The Spiral Path

Wonder, Science, and Faith

Archive for the category “Mother God”

19 Sep 2012

RS34: Walking on Water

St. Paul's Harbour, Rhodes 3

St. Paul’s Harbour, Rhodes (c) JAT 2001

Jen has reminded me I haven’t written a solo post here, so I’m going to do that today.  I’m going to talk about what it feels like to walk on water.

I don’t mean that I or any human being has ever been able to literally walk on water.  When my great-nephew wrote about “walking on water” in the Gospel of Mark, he didn’t mean it literally.  He meant it metaphorically.  He was trying to describe what it feels like when a person has entered into the Kingdom state of fullness of heart.

He chose the image of water carefully.  In Second Temple Judaism, water was a powerful and frequent symbol in Jewish texts.  Often it meant blessings from God.  In an arid region, rainfall is a blessing, and most of ancient Judea was arid.  But there was a parallel understanding of water, too, as the primal force of chaos, the place where uncontrollable monsters lived. Where female monsters lived.

The Book of Genesis starts out with the assumption that water has to be pushed back by God and held in place before the Garden of Eden can be planted.  The sea is seen as a dangerous place.  An unpredictable place.  A deep place which is formless and dark, with no knowledge in it.  God fixes this problem by first bringing light (knowledge of order and symmetry) onto the scene.  He calls the light Day and the darkness Night, but he hasn’t created the Sun or the Moon yet, so the light he brings to Planet Earth isn’t sunlight.  It’s the light of knowledge.

The men who wrote the Book of Genesis emphasize again and again that you should want to have order in your life.  Order is good.  Chaos is bad.  There’s knowledge, and God saw that it was good.  There’s careful separation of all major “elements” into their proper places, and God saw that it was good.  There’s careful naming of all creations, large and small, and God saw that it was good.  The earth itself (adam in Hebrew) is separated into two aspects — male and female — and given the breath of life.  The resulting creations, man and woman, who are made in the image of God, are God’s representatives on Earth and through them God can impose the law of hierarchy upon all other kingdoms in creation (kingdoms in a biological sense, that is).  And God saw that it was good.  By the seventh “day,” God has put a big, fat leash on all that watery chaos stuff and firmly imposed the Law of Cause and Effect upon Planet Earth, and it’s so darned good that God calls for a day of rest to honour his accomplishments.

And what is Elohim’s greatest accomplishment?  The greatest accomplishment of Elohim (“the gods” in Hebrew) is to whip that dark, watery, feminine principle into shape and force it to obey the male principles of order, knowledge, law, and hierarchy.  When Elohim creates humankind — adam — he creates adam entirely out of strong, orderly, procreative, male earth.  No water in sight.  Elohim adds the breath of life (by inference from Gen. 1:30) to his new creations, but he’s very careful not to include any of that chaotic water stuff in his perfect new creations.  Water’s okay when it’s in its proper place, but let it loose, and there’s no describing the destruction that will occur.

Oh wait!  There is a description!  Let me see now . . . of yes, that would be the Great Flood story.  The Great Flood story reminds you (just in case you need reminding) what happens when bits and pieces of the Divine Order fall out of their proper places and start to misbehave (Gen. 6:1-7) and why God’s creation of order and hierarchy is a good thing!  A good thing you really, really want!

Still, even the bad behaviour of the Nephilim was nothing compared to the fall of the Feminine Principle.  When the Feminine Principle fell out of her proper place in the heavens and coalesced into the dark, formless, watery depths that existed before God came to rescue her with his light of knowledge an’ all  . . . well, that was a real mess.  A mess that still needs fixing.  Occasionally, if things get really bad on Earth, God unleashes her and lets the monsters out, which is exactly why you need to put a Molten Sea in front of your big temple (1 Kings 7:23-26).  You need to remind your people that God has given you power over the forces of chaos by proxy.

This power by proxy comes in the form of ritual bathing in water that has been tamed.  Fresh water — including rainfall — is water that has been properly tamed by God.  Restored to its true state of purity.  Immersion in purified water allows you to share in God’s purification process.  (It also happens to make you cleaner, and therefore healthier and happier, but this is a separate question.)

Mark, a trained scholar, had all these traditions about water in mind when he chose to show me “walking on water” in the middle of his Parable of the Idol Bread (Mark 6:47-51).  He’s turned the traditional meaning of water on its head.  It’s a new relationship with water.  Nobody commands the waters of Lake Tiberias to part so Jesus can walk across on dry land.  Nobody immerses themselves in the waters in baptism.  Nobody puts the waters in big jars or little jars or cauldrons or ritual baths.  The lake is the lake, the way it’s always been the lake.  And Jesus is Jesus, the way he’s always been Jesus.  And the lake and Jesus seem to be getting along!  No fighting with the lake, no thrashing with monsters in the lake, no prayer rituals to calm the lake.  Jesus starts walking towards his companions (who are struggling with questions of understanding and true faith) and the lake suddenly calms down as if maybe the waters (the Feminine Principle) and Jesus are working together and aren’t in conflict with each other.  As if maybe the waters are comfortable supporting Jesus because he has already “taken heart and stopped being afraid.”  As if maybe the waters are not and never have been the problem.

The problem is written down in black and white as plain as you can get in Chapter 7 of Mark.  The problem is not what you touch on the outside of your body.  The problem is not the water itself or what you do with the water.  The problem is what you choose to do on the inside of your body.  The problem is what you choose to do with your own free will.

The journey to know your own free will, as I said last time in conversation with Jen, is very much a journey that resembles the stages of grief.  All people must wrestle with what it means to have free will.  They must question it, be confused by it, be angry at it, reject it, and finally come to terms with it.  As the character Job once did.  As I did as Jesus son of Joseph two millennia ago.

There’s a reason for this, a reason that has nothing to do with sin or salvation or sacraments or separation from God.  The reason for this painful journey is that God trusts you.

Human beings often wonder why they’re here and why it has to hurt so much.  Many reasons have been offered over the centuries by different religious leaders.  In the tradition of Occam’s razor, I offer this: you are here to learn how God the Mother and God the Father discovered together how to walk on water.  You’re here so you can experience firsthand what it means to use your free will in every permutation possible in the service of Divine Love.

Put that way, it sounds simple, doesn’t it?  But it’s not.  You know that and I know that.  It’s damned hard to work your way through the stages of knowing what free will means.  Not what you, as a human being, think it means, but what God the Mother and God the Father think it means.

To live from a place of pure free will is, as you may imagine, the very opposite of living in a world of pure cause and effect.  But once, long ago, long before the event called the Big Bang took place, the universe was not as we know it today, and the laws of cause and effect held much more sway than they do today.  This is hard — beyond hard — for most angels to understand, so some of us decide to incarnate here to see what this kind of existence must have felt like.  Our Divine Parents let us do this because they trust us.

When souls decide to incarnate here as human beings, they know it’s going to be hard, but when they get here they find out it’s even harder than they could have imagined.  They do it anyway, though, because they’re experiencing something important, something that’s part of their history, their past.  They want to understand their relationships with everyone at a much deeper level, and this crazy journey called “life as a human being” helps them do it.

Not every soul chooses to do this.  But the ones who do, do so voluntarily.  These are the souls who are primarily kinesthetic learners at a deep soul level.  They learn best by experiencing something firsthand, by walking a mile in somebody else’s shoes so they really “get” what it feels like.

If you’re reading this, it means you wanted to come to Planet Earth for a while so you can walk in your Divine Parents’ shoes and see for yourself what it felt like for them to work together to overturn the rule of “cause and effect” and replace it with something infinitely more powerful and mysterious: Divine Love (a.k.a. quantum physics).

The human brain (unlike other mammalian brains) has an annoying habit of trying to shed its own emotions and slip into the unloving habits of cause and effect.  (As your cats and dogs like to remind you.)  So the human brain is ideally suited to this particular journey of discovery.  It has both a great potential for learning and a great potential for unlearning.  So to state your brain gives you the option to explore every possible nook and cranny of free will would be an understatement.

I know you can think of a thousand examples of people who didn’t use their free will in loving and trusting ways.  But what about the people who have come to terms with their own free will?  Who are they and what do their lives look like?  More important, are these people “special,” or can anyone on Planet Earth find this experience of redemption?

We’ve often used the term “redemption” on this site in contradistinction to religious salvation, and I’d like to talk about this a bit more.  Any human being — regardless of gender, sexual orientation, age, culture, time, place, or religion — who has worked through the grief stages of free will is a person who has experienced redemption in the way that I experienced it.  Redemption is the emotional insight that fills up a person’s entire heart and mind with the knowledge that it’s okay to never fear the Truth.

There’s Truth in the universe and there’s Divine Love.  They’re not the same thing.  Truth exists in the absence of consciousness.  Divine Love is the choice of consciousness to never hide from the Truth, to always be transparent to the Truth, to fully embrace whatever is true about another being without losing the truth of oneself.  What does this mean?  It means that Divine Love always respects the right of another person to be another person and not a mere extension of one vast cloud of self.

A human being who understands that free will holds the key to Divine Love, forgiveness, passionate creativity, and committed relationships (devotion) is a human being who has found redemption.

Such a person can be found anywhere.  And, indeed, such individuals are found in all cultures.  They are the people who simply won’t back down from the idea that all beings are worthy of respect, fair treatment, compassion, kindness, and encouragement.  They are the people who believe in social justice and due process, in democracies rather than republics or empires, in transparency in government and accountability for intentional harms.  They are the people who treat women with as much respect as men, who treat the planet with as much respect as they treat other human beings.  They are the people who treat their children as souls in need of education, guidance, mentorship, and respect instead of as property to be bartered for status or personal gratification.  They are the people who don’t whine and complain and blame God for all the travails they’ve chosen themselves.  Most of all, they’re the people who have the courage to see their neighbours as worthy human beings, not as objects of hatred, contempt, and violence.

When you really “get it” — when you understand that your ability to choose your path does not make you separate from the rest of Creation but is in the fact the very glue that holds God’s family together as a loving, trusting group — the world no longer feels to you like a place where good is fighting evil or light is fighting dark or order is fighting chaos.   It doesn’t feel like a fight any longer, but neither does it feel like mere acceptance of the way things are (which is often just resignation in disguise).  It’s not obedience.  It’s not piety.  It’s not subjugation.  It’s not anomie.  It’s not cynicism.  It’s not apathy.  It’s not depression.  It’s not escapism.  It’s just  . . . honesty.  The heart’s honesty.  The heart’s willingness to see things as they really are and, despite that, to dig deeper, ever deeper — or maybe higher, ever higher — into empathy for another person’s Truth.

There is no adequate word for this emotion in English.  “Trust” would come closest.

When you have this sense of trust, it feels as if you’re holding God’s hand and God is guiding you through the storms and worries of daily life.

It feels as if you’re walking on water.

Blessings to all,

Love Jesus

September 19, 2012

 

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Posted in "4 S's", Bible, Cause & Effect, Divine Love, Favourite Posts, free will, Jesus' teachings, Law (Nomos), Mother God, Realspiritik, redemption, theodicy, trust and tagged | Leave a Comment
05 Sep 2012

RS29: Father of Lights and Mother of Breath – Again

Irises (c) JAT 2013

Irises (c) JAT 2013

A:  I just love Biblical Archaeology Review.  Yesterday I came home from work and checked out the latest newsletter they’d e-mailed.  I get a newsletter from them every few days, and sometimes I don’t read them.  But this one caught my eye, and I clicked on the link (http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/misogyny-in-the-bible/).  There I found a wonderful article by Biblical Studies professor April DeConick.  The full article, called “Biblical Views: How the Mother God Got Spayed,” appears in the latest issue of Biblical Archaeology Review (Sept./Oct. 2012).  I just love everything about this article.  It’s so honest.  She dares to ask if we’re “trying to apologize for the misogny in the Bible because of our religious belief in the sacred nature of the Bible.”  Thank you for saying this out loud, Dr. DeConick!

I’d like to quote one paragraph from her article:

To begin with, humans — whether ancient or modern — think within gender categories.  And whether we admit it or not, gender never has been neutral.  Power is always involved.  In the ancient world, the female body was believed to be subhuman, imperfect — a deficient body because it lacked the male genitalia.  The male body was the perfect body.  So the male body dominated the scene, including the Bible, Christian theology and Christian ecclesiology.  In other words, the Bible came into being within a cultural matrix where the female body by definition was substandard and dehumanized.  This dehumanization of the female body affected virtually every storyline of the Bible.

She then goes on to explain how this misogynist view of the female body affected the way ancient Jews and early Christians perceived God:

This misogynist view of the female body affected the way in which the ancient people created their theologies and engaged in worship.  This is not to say that all ancient Jews and early Christians perceived God only as a male Father God.  Indeed, worship of the Mother God in conjunction with the Father God can be demonstrated to have occurred within ancient Israel.  Both the Bible and archaeology confirm this.  So it isn’t that the Mother God was absent from their worship.  Rather she was consciously eradicated from worship by the religious authorities.

Then DeConick dares to say that in early Christianity, “[w]e have records that demonstrate that the Holy Spirit was perceived by the first Christians to be not only female, but also Jesus’ Mother.”

Yup.  I just love it when good scholarship backs up everything you’ve been telling me for the past few years.*

J:  I worked very hard to distance my teachings from the religious orthodoxy of my day.  As we’ve discussed many times, I didn’t view God as a male-only figure.  I also didn’t view God as a “genderless divine essence,” as biblical scholar Ben Witherington so quaintly puts it (a thesis that’s challenged by Dr. DeConick in her article).  For Paul, Spirit/God/Christ was a genderless divine essence, just as for Plato, God was a genderless divine essence.   But this was never my teaching.  So for those Christians who want to retreat into the cowardly territory of God as “cloud of knowing” or “ground of being” instead of God as two loving people, they need to be honest about their beliefs.  They’re modern day Platonists, not followers of the teachings of Jesus.

A:  The Gospel of Mark speaks so eloquently about your lack of misogyny.  The stories about the hemorrhaging woman and the daughter of Jairus (Mark 5) break my heart.  The hemorrhaging woman seems to me like a symbol of the terrible abuse suffered by any woman whose symptoms make her “unclean” and “impure” according to religious law.  Can you imagine being treated as a pariah for years and years simply because you’re a woman and you’re medically ill?  How cruel is that.

J:  It seems hard to believe the Roman Catholic church and the strict Calvinist traditions can be so willfully blind about my teachings on women.  They can reinterpret the healing stories from the Gospel of Mark until they’re blue in the face, but they can’t erase the obvious truth that I believed women are equal to men in the eyes of God and are not unworthy or impure simply because they’re women.

A:  I love the way DeConick picks up on Tertullian’s role in destroying the self-image of Christian women for centuries to come.  Tertullian was a very nasty fellow — a status addict of the worst kind.

J:  To despise a woman because she’s a woman is a clear indication of status addiction.  To despise the idea of God as two people — God the Mother and God the Father — is another clear indication of status addiction.

A:  How so?

J:  Status addiction is a form of theft.  It’s an intentional theft of someone else’s sense of worthiness and self esteem.  In the Christ Zone model we’ve been looking at, there can be no true balance or wholeness or self-actualization unless all four major needs are met: physiological needs, safety needs, love & belonging needs, and self-esteem needs.  So important are these four major needs to human health and happiness and peace that psychiatry should reformulate its DSM bible to show disorders of physiological needs, disorders of safety needs, disorders of love & belonging needs, and disorders of self-esteem needs, instead of its current categorization system.

A status addict is someone whose brain is not functioning in balanced, holistic ways.  For various reasons a status addict can’t generate an inner sense of self.  They can’t generate a portrait of themselves, if you will, a portrait of themselves as a child of God.  Often this is due to damage in the parietal and parieto-temporal regions of the brain.

Because they can’t “see” themselves — because they can’t “plant” themselves in the firm ground of relationships and boundaries and heart-to-heart bridges among all life in Creation — they can’t rely on emotions such as trust and Divine Love and forgiveness to help them cope.

A:  Why not?  Why can’t they rely on trust and Divine Love and forgiveness?

J:  Because these coping mechanisms are all founded in the core principle of relationship — relationship between two or more people.  If you choose not to “do relationships” you also can’t “do love and trust.”  Positive, mature relationships draw on all the same parts of the brain as love and trust do.

A:  Such as oxytocin and vasopressin and prolactin levels in the bloodstream and brain.  Also serotonin.  To name a few.

J:  Yes.  One of serotonin’s jobs is to act as a mediator between the Darwinian Circuitry of the brain and the Soul Circuitry of the brain.  The role of serotonin in sustaining mood is beginning to be understood by medical science.  But it’s not the only factor in mood disorders.  A major complicating factor for many individuals — one that hasn’t been recognized by researchers — is status addiction.  Status addiction drives a person at a physiological level to seek a brief glimpse of himself by stealing somebody’s self-image.

It goes like this:

The status addict sees a woman who has confidence, self respect, and dignity.  It’s as if she’s painted a portrait of herself inside her heart and knows who she is.  Also who she’s not.  The status addict doesn’t know who he is and doesn’t know who he’s not.  But he’s jealous.  He’s jealous and angry at the woman who has something he does not.  So he endeavours to take it.  He endeavours to steal her portrait, or a piece of her portrait, and claim it for himself.  He takes it any way he can — usually through threats and physical or emotional abuse.  But the most vicious predator will try to rob the spiritual part of her self portrait, the part that tells her who she is in relationship with God.  He’ll try to rip out her entire sense of worthiness and self-esteem as a child of God.  Then he’ll take that piece of her portrait and pin it up on his own “inner wall.”   He’ll look at it and gloat.  He’ll enjoy her suffering.  The stolen portrait becomes a hazy sort of mirror where he can finally see himself. And for a brief moment, he’ll see himself as someone powerful and clever and potent.

Sixty seconds later his brain will let go of the high.   The image will vanish.  The sense of inner emptiness will return.  So he’ll have to go out and steal somebody else’s spiritual portrait.  This is how he copes with his own inability to love and trust and be in relationship with anyone, including God.

A:  Religious law as schadenfreude.

J:  Yes.  It’s a very poor substitute for reality, but many individuals rely on it.

To steal the reality of another person, to steal their wholeness, to try to steal their very existence, is a concentrated form of hatred.  It’s not purity of thought or transcendence that drives a person to say there is no personhood in God.  It’s not wisdom.  It’s not faith.  It’s just hatred.  Plain old fashioned hatred.  Hatred born of a status addict’s rage at the void he feels within himself.

To try to rip out God’s own self image, God’s own need for love & belonging, God’s own need for self-esteem (or, as we’ve called it here, God’s humbleness) is cruel and unconscionable.  I mean, where do people think we get our needs in the first place?  Do they think angels have a hard-wired need for love & belonging and self-esteem (humbleness) but God the Mother and God the Father don’t?  Do they really think God the Mother and God the Father have no feelings?

Every child born on Planet Earth tells the truth about God and God’s angels again and again and again.  Even the chromosomes of a child tell the truth.

God the Mother is real.

There’s no point fighting this truth any longer.

 

* Please see “Third Step: Invite Our Mother to the Table” and “Father of Lights, Mother of Breath


 

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Posted in Bible, Christ Zone, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Mother and Father God, Mother God, Plato, psychopathy, Realspiritik, religion and mental Illness, sense of time & timing, status addiction and tagged , | Leave a Comment
09 Aug 2012

RS22: Freedom and Slavery

pryamids_giza_Historylink101

“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 | Leave a Comment
24 Aug 2011

RS3: Learning to Like God

A: Jesus, why do you think there’s so much resistance to the idea that God is actually two distinct people, two distinct consciousnesses, a Mother God and a Father God working together to bring new life into being?

Learning to Like God Doesn't Mean You Have to Stop Having Fun (c) JAT 2013

Learning to Like God Doesn’t Mean You Have to Stop Having Fun (c) JAT 2013

J: I don’t think there’s one simple answer to that question. Human beings have been struggling for thousands of years with questions about who God is. The important thing to bear in mind is that people of faith have usually been in conflict with people of religion, regardless of place or time or culture. People of faith, wherever they live, are the people who listen for God’s presence with their hearts and bodies and minds and souls and courage. People of faith have a tendency to get sucked into groups run by people of religion. I’m defining “people of religion” as those who choose to obey the Laws and the Prophets.

A: Whose laws and whose prophets?

J: Everybody’s religious laws and everybody’s religious prophets when those laws and prophets contradict the obvious truths which God speaks to all people of the world each day.

A: Such as?

J: Such as the obvious truth that relationship is the foundation of all life. Human babies aren’t plucked from trees like ripe figs. At some time, there has to be an intimate relationship between male sperm and female ova. Even if this connection takes place in a test tube.

A: That hasn’t stopped scientists from cloning animals. And trying to clone human beings, I’m sure, though I doubt they’re talking out loud about this kind of Mengelian research.

J: The media have been creating the impression in the popular imagination that cloning is an easy, harmless, reliable, Newtonian process that obeys simple laws of Cause and Effect. Why, soon there’ll be home cloning kits for you on the shopping channel! Just think! You’ll be able to clone dear ol’ granny! The reality of cloning is much more complex, however. Beyond all the hidden struggles in labs and the fudged data and the attempts by major corporations to try to patent DNA that doesn’t belong to them, there have been serious failures and inexplicable weaknesses in the cloned creatures.

A: How do God the Mother and God the Father respond to these cloning projects?

J: The same way they respond to other acts of human psychopathy. They allow observable consequences to unfold so other people can see for themselves what a stupid idea it is.

A: Boy, sometimes it takes an awful lot of pain to get regular people to see the observable consequences of a stupid idea.

J: Human beings have free will. They can choose to be greedy and selfish, as many corporate researchers are choosing to be, or they can choose to be compassionate and clear-headed. Many of these corporate researchers see no contradiction in also being practising conservative Christians or Jews or Muslims because Abrahamic orthodoxy insists that God has given human beings special rights and privileges as “sovereigns” over all creatures of Planet Earth (Genesis 1:28 and, by inference, Genesis 2-3). Many, many religious people have assumed this means they can do whatever the hell they want on Earth, and God will simply nod and smile and say, “My, what a good boy you are!” Obviously, there’s something wrong with this picture.

A: Nuclear weapons spring quickly to mind.

J: Yes, plus toxic wastes poured into the ground and water. Diversion of major fresh water sources. Drilling for oil in unsafe and harmful environments such as thousands of metres below the sea bed. There’s not a lot of common sense or clear-headedness — let alone compassion — in any of these choices.

A: Yet you’re not advocating that we give up all technology and return to an ancient agrarian lifestyle.

J: No, I’m not asking people to give up their phones and their cars and go live on a barren mountaintop to get closer to God. On the other hand, a little balance might be nice. People might spend a little less time with their phones and their cars and a little more time with their children.

A: But that would mean spending time on their relationships.

J: It never ceases to amaze me that pious folk who refuse to treat anyone but themselves with respect will turn around and insist they have all the answers about how to be in relationship with God. How can a person who knows nothing about relationships claim to be an expert in relationships? How can a man who treats all women as inferior claim to know who God is? It’s narcissistic bullshit, nothing more.

A: These guys are too busy throwing themselves on their status-saturated swords to notice they’re not very nice people.

J: In orthodox Western Christianity, the image of God is very much one of the old bearded guy in the sky who’s throwing himself on his status-saturated sword for the sake of all those little peons who are too weak and sinful to make any good relationship choices ever.

A: God as the ultimate narcissist. No wonder so many people of faith have rejected the traditional Christian image of God. What’s to like?

J: It’s pretty hard to love and trust somebody when you believe there are no grounds to even like him or her.

A: So . . . it would make sense for the church of the third millennium to show people ways in which they can like God the Mother and God the Father as people and as divine parents. That way they can start to build a solid, respectful, daily relationship with God.

(c) Image*After

(c) Image*After

J: Naturally, it will come as no surprise that having a respectful relationship with God is no different than having a respectful relationship with your neighbour. If you can’t treat the one with kindness, you sure as heck can’t treat the other.

It’s only common sense.

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Posted in Church of today, faith, free will, Law (Nomos), Mother and Father God, Mother God, psychopathy, Realspiritik, the right to be right, theodicy and tagged | Leave a Comment
02 Aug 2011

JR62: Seventh & Final Step: Remove the Thorn in Jesus’ Flesh (That Would Be Paul)

A: We’ve talked a lot on this site and on the Concinnate Christianity blog about the differences between your teachings and Paul’s teachings. Many readers will say there’s not much evidence in the Bible for the differences you and I claim. What would you say to Progressive Christians who want to “have their Jesus and keep their Paul, too,” who want to make you, Jesus, more credible, without actually giving up any of their cherished Pauline doctrines?

J: They make me look like a dweeb, to be honest. An ineffectual, wimpy, turn-the-other-cheek kind of guy.

A: Which you were not.

J: They say they want to save me from the fundamentalist Christian right and the secular humanist left, yet they’re forcing me to sit down at the Tea Party table with Paul, which is the last place I want to be. I’m a middle of the road social democrat, and I believe with all my heart and soul that a society can’t function in a balanced way unless rights and responsibilities are given equal weight in all spheres of life. Paul was a man who taught about rights, rights, rights and not nearly enough about responsibilities. He and I had very different values.

A: Paul talks about punishments.

J: Yes. Paul talks about divine punishment and divine testing. He talks about his freedom — his right — to speak with divine authority. He talks about the need for self-discipline. He talks about divine rewards. But, you know, when you look carefully at what he’s written, he doesn’t speak to the soul of his listeners. He doesn’t challenge them to see each of their neighbours as a separate person worthy of respect. Instead he does the opposite: he encourages them to see themselves as non-distinct members of a vast “body of Christ.” Paul, instead of insisting that people build solid interpersonal boundaries — the foundation of safety and respect and mutuality between individuals — tells people to dissolve those boundaries. It sounds good on paper, but “Oneness” does not work in reality. If you encourage the dissolution of interpersonal boundaries, you’ll see to your horror that the psychopaths in your midst will jump in and seize that “Oneness” for themselves. They won’t hesitate to use it to their advantage.

A: Because they have no conscience.

J: Humans (as well as angels on the Other Side) are all part of One Family. But this isn’t the same as saying humans are all “One.” As anyone who comes from a big family knows, respect for boundaries is the grease that keeps you from killing each other.

A: It can be tricky to manoeuvre all the boundary issues in a big family.

J: Yes. You need all the brain power you can muster to stay on top of the different needs of different family members.

A: Spoken like a man who came from a big family.

J: When you’re the youngest son in a family with three older brothers and two sisters (one older, one younger), you catch on fast to the idea of watching and learning and listening to the family dynamics so you don’t get your butt kicked all the time.

A: It’s real life, that’s for sure.

J: That’s the thing. It’s real life. It’s not about going off into the desert to live as a religious hermit. It’s not about living inside walled compounds or hilltop fortresses. It’s about living with your neighbours and learning to get along with them through communication and compromise and empathy. It’s not fancy, but it works.

A: The Gospel of Mark makes this message very clear.

J: Christians have long assumed that the author of Luke truly believed in my teachings and was trying his best to convey them in a fresh way to a new generation of believers. Luke, of course, had no interest in my teachings, and was instead trying to promote Paul’s package of religio-political doctrines. This is seen most obviously in the so-called Great Omission — the complete absence in Luke of Mark’s most important theological statement. Luke cut and pasted many parts of Mark’s gospel, and thereby changed their meaning. But he didn’t even try to include the dangerous theology found in Mark 6:47 to Mark 8:27a. He ignored it and hoped it would go away.

A: Why? Why did he want it to go away?

J: Mark’s gospel, as we’ve been discussing, was a direct rebuttal of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. Paul wrote first (years before Mark), and in the middle of his letter he included 3 linked chapters on freedom and conscience, authority and obedience, sin and salvation, as these themes revolve around food — idol meat and, more importantly, the blood and bread of Christ (1 Cor 8:1-11:1). We can call this set-piece the “Idol Meat Discourse.” In this set-piece, Paul makes a number of claims about God that Mark, following my example, found particularly galling. Mark countered those claims by writing his own 3-chapter set-piece (Mark 6:30-8:26). I’m going to call Mark’s set-piece “the Parable of the Idol Bread.” This was Mark’s head-on attack on Paul’s Eucharist.

A: Mark didn’t support the sacrament of the Last Supper?

J: Mark knew that Paul’s speech about sharing in the blood and body of Christ (1 Cor 10:14-22) was a thinly veiled Essene ritual, the occult Messianic Banquet that had grown out of earlier, more honest offerings of thanks to God. I rejected the notion of the Messianic Banquet, with its invocation of hierarchy and status addiction. Mark rejected it, too.

A: Right before Mark launches into his Parable of the Idol Bread, he includes an allegorical tale about a banquet held by Herod and the subsequent beheading of John the Baptist (which we know didn’t actually happen).

J: Yes. Mark uses a lot of sophisticated allegory in his gospel. (Plus I think the less loving aspect of him wanted to see John’s head end up on a platter, which is where he thought it belonged.) Mark leads up to his set-piece — which, of course, is an anti-Messianic-banquet — by tipping off the reader to an upcoming inversion of religious expectations. He’s telling them not to expect Paul’s easy promises and glib words about “Oneness.” He’s telling them to prepare themselves for an alternate version of Jesus’ teachings about relationship with God.

A: What was that alternate version?

View of the Galilee from Mount Tabor ((c) Free Israel Photos)

View of the Galilee from Mount Tabor. Photo credit Free Israel Photos.

J: It was a radical vision of equality before God, of inclusiveness and non-Chosenness. It was a vision of faith without status addiction. Of faith and courage in numbers. Of freedom from the slavery of the Law. The love of a mother for her children (including our Divine Mother’s love for her children!). A relationship with God founded on trust rather than fear. The healing miracles that take place in the presence of love rather than piety. The ability of people to change and let go of their hard-heartedness (ears and eyes being opened). The Garden of Eden that is all around, wherever you look, if you’re willing to see and hear the truth for yourself. The failure of both the Pharisees and the Herodians to feed the starving spiritual hearts of the people. The personal responsibility that individuals bear for the evil things they choose to do. The importance of not idolizing the words of one man. (There’s no lengthy “Sermon on the Mount” in Mark as in Matthew; in fact, there’s no sermon at all, let alone a set of laws carved on stone tablets!).

A: That’s a lot to pack into three short chapters.

J: This is why I refer to Mark’s set-piece as a parable. As with any properly written parable, the message isn’t immediately obvious. You have to use all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength in order to suss out the meaning.

A: I noticed when I was doing my research papers for a New Testament exegesis course that the setting of Mark’s Parable of the Idol Bread is crucial. Not one but two major teaching events with miraculous endings take place out in the middle of nowhere near the Sea of Galilee. There’s no proximity to important sacred sites such as Jerusalem or Jericho or the Dead Sea or the River Jordan. There’s no Greco-Roman temple or Jerusalem Temple. There’s no holy mountain. There’s no sacred stone. There’s no palace or patron’s villa. But there’s a lot of green grass, with enough room for everybody to recline in groups (as in a Roman banquet) and share the event together.

In the middle section, in Chapter 7, Mark shows you leaving Galilee to carry out more healing miracles, but these healings take place in Gentile areas — everywhere but the sacred site of David’s city. You can tell Mark doesn’t think too much of Jerusalem’s elite.

J: Mark had a scathing sense of humour, much like Jon Stewart’s. When he wrote his gospel, he was thinking of it as a parable and a play at the same time. He wanted the actions of the actors to speak to the intent of the teachings.

A: Actions speak more loudly than words.

J: Yes. He wanted people to picture the actions, the geographical movements, that changed constantly in his story but never went close to Jerusalem in the first act of his two-act play. His Jewish audience would have understood the significance of this.

A: Tell me about the Idol Bread.

J: The meaning of the bread in Mark’s parable makes more sense if you look at the Greek. In Mark’s parable, and again later at the scene of the so-called Last Supper in Mark 14, the bread in question is leavened bread — artos in the Greek — not unleavened bread, which is an entirely different word in Greek (azymos). Mark shows me constantly messing with the bread and breaking all the Jewish laws around shewbread and Shavuot bread and Passover bread. At the teaching events beside the Sea of Galilee, the bread is given to the people rather than being received from the people in ritual sacrifice. It’s torn into big hunks. It’s handed out to everyone regardless of gender or rank or clan or purity. It’s handed out with a blessing on a day that isn’t even a holy day. Nobody washes their hands first. Everyone receives a full portion of humble food. Everyone eats together.

A: If the fish in this parable are a metaphor for courage and strength (see Mark’s Themes of Understanding and Strength) then what does the bread represent?

J: Artos — which is very similar to the Greek pronoun autos, which means “self” and, with certain prepositions, “at the same time; together” — is a metaphor for the equality of all people before God. Everybody needs their daily bread regardless of status or bloodline or rank. It’s about as status-free a symbol as you can get.

A: Something tells me that got lost in the Pauline translation.

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Posted in Church of today, Essenes, First Corinthians, Gospel of Mark, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Mark vs Paul, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Mother God, Paul vs Jesus, relationship with God and tagged , | Leave a Comment
30 Jun 2011
1 Comment

JR53: Saying 22 in the Gospel of Thomas

A: At the beginning of Stevan Davies’s translation of the Gospel of Thomas, there’s a Foreword written by Andrew Harvey. Harvey has this to say about the Gospel of Thomas: “If all the Gospel of Thomas did was relentlessly and sublimely champion the path to our transfiguration and point out its necessity, it would be one of the most important of all religious writings — but it does even more. In saying 22, the Gospel of Thomas gives us a brilliantly concise and precise ‘map’ of the various stages of transformation that have to be unfolded in the seeker for the ‘secret’ to be real in her being and active though [sic?] all her powers. Like saying 13, saying 22 has no precedent in the synoptic gospels and is, I believe, the single most important document of the spiritual life that Jesus has left us (pages xxi-xxii).”

Harvey then plunges into 5 pages of rapture on the ecstatic meaning of Saying 22. None of which I agree with, of course. And none of which you’re likely to agree with, either, if experience is any guide. But I thought maybe you and I could have a go at it.

J: By all means.

A: Okay. Here’s the translation of Saying 22 as Stevan Davies’s writes it:

“Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples: These infants taking milk are like those who enter the Kingdom. His disciples asked him: If we are infants will we enter the Kingdom? Jesus responded: When you make the two into one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the upper like the lower and the lower like the upper, and thus make the male and the female the same, so that the male isn’t male and the female isn’t female. When you make an eye to replace an eye, and a hand to replace a hand, and a foot to replace a foot, and an image to replace an image, then you will enter the Kingdom (page xxii and 25-27).”

Harvey’s interpretation of this saying speaks of an “alchemical fusion” and a “Sacred Androgyne” who “‘reigns’ over reality” with actual “powers that can alter natural law” because he or she has entered a transformative state of “mystical union,” where “the powers available to the human being willing to undertake the full rigor of the Jesus-transformation are limitless.”

I’m not making this up, though I wish I were.

Mustard Seeds by David Turner 2005. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

“The disciples said to Jesus: ‘Tell us what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.’ He replied: ‘It is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all. However, when it falls into worked ground, it sends out a large stem, and it becomes a shelter for the birds of heaven'” (Gospel of Thomas 20). Mustard Seeds by David Turner 2005, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

J: And there I was, talking about a little ol’ mustard seed . . . . It’s a terrific example of the danger of using “wisdom sayings” as a teaching tool. People have a tendency to hear whatever they want to hear in a simple saying. Parables are much harder to distort. Eventually I caught on to the essential problem that’s created when you choose to speak indirectly to spare other people’s feelings. When you use poetry instead of blunt prose, it’s much easier for other people to twist your meaning intentionally. You can see the same understanding in the Gospel of Mark. Mark is blunt. He doesn’t waste time on cliches and “wisdom words.” He goes straight for the truth, and leaves no wiggle room for gnostic-type interpretations.

A: Harvey seems to have found a whole lot of wiggle room in Saying 22.

J: I must admit that Harvey’s “revelation” of the Sacred Androgyne makes me feel sick to my stomach.

A: Why?

J: Because it denies the very reality of male and female. It denies the reality that God the Father is male and God the Mother is female. It denies the reality that everything in Creation is built on the cherished differences between male and female. Being male isn’t better than being female. And being female isn’t better than being male. But they’re not the same. Neither are they yin-and-yang. They’re not two halves of the same coin. They’re not mirror images of each other. They’re not a fusion — they’re not a Oneness — like a bowl of pure water. God the Mother and God the Father are like a bowl of minestrone soup. You can see all the big chunks of differentness floating around in there, and that’s okay, because that’s what gives the mixture its taste, its wonder, its passion.

God the Mother and God the Father aren’t the same substance with opposite polarities. No way. They have individual temperaments and unique characteristics. In some ways, they’re quite alike. In other ways, they’re quite different from each other. Just as you’d expect in two fully functioning, mature beings. That’s why it’s a relationship. They work things out together so both of them are happy at the same time. It’s not that hard to imagine, really. They have a sacred marriage, a marriage in which they constantly strive to lift each other up, support each other, forge common goals together, build things together, and most importantly, raise a family together. They look out for each other. They laugh together. They’re intimately bound to each other in all ways. But they’re still a bowl of minestrone soup. With nary a Sacred Androgyne in sight.

A: Okay. So if you weren’t talking about “oneness” or “alchemical fusion” or the “Sacred Androgyne” in Saying 22, what were you talking about?

J: Well, I was talking about the mystery and wonder that can be found in a simple seed. I was talking — as I often was — about how to understand our relationship with God by simply looking at and listening to God’s ongoing voice in the world of nature.

A: Oh. Are we talking about tree-hugging?

J: You could put it that way.

A: David Suzuki would love you for saying that.

J: I was a nature mystic, to be sure. Endogenous mystics are nature mystics. They see the image of God — and more importantly the stories of God — in God’s own language, which is the world of Creation. The world outside the city gates has so much to say about balance and time and beginnings and endings! The world outside the city gates is a library. It’s literally a library that teaches souls about cycles and physics and interconnectedness and chemistry and complexity and order and chaos all wrapped up together in a tapestry of Divine Love.

A: What you’re saying seems like a pretty modern, liberal sort of understanding. Were you able to articulate it this way 2,000 years ago?

J: Not to be unkind to modern, liberal thinkers, but when was the last time a philosopher of science sat down with a mustard seed and reflected on the intrinsic meaning of it? When was the last time you heard what a humble fresh bean can teach you about the spiritual journey of all human beings?

A: I see your point. People in our society don’t usually take the time to sit down and “smell the roses.”

J: Geneticists and biologists and related researchers can print out all their research on the genome of a kidney bean, and can even modify this genetic code in a lab, but to a mystic the kidney bean holds more than pure science.

A: So we’ve switched from mustard seeds to kidney beans as a metaphor?

J: Kidney beans are bigger and easier to see without magnifying lenses, and a lot of people have begun their scientific inquiries by growing beans in a primary school classroom. So yes — let’s switch to beans.

A: I remember being fascinated by fresh beans and peas when I was young. If you split the bean with your thumbnail, and you didn’t damage it too much when you split it, you could see the tiny little stem and leaf inside at one end, just waiting to sprout. If you planted a whole, unsplit bean in a small glass-walled container, you could watch the whole process of growth — the bean splitting open on its own, roots starting to grow from one end, the stem and leaf popping up, the two halves of the bean gradually shrinking as their nutrients were converted into stem and root growth. Somehow the bean knew what to do. It just kept growing out of the simplest things — dirt, sunlight, water.

J: The bean is a lot like the human brain. If you plant it whole in fertile ground and provide the right nutrients, it grows into a thing of wholeness and balance and wonder and mystery. On the other hand, if you try to split it open, or extract the tiny stem hidden inside, or plant it on rocks instead of good soil, or fail to give it sunshine and water, it won’t thrive. It may not even root at all. You can’t force the bean to grow where it isn’t designed to grow. You can’t force it to grow once you’ve forcibly split it open. You can’t force it to grow on barren rock. The bean has to be whole when you plant it. The outside skin has to be intact. The different parts inside the skin have to be intact. The bean has different parts, but it needs all those different parts in order to be whole — in order to create something new. The bean isn’t a single substance. But it is holistic. It’s a self-contained mini-marvel that teaches through example about cycles and physics and interconnectedness and chemistry and complexity and order and chaos. It appears simple, but in fact it’s remarkably complex. Creation is like that — it appears simple, but in fact it’s remarkably complex.

A: Why, then, were you talking about “male and female” in Saying 22? Why did you seem to be talking about merging or fusion of male and female into an androgynous state? Or a Platonic state of mystical union?

J: It goes to the question of context. I was talking to people who, as a natural part of their intellectual framework, were always trying to put dualistic labels on everything in Creation. Everyday items were assigned labels of “good or evil,” “pure or impure,” “male or female,” “living or dead.” It had got to the point where a regular person might say, “I won’t use that cooking pan because it has female energy, and female energy isn’t pure.”

A: I’m not sure that kind of paranoid, dualistic, magical thinking has really died out, to be honest.

J: There are certainly peoples and cultures who still embrace this kind of magical thinking. You get all kinds of destructive either-or belief systems. You get people saying that right-handed people and right-handed objects are favoured by God, whereas left-handed people are cursed. It’s crazy talk. It’s not balanced. It’s not holistic. It’s not trusting of God’s goodness.

A: And you were left-handed.

J: Yep. My mother tried to beat it out of me, but I was a leftie till the day I died. When I was a child, I was taught to be ashamed of my left-handedness. Eventually I came to understand that I was who I was. The hand I used as an adult to hold my writing stylus was the same hand I’d been born with — my left hand. But on my journey of healing, redemption, and forgiveness, I came to view my hand quite differently than I had in my youth. Was it a “new hand”? No. Was it a new perception of my hand. Yes. Absolutely yes.

A: You stopped putting judgmental labels on your eyes and your hands and your feet and your understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God.

J: One of the first steps in knowing what it feels like to walk in the Kingdom of the Heavens is to consider yourself “a whole bean.”

A: Aren’t there kidney beans in minestrone soup? How did we get back to the minestrone soup metaphor?

J: A little mustard seed in the soup pan never hurts either.

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Posted in Davies (Stevan), dualism, Favourite Posts, gender and sexuality, Gnosticism, Gospel of Thomas, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, Mother and Father God, Mother God, parables, Plato, relationship with God, unio mystica, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged ,
12 Jun 2011

JR49: Third Step: Invite Our Mother to the Table

A: Last time we spoke, the idea of the “scandal of particularity” sort of popped onto the page. I’ve been thinking about it for the past few days, and I’d like to return to that idea if it’s okay with you.

J: Fine by me.

A: You said — and I quote — “There IS a ‘scandal of particularity,’ but it applies to God the Mother and God the Father, not to me.” Can you elaborate on this?

J: Orthodox Western Christianity — the religious structure built on the teachings of Paul and Paul’s orthodox successors — has worked very hard in the last few centuries to “reposition” me, Jesus son of Joseph, in the marketplace of world opinion. Many critics of Christianity have pointed out how damaging and abusive it is to claim that God “became” one particular man in one particular place at one particular point in time. No end of systemic abuse has been voluntarily created by Church representatives because of this claim. Claims about me have been used to justify maltreatment of women, violence against Jews, and attacks on the “inferiority” of all other religious traditions.

Christians who think that I, Jesus, am happy about their claims should check out the current song by Christina Perri called “Jar of Hearts.”* “Jar of Hearts” is a song about a person who has finally figured out how abusive her former partner is. “Who do you think you are?” she asks with no holds barred, “running’ ’round leaving scars, collecting your jar of hearts, and tearing love apart.” This song reflects quite accurately how I feel about “Mother Church.” I want no part of the traditional teachings about Jesus the Saviour. If they want to keep their Saviour, they’ll have to find a new candidate, because this particular angel has resigned. Quit. Left the building. I’m tired of being their whipping boy.

A: Not quite the answer I was expecting.

J: People think that angels have no feelings. Well, I have plenty of feelings about the way the Church has abused me and those I love. I forgive individual church leaders — those who have perpetrated great harm in the name of God and Jesus — but I feel the pain intensely. Forgiveness isn’t the same thing as sweeping great harms under the carpet. Forgiveness is first and foremost a state of honesty — honesty about the intent and the injury inflicted by the intent. The intent of the Church’s teachings about me (Jesus) and about sin, salvation, sacraments, and separation from God is selfish and narcissistic. These teachings promote physiological addiction disorders. They harm lives. They harm relationships. They harm the understanding of humanity’s role in Creation. I do not respect these teachings, and I do not support the right of the Church to teach abusive spirituality to desperate people. Abuse is abuse. Western society as a whole no longer supports or condones spousal abuse or child abuse or corporate abuse. Yet Western society continues to condone spiritual abuse. This must stop.

A: Many Christians have noticed the problem of abuse in the Church and have decided to walk away from the Church. They don’t see how it can be fixed.

J: People want and need to be in relationship with God. They need faith in their lives. Unfortunately, the Church has taken terrible advantage of this need.

A: I haven’t seen much willingness among Christians I know to ask tough questions about Church doctrine. They’re trying to change the window dressings while the basement foundation is full of rot. No wonder people are leaving the mainstream churches in droves! At least in Canada they are. Can’t comment on the experience in other countries.

J: In Canada there’s such a widespread ethos of inclusiveness, access to public health services and public schooling, government accountability, gender equality, and prevention of child abuse that individual Canadians aren’t seeing their day-to-day ethos reflected in the core teachings of the orthodox Church.

A: Because it’s not there. The words are there, but not the underlying ethos.

J: No. The ethos isn’t there. The Church can talk till it’s blue in the face about the importance of service work and mission, but regular people can still sense there’s “something wrong with the picture.” They can sense there’s rot in the foundations. And they don’t want to be a part of that. Some of them decide to leave the church. Others stay and do their best to try to fix it from within. But there’s mass confusion. And people are starving — literally starving — for a faith experience that makes sense to them at the deepest possible level of the heart.

(c) Image*After

“A woman in the crowd said to him: Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you. He said to her: Blessed are they who have heard the word of the Father and have truly kept it. For there will be days when you will say, ‘Blessed is the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk'” (Gospel of Thomas 79 a-b). The Gospel of Thomas follows a minority voice in Judaism that speaks of women in a positive light and shows them as being equal to men in God’s community (rather than inferior knock-offs). This particular saying in Thomas goes even further and talks about God the Mother as one who shouldn’t be understood in terms of ordinary human motherhood. As Co-Creator of everything in the universe, our blessed Divine Mother is beyond our simple conceptions of what it means to be a mother. When compared to Hellenistic cult images of the Divine Mother (for example, the multi-breasted Artemis figure from Ephesus), it’s easy to see why Jesus faced an uphill battle in changing people’s perception of God. Photo credit Image*After.

A: For 2,000 years now we’ve been saddled with a religion that absolutely insists in no uncertain terms how ludicrous it is to even consider the remote possibility that possibly — just possibly — God might not be a “he” but might instead be a “he and a she.” It’s okay, of course, for us to bust our brains on the question of the Trinity and all the other “mysteries” that go with traditional Christianity. But it’s not okay for us to suppose that God is two people united forever in divine marriage with each other.**

J: Such a portrayal of God brings with it all sorts of implications the Church doesn’t want to deal with. For one thing, they’d have to explain why and how they “kidnapped” our Divine Mother, why they eradicated her from the message. They’d have to explain — at least in the Roman Catholic Church — why they allowed a cult to flourish around the fictional character of Mary, Mother of God.

A: You did have a mother. And her name was Miriam.

J: Yes. But she was no more the Mother of God than I was God incarnate. She was a normal human mother. That’s it.

A: Two flesh and blood people — you and your human mother — who’ve been turned into myths, lies, and symbols.

J: Meanwhile, there’s a very real and very particular Mother in Creation. God the Mother. This is the scandal of particularity I was referring to — the scandal of God the Mother and God the Father being two particular, definable, real, knowable people. Real people who have existed and continue to exist in real time and real space and real history. Real people who refuse to be moulded by the grandiose lies made by assorted religious mystics over the centuries. Real people who belong to each other — not to their children — in marital love. Real people who are our PARENTS. Real people who get hurt when their dysfunctional human children try to cross the boundaries of safety and trust between parents and children by engaging in occult practices — especially occult sexual practices.

A: Mystics have often described their “union with God” as a mystical marriage, with God as the bridegroom and the mystic or the church as the bride.

J: Yeah. And for the record, that’s another doctrine that’s gotta go. It’s highly dyfunctional and abusive for children to want to have sex with their own parents. This should go without saying. But for too long the Church has condoned mystical practices that lead in this direction.

A: Who can forget Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa of Avila with her mouth agape and her toes curled in orgasmic ecstasy?

J: Here’s a thought. Maybe we should butt out of the personal relationship between God the Mother and God the Father — their private life — and get on with the important job of being their children. For starters, human beings of faith could be nice to our Mother for a change. You know, talk to her. Include her. Invite her to the table of faith. Look to her for guidance and inspiration. Say thank you to her. Look her in the eye and say, “Thank you for loving me.”

A: It’s amazing how effective the Church’s strategy has been. They’ve managed to put blinders on people’s eyes so they literally can’t see God the Mother. She’s the Invisible Woman in Western theology. She’s standing right in front of us, waving her arms and jumping up and down, and people of faith still don’t see her.

J: If that isn’t gender abuse, I don’t know what is.

* “Jar of Hearts” was written by Drew C. Lawrence, Christina J. Perri, and Barrett N. Yeretsian.

** See also “A Divine Love Story” and “How My Experience as a Chemist has Influenced My Mysticism.”

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Posted in "4 S's", angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), Church of today, forgiveness, honesty, intent, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' teachings, Messiah, Mother and Father God, Mother God, occult themes, Paul vs Jesus, relationship with God and tagged | Leave a Comment
01 May 2011

JR35: Father of Lights, Mother of Breath

Father of Lights, Mother of Breath

“Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the Word of Truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures” (James 1:17-18). Photo credit JAT 2014.

A: Saying 56 of the Gospel of Thomas is somewhat puzzling. Stevan Davies translates it as “Jesus said: Whoever has known the world has found a corpse; whoever has found that corpse, the world is not worthy of him.” Davies suggests that this saying relates to the two Creation stories in Genesis. He says, “it seems that the animating principle of the world is the Kingdom within it that remains undiscovered by most people. They do not realize that for them the world is a corpse; when they discover that it is, they simultaneously discover the Kingdom that can animate it” (page 61). Davies’s interpretation doesn’t feel right to me. What were you trying to get at here?

J: Davies’s thesis that the Kingdom is an animating principle within a person and within the world outside each person is central to his interpetations of the Thomasine sayings. He’s entitled to his own theories, but I don’t have to agree with them.

A: So you don’t agree.

J: No. Davies’s interpretation — for all that he tries to cast it in the light of Wisdom teachings instead of Gnostic teachings — is still Gnostic. In other words, it’s an occult interpretation. Occult interpretations of the world rely heavily on dualistic thinking — everything is reduced to pairs of opposites such as “good versus evil” or “light versus darkness.”

A: “Alive versus dead.”

J: Yes. As soon as a person starts talking about “dead things” being animated — literally, being brought to life — by outside forces, then you’re moving in the direction of dualistic, occult thought. What scholars call Christian Gnosticisms are really just a form of immaturity. Emotional and intellectual immaturity. Nothing in Creation can be reduced to the kind of simplistic “either-or” religious formula that’s being offered in Davies’s interpretation. Life just isn’t like that.

A: So you don’t agree that “alive versus dead” is a legitimate pair, a legitimate starting point for discussion about the nature of life?

J: You have to understand the religious context in which I lived. People had some very strange ideas about birth, life, illness, and death — everyone did, regardless of their religion. Jews were no different. We had tons of restrictions and limitations and taboos around natural life processes. Especially around death. Taboos around some other things had loosened up when Jewish lands fell under the sway of Hellenistic thought and then Roman thought. But the taboos around death hadn’t diminished. People were very frightened of dead bodies. Only certain people were allowed to touch them. No one could be buried inside the city walls. The list went on and on.

A: That doesn’t sound much different from today.

J: One of religion’s most important jobs is to help people deal in mature and compassionate ways with death. Few religions manage to accomplish this task with any grace or decorum. One of the few modern religions that brings death into the community in a living, natural way is Rabbinic Judaism. Christianity could learn a thing or two from Judaism on this score. However, the approach to death seen in today’s synagogue was not the approach to death I grew up with. Rabbinic Judaism didn’t exist in the first half of the 1st century CE. Judaism was a mess. We had so many competing philosophies and so many competing rituals that regular people were hopelessly confused.

A: Dare I say that you added to that confusion?

J: You can say that. It’s true. But Judaism had some good things going for it. Even though I had studied the works of Hellenistic philosophers, looking for nuggets of spiritual wisdom, I came back in the end to the best that Judaism had to offer. In my view, the best ideas of Judaism topped everything the other religions were offering.

A: Can you give some examples?

J: The most obvious one is the image of God in the Hebrew texts. There was the strange idea in Judaism — uncommon, though not unprecedented in the history of religion — that there was really just one God, not a whole pantheon of gods. Of course, I didn’t agree with the Platonic idea that God was a single undifferentiated “He.” This idea had slowly made its way into Jewish thought, and by the 1st century CE it was widely accepted by many Jews. But not all Jews saw God as 100% male. A thinking person couldn’t make sense of the natural world if it was seen solely as a “male domain.” There had to be a feminine principle in there somewhere — a feminine principle that was equal to the male principle and in full partnership with the male principle. My personal experiences as a mystic clinched that theory beyond all doubt. Once I had seen and felt the reality of God the Mother and God the Father in my own heart, I had no doubt about who God really is. God is Father and Mother together — Abba and Ruah. Father of Lights, Mother of Breath. That’s what I called them.

A: You refer to the Father of Lights in the Letter of James (James 1:17-18). You also say there that the Father of Lights gave birth to us “by the word of truth.” What did you mean by this?

J: “The word of truth” — logo aletheias in the Greek, which is not the same as Sophia (Wisdom) — is a name I sometimes used for God the Mother. I was trying to make it clear that God the Father doesn’t give birth to us by himself. It isn’t a weird form of parthenogenesis (virgin birth). It’s the most natural form of creation imaginable.

A: Two partners coming together in light and in truth and fulfilling our creation because they want to.

J: This image of God was considered heretical to both pious Jews and pious Gentiles. There were countless images of the Divine in many different religions. The only image of the Divine that wasn’t being preached was the one I was preaching — the God Who Is Two. One God, many children. One God, many souls. One God, many Kingdoms. This image of God as God really is did have — and still has — the power to free so many people from the suffering caused by prejudice and hierarchy and male dominance! This image has the power to open up the gates of meaningful relationship with God. Everything you see in the world around you makes so much more sense when you allow yourself to make room for the “crazy, heretical notion” that God is Two — not One, and not Three. All the most meaningful experiences of life as a human — the experiences of love, of redemption, of healing, of trust — they all rely on relationship. On two people — at a minimum — coming together in mutual aid and comfort. As the song says, “one is the loneliest number”. On the other hand, two is the number of change, growth, creation, balance, and divine love. The world of science and nature constantly reinforces this one simple message: it’s all about Two, not One.

A: It seems very strange to me that when an individual adamantly holds to the idea that God is One, his or her thinking becomes less holistic and more dualistic — more based on black-and-white pairs of opposites. When pious religious followers commit themselves wholly to the idea that God is One, it’s like a cartoon thought bubble pops up and fills itself up with all sorts of nasty, judgmental words. Words so nasty they could singe the hair off your head. You wouldn’t think the idea of God-as-One could lead to so much hatred and prejudice and racial discrimination. But we have plenty of history to prove it. I’ve been watching the Kennedy mini-series on the History Channel, and of course they examine the racial rioting in the U.S. South in the early 1960’s. I simply can’t understand or relate to that kind of vicious hatred.

J: Well, we had plenty of that kind of vicious hatred in my time. Jews against other Jews. Rich against poor. Chosen people against damned people. Blah, blah, blah. No end to the bigotry. No end to the narcissism.

A: I see you’re equating bigotry with narcissism.

J: Sure. Bigotry can only grow in a garden that’s growing the weeds of narcissism and bullying. Narcissism is a psychologically dysfunctional state where an individual’s brain becomes addictively dependent on the myth that he or she is “special,” “better than others,” and entitled to better treatment than other people. Like any addict, the status addict has to receive regular fixes. To maintain a stance of bigotry towards another person on the basis of skin colour is simply proof of addiction — addiction to status. The choice to hate somebody on the basis of race or skin colour has the same biological effect on the brain as an addiction to cocaine. Bigotry is a form of “using.” It has no place in the life of a person of faith.

A: Bigotry is another form of dualistic thinking — “us versus them.”

J: It’s also a clear indication of immaturity in an individual. A mature individual is able to process ambiguity, change, complexity, and “shades of grey.” A mature individual is capable — even as a frail human being — of perceiving and appreciating the vast scope of Creation and the awe-inspiring, humbling interconnections that exist among all forms of life, both here and elsewhere in Creation. A mature individual doesn’t ask “what God can do for you,” but instead asks “what you can do for God.”

A: That statement would be considered blasphemous by the “piety and pity” crew that insists we’re all full of sin and unworthy before God.

J: Well, I rejected the “piety and pity” parade, as you can tell from everything I’ve been trying to say on this site.

A: I’ll just call you the “trust and twofulness” guy instead.

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Posted in Davies (Stevan), dualism, Gnosticism, Gospel of Thomas, Jesus Redux, Kingdom teachings, Letter of James, life and death, Mother and Father God, Mother God, status addiction and tagged , | Leave a Comment
10 Nov 2010

CC40: How My Experience as a Chemist Has Influenced My Mysticism

Theology at its best is a language — a language that helps individuals understand their relationship with God while not contradicting or denying one of God’s other important languages: science.

It’s important for God’s children to have access to the language of uplifting theology. This is because not all of God’s children can easily understand or relate to the language of science. This is okay with God. In fact, it’s more than okay. God’s children (one of whom would be you) are not all the same. God’s children are all different from each other, although we share some traits in common, such as the ability to love and forgive.

Your soul wasn’t created by God the Mother and God the Father with a batch of dirt and a cookie cutter (Genesis 2:7 notwithstanding). In all of Creation (and it’s a pretty darned big Creation!), there’s no other soul quite like you. There’s no other soul who thinks exactly the way you think, no other soul who expresses love exactly the way you express love. You’re one of a kind.

This means you “get” some languages better than you get other languages.

Maybe you totally get music, which means you feel the rhythms and harmonies deep in your bones without anyone ever really teaching you how to do it. You just “get” it so deeply that your whole life is transformed by it, each and every day.

Maybe you totally get poetry. That’s a language, too. It’s not the same as prose. Somehow it triggers different feelings and different responses in you than prose. You read a few verses of exquisite poetry and BAM — powerful insights descend upon your soul and you’re forever changed.

Now don’t laugh, but I react to chemistry the way many people react to music and poetry. It’s not that I don’t like music or poetry, it’s just that, well, I really, really “get” the language of chemistry.

“Tremble, O Earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turns the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a spring of water” (Psalm 114: 7-8). Photo credit JAT 2017.

If you’ve studied a lot of chemistry, you know that chemists don’t think in quite the same way as physicists, or biologists, or computer scientists, or mathematicians. Physicists get excited about field theory. Biologists get excited about energy transfer in living organisms and ecosystems. Computer scientists can think in binary code (an amazing skill!). And mathematicians live and breathe for the wonder of tautologies (showing how two sides of an equation are actually equal).

But chemists spend most of their time dealing with bonding. Molecular bonding. They want to know what holds atoms together into molecules. They want to understand the relationships between the constituent parts of both atoms and molecules. They spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to coax one little ion or electron from one spot to a different spot so it can do a different job. A chemist’s stock in trade is the probability wave functions of electrons, those tiny little negatively charged particles that are so much smaller than an atomic “nucleus” and are so damned fussy about where they’re willing to be located at any one time. Yet where would our material world be without them?

Even though physicists now estimate that “ordinary matter” (that is, atoms and molecules) accounts for no more than 4-5% of all known energy in the known universe (they call this ordinary matter “baryonic matter”), baryonic matter has a lot to tell us about the nature of God. And this baryonic matter is what chemists really “get.”

A number of physicists these days are pulling out all the stops to try to find a unified theory of nature. (Hence the construction of the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider). But, you know, for my part, as a chemist and as a mystic, I’m wary of anyone in any field who starts to look for a simple unified theory about anything. This smacks of monism, the longstanding religious belief that when you get to the very heart of Creation, there exists only a singular, undifferentiated, divine “oneness.” Plato’s middle writings, such as Phaedrus (247c), speak of this colourless, shapeless, all-inclusive oneness, and many neo-Platonic Christian mystics have followed suit in the monism department.

Needless to say, I’m not a monistic or apophatic mystic.

Me, I think it’s okay for us to listen to what God is saying to us through the language of chemistry. Even though baryonic matter (including the ordinary atoms and molecules that make up Planet Earth’s waters, lands, and atmosphere, plus all life on Planet Earth) represents only 4-5% of the universe’s energy, it’s the only part of Creation we can directly access as human beings, and it’s the only part of Creation that God seems to think we need while we’re living here as angels-in-temporary-human-form, so I figure it’s worth paying attention to!

And as I said above, chemistry is all about bonding.

It’s all about the relationship and balance between the tiny negatively charged particles we call electrons and the much larger positively charged particles we call protons. It’s all about the relationship and balance between certain probability wave functions and certain forces such as gravity, etc.. (I’m simplifying here, and am purposely skipping the whole subatomic particle thing, as it would needlessly complicate the discussion at this point).

When you think about a molecule such as sodium chloride (table salt), you probably think about it as salt. Me, I think of God the Father’s negatively charged electrons dancing a beautiful electron orbital dance of harmony, balance, intentional cooperation, and divine love with God the Mother to help her unite her much larger sodium ions with her equally large chloride ions in a very specific and useful scientific way that helps them together, as God, create the necessary biological building blocks used by the many forms of individual life that have lived here at one time or another over the past 3.85 billions years or so.

There you have it — my one-sentence rebuke of Creationism.

In my opinion, Creationism is an example of the language of theology at its worst.

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Posted in apophatic mysticism, Concinnate Christianity, Creationism, ethical mysticism, HDM Myths, monism, Mother and Father God, Mother God, My Spiral Path, oneness, Plato, Soul and tagged | Leave a Comment
08 Nov 2010

CC39: Confessions of a Blonde Mystic

When I was growing up, I had no inkling that one day I’d become a mystic.

I was pretty geeky, but not that geeky. When I was 10, I wanted to become an archaeologist. By the time I was 12, I was sure I was going to be a writer. By age 18, I wanted more than anything to fall madly in love and focus my whole being on the love of my life (whoever the heck that was!). By age 22, I was married and enrolled in graduate studies in art conservation. By age 25, I had settled down as a stay-at-home mom.

Nothing very mystical about that.

Where there hints about my mysticism-to-be? Did I have unexplained episodes of “transcendence” as a child? Did I “see” things that weren’t there? Or “hear” things that weren’t there?

Nope. I was a normal kid. I was a bookworm, and I wasn’t good at sports, and I was way too mouthy for my own good. (Still am.) But I didn’t have any unusual “episodes” when I was growing up; nor would I have received any encouragement for such from my famil. There was no enthusiasm in my family for religiosity. My family were nominal Christians, which meant we went to United Church services at Christmas and Easter. Sometimes my sister and I were sent to Sunday School, but these church experiences left little impression on me. The word “spirituality” was never mentioned.

Both my parents were eminently practical (having grown up during the Great Depression) and quite liberal and inclusive in terms of their values. So there was no talk around the dinner table about God’s true nature, or salvation, or apocalypticism. Acceptable topics of discussion included business and politics and law-abiding citizenship. I was a teenager in the early 1970’s, so, of course, there were numerous lectures about staying away from drugs, lectures which I took very seriously. To this day, I’ve never used street drugs, and I’m one of the few people I know who’s never tried pot. Not even once.

Yup. Still a geek, and proud of it.

The thing about genuine mysticism — the Real McCoy, as opposed to verifiable states of psychiatric dysfunction — is that genuine mysticism is not about random and unpredictable “transcendent episodes” sprinkled like chili peppers into an everyday bowl of bland and tasteless cream of potato soup. A genuine mystic (and frankly there aren’t a whole lot of them out there) is somebody who’s hardwired with a particular package of traits, learning styles, and talents. When these particular traits, learning styles, and talents are examined as a whole, a discernible pattern emerges, and if this pattern can be shown to be consistent over many years, then, and only then, can you say that a particular man or woman is a true mystic.

In other words, you can’t call somebody a mystic because he or she reports one or two unusual “episodes” of seeing or hearing or feeling the presence of the Divine.

This is just common sense. You wouldn’t call someone a professional artist on the basis of one or two beginner’s paintings. You wouldn’t call someone a professional mechanic on the basis of one flat tire correctly changed. Similarly, you shouldn’t call someone a mystic on the basis of one or two self-reported “events.” There should be a long track record of professional development and committed endeavour for practising mystics, as in any other field. This is the only way to prevent charlatans and fraud artists from ruining other people’s lives with their “predictions” and “divine assurances.”

What makes me a mystic (or a contemporary channeller, as I sometimes call myself), as opposed to a spiritual person or a person of deep faith?

Well, to turn it around a bit, is it possible for a spiritual person or a person of deep faith to also be a professional artist? Or a mechanic? Or a farmer? Or a teacher?

Of course! In fact, many people would suggest that if you hope to be a really gifted teacher (or mechanic or whatever), you need to bring all your faith and all your spirituality into your calling in a holistic way so you’ll be able to teach (or fix engines) from the heart. This, too, is just common sense.

For me, it’s the same thing. I’m a spiritual person and a person of deep faith, which makes me no different than the mechanic who starts and ends his day as a spiritual person and a person of deep faith. But where the mechanic delights in working on engines, and the teacher delights in guiding the minds of growing children, I delight in the work of a mystic, which is so philosophical and intellectual and esoteric that it would bore the living crap out of 99.9% of the people I know.

It’s my passion to delve each and every day into the deepest mysteries of Creation — questions about God, about the soul, about quantum biology, about who we are at both the quantum level and the emotional/creative level. My passion is to ask annoying questions, and my skill is to be able to hear the answers when they come down the quantum pipeline from God the Mother and God the Father. (And from Jesus, but that’s another story.)

Make no mistake — I both see and hear God. But it’s not random, and it’s not occasional. It’s an everyday part of my life as a mystic. It’s an everyday part of my life because I practised and practised and practised until I’d fully developed the talent I was born with. Through a combination of natural soul hardwiring plus committed human effort, I gradually “came into” my calling. It’s an unusual calling, to be sure, but it’s a genuine calling.

Everyone is born with natural intuition. I’m NOT saying I’m one of the few people who has intuition. Just the opposite, in fact. I think everyone can more fully develop their intuitive faculties and incorporate that aspect of their being into their daily lives. But intuition isn’t the same thing as mysticism. I want to be clear on that point. Like everybody else, I have normal intuition. But alongside that normal intuition I have another skill, a different skill, that not everyone is born with. I have what might be called, for lack of better terminology, an ability to accurately and consistently tap into the space-time continuum while in a fully conscious non-hypnotic non-drug-induced mystical state of connection to God.

One way to find a true mystic is to ask about favourite stories and films. True mystics always a special fondness for speculative fiction. Solar Sailor (c) Jamie MacDonald 2013. Used with permission of the artist.

One way to find a true mystic is to ask about favourite stories and films. True mystics always have a special fondness for well-crafted speculative fiction. Painting “Solar Sailor” (c) Jamie MacDonald 2013. Used with permission of the artist.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Space-time continuum . . . it sounds like something you’d hear on Star Trek. The original Star Trek. And you’d be right. You’re going to have to forgive me, though, because I can’t think of any other way to describe it. And besides, where would the Blackberry be today if not for the inspiration of Captain Kirk’s flip-phone communicator to urge inventors onward?

Did I mention I love the original Star Trek series? And TNG ain’t half bad, either? (I may like designer clothes, but, as you can tell, I’m still a geek at heart.)

P.S. I’m not a medium or a psychic, and I don’t believe in ghosts. So don’t ask me if my life is like “Medium” or “Ghost Whisperer” or “The Listener” or “Rescue Mediums” on TV, because the answer is NO.

My life is way more exciting than that.

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Posted in apophatic mysticism, brain-soul connection, building your intuition, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, faith, Mother God, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism, relationship with God, religion and mental Illness and tagged , | Leave a Comment
17 May 2010

CC11: Okay, I’m a Heretic. But So Is Jesus!

Okay, I admit it . . . I’m a heretic.

I refuse to accept the teachings of orthodox Western Christianity on a whole bunch of topics.

I refuse to accept that God is “One.”

I refuse to accept that God is a “Trinitarian One.”

I refuse to believe that a cosmic evil force (called Satan, among other names) exists.

I refuse to accept that the sacrament of baptism has any magical powers to save people.

I refuse to accept that the sacrament of communion has any magical powers to save people.

I refuse to believe that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God or is the Saviour.

I refuse to believe that God’s children are unworthy of God’s love or incapable of having a relationship of integrity with God.

You might think this puts me in the camp of Progressive Christianity or Unitarianism. But wait! I’m not finished yet!

I also refuse to believe in a world where God the Mother and God the Father don’t intervene.

I also refuse to believe in a world where angels don’t exist.

I also refuse to believe in a world where miracles don’t exist.

I also refuse to believe in a Newtonian world-view. I’m a quantum gal all the way.

The church of today reminds me a lot of this porcelain lamp that belonged to my great aunt. The functioning parts that once held the light source have long since been lost. Only the forms and traditions of the base have been retained. The base is quite lovely, but without the truth of Jesus’ original teachings, the forms aren’t able to shed the full light of God’s love on our lives.

 I’m a heretic as far as the United Church of Canada is concerned because I don’t believe that Jesus is our Saviour. And I’m a heretic as far as Progressive Christianity and UU adherents are concerned because I’m a mystic who believes in miracles.

But here’s the thing . . . (and you’re probably not going to like this part) . . . everything I currently understand about God, all my heretical ideas — I got them from the angel who once lived as the man named Jesus. This is what my mystical life has entailed: listening to Jesus. Just listening to what he has to say about God. Just listening with all my heart and all my soul and all my mind and all my strength to Jesus’ own take on what he said and what he did and what he was trying to accomplish in his life.

What Jesus has told me during thousands of hours of contemplative work over the past 10 years is radically different from what the United Church and the Anglican church taught me. It’s also radically different from what my theology professors have been teaching me. But what Jesus has been telling me isn’t “new.” It’s not a bunch of newly invented hot-off-the-press New Age hooey.* The evidence for what he’s been telling me is right in the Bible. It’s been there all along, sitting in plain sight for everyone to see.

The problem for readers is that the Bible doesn’t contain just one truth. The Bible contains a lot of competing storylines and a lot of competing agendas. It’s hard to sort them all out. It’s hard to figure out who said what, and, more importantly, why they said what they said.

Jesus has expended a lot of time and patience to help me understand the why. It took me years to understand the “why,” but once I did, I began to see that certain passages of the Bible resonate strongly with Jesus’ continuing message, and other passages sound like the opposite of Jesus’ teachings.

In my time working with Jesus, he has always insisted on rigorous scholarship. Therefore, as part of my mystical journey, I’ve had to learn the tools of biblical exegesis as they’re currently taught in a modern university setting. I’ve had to learn the basic grammar and vocabulary of Koine Greek. I’ve had to learn about church history, about the development of church doctrine over the centuries. I’ve had to read translations of Paul, Tertullian, Augustine of Hippo and the like. I’ve had to read the polity manual of the United Church of Canada from cover to cover (including the appendices). On the basis of my mystical work in combination with my ongoing academic training, I’m totally confident in saying that what Jesus taught his followers 2,000 years ago is not what the church has been teaching.

I’m a heretic because I’ve listened carefully to what Jesus has taught me about God, and I think Jesus is right.

So I’m a heretic because I think Jesus was (and still is) right when he says that the best model for understanding who God is is for us to think of the most wonderful set of parents possible, and go from there. (This would not exclude two wonderful homosexual parents!!)

I’m a heretic because I think Jesus was (and still is) right when he says that no single ritual such as baptism or communion can replace the need for people to take responsibility for their own choices towards other people, themselves, and God.

I’m a heretic because I think Jesus was (and still is) right when he says that institutionalized religion has never taught the faithful what forgiveness is.

I’m a heretic because I think Jesus was (and still is) right when he says that the true journey of faith is one of redemption, not one of salvation.

I’m a heretic because I think Jesus was (and still is) right when he says that the core consciousness of a human being — the soul — is beautiful, worthy, and amazing. The problem of suffering is not created by sinful souls. The problem of suffering is damage caused in the biological brain, damage that induces people to behave in abusive ways that make their own souls cringe.

I think Jesus is a pretty smart guy.

* If you want to see an example of what I mean by “newly invented hot-off-the-press New Age hooey,” I invite you to read a copy of The Mystical Life of Jesus by psychic Sylvia Brown.

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Posted in Bible, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, gender and sexuality, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Mother God, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism and tagged , | 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.

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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 | Leave a Comment

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