity is in some ways the history of certain groups of people believing they are both different and better than everybody else.

Police officers have a different path from nurses, but police officers aren’t “better” than nurses. Same thing with mystics. Mystics have a different path from most people, but they aren’t “better” than other people. I just want to be clear about that.

I am no longer a natural blond. I was blond as a child, but later my hair darkened, and after that my hair turned grey. I am a blond thanks to chemical intervention from L’Oreal. I am a blond because I’m not an ascetic.

I’m not an ascetic because I live according to a “mystical rule” of moderation, balance, common sense, and brain health.

These four “rules,”especially the rule about brain health, put me far outside the traditional understanding of how Christian mystics live. But I’m a person of science as well as a person of mystical inclination, and recent advances in neurophysiology have convinced me that many traditional mystical practices are dangerous and have no place whatsoever in the modern church.

This is why I don’t fast as part of my spiritual practice. Intentional, long-term fasting for “spiritual” reasons will damage anyone’s brain. (Naturally, I’m not talking about short-term occasions of fasting that may arise, which your body can handle.) I’m a mystic who believes in eating balanced foods in moderation because God seems to have designed the brain with a balanced lifestyle in mind for everyone, including mystics.

Crazy ol’ me, thinkin’ my brain and body are a natural, beautiful part of God’s creation!

As I said above, I am NOT a Gnostic. I’m a mystic who thinks we should be listening more to what God is saying through science, and less to what Christian tradition is saying through, well, tradition, when it comes to healthy spiritual practices.

I’m a fully practising mystic who thinks it is irresponsible and naive for church leaders to ignore the serious health risks that arise when traditional ascetic practices are embraced.

If I didn’t know better, I might think the church was more interested in preserving its traditions than in protecting and enhancing the mental, physical, and spiritual health of its congregants!

Gosh . . . where would I get such an idea?

* If you want to read more about this tradition, you can check out the chapter called “The Monk Who Rules the World” in Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1985).

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Posted in asceticism, cataphatic mysticism, Concinnate Christianity, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism, spiritual ascent, spiritual practices and tagged cataphatic mysticism, spiritual practice in the 3rd millennium | Leave a Comment

The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “spiritual ascent”

RS22: Freedom and Slavery

TBM17: Learning to Understand Your Own Angels

JR41: City on the Hill: Saying 32 in Thomas

JR27: Paul’s "Temple" versus Jesus’ "Kingdom"

TBM5: Keep It Simple, Keep It Sane

CC37: More on Harpur’s "Pagan Christ"

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

CC34: Pseudo-Enlightenment

CC23: Seeing God in Black and White: A Parable

CC22: The Trinity: A Perfect Shell Game

CC21: The Law of Attraction in the Gospel of Matthew: God as the Great Gumball Machine in the Sky

CC20: Further Update on the Vatican’s "Sin Within"

CC17: My Firsthand Experience With a Modern Apocalyptic Prophet

CC10: The "Mind" of God

CC7: Radical Jesus in the Gospel of Mark

CC4: The Blonde Mystic

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