The Spiral Path

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Archive for the category “Jesus’ teachings”

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
14 Sep 2012

RS33: The Way of the Cross

St. Michael's Mount 02

“For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him (Psalm 22:24). Pictured here is the garden at St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, which for some reason reminds me of the Garden of Gethsemane. Photo credit JAT 1997.

A:  Tell me more about the practice you taught of “taking up the cross.”

J:  We got a little side-tracked last time, didn’t we?

A:  As usual.  No straight lines around here.  Always curves and meandering paths.

J:  Funny how the clearest and truest path to the heart is never straight.

A:  It took me a long time to figure this one out.  But there’s so much freedom, so much peace, in understanding that love isn’t linear and isn’t supposed to be.  It has its own strange rhythms.  But in the end it’s stronger than anything I’ve ever known.  It’s so  . . . so  . . . strong.  It’s so complex.  It’s not a pure strand of anything.  It’s this amazing tapestry, as you’ve described it before.  A tapestry with so many colours and so many songs and so many tears.  All woven together into this picture, this portrait, of life.  Life filled with passion and wonder and awe.  Life where you’re constantly surprised.  But also life where you don’t mind being surprised.

J (nodding):  It’s very important, the idea of being surprised and not minding.  It’s the “not minding” part that sets apart a person who’s listening to his/her soul and a person who’s not.  The soul doesn’t mind surprises.  The brain’s Darwinian Circuitry hates surprises.  You can tell a great deal about a person’s brain health in the small moments when surprise strikes.  The soul takes these unexpected events in stride.  The Darwinian Circuitry seizes up and panics and can’t take swift, wise action.  The soul continues to be able to act during a crisis.  The Darwinian Circuitry comes to a grinding halt.

A puzzling thing happens when the Darwinian Circuitry panics.  Inside the brain there’s a sudden “disconnect” between the decision-making centres and the movement centres.  People literally freeze like a deer in the headlights.  This is when they’re most vulnerable to lies — to words spoken aloud with authority by people who are in a position of trust.  This is when mobs can be persuaded to riot.  But it only works — and I want to emphasize this — it only works when people have already panicked.  It only works when people have stopped listening to their own souls.  You can’t force people who are listening to their own souls to join a mob.  They won’t do it.  They find no pleasure and no safety in the ridiculous idea that’s floating around of “homo duplex.”  Mob mentalities — hive mentalities — are dangerous to the goals of healing, peace, and redemption.  Mob mentalities lead to Crusades.  Crusades are never a positive thing in the eyes of God or God’s angels.

A:  It’s interesting how individuals stop taking personal responsibility for their own actions when they’ve agreed to hand over their own free will to a mob leader.

J:  For those who can’t hear the inner wisdom of their own soul, it’s a relief to hand over their free will to somebody else.

A:  It’s a difficult process, reclaiming your own free will.  (Sighhhhh.)

J:  Yes.  There’s probably no greater challenge for a human being.  Nonetheless, it’s the challenge that all human beings are called to.  They 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.

A:  What you just said reminds me of the stages of grief.

J:  That’s exactly what the process is.  It’s an experience of working through grief.  And, by god, you need forgiveness to get you through it, because somewhere in the middle of the process you’re going to come face to face with the reality of all the times when you didn’t apply your free will in loving and trusting ways.  You’re going to feel like a shit.  This is where forgiveness sees you through.  Forgiveness is the act of free will that allows you to keep going, to get up the next day and keep going even when you’ve stopped denying the harm you’ve created here on Planet Earth.

A:  This is where you really need a mentor.

J:  Yes.  You need to know that somebody else has already forgiven you so you can find the courage to forgive yourself.

A:  That mentor can be God.

J:  Yes.  If a person trusts that God the Mother and God the Father forgive her even when she’s been a shit, she can lean on their strength as she struggles to learn from her mistakes and forgive herself.  It takes time to learn to forgive, but that’s okay.  People have to believe that God doesn’t expect instant results.  Indeed, instant results aren’t scientifically supportable or biologically possible.  God only expects consistent effort.  God will help you if you’re willing to make a consistent effort to be the best person you’re capable of being.

A:  Warts and all.

J:  God doesn’t mind warts.  Human beings end up covered in warts and scars and cracked bones and broken hearts in their time on Planet Earth.  God forgives you anyway.  I can’t emphasize this enough.  God sees past all the warts and scars and cracked bones and looks straight into your broken heart.  You can’t hide a broken heart from God.  Nor should you want to.

A:  It’s so difficult for regular human beings to believe they’re worthy of God’s daily forgiveness.  I really struggled with this in the beginning.  But I’m glad you persisted!

J:  It changes everything when you’re willing to accept God’s forgiveness.  Everything.  You find the freedom to move — really move.  So instead of being nailed helplessly to the cross, immobile, desperate, unable to flow with the changes and surprises of each day, you begin to be able to move.  Sure, at first you have to drag the damn cross with you, and it’s heavy, and it hurts.  But at least you’re moving!  And you’re starting to reclaim your sense of your own self, your own true potential.  After a while the cross you’re dragging around starts to feel different to you.  It starts to feel less like a heavy burden and more like . . . gravity.  A place where you can feel the weight, the seriousness, the reality of honest truth and not be afraid of it.  A place where honest truth is your ally, your very foundation.  Your centre of gravity.

A person who has chosen to pursue status (“gaining the whole world” at the expense of honest truth) relates strongly to the image of the crucifix — Jesus nailed to the Cross — because this is the way he or she feels in relation to the world and to God.  He feels trapped.  Nailed down.  Impoverished of health and happiness.  Stuck in an endless circle of pain and self-sacrifice.  So he thinks the image of the crucifix is right.

By contrast, a person who has chosen the path of knowing free will, love, forgiveness, healing, and redemption sees the cross in very different terms.  He sees a symbol of freedom from the self-enslavement of status addiction, a symbol of the courage to be yourself and know yourself and trust yourself in a world that tells you this is impossible.

To be disenfranchised from Empire is not necessarily a bad thing.

 

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Posted in brain's Darwinian Circuitry, brain-soul connection, conscience & morality, courage, Divine Love, forgiveness, free will, honesty, Jesus' teachings, Peace Sequence, personal responsibility, Realspiritik, relationship with God, Son of Man and tagged | Leave a Comment
11 Sep 2012

RS32: Resurrection of the Son of Man

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Old City of Jerusalem ((c) Free Israel Photos)

A:  Did you know ahead of time — before you went to Jerusalem — that you were going to die?  Most Christians believe you were prophesying your own death in Mark 8:31.

J:  Well, I did know my time was running out, but I kept that suspicion to myself.  So the question about the Son of Man in the Gospel of Mark is a separate question.  When Mark talks about the Son of Man being rejected, killed, and resurrected, Mark isn’t talking about me or any other human being.  For me, and also for my great-nephew Mark, “Son of Man” meant humanity’s highest potential, humanity’s ability to transcend terrible suffering and turn it into something positive and life-enhancing.  Not “life” as in existing and surviving, but “life” as in choosing to do what’s right with courage and conviction and respect for all creatures.

Like Job, a person who refuses to take “no” for an answer in his quest to be in full relationship with God is going to go through some difficult times.  To search for love and trust in a world that rejects love and trust is no easy task.  There will be no support from “the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes” in this quest.  Those in authority will do their best to destroy you and your dogged determination to find the truth about your heart and soul.  They certainly won’t reward you for teaching others how to hear God’s voice.  But at the end of the day they can’t stop these truths from being constantly reborn in the hearts and minds of those who believe in humanity’s highest potential.

This is the kernel of divine truth that lies at the heart of the resurrection story.  The truth about Divine Love can be temporarily crushed — killed by the elders, chief priests, and scribes — but it always returns.  It always reignites in the hearts of those who are listening to God through the lens of the heart.

A:  But Peter and James and John didn’t like what you were saying.

J:  That’s an understatement.  Compare what Mark says about choosing between status and “life” (eg. Mark 8:34 – 9:1) to what John says throughout his gospel.  For John, it’s all about the status.  Status so pure and so elevated it will save you.

A:  A lot of Christians have been confused by Mark’s statement that those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life based on your teachings will save it.  But it makes perfect sense in the context of choosing between status (“gaining the whole world”) and losing your ability to love and trust (“forfeiting their life/soul”).  Seems pretty clear, actually.

J:  These passages (plus some others) in Mark have often been interpreted as an endorsement of asceticism.  I want to emphasize that I didn’t ever teach or endorse the practice of asceticism.  And I didn’t teach the practice of self-dissolution.  I taught the practice of denying the cravings of status addiction.  I taught the practice of “taking up the cross.”

A:  Can you explain that in more detail?

J:  The Romans in the first century CE were brutal tyrants, despite all their talk of honour and law and Pax Romana.  Their culture was profoundly status-oriented.

A:  As many cultures continue to be to this day.

J:  Yes.  Romans held great store in the rights of citizenship.  If you were a Roman citizen, you had special rights and privileges.  Citizenship was a sign that you were favoured by the gods.  But if you weren’t a citizen — and most Jews in the province of Palestine weren’t — you had no recourse to the laws that applied exclusively to Roman citizens.  If the Romans didn’t like you, they could crucify you.  Tens of thousands — hundreds of thousands — of people who weren’t citizens ended up on crosses throughout the Roman Empire.  Theoretically, however, citizens couldn’t be crucified.  So the cross became a symbol of disenfranchisement — of being cut off from the ancient rights and privileges that had accrued to various ancient peoples over the centuries.  Second Temple Judaism had built up a strong body of laws.  But these laws meant nothing if the Romans took a dislike to you.  A lot of disenfranchised Jews ended up on crosses.

A:  Yet you were a Roman citizen.  And they put you on a cross.

J:  Yes.  Which is why they had to take me down after only a few hours.  But the cross isn’t what put me at death’s door.  I was almost dead by the time they tied me up there.

A:  Tied?  I thought the Romans nailed people in place.

J:  It was a bit of a rush job.  They would have come back later to properly nail me down if they hadn’t been forced to take me down from the cross after an old friend alerted the authorities to the crime of crucifying a Roman citizen.

A:  Why were you almost dead?

J:  I’d been in prison for three months.  I’d been stabbed in the lower abdomen by John.  I’d been poisoned by Peter.  But I didn’t have the decency to die in prison.  So finally, late in September, James got fed up.  He bribed some officials to send me out with a batch of prisoners who were scheduled to die.  He didn’t think anyone would recognize me and raise a ruckus.  He was wrong.

A:  So your own brother was the one who tried to make you die an ignominious death on the cross.  That’s just  . . . well, there are no words for such a betrayal.

J:  My older brother Judas was in on the original plan to capture me and put me in prison.  But when the rest of the story unfolded . . . he couldn’t take the guilt.  He committed suicide.

A:  You say you’d been in prison for three months, and you were tied to the cross in September.  That doesn’t add up with the Passover timeline.

J:  John created the Passover timeline.  It suited his mystical belief that I’d been overlighted by God.  He also couldn’t remember, from a factual point of view, when I’d been arrested.  His memory for poetry and scripture was excellent, but his memory for historical facts and dates was very poor.

A:  So in his mind your arrest did take place in the early spring at Passover.

J:  Yes.  And, as always, he was persuasive in his charismatic prophecy, so people took him at his word.  He said it happened at Passover, so this date was quickly embraced by new followers after my death.  From everyone’s point of view, there was a lovely mystical symmetry — even a mystical necessity — in this date.

The truth is that I didn’t go to Jerusalem for Passover in my final year.  It was a shocking heresy on my part, but I couldn’t agree to go to the Temple to participate in a festival I believed was morally wrong.  I couldn’t agree to participate in a ceremony that celebrated the escape of one group of people through the death of innocent children — children who were murdered by an avenging God.  And all the other plagues . . . the whole thing felt wrong to me at a gut level.

A:  Starting to see why your family hated you so much.  You rejected one of their cherished traditions.  One of the traditions that gave them status.

J:  I rejected traditions founded in hatred and vengeance.  But there were other traditions worth keeping.  This is why I went to Jerusalem seven weeks later for the celebration of Shavuot (Weeks) — what Christians later called Pentecost.  Shavuot was a whole different kettle of fish.  Shavuot was about gratitude — thanking God for the bountiful gifts of food in the first harvest.  I had no use for the Passover laws, but I saw how Shavuot could be a time of real healing and redemption for Jews of faith — like an ancient but very Jewish version of Christmas, with people sharing their gifts and their hearts with each other and with God.

My problem was that I said this out loud.  I gathered my friends and family and followers together, and presented them with this “new version” of Shavuot — a supper where we would sit together as equals and invite God the Mother and God the Father to share a humble meal of bread and water with us.

A:  The Last Supper.

J:  And it was, indeed, my last supper as a human being where my body wasn’t filled with pain and fear.  I was arrested later that night.

A:  Had you decided before you went to Jerusalem that you were going to suggest this “new Shavuot”?  Or was it a last minute idea — a sudden flash of inspiration?

J:  I knew before I went.  I also knew I’d make a lot of new enemies for daring to change old customs in this way.  But it was the right thing to do.  So I did it.

A:  So you knew ahead of time you risked arrest, even death.

J (nodding):  I knew.

A:  And you didn’t try to stop it.

J:  Don’t get me wrong.  I wasn’t trying to be a martyr.  And I didn’t want to be arrested and tortured.  I saw no joy or fulfillment in that prospect.  On the other hand, I wasn’t going to back down.  I wasn’t going to lie to other people about who God is.  I wasn’t going to pretend that all Jewish traditions were blessed by God, because, you know, they weren’t.  I wasn’t afraid to tell the truth.

The truth about love and trust, about humanity’s ability to love God and trust God, about God’s choice to love humanity and trust humanity, always manages to be reborn.  No death can stop it from happening.

The Son of Man always returns in the hearts and smiles and courage of those who love.  It’s our inheritance as children of God.

 

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Posted in Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' teachings, John the Baptist, Kingdom teachings, Realspiritik, religion and mental Illness, Son of Man, status addiction and tagged , | Leave a Comment
02 Sep 2012

RS28: For Now We See in a Mirror, Brightly

A:  Okay.  To sum up so far, you rejected traditional and cultural beliefs about illness and healing, left the major urban centres, moved to a small town in Galilee — Capernaum . . .?

J:  Capernaum.

A: . . . broke countless religious rules about healing, didn’t use magic, ritual, or even prayer during your healing sessions, insisted on using observable science, insisted on building relationships of compassion with your patients, insisted on the power of faith, insisted on examining patients directly instead of using proxies, and rarely asked for anything in return.  Many patients with neurological, psychiatric, endocrine, and autoimmune disorders suddenly got better.  People thought you were a miracle worker.  You didn’t believe you were the prophesied Messiah, but many other people did.

Canadian National Parks 120

“Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but just grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’ Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?”‘ He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease'” (Mark 5:25-34). Photo credit Hemera Technologies 2001 – 2003.

From today’s perspective, you don’t look like a religious teacher or wandering philosopher sage at all.  You look like a really gifted doctor.  In fact, you look to me like a really gifted psychiatrist.  And I ought to know what a psychiatrist looks like, since I was married to one for twenty years.

J:  I don’t deny what you’re saying.  A psychiatrist’s job, after all, is to help patients examine the parts of their biology that are interfering with their ability to think, feel, and choose in balanced, holistic ways.  It’s probably the most important field of medicine, though it’s usually the specialty that receives the least respect and the least funding.

A:  You were a physician.  A pioneering spirit in the as-yet unknown discipline of psychiatry.  Yet a religious movement sprang up around you.  Why?

J:  Because I was a man of deep faith.  I wasn’t afraid to trust God, to love God as they really are.  I wasn’t afraid to open my heart to the wonder of healing.  More important, I had a radically different idea of what illness and healing meant.  For me, illness didn’t mean “lack of perfection.”  And healing didn’t mean “acquisition of perfection.”  I had an entirely different understanding of our lives as human beings, an understanding based on my observation of the natural world.  For me, pain and death were not the enemy.  Death was obviously unavoidable.  Pain was a language, a language that spoke the truth about a person’s relationships with himself, with others, with the world around him, and with God.  I saw the loss of love and trust in God as a major source of pain and suffering in the people around me.  Their souls weren’t happy with the loss of relationship with God.  Their bodies mirrored this lack of happiness, this spiritual pain.

The truth is that all souls need God.  They need relationship with God.  They need to feel that connection, that bond of love and trust.  They also need to feel the same kind of love and trust in their relationships with their families and friends and community.  They need to feel safe — emotionally, physically, intellectually, and spiritually safe.

The world I grew up in didn’t teach anyone to feel safe in their relationship with God, or, for that matter, safe within their own families.  No community can be safe when it preaches the inferiority of women and the right to own slaves.  Second Temple Judaism was no different in this regard from the Hellenistic world around us.  Women had few rights.  And seriously ill or disabled women had even fewer.

My daughter was born with Down Syndrome.  She died at age 3 of respiratory failure.  It was probably pneumonia.  But she died in terrible emotional pain, terrible emotional suffering, because her own mother believed she was a curse.  A curse!

Her body got sick and died, but the pain of her physical suffering was small in comparison to her emotional and spiritual suffering.  She was horribly abused by her mother and her mother’s family.  Not because she deserved it but because Jewish magicians said she deserved it.  And I did nothing to protect her.

After she died — and there’s no doubt her mother and her mother’s mother were complicit in her death — I had to look at myself in the mirror and be honest about what I’d done — or rather, what I hadn’t done.  I had to own up to my complete and utter lack of courage.  And I had to deal with the constant memory of her face and her trusting smile.

I have no respect for the constant preaching from Christian theologians about the lofty preeminence of my suffering and death and resurrection.  Fuck that.  My contribution wasn’t my own death.  My contribution was to see meaning and life in the face of death, to see transformation and forgiveness in the face of death, and to really mean it.  My contribution was to find the courage to remember my daughter’s trusting smile and try to do something useful with the gift of her love.  Her love — the memory and the ongoing presence of her love in my heart — was a constant source of wonder and healing for me.

Apparently my guardian angels approved of this attitude because after I spent years learning how to forgive and learning how to listen to God’s voice and learning how to follow my own inborn talent as a physician, really weird shit started to happen around me.   I mean, really weird shit.  Healings that were more than placebo effect (which I had started to get used to by then).  I mean sudden, miraculous healings that only God can do.  I was as shocked as many of my patients.  But I understood in a logical, rational way what was happening.  So I wasn’t afraid.  I was just . . .  non-plussed.

A:  Why weren’t you afraid?

J:  Because I trusted God.  Because I could hear the voice of my own guardian angels.  Because I could feel the comfort and safety of these “events” deep in my gut.  Because people around me were crying in relief and gratitude.  Because good things were happening to regular people.  Because some of the people I helped heal began to believe in a loving God instead of a cruel, vengeful God.  Because God was obviously present in small huts and green fields and all the places where God wasn’t supposed to be present.  Because the only contribution we humans needed to bring to the table of healing was our kindness — our true kindness towards ourselves, towards each other, and towards God.  Not many people then or now have been willing to show kindness towards God.

A:  Did you understand the science of the miracle healings?

J:  You mean the quantum physics of it?  Hell, no.  I’m an angel on the Other Side and I still barely grasp the quantum physics of it!  But the science of it is there.  The truthful and logical reality of the healings is there.  Just because humans — and many angels! — don’t fully understand the science doesn’t mean it’s not science.  It’s just a really, really advanced science.

A:  A science which obviously circumvents the linear “cause and effect” of classical, Newtonian physics.

J:  Divine Love and forgiveness feel like emotional gifts, but at a quantum level, they’re both related to non-locality or, as some prefer to call it today, quantum entanglement.  Love and forgiveness also tie in with the soul’s sense of time and timing.

If you have no sense of time — no personal relationship with past, present, and future — it’s impossible for you, as a human being, to give and receive either Divine Love or forgiveness.

Trying to live in the moment — in other words, living in a state of denial about your own pain or somebody else’s pain — destroys the biological brain’s ability to process pain and turn it into something else, something much deeper and more proactive in the world, like, oh, say, like courage.

A:  So you’d define courage, then, as the ability to shift pain into some form of healing action or choice.  The ability to take action and help make the world a better place, even if it’s an emotional action, like choosing to love and forgive and trust, as opposed to a physical action, like joining the Peace Corps.

J:  Yes.  Courage is the choice to help God “build an ark.”

A:  There’s no doubt about the amount of pain that exists in the world.  So if pain is the raw material — the wooden planks — that can be turned into something deeper and more proactive, that’s one helluv’an ark we’re gonna be building.

 

 

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Posted in healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jesus' teachings, quantum theory, Realspiritik, relationship with God, sense of time & timing, theodicy and tagged , | Leave a Comment
19 Aug 2012

RS25: Where Love Goes, Miracles Follow

Detail of Woodpecker tapestry designed by William Morris (1885). (from Wikimedia Commons)

Detail of Woodpecker tapestry designed by William Morris (1885). (from Wikimedia Commons)

J:  I’d like to begin today with a quote from the text you were reading the other day — the scroll fragment that deals with exorcism as it was usually handled in my time (Dead Sea Scroll 4Q560)*:

Col. 1 [. . .] the midwife, the punishment of those who bear children, any evil madness or d[emon . . .] [. . . adjure you, all who en]ter into the body: the male Wasting-demon and female Wasting-demon [. . . I adjure you by the name of the Lord, “He Who re]moves iniquity and transgressions” (Exod. 34:7), O Fever-demon and Chills-demon and Chest Pain-demon [. . . You are forbidden to disturb by night using dreams or by da]y during sleep, O male Shrine-spirit and female Shrine-spirit, O you demons who breach [walls . . . w]icked [. . .]  Col. 2 before h[im . . .] before him and [. . .]  And I, O spirit, adjure [you against . . .]  I adjure you, O spirit, [that you . . . ]  On the earth, in clouds [. . .] (Translated by Michael O. Wise)

A lot of words are missing from the fragment, but you get the picture.  Illness is ascribed to demons.  Cures are ascribed to the power of magical words, words spoken in ritualistic ways by Jewish magicians.  The magicians would have used magical amulets, too, and divining tools (though technically these were forbidden by Jewish orthodoxy).  Also drugs that were transmitted in the form of incense and smoke.  People today forget that opium and other narcotics were well known in my time.

These magicians were experts in chicanery.  They worked in teams, with one man acting as the wandering magician desperate to save people from demons, and others seeding themselves into the crowds to look for vulnerable targets.  They would listen to the talk of the people around them, scope out the stories that could be copied by the scammers themselves, then mimic the symptoms so they could be dramatically and publicly “saved” by the magician.  It’s an old scam.

A:  It was the faith healing scam of your day.

J (nodding):  People today read the prohibitions in the Jewish Scriptures against magic and divining and later prophecy and other occult practices, and they assume that Jews in the Second Temple period obediently followed these tenets of Judaism.  Archaeological finds prove they did not.  From the time of the Alexandrian conquest onward, Jews became a rather superstitious lot, just like their Hellenistic neighbours.  Regular people carried magic amulets and regularly spoke magic spells and chants.  They also believed in the power of curses.  When magicians found formulas that seemed to work, they wrote them down.  This is why archaeologists have found so many ancient magical codices and scrolls.

A:  Biblical Archaeology Review has had some interesting articles on this topic in recent years.  There’s also some evidence for Jewish necromancy in the early centuries of the common era — the use of human skulls with inscriptions written on them (though these are pretty rare).

Most practitioners of magic used bowls, it seems.  According to BAR, “the largest body of inscriptions from ancient Judaism is the collection of more than 2,000 magic bowls from Talmudic Baylonia (present-day Iraq) from the fifth-eighth centuries C.E. These bowls were inscribed in Aramaic with incantations against demons.”**

I think it just goes to show that within every religious tradition there are always pockets of people who are drawn to the most extreme ways to try to control the Law of Cause and Effect — which is what magic is all about.

J:  Not that this has changed . . . There are still plenty of pious religious folk who believe far more in magic (the Law of Cause and Effect taken to its logical, gory extremes) than in compassion or healing or forgiveness.

A:  So Paul’s followers — and the John the Baptist’s followers — wouldn’t have seen anything too radical or different in the magical claims made by Paul and John.  They would have expected to hear how they themselves could participate in this new way of controlling the Law of Cause and Effect.  It wouldn’t have surprised them to hear claims about name magic and power over demons.

J:  It would have surprised them to not hear these claims.

A:  So you surprised people, then.

J:  Once I got to the point in my life where I deeply trusted God’s love, God’s forgiveness, and God’s infinite goodness, there was only one path open to me — the path of girding my loins with science and faith instead of victory and vengeance.  It’s pretty hard to keep looking for victory and vengeance when you’re absolutely convinced God loves all people equally.  I had no religious books to guide me — not ones I trusted or respected, anyway — so I had to start from scratch.  I had to start from first principles.

A:  Can you give an example of that?

J:  It’s a process of reexamining everything you once believed in, so it’s not simple and it’s certainly not straightforward.  It’s like being handed a huge lapful of intertwined yarns and being told you have to untangle all the different threads and sort them by colour and weight before you can do anything else.  At first it looks like a gigantic job, an insoluble task.  But eventually you realize that if you’re patient and observant and careful in your actions, you can gradually sort out the mess.

A:  You mean you’re not supposed to take a hatchet to the ball of yarns and split them apart in one fell swoop?

J:  That was the Roman way.  Got a mess?  Fix it with a sword!

No, this way — the angel way — was much more tedious.  The idea was not to fix things by destroying annoying people and places.  The idea was to untangle all the threads, examine them individually, see the ways in which each was unique and relevant to healing, then weave them together into something new — into a beautiful tapestry instead of a useless, tangled mess.

A:  How very un-Roman of you.

J:  It was also un-Jewish.  And un-Greek.  And un-Egyptian.  So I got in everyone’s face with my theories.

A:  I’d like to go back to the point you raised about God’s loving all people equally.  How did you get to this place of understanding?  And how did it affect your ministry?

J:  I came to understand the meaning of God’s love through my experiences as a mystic.  I didn’t set out to become a mystic, but it turned out that way.  My heart kept opening wider and wider to the experience of compassion for others, and I started noticing how much pain regular people were in — the women, the children, the slaves, the poor, the ill, the disadvantaged.   I couldn’t not care.  I couldn’t turn away from their hearts.  I decided I had to do something.  This was the “faith” part of my journey.

Once I claimed this knowledge fully, and made it part of the very fibre of my being, part of my core essence, I had the strong foundation I needed to reexamine and reappraise all questions about healing through the lens of my trust in God.  I had to take it one question at a time, but the important thing is that I was willing to ask hard questions.  I was willing to challenge cultural assumptions.  I was willing to accept the evidence of my own senses in place of somebody else’s words.

I’ve always found it bizarre that Christianity has insisted on calling me “the Word” incarnate when I was the person least likely to  rely on words or law or philosophical “truth.”  I believed in what the world of science and nature taught me.  I had little respect for words.  Hypocrisy had a way of appearing as a magic cloak of many words.

A:  Albert Einstein once said, “It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”  (I have this saying on my fridge.)

J:  Yes.  This relates to the brain’s function.  If you tell the brain that only Cause and Effect exist, it will only look for Cause and Effect.  If you tell the brain there is Divine Love which interacts in unpredictable and heart-stopping ways with Cause and Effect, the brain will be able to see what’s actually there.  It will be able to see the quantum events that are taking place all around life on Planet Earth.  It will be able to see miracles.

A:  The brain won’t reject the evidence that’s in front of it.

J:  Miracles are invisible — literally invisible — to the brain of a person who has staked everything on the Materialist view of Creation.  This includes devout Christians who uphold the teachings of Paul.  Paul was a Materialist who didn’t believe in the mystery and immensity of Divine Love — its curious blend of order with chaos, linear with non-linear, female with male, mind with heart, logic with passion.  Paul couldn’t see love.  So he also couldn’t see miracles.  Love and miracles go together like two peas in a pod.  You can’t have one without the other.

A:  Where love goes, miracles follow.

J:  As anyone who has ever known real love will tell you.

 

* Michael Wise, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook, trans., The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation (New York: HarperCollins–HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), p. 566.

** See the Book Review by Michael D. Swartz on page 70 of the Sept./Oct. 2010 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.  Swartz is reviewing an exhibition catalogue called Angels and Demons: Jewish Magic Through the Ages, edited by Filip Vukosavovic (Jerusalem: Bible Lands Museum, 2010).

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Posted in Cause & Effect, Divine Love, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jesus' teachings, Materialism, miracles, mystic, Realspiritik and tagged | Leave a Comment
03 Dec 2011

RS16: Angels in Blue Jeans

(c) Jamie MacDonald. Used with permission of the artist.

(c) Jamie MacDonald. Used with permission of the artist.

A: Some people who are reading this discussion might say it’s unfair of us to suddenly throw brain science onto the same page alongside spirituality, to insist your teachings 2,000 years ago were built around ideas that have only been proven by science in the past few decades. How would you respond to that?

J: Well, the thing about science is that scientific research always lags behind the human mind, the human imagination. Research only evolves because somebody somewhere has had a great idea and wants to push the idea out of the 4D realm of consciousness and into the 3D world of physical reality. So it doesn’t phase me at all to hear people grumbling about the brain science. The honest truth is that I was a pioneer in the deep interconnection between science and faith. Sure, my ideas were rough around the edges, as early theories usually are. But that was the focus of my ministry.

A: I can hear the scornful scoffing from here — the outrage from pious Christians.

J: Well, I wasn’t a Pauline Christian. Never have been, never will be. Nor was I a devout Jew. So pious Christians and pious Jews can be as angry as they like. It won’t change the fact that I tried to found a radically new religious movement based on the most loving values I could find, regardless of where I found them. I was equally happy to gather insights from folk medicine as from Greek philosophy. In fact, I found more truths about God in the medicine chests of Galilean peasants than I ever found in Plato or Aristotle. Philosophers who live their lives inside their heads instead of their hearts have rarely contributed anything of value to the betterment of human lives. If I had a time machine (which I don’t, of course) I’d go back in time and invite Plato to spend a month in the copper mines and then ask him if he’d like to revise his bloody Republic.

A: Just a month?

J: He probably wouldn’t have lasted more than a month. The mines were brutal places.

A: There’s nothing like walking a mile in a slave’s shoes to understand how unjust slavery is.

J: Yes. I never became a slave — not in legal terms — but I went from a life of great privilege to a life of great hardship, and it altered all my ideas of, well, of everything. I wouldn’t have been able to see the truth about the Divine Heart if a lot of very powerful people hadn’t kicked the crap out of me.

A: Tell me more about that.

J: I’d been raised on a lot of insufferable ideas about how “important” I was and how “special” I was. I got it with my morning olives, you could say. “Yeshua, remember who you are. Yeshua, behave according to your station. Yeshua, don’t talk to those . . . those . . . filthy peasants. Yeshua, remember who you are!”

A: So who were you?

J: I was a descendant of the High Priest Onias III. One of many descendants, I should add. He had a lot of fertile children. John the Baptist was also a descendant of his. So technically speaking, John and I were cousins, though so distantly related that it only mattered to fanatical devotees of genealogy.

A: Was anyone keeping track of these things by the time you were born? Did anyone care that your great-great-whatever-grandfather had been High Priest of the Jerusalem Temple?

J: Oh yes. It was a big deal. It carried a lot a cachet. It was like saying today, “I’m a descendant of Queen Victoria.” The children of Queen Victoria married into many of the royal houses of Europe, and her descendants are spread all over the place. My family — on my mother’s side — was kind of like that. Our bloodline was considered “sacred.”

A: Even though your father was Greek.

J: Even then. He was talented and ambitious and indispensable as far as the Romans were concerned. He had a real talent for math. He could do complex calculations in his head, and he had a wonderful eye for architectural design. His name isn’t remembered in the annals of Roman architectural history, but he built some pretty memorable streetscapes in the newly conquered lands of Syria and Palestine.

A: He added to the status and prestige of Augustus.

J: Yes. His acceptance among the Romans made him a good match for my mother as far as my Jewish grandfather was concerned. Strong political connections. But, strange as it may seem, my parents’ marriage was a love match. They loved each other deeply. After my father died, when I was about four and my oldest brother, James, was sixteen, my mother lived as a widow in mourning for the rest of her very long life.

A: She was a widow during the small window of time when Roman marriage laws gave a measure of independence to widows who had at least three living children.

J: Yes. Few people see the significance of the list of my family’s names that Mark includes in his gospel. Mark 6:3 says, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters [plural] here with us?” There’s no mention of my father. There’s no mention of a step-father, either. Mark is clearly telling his audience that Mary had full property rights as a widow under Roman marriage law. It means she was wealthy and well connected, because only wealthy people could afford to provide the physiological needs and safety needs required to raise such a large family, and only well connected women could side-step the economic and cultural pressure on them to marry again. It’s right there in Mark. Plain as day.

A: In an era when infant mortality rates were high and most adults didn’t make it to “middle age” as we define middle age, it was important to note your family’s size and health and economic situation. It told readers something about who you were.

J: I grew up in a family that had enough money and enough prestige to guarantee that I had good nutrition and shelter while I was growing up (i.e. provide for my physiological needs); to protect me from being abused by robbers or slave-holding masters or religious masters (i.e. provide for my safety needs); to provide me with a family setting where I felt loved and respected (i.e. meet my needs for love & belonging); and to insist that I receive a strong education in Greek and Jewish philosophy, law, rhetoric, and geometry (i.e. give me the tools to build my self-esteem).

I may have made a lot of mistakes in my youth, but because of my upbringing I had a healthy brain. This gave me a considerable biological advantage compared to many others in the first century culture I lived in. My healthy brain made it possible for me to learn from my mistakes and ask new, harder questions about our relationship with God the Mother and God the Father. My healthy brain made me tougher and smarter than most of my peers.

A: Because you were using all parts of your brain in a balanced way. A holistic way. Not a rigid, fearful way.

J: When human beings stop being afraid of learning from their own mistakes — when they’re willing to be humble — they can do amazing things in the world.

But first — and this is the big stumbling block for status-addicted pious folk — first they have to get over themselves. They have to let go of every shred of religious chosenness and religious purity and religious salvation. They have to be willing to look God right in the eye. That’s what humbleness is. That’s what true faith is.

A: I love the way young children look their parents right in the eye and tell the truth out loud. That’s the way it should be.

J: That’s the way it actually is for angels-in-angel-form.

A: This morning my angel team shared a fascinating dream with me. They were talking about their own observations on the difference between Pauline Christianity and the kind of faith you tried to teach.

In the dream, they compared Pauline Christianity — orthodox Western Christianity — to a store that insists we each buy a fancy, expensive tuxedo. According to the store, you need to have a tuxedo on hand for that one-time-only day when you come face to face with God. You might never wear it during your lifetime as a human being. But, by golly, you better spend the money to buy it NOW so you can lock it in your closet and keep it safe for “That Day” in the future when God comes calling.

Of course, the store gets your money today . . .

You, on the other hand, would look pretty great in a tuxedo, but I know you well, and you’re no tuxedo-in-the-closet kind of guy. You’re a blue jeans kind of guy. Put on your blue jeans and go out into the world TODAY to see where you can help God TODAY. No standing on ceremony. No false humility. Just a guy with a big heart who knows what’s important in life.

Thanks, big guy. Thanks for saying what you needed to say in the way you needed to say it. We need more of this kind of courage in the world.

And thanks to my angel team, too. Couldn’t do it without you.

 

Food for thought (added March 3, 2015): On February 27, 2015, the National Post offered an article and video about a Canadian man who is a descendant of Queen Victoria. Hermann Leiningen carries a title, but in every other way is a normal Canadian.  His story reminds me of Jesus’ story, right down to the excellent manners, quick mind, and good education.  Please see “The Canadian who would be king: What it’s like to be the great-great-great grandson of Queen Victoria.”

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Posted in brain-soul connection, Christ Zone, Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' teachings, Paul vs Jesus, Realspiritik, slavery, Whole Brain Thinking and tagged | Leave a Comment
21 Nov 2011

RS14: Balance As a Spiritual Practice

A: Last time you finished by saying there’s only one path to love and belonging, and that one path is balance. That sounds way too easy.

(c) Image*After

(c) Image*After

J: If it were easy, the vast majority of human beings would already be living lives that are full of love and belonging, but few people are. Living in the Christ Zone is a path that’s logical and clear and consistent regardless of race or gender or age, but it’s a lifelong challenge. It’s an everyday way of living, not a “one-off” experience. It’s something you have to keep working at your whole life.

A: There you go, using those annoying words like “life” and “living” again! Readers might start to get the idea that you’re promoting the radical idea of full engagement with life! Gosh, wouldn’t that be heresy? ;))

J: Orthodox Western Christianity has been preaching Escape for two thousand years. Gnostic Christianity and other forms of Gnosticism have been preaching Escape for even longer. I didn’t preach Escape. I preached compassion, forgiveness, and healing — all of which arise out of the practice of balance.

A: Hang on. You’re saying that living a life of balance is a form of spiritual practice. What Christians would call praxis?

J: You bet. And it’s the only form of spiritual practice that actually works.

A: That’s a bold statement.

J: Fortunately for me, I have science on my side. That’s more than the apophatic and anagogic mystics can say.

A: Okay. So can you try to explain why it works when other forms of spiritual practice don’t (according to you)?

J: It works because it flows with the grain of scientific law instead of against it. Traditional mystical practices have always flowed against the grain. Traditional mystical practices such as lengthy fasting, rigorous asceticism, intentional segregation from others, self-induced or drug-induced trances, sleep deprivation, celibacy, begging for alms, withdrawal into cloistered communities, and veneration of saints are all practices that damage one or more circuits of the biological brain.

It’s a straightforward task to draw up a list of traditional spiritual practices, such as fasting, and compare this list to the needs of the Christ Zone model. Right off the bat you can see that fasting is going to seriously interfere with a person’s physiological need for ongoing nutrition to fuel the brain. Chronic sleep deprivation makes mincemeat of the brain’s circuits. Celibacy causes damage on all fronts, and impairs the functioning of the immune system. Same with asceticism. Being forced to beg for alms is an affront to one’s dignity and sense of self worth (the soul would much rather be working for a living). Intentional segregation snuffs out all hope of building on your love and belonging needs to create full, mature, transformative relationships with others. Self-induced or drug-induced trance states — including those brought on by prolonged periods of prayer, meditation, chanting, scriptural study, recitation of the Psalms, praying the Rosary, and contemplation of icons — all force the brain to divert important resources to parts of the brain that are of little or no use to people in their everyday lives.

Those who devote their daily lives to these practices are not balanced. They can’t be. It’s impossible to be balanced if you don’t choose balance on a daily basis. Balance isn’t a magical gift from God. It’s a daily choice that requires you to use all your best attributes in combination with your God-given free will. It’s a daily choice that draws upon your soul’s great courage.

The most toxic spiritual practice of all — one that’s unfortunately all too common in major world religions — is the goal of eradicating the self so one can become an empty vessel. This is the dumbest, stupidest, most dangerous practice imaginable, and I can’t state strongly enough how much we, the angels, want it to stop. But people have got it in their heads (thanks to mystics and mystery schools) that the people who have detached themselves from their own core selves are somehow more saintly, more virtuous in their spiritual devotion than regular folk. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A: So what’s the end result of these traditional practices? People join a cloistered religious community to get closer to God and end up getting farther and farther away from God because of damage to their brains?

J: Couldn’t have said it more clearly.

 

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Posted in "Escape", anagogic mysticism, apophatic mysticism, Christ Zone, Church of today, free will, healing, humility, Jesus' teachings, life and death, Realspiritik and tagged , | Leave a Comment
08 Nov 2011

RS12: How the Christ Zone Is Unwelcome in the Church

A: I think there’s a danger in posting the Christ Zone model. I think there’s a danger that many Christians will glance at it and assume this model isn’t new and isn’t different. I want to be very clear, for the record, that this model has nothing in common with the traditional teachings of orthodox Western Christianity. Many devout Christians want to believe their religion has always taught people how to live a life of balance and humbleness and self-actualization. But the truth is, it hasn’t. If Christians want to heal the church of the third millennium, and help people of faith understand more fully how to be in relationship with God, they have to be honest about the psychological abuses perpetrated within the halls of Christendom over the centuries.

Fenced (c) JAT 2014

Fenced (c) JAT 2014

J: Living your life according to the Christ Zone model — or, as I called it, “entering the Kingdom of the Heavens” — appeals tremendously to anyone who cherishes values such as gender equality, egalitarianism, humbleness, self-respect, and service. It should go without saying that many religious folk have been taught by their religious leaders to be suspicious of gender equality, egalitarianism, humbleness, and self-respect (though service work is usually endorsed). So let’s be honest — most conservative religious leaders do not ever want to hear about the Christ Zone model. If they had their way, they’d bury it. Permanently. It flies in the face of everything they’ve been teaching.

A: This was true 2,000 years ago when you first introduced your Kingdom teachings.

J (nodding): Here’s the problem: individuals who live their lives according to the Christ Zone model do not and will not play the “Status Addiction Game.” They have too much common sense and too much faith in God to listen to religious bullshit about Chosen People and Salvation and Sin and Special Sacraments and Atonement and Judgment Day (that is, doctrines which feed status addiction). Their brains work really well — the way God intends — and they have no tolerance for cruel or unjust treatment of anyone. They see Creation as a beautiful and good place, a place to appreciate and learn more about. They see God as a person* with feelings who cares about all beings. They’re natural-born social democrats who scoff at ideas such as special royal bloodlines. They make very poor slaves.

A: You don’t have to put metal chains on people to enslave them.

J: No. In fact, the best chains are the invisible ones. The mental and emotional chains that come with indoctrination of regular people can serve a tyrant for a lifetime. Very useful as far as a psychopath is concerned.

A: This morning I was thinking about the early 6th-century Rule of Saint Benedict (see also Humility: Vice or Virtue?). I had to read the whole Rule for one of my church history courses. This helped me pinpoint the ways in which traditional Christian monastic practice has done everything in its power to prevent individuals from feeling what it’s like to live in the Christ Zone — to prevent people from living in relationship with God. Everything about Benedict’s Rule seems almost designed to obstruct a person’s chances of balancing the four main needs of the Christ Zone model.

J: Actually, your observation is accurate. It’s an intentional design. It’s a Rule for Living that’s intentionally designed to break an individual’s sense of self and force him (or her) to be a willing and obedient slave to his master’s authority — and by “master” I don’t mean God or Christ; I mean the abbot, bishop, or land-owning aristocracy. Benedict’s Rule has nothing to do with being in relationship with God, and everything to do with crushing the human spirit so it won’t rebel against injustice.

A: Well, that’s a pretty picture!

J: I don’t want to make it sound as if Benedict “invented” this system of control through religious teachings that beats humility and obedience into people’s heads. Far from it. This method of controlling potential troublemakers through psychological means has been around for at least 5,000 years. In my time, the Essenes were the Jewish group that “rediscovered” these teachings and embraced them. But the Essenes didn’t invent this method of control. Just as Paul, when he founded a new theistic religion based on a Saviour called Jesus Christ, didn’t invent this method. Just as Paul’s orthodox followers didn’t invent the “humility and obedience” paradigm. But it’s time for Christians to be honest about this gruesome intent among early orthodox Christians. It’s time for them to recognize that the orthodox Western church has never wanted regular people to imitate the kind of life I actually lived. God forbid that anyone should be allowed to think God likes them!

A: One of my theology classmates a few years back was a devout Roman Catholic. One day in a small group discussion he asserted (with tears in his eyes) that God doesn’t need us. Not any of us. Apparently, God only needs Jesus. This is what the Roman Catholic church has taught him. And he believes it.

I was horrified. Shocked to the core.

The worst part is that millions and millions of Christians would agree with him.

J: These teachings help destroy the ability of regular people in the Christian community to seek the path of wholeness and humbleness that I found during my ministry. My heart goes out to them in their suffering. The church is abusing them — spiritually abusing them — and they’re going to keep paying the price for this abuse until they decide to walk away from it.

The good news is that you can walk away from the church’s teachings without walking away from God.

God is always with you. Whether you like it or not!

* The English language doesn’t easily allow the use of plural verbs, pronouns, and adjectives when referring to God. But when I type the word “God” I’m always thinking of two people rather than one — God the Mother and God the Father working in love together for all we know and love in Creation.

 

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Posted in Christ Zone, Church of today, Essenes, humbleness, humility, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Realspiritik, relationship with God and tagged | Leave a Comment
02 Nov 2011

RS9: Jesus and the Occupy Wall Street Movement

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

A: I read recently on a Christian forum the assertion that if you were alive today, you’d be right in the thick of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. How do you respond to that?

J (sadly shaking his head): I’d say that anyone who believes I would willingly join the Occupy movement has no understanding of who I was or what I taught.

A: Many of today’s compassionate Christians feel some sympathy, some resonance with these anti-capitalist protests. The underlying message seems to fit in well with assorted attempts in Christianity’s history to renew and heal the church by simplifying church practices. Trying to root out corruption. Trying to make the church look more like your vision of church (as they imagine your vision to be). Francis of Assisi is a famous example of a well-to-do Christian who gave up all his worldly goods and chose a mendicant life of service. Francis believed with all his heart he was doing the right thing. He believed he was following your own example of how to live a spiritual life of charity and love and humility.

J: You know, the Occupy Movement reminds me a lot of the radical first century Jewish group called the Zealots. I wasn’t a Zealot (or proto-Zealot) then and I’m not a Zealot today.

A: The Zealots were very anti-Roman. They were one of several factions in the Jewish civil war that took place in the 60’s CE in Judea, Galilee, and Samaria. They burned down the city archives in Jerusalem to try to destroy all the tax records and debt records. They thought this would end the grave imbalance of wealth between rich and poor, and bring about a more egalitarian economic situation.

J (nodding): What starts out in the beginning as a group of people with legitimate social and economic and political concerns can quickly devolve into rigid sectarianism: “We’re right and they’re wrong.” Black and white issues. Black and white solutions. Things are rarely that simple. Once you start burning down buildings, even for “a good cause,” you’re on the slippery road to war.

A: A few years later, there wasn’t much left of Jerusalem. Not after the Romans sent their troops in.

J: Yes, but the Jews themselves had done a fine hatchet job on themselves before Vespasian (and later Titus) arrived on the scene with their legions.

A: Okay. I think most compassionate Christians would get the idea that you didn’t — and don’t — support the idea of burning down buildings as a way to bring about change. But the protestors in the Occupy Movement aren’t burning down any buildings. They’re occupying public land and protesting peacefully. So isn’t that a positive thing?

J: During the time they’re hanging around in parks and beside churches, talking to reporters and making lots of noise, are they hard at work producing goods and services and taxable income that will help strengthen their local economies?

A: Um. Maybe some of them are. There’s probably a black market economy at these sites already.

J: Do black market economies put tax money into the communal pot so roads and sewers and schools and public hospitals can be built for the benefit of everyone in the community?

A: Uh, well, no. The whole idea of a black market economy is to stay off the grid so you don’t have to pay taxes.

J: Right. So this terrible evil — capitalism — which ultimately pays for the roads and sewers and schools and public hospitals must be brought crashing down so that . . . what . . . so that no one in America can afford to build public schools?

A: I see your point.

J: The problem today isn’t Wall Street — not at the deepest level, anyway. The traders and bankers and investors whose foolish actions led to the initial financial crisis in 2008 aren’t dealing in money or capitalism. They think they are, but they’re not. They’re dealing in the one thing I attacked with all my strength: they’re dealing in status. These financiers and traders are status-addicted individuals trading in the only thing that matters to them — status points. Like all addicts, they think only of their next high. This is why they seem to have no empathy for the people whose lives they’ve destroyed with their business actions. They’re simply unable — at a physiological level — to place the needs of others ahead of their own need for an addictive high. It’s that simple.

A: That’s pretty scary.

J: Scary, but consistent with the facts. These individuals have demonstrated clearly and repeatedly through their own actions that they’re not able to self-regulate their own behaviours. They’re not able to act in ways that lead to the greater good because — bottom line — they’re not interested in the greater good. They’re interested in acquiring status, and they can only get it at somebody else’s expense. This means people have to get hurt. Average Joe has to be hurt so Mr. Banker can feel he’s smarter and stronger and faster and better than Average Joe. Mr. Banker gets his hit of status by making Average Joe miserable. It’s just part of the reality for those who are addicted to status as their drug of choice.

A: Dopamine response in the neural pathways devoted to pleasure? Same as with cocaine addiction? Status addicts get a high when they make somebody else suffer?

J: You bet.

A: Schadenfreude.

J: Schadenfreude — enjoying the suffering of another person — is one manifestation of status addiction. But it’s not the only one. Status addiction can manifest in a number of different ways. In its most extreme form, status addiction becomes synonymous with psychopathy. But, as with all addictive disorders, there’s a spectrum or continuum of dysfunction, with some people in the more manageable range of the disorder and others in the range of treatment resistance. Like any other disorder, status addiction can present with a variety of signs and symptoms. Each case has to be looked at on an individual basis. It’s one of the hardest things to sort out from a medical point of view.

A: Interesting that neither psychopathy nor status addiction is included in the DSM-IV — the bible of psychiatry.

J: There’s no inclination among researchers to examine the reality of status addiction. It’s the garden rock nobody wants to lift up. Once you lift it up, you’re going to find a whole lot of human creepy-crawlies hiding there you don’t want to deal with. Most of these creepy-crawlies have a vicious bite and a toxic sting.

It can be dangerous to confront an addict’s core addictions. Status addicts can react in violent ways — emotionally abusive and sometimes physically abusive ways — when they suspect their supply of status is about to dry up. I know this from firsthand experience.

A: On October 15, 2011, the Globe and Mail published a fascinating article by Ira Basen called “Economics has met the enemy, and it is economics.” It begins with mention of Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims, who were recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2011.

The article says, “. . . no one who’d followed Prof. Sargent’s long, distinguished career would have been fooled by his attempt at modesty. He’d won for his part in developing one of economists’ main models of cause and effect: How can we expect people to respond to changes in prices, for example, or interest rates? According to the laureates’ theories, they’ll do whatever’s most beneficial to them, and they’ll do it every time. They don’t need governments to instruct them; they figure it out for themselves. Economists call this the ‘rational expectations’ model . . . Rational-expectations theory, and its corollary, the efficient-market hypothesis, have been central to mainstream economics for more than 40 years. And while they may not have ‘wrecked the world,’ some critics argue these models have blinded economists to reality: Certain the universe was unfolding as it should, they failed both to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008 and to chart an effective path to recovery.”

J: The rational expectations model and the efficient-market hypothesis both start with the simple assumption that human beings are all fully functional in terms of their brain chemistry. In other words, there’s the assumption that all individuals will make decisions on the basis of logical principles. This in turn will lead to logical — and beneficial — outcomes for everyone (as the theory goes).

But addiction disorders don’t operate on logic. Neither do they operate on common sense or fairness or empathy. They have their own internal logic that makes sense to them at any particular time, but the logic of an addict is like quicksand. It’s always shifting. There’s no solid footing underneath. Decisions are made for the wrong reasons. And there’s no willingness to take responsibility for the terrible consequences of these decisions once they arise.

Even worse, a status addict can’t learn from his or her own mistakes. He or she can’t self-regulate these behaviours. At the worst possible time, when she’s under the greatest stress, she’ll feel a desperate need to acquire the high of fresh status points — whether through a crazy trade or an impossible-to-keep business promise or a pump-me-up session of “positive thinking” bullshit or the purchase of a new luxury car or twenty-five visits to Facebook that day. Such a person (despite university degrees and impressive credentials) is the one least likely to be able to think clearly and effectively during a financial crisis, since a key source of her status is under direct assault.

Of course, like anyone suffering from an addiction disorder, a status addict is responsible for his or her own choices, and is responsible for undertaking the choice to change. Denial of the problem is no excuse for the harm that’s been caused.

An addict needs help to overcome the addiction, of course — lots of responsible, mature, non-judgmental help. It takes courage to confront addiction. Courage and time and commitment. And God’s help.

It’s never too late to confront the problem of status addiction. This is what I taught 2,000 years ago. This is one of the reasons that forgiveness and healing figure so prominently in my teachings.

It’s pretty hard to overcome the suffering created by status addiction without forgiveness and healing to help keep you on the path of recovery.

Been there, done that. Can’t recommend it enough.

 

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Posted in Cause & Effect, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus' teachings, Materialism, psychopathy, Realspiritik, status addiction and tagged | Leave a Comment
18 Sep 2011

RS8: Timeless Courage and Kindness

A: Last Thursday (Sept. 15, 2011) my 87 year old dad had surgery at a publicly funded hospital in the Greater Toronto Area. It was a planned surgery — a knee replacement — but it was still a big deal for us. You worry when an 87 year old is having major surgery! Anyway, my mom and I got to sit for several hours in the surgical waiting room and watch all the people going about their day at this major teaching hospital.

As you’d expect there were people of all ages and all ethnicities. Different faces, different voices. But all focused on a common issue — the care and healing of sick people. I think my favourite moment came when a group of new student nurses went past with a supervisor. Ten or twelve young women, all different ethnicities, but all sporting long, shiny hair tied back in a ponytail. Black hair, blond hair, brown hair. United by fashion, I guess you could say.

Anyway, it was a positive environment. A real environment. Very grounded in our lives as human beings, human beings who need each other’s help. Coming so soon after the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it seemed like the right sort of answer to the question of why we suffer as human beings here on Planet Earth. We can’t stop change. But we can bring healing to those who are in pain in the aftermath of change.

J: Most days there’s more healing in the pinkie finger of a publicly funded hospital than in the entire body of orthodox Western Christianity.

A: The staff we met at the hospital were upbeat and positive about my dad’s procedure. They were starting with the assumption that if they did a good job on the surgery and he did a good job on the physio and follow up care, his quality of life would probably improve. I liked the fact that self-pity wasn’t encouraged or condoned. They expected my dad to be a full participant in the process of healing.

J: It’s an interesting scientific fact that people’s attitude toward their health and recovery plays a major role in the trajectory of their healing. In particular, anger and self-pity interfere with the healing process because these choices prompt the body to sustain high levels of stress hormones. Stress hormones such as cortisol can damage crucial areas of the brain. In other words, if you choose to hang onto your anger and self-pity, you can damage your own brain.

A: Canadian physician Gabor Mate has written a very readable book on the connection between stress and health — especially how too much stress is linked to illness. (Gabor Mate, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (Toronto: Vintage Canada-Random House, 2003)).

J: Though fans of Richard Dawkin’s “selfish gene” won’t like what I’m about to say here, there is intentionality on God’s part in the design of DNA on Planet Earth.* All human beings share the same basic DNA, so all human beings are affected by the problem of brain damage caused by stress hormones and other neurophysiological imbalances. As researchers are grudgingly beginning to recognize, the human brain — and thus the wider human community — works a lot better when people make the choice to love and heal and forgive and learn from past mistakes. The human brain also works better when men and women, boys and girls, pool their respective talents as part of a team of different-but-equal individuals. No person is an island.

No matter what pond you happen to be living in, we all look to the same God for love, forgiveness, healing, and guidance. Photo credit JAT 2017

A: Especially not religious leaders.

J: God doesn’t single out certain individuals to be “chosen” priests or ministers or religious leaders. Those who claim to be chosen by God must answer to their communities for the choices they make. They must answer for their claims that God would want to blow up certain buildings or that God would want to take revenge on certain people. Why would God, who love all their children equally, be in the business of choosing one group over another? The inner heart knows God doesn’t play favourites. It cannot be any other way.

A: In the summer I stumbled across a wonderful article in the Toronto Star about a village in Pakistan where, for decades, hatred and violence between Muslims and Hindus had become the norm. (Rick Westhead, “A life-saving gift: How a Pakistani village plagued by sectarian attacks was transformed by one Hindu man’s blood donation to a dying Muslim woman,” Toronto Star, Saturday, July 30, 2011, p. A3). As reporter Rick Westhead describes, a difficult life in a desert environment was filled with fear because certain people had decided it was okay to beat and rape and even kill their neighbours on the other side of the religious divide. This all changed “in a moment” when a young Muslim mother desperately needed a blood transfusion and the only willing donor was a Hindu man. As word spread of the man’s offer, a group of Muslim men, incensed that medical staff refused to provide separate facilities for Muslims and Hindus, led a charge on the medical clinic to try to kill the blood donor. The doctor intervened. He told the attackers the Muslim woman would die without the transfusion. The leader of the Muslim attackers suddenly had an epiphany. He saw how generous the Hindu donor was. He suddenly felt remorse for his own hatred, and the next day he apologized to the donor: “‘I don’t know what came over me,’ Latif says. ‘I remember thinking that here we were refusing to even shake hands with the Hindus and he was willing to give us his blood. It was a marvelous thing he did. It was the turning point of my life.'”

Today the village is a place transformed by kindness and empathy and mutual assistance — all because of the bravery and compassion of one Hindu man and one Muslim man who were willing to let go of a longstanding “tradition” of hatred. Plus the doctor who stepped in the middle and said what needed to be said.

This reminds me a lot of you when you were healing the poor and the excluded in the towns of Galilee.

J: This is the great truth about God’s children. No matter who you are or what your religion or what the colour of your skin, you’re a child of God. You’re capable of astonishing feats of compassion and courage. It’s who you really are. When you look at your neighbour, whether Muslim or Christian or Jewish or another religion, you need to look at them through God’s eyes. You need to see them as your brothers and sisters, as your family-of-the-soul. Because this is the way God looks at all people — as individuals who are equal but different.

A: I’d like to remind readers of the My Fellow American interfaith initiative that can be visited at http://myfellowamerican.us. When I was watching the 2-minute video yesterday, with its clips of ordinary Americans who happen to be Muslim, I kept thinking of the waiting room at the hospital. I kept thinking of all the people who were there because they share the same human capacity to care. We’re all the same when we’re trying to heal and trying to help others.

J: Two thousand years ago I wrote the parable of the Good Samaritan to talk about this timeless issue. I was once the man who was beaten up by the side of the road (quite literally), and through the kindness of strangers I discovered to my shock that people can actually choose to be the loving and forgiving children God knows us to be. I would never have found my faith and my trust in God without the help of these kind, humble strangers. The people who helped me weren’t famous. They had no status. They had no wealth of the earthly kind. But they had that most mysterious of treasures — the heavenly heart.

A: It’s extraordinary how one act of great kindness and courage can change the world, isn’t it?

* This statement isn’t meant to lend support to Creationists or the Book of Genesis. Far from it. Scientific evidence about the age of the universe and the age of Planet Earth must take precedence over “revealed” teachings from sacred texts.

For more thoughts on the My Fellow American project, please see http://jesusredux.blogspot.com/2011/07/my-fellow-american-interfaith.html

 

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Posted in Divine Love, healing, Jesus' original writings, Jesus' teachings, Mother and Father God, parables, Realspiritik, Soul, theodicy and tagged , | Leave a Comment
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
08 Jun 2011

JR48: Second Step in Healing the Church: Restore the Mystery of Divine Love

A: I was rearranging a couple of my bookshelves yesterday — actually, I was tidying up because my parents are coming over — and I felt drawn to set aside a book I picked up last fall in the remaindered book section at Chapters. It’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Christian Mysteries by Ron Benrey (New York: Alpha-Penguin, 2008). It’s not a bad little book. And it sure beats trying to wade through Jaroslav Pelikan’s massive 5 volume history of church doctrine.

Anyway, Benrey’s book is divided into 4 parts and a total of 24 chapters. Part 1 is called “The Christian Mindbenders.” The 6 mysteries included in Part I are “the mystery of the incarnation,” “the mystery of the trinity,” “the mystery of Jesus’ dual natures,” “the mystery of Jesus’ resurrection,” “the mystery of the atonement,” and “the mystery of the last things.” A few days ago, you said there’s not enough mystery in the church.* Yet Bender has filled a whole book with Christian mysteries of various sorts — most of which you’ve trashed in your discussions with me. So I’m wondering if we can return to the question of mystery in the church today. How do you envision the role of mystery in healing the church?

J: First, it’s important for church leaders to accept that people want and need mystery. If you strip away the mystery, all you really have is a secular service club devoted to charitable causes. That’s not faith. Faith and mystery go hand in hand.

Strange as it may sound, mystery is always associated with a sense of movement, beauty, grace, and transformation. Photo (c) Image*After

“Jesus said: Images are visible to people, but the love within them is hidden in the image of the Father’s love. He will be revealed but his image is hidden by his love” (Gospel of Thomas 83). Standard translations of this saying use the word “light” where I’ve used the word “love.” But for Jesus, Divine Love — rather than hidden knowledge — was the great light that shines upon us all. There was no word in Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic that adequately captured this concept of love, so he sometimes used the Greek word φως (phos) to try to capture the intensity and sense of life in God’s love. Strange as it may sound, mystery and love are always associated with a sense of movement, beauty, grace, and transformation. Photo credit Image*After.

A: Why?

J: Because faith — as opposed to piety or fear of God — is about relationship with God. And as soon as you start talking about relationships, you start entering the realm of mystery.

A: That feeling of awe about somebody else’s gifts and gaffes — their amazing courage, their brilliant insights, their hilarious mistakes.

J: Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is consciousness — what it means to be a person. This mystery extends to the origins of our divine Mother and Father. God the Mother and God the Father are distinct consciousnesses — two distinct people — with vastly different talents and abilities, yet they share their journey together in the deepest love and trust and gratitude. What they create together is so much bigger than what either could create alone. There’s an immense sense of wonder on the part of all angels at the richness and kindness and patience that’s infused in everything our Mother and Father create together. The creations themselves are cause for much appreciation and emulation. But it’s not the creations themselves (stars, moons, planets) that convey to us — their angelic children — the deepest sense of divine mystery. It’s the love itself. The deepest mystery — the startling mystery, the core mystery, the infinite puzzle — is the mystery of divine love. And this is a mystery based on relationship.

A: Some Christian theologians like to talk about the “scandal of particularity.” In Christian terms, it’s related to the doctrine of the incarnation — the idea that God entered one particular, limited existence. Namely you. It’s interesting that what you’re describing as the mystery of divine love sounds nothing like the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, yet it sounds an awful lot like the scandal of particularity — though not at first. You have to ponder the feeling for a while to notice the connection . . . which reminds me that I’ve noticed over the years that some of the doctrines Christians cling to so desperately contain an echo or a hint of something true. The doctrines have become all twisted around and knotted so we can’t see the original truth anymore. But at the same time we don’t want to let them go because we sense there’s something important there.

J: You’ve really nailed that. There IS a “scandal of particularity,” but it applies to God the Mother and God the Father, not to me.

A: I’ve been hanging around with you for too long.

J: The same thing applies to the idea of the Christ archetype. I was not — and am not –THE Christ. The original Christ archetype is held by God the Mother and God the Father TOGETHER. I seek to emulate their courage, their love, their devotion as an angel, as a child of God, and in so far as I choose to emulate their example, I am a “small-c” christ. But when angels think of Christ, we think of our divine parents. We think of God. It’s a term of affection. And gratitude. It’s a positive epithet. But Paul and his successors took this term of affection and turned it into a word that means power and control and hierarchy. They mutated and subverted the meaning of everything that God the Mother and God the Father stand for together as the Christ.

Sure, there really is a Christ. And sure, regular Christians don’t want to let go of the idea that there’s a Christ. But they’re pinning the tail on the wrong donkey. I’m not the Christ. I’m a child of Christ — as, indeed, are all souls in Creation.

A: When we started talking about the “scandal of particularity” a few minutes ago, I got my butt off my chair and retrieved another book — this one called Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes, edited by Serene Jones and Paul Lakeland (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). In it there’s an article called “God With Us in the Dust” by Karen Baker-Fletcher (pages 188-190). Baker-Fletcher says this:

“What, then, is the difference between Jesus and other humans? It is not that we are like Jesus in the suffering we humans endure. It is the other way around; Jesus is like us, relates to us, identifies with us, having experienced the violent consequences of human sin. Jesus is like us because Jesus has been sinned against. He therefore can identify with human suffering. Jesus is like us because Jesus also feasts and rejoices with us. But we are not Christs [emphasis added]. Jesus does not sin but is sinned against. Jesus is unlike us because he is the Christ, the anointed one, one with God. God alone in Christ can promise restoration, redemption, salvation. As human beings we may participate in this activity, but we do not initiate it (page 189).”

How do you respond to these thoughts?

J: Well, she’s managed rather neatly to allude to the Christian mysteries of the incarnation, the trinity, Jesus’ dual natures, Jesus’ resurrection, the atonement, and the last things all in one paragraph. She gets points for brevity. But she gets no points for understanding my ministry or my true relationship with God.

A: You’ve said in the past that all human beings have the potential to live as Christs-in-human-form.

J: Yes. It’s a question of living your human life in imitation of Christ — not as Paul taught the Christ, but as I and others have taught the Christ. Since I am not the Christ, there’s no point living your life in imitation of me. On the other hand, since God the Mother and God the Father ARE the Christ, it’s a pretty good bet that if you live your life in imitation of their love — their courage, their devotion, their gratitude, their trust — you’re going to be “in the zone.”

A: In the Christ Zone, as you’ve called it before.

J: Yes. I’ve called it the Christ Zone for a modern audience but 2,000 years ago I called it . . .

A: The Kingdom of the Heavens.

J: Same thing, different name. It’s not the name that matters, after all. It’s the intent. Paul’s intent — his choice of ground on which to sow the seeds of human potential — was barren and rocky because he didn’t actually want people to understand their potential to initiate the activities of healing, forgiveness, and redemption. He wanted them to feel helpless and hopeless about themselves so they would turn first and foremost to church leaders (such as himself) for authority and guidance.

A: And you?

J: I wanted people to feel helpful and hopeful about themselves so they would turn to God the Mother and God the Father for direct guidance.

A: How very Protestant of you.

* Please see First Step in Healing the Church: Rescue the Soul.

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Posted in Christ archetype, Christ Zone, Church of today, consciousness, Divine Love, faith, intent, Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Mother and Father God, mystery, Paul vs Jesus, Paul's teachings, relationship with God, Soul and tagged , | Leave a Comment
24 May 2011

JR43: The Case for "Mark Versus Paul"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concerns of Form:

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

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

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

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

Theological and Social Concerns:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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21 May 2011

JR41: City on the Hill: Saying 32 in Thomas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A: Yet the pain always expresses itself somehow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A: A lesson it took me years to understand.

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

A: Why?

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

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

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

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

J: Damn straight.

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

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Posted in anagogic mysticism, Davies (Stevan), dissociation, Gospel of Thomas, healing, Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, spiritual ascent, status addiction, theodicy and tagged | Leave a Comment
06 Mar 2011

JR18: The "Trilemma"

A: This morning it seemed like a good idea for me to post part of the cognate paper I wrote for my Master’s degree. I’ve included the abstract, the information from the Schematic Model that underlies my argument, and an introduction to the argument itself. This paper has not been published, but, like all original writing, is covered by copyright laws.

This research paper was the product of years of combined academic and mystical research. I got a lot of help from Jesus (though I couldn’t put that in the bibliography!), and I got little help from my supervising professor, who was somewhat bewildered by the paper. The paper was read and marked by a second professor — P.H., a theologian of Pentecostal stripe — who hated the paper and who, strangely enough, accused me of wasting 20 pages in the middle on “nothing” and then in the next breath accused me of not backing up my stated theory about Jesus’ teachings. She literally could not see, with her fundamentalist background, that the “wasted pages” constituted an analysis of radical claims about Jesus made by the author of the Gospel of Mark. People see what they want to see, even in academia.

July 18, 2012:  Today I posted the research paper in its entirety.  You can access it on the “Doctrines of the Soul” page I’ve added to this site.  Enjoy!

ABSTRACT:

This paper compares different theological claims that were made about the soul in Hellenistic philosophy, Second Temple Judaism, and early Christianity, and shows through the use of a new theoretical model that these claims cannot be grouped by religion. Doctrinal claims about the soul can instead be grouped into one of three main fields of theological inquiry: the physis versus nomos debate; the nomos versus the Divine debate; or the physis versus the Divine debate. These three debates have operated in parallel within Christianity since its inception. The Gospel of Mark provides evidence that Jesus’ own teachings on the soul may have been part of a novel solution to the physis-Divine debate. By contrast, Tertullian’s detailed doctrine of the soul, presented in The Soul’s Testimony and A Treatise on the Soul, draws on the traditions of the nomos-Divine debate, and yields very different claims than those presented in Mark. Tertullian’s doctrine of the soul, and his related doctrine of original sin, have exerted great influence on the orthodox Christian understanding of the soul. The church today has the option of reexamining the history of early Christian soul doctrines and assessing the three parallel strands of thought to uncover a previously overlooked biblically-based understanding of the soul that can meet today’s pastoral needs.

 

Schematic Model for the Theological “Trilemma”:

(c) Jennifer Thomas 2010

(c) Jennifer Thomas 2010

1. The Rift Between PHYSIS and NOMOS   The Problem: How can we reconcile the necessities of nature with the themes of justice and judgment derived from human laws?  The Solution: Elevation of human authority and human status (arete). IN TENSION WITH 2 AND 3.

2. The Rift Between NOMOS and the DIVINE   The Problem: How can we reconcile the themes of justice and judgment derived from human laws with the puzzling long-term relationship we have with God?  The Solution: Elevation of prophetic authority, and lack of accountability to the necessities of nature.  IN TENSION WITH 1 AND 3.

3. The Rift Between PHYSIS and the DIVINE  The Problem: How can we reconcile the necessities of nature with the puzzling long-term relationship we have with God? The Solution: Elevation of secret knowledge, mysticism, and cult rituals. IN TENSION WITH 1 AND 2.

The model I propose is shown in diagrammatic format in figure 1, Schematic Model for the Theological “Trilemma.” This figure is elaborated on in tables 1, 2, and 3. Although a much longer paper would be needed to examine this model in detail, in the current paper I will use this model to examine three major streams of theological thought that have all, in their own way, used doctrines of the soul to resolve issues of religious and political authority. By placing the different doctrines of the soul mentioned above into this framework, it is easier to see in what way Tertullian’s theology differs markedly from that of Jesus in the Synoptics. The contrast between these two demonstrates clearly that doctrines of the soul do not line up neatly according to the respective religious tradition from which each emerged. In other words, there is not a soul doctrine that is unique to Judaism, a different soul doctrine that is unique to Hellenism, and a third one found only in Christianity. Instead, a distinctive three-fold pattern exists, a pattern that is shared among Judaism, Greek religion/ philosophy, and early Christianity, and this three-fold pattern is the basis of the model I am proposing. This three-fold pattern, or “trilemma” as I have chosen to call it, partly explains the “why” of fierce theological debate. It also helps explain why we are so confused today about the nature of the soul.

The pattern I am proposing as a theological framework to help us analyse our current confusion arose in response to observations made by Walter Burkert in his book Greek Religion. Towards the end of this important book, Burkert discusses the religious and philosophical crisis that erupted in the fifth century BCE when sophists and atheists undermined Greek religious certainty with their observations about nomos and physis:

Nomos, meaning both custom and law, becomes a central concept of sophistic thought. Laws are made by men and can be altered arbitrarily. And what is tradition if not the sum of such ordinances? Horizons are extended through travel and the reports of travel: with growing interest men became aware of foreign peoples among whom everything is different, witness the ethnographic digressions of Herodotus. In this way the unquestioned assumptions of custom can easily be shaken. The discovery of the changeability of custom becomes particularly dangerous when nomos is set in opposition to physis, a concept provided by the philosophy of nature where it is used to denote the growing of the cosmos and of all things contained in it from their own laws. Archelaos, a pupil of Anaxagoras, is supposed to have been the first to formulate this antithesis about 440 BC: the just and the unjust, the ugly and the beautiful are not defined by physis but by nomos, by arbitrarily changing human convention.

But it was on tradition, nomos, that religion primarily rested, as the Greeks knew well. Its foundations were seen to be threatened, at least in theory, as a result of the questioning of nomos.[1]

Burkert then goes on to outline how pre-Socratic thinkers such as Heraclitus, Empedocles, Sophocles, and Diogenes of Apollonia “delivered” the pious from this crisis of uncertainty by asserting that “[t]here are laws of eusebeia which are rooted in heaven, removed from human caprice, and eternal like the cosmos itself.”[2] Thus, concludes Burkert, “nature speculation provides a starting-point from which to close the rift between physis and nomos, and so to give a new, unshakeable foundation for piety.”[3]

“The rift between physis and nomos” is a phrase so powerful, so meaningful, that it seems almost paradigmatic, and Burkert’s recognition of the pattern opened the door to a pursuit by this author of other such paradigmatic rifts. This line of enquiry led to the observation that there seem to be two other major rifts: the rift between nomos and the Divine, and the rift between physis and the Divine. Each of these rifts is not a simple duality but rather a complex philosophical/theological tension that encompasses perennial questions about what it means to be human, and what it means to be a human in relationship with God.

The three-fold pattern I suggest here can be represented by the triangle shown in figure 1. Each point of the triangle represents one of the three rifts. Although other writers have proposed three-point triangles to highlight both doctrinal and scholarly incongruities[4], what distinguishes the “trilemma” from other three-point models is the fact that each point in the proposed triangular scheme represents not a single concept but a complex tension between two difficult-to-reconcile concepts that seem to be separated by a rift. Each of these rifts, on its own, represents a valid question. For instance, it is perfectly valid for religious seekers to ask in what way human laws and traditions should (or could) align with the laws of nature (nomos in tension with physis; table 1); or in what way religious laws are (or could be) made in the image of our relationship with God (nomos in tension with the Divine; table 2)[5]; or in what way the actual laws of nature reflect our relationship with a God who allows death and suffering (physis in tension with the Divine; table 3). These are all straightforward and important themes of theology. What is not straightforward is the way in which the answers to these questions gradually resulted in three divergent theological solutions, as shown on tables 1, 2, and 3. Each of these three theological solutions presents a different view of who God is, and how we can be in relationship with God. These solutions are mutually incompatible. For instance, if you “cut and paste” the three different versions of how God is perceived in these three different solutions (that is, if you try to put them all together on one point in the centre of the triangle), you arrive at a God who is simultaneously distant and transcendent, fully immanent, unchanging, emotionally detached, interventionist, emotionally involved, in conditional relationship with us, in unconditional relationship with us, and proleptically in relationship with us. This simply cannot be, unless one resorts to the time-honoured tradition of explaining away overt contradictions as mysterion.[6]

What emerges upon examination of the “trilemma” is the extent to which these three theological solutions are mutually incompatible. The questions that underlie the three points are not incompatible; but the solutions that have arisen and been accepted as dogma over many centuries are very much incompatible. A person who attempts to hold all three solutions together as a unified whole is likely to end up confused at the very least. Yet for centuries Christians have been trying to do this very thing. Before that, the people of Judah/Israel and the people of classical Greece wrestled with the same confusion. This is not a new problem. But until we recognize it as a reality that is causing us problems, and until we look for new ways to de-complicate our Protestant theology, we will continue to be confused about our relationship with God.

This same confusion manifests in our current understanding of the soul, which, as I will show in the next two chapters, presents a theological solution based on only one point of the trilemma – the nomos-Divine rift – while using a confusing blend of vocabulary that seems to point to the other two points as well. Thus we will see the emergence of a soul doctrine that means one thing while ostensibly saying another. The intent of this soul doctrine is to entrench the inviolability of divine contract laws (the nomos-Divine rift), but it refers often to the language of free will (physis–nomos rift) and of mystery (physis-Divine rift). In this context, it is little wonder that today’s church is so reticent about the soul – at present, the orthodox understanding of the soul makes no sense!

 

[1] Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (1977; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 312-313.

[2] Ibid., 318.

[3] Ibid.

[4]Dr. W. M. pointed out to his Winter 2009 class the triangular models of Mattitiahu Tsevat and James Barr respectively. Tsevat’s model shows the doctrinal dilemma of the Book of Job, which can be summarized as “just Creator, just persons, just rewards: pick two.” Mattitiahu Tsevat, “The Meaning of the Book of Job,” Hebrew Union College Annual 37 (1966), 73-106. James Barr presents a threefold process for studying the Bible – referential, intentional, and poetic – in The Bible in the Modern World (London: S.C.M. Press, 1973), 61. James Rives, however, comes closest to the model I’m suggesting when he describes the three kinds of advantage offered by religion in the Greco-Roman period: (1) traditional benefits, (2) intensification, and (3) salvation. James. B. Rives, Religion in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 168-179.

[5]As the entry on nomos in the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology points out, “[t]he legal, ethical and religious meanings of nomos are inseparable in antiquity, for all goods were believed to come from the gods, who upheld order in the universe and in relations between men . . . . Philosophy (even that of the Sophists), kept alive the awareness that, since human laws are so fallible, man cannot exist unless he conforms to cosmic, universal law . . . . Whereas the Sophists criticized the idea of absolute validity attaching to nomos, Plato and Aristotle each in his own way connected it with the nous, the human spirit, and thereby once again with the divine.” Hans-Helmut Esser, “Law, Custom, Elements,” in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, vol. 2, rev. ed., ed. Colin Brown (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1986),439.

[6]Although I am a practising mystic, I would not want to fall back on the excuse of mysterion to try to force these different images onto a single page. Mystery as a concept can be dangerous when used as a catchall to smooth over doctrinal inconveniences or to uphold church authority at the expense of the oppressed. The church needs mystery – but it does not need the kind that has been used to justify longstanding abuses in the church towards women and the disadvantaged.

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Posted in Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, Law (Nomos), Mark vs Paul, Original Sin, orthodox teachings about the soul, Paul vs Jesus and tagged | Leave a Comment
21 Feb 2011

JR13: Jesus Speaking on Prayer

A: This morning I was tidying up some papers and I came across an insert from the worship bulletin of a small local church. This particular church is a “one of a kind” group that’s blending ideas from Unitarianism, the United Church of Canada, Gnosticism, and maybe some Eastern ideas filtered through a New Age lens. I notice that I circled the group prayer and wrote in the margin, “How Not to Pray.” I wondered if you could go through the prayer with me and explain — from your angelic perspective — why this kind of prayer isn’t helpful.

J: Sure. Can you type the prayer here for reference?

A: Typing fingers coming right up. Okay. It says on this insert that the prayer is called the “Prayer of Transfiguration,” adapted from the Prayer of Abandonment by Charles de Foucauld. Here’s the text:

I abandon myself to the Light; Let it transform my life. Whatever it does, I am open; I am present to all, I accept all. Let the Divine will be done in me. And in all creation — I wish no more than this. Into the hands of Life I commend my spirit; I offer it with all the love of my heart. For I am Light, And so need to give my self, To surrender my self into Life’s hands without reserve, And with boundless confidence and gratitude, For we are all called — to Live in the Light!

A: I think a lot of people would find this prayer quite lovely, quite meaningful. However, I happen to know from personal experience that you don’t encourage people to pray this kind of prayer. Can you explain your thoughts, your reasoning?

J: Prayer is a messy topic. People of faith have a tendency to claim that all prayer is good, all prayer is helpful. But it’s not. From the point of view of angels — the angels who are tasked with looking after the human beings who live on Planet Earth — all prayer is not created equal. There are what I might call genuine prayers — the ones spoken with the soul’s own loving intent. There are also pseudo-prayers — words strung together with unkind intent and directed at God. Pseudo-prayers predominate, unfortunately.

A: Let’s talk more about the pseudo-prayers. Can you be more specific about the “unkind intent” you’re referring to?

J: When people try to speak with God, communicate with God through prayer, the words they speak are of little interest to God or to God’s angels. There are meaningful prayers that consist of only one word or one sound. The actual words are not that important.

A: Mantras. When you speak of prayers that contain only one sound, you’re talking about mantras.

J: Mantras work for some people. Not for everyone. But for some people. Mantras should not be recommended for everyone on a spiritual path.

A: Why not?

J: Because everyone’s soul is different. Therefore everyone’s learning style is different. And everyone’s communication style is different. There is no single form of communication with God that can recommended for all people. Each person has to find his or her own best path.

A: I’m not a mantra person. I’m definitely a word person. I have to talk with God in words.

A utility shed made into a charming gift that lifts the soul and brings a smile to your day. A great way to pray is to simply say, “Thank you for lifting me up in this moment. I really needed that. Thank you for guiding me to this!” New Brunswick Botanical Gardens. Photo credit JAT 2022.

J: I’m also a word person. It works for me, but it doesn’t work for everyone. Here’s one area where people definitely shouldn’t try to do what Jesus does. They should try to find their own best form of communication with God. There are many nuanced forms of conversing with your Divine Parents. Some people need to go outside and sit quietly in the sun. Some need to be actively engaged in the outdoor world of nature — maybe through hiking, camping, sailing, canoeing. Gardening is another big one. Some people can’t hear God unless the music is on really, really loud. Some people can’t hear God unless the room is very, very quiet. There’s no one correct way. They’re all equally valid, equally beautiful ways as far as God is concerned. God always meets you where your soul longs to be. So if your soul is the kind of soul that hears God when it’s very, very quiet, that’s when God will be speaking with you. God respects who you are as a soul. Therefore, God won’t try to “force” you to listen at a time that’s not good for you. God is nothing if not respectful.

A: None of the spiritual practices you just mentioned sound like traditional religious prayer. Why not?

J: As I was mentioning, it’s not the words that God listens to. It’s the intent. God pays no attention to rote prayer, to be honest. It’s just a waste of everybody’s time. Rote prayer isn’t about communication or relationship. Rote prayer is just a habit — a habit like making your bed every day or putting the toilet paper roll on the same way every time. It’s something you do because it helps you cope with daily stress. Or maybe it’s something you do so you won’t be punished by an authority figure who expects you to pray. But it’s not relationship between you and God. You can’t expect to recite the Lord’s Prayer every day and have it mean anything or do anything. The Lord’s Prayer has no special power in Creation, despite what many orthodox Christians would like to believe.

A: Define what you mean by “unkind intent.” Can you give specific examples of that?

J: Sure. Prayer directed at getting somebody cursed by God. Prayer directed at getting special favours for yourself at the expense of those around you. Prayer directed at cursing yourself for your own unworthiness before God. Prayer directed at getting healing for somebody else. Prayer directed at getting somebody’s soul saved. Prayer directed at getting somebody’s loved ones released from purgatory or hell. Prayer directed at being chosen to be among God’s elect. Prayer directed to saints. Prayer directed to holy relics. Prayer directed at getting somebody blessed by God.

A: So . . . pretty much all the most popular orthodox Western Christian prayers.

J: Yup. God doesn’t curse people. God doesn’t favour you over your neighbour. God doesn’t accept your self-pity, because God knows your true potential. God heals with or without anybody’s prayers, but it’s up to God to decide the right time and the right place. God hasn’t lost any souls, so God doesn’t need to save any souls. There is no purgatory and there is no hell, so God doesn’t need help freeing anyone. God doesn’t have any chosen children and there is no group of elect souls. All souls are created equal, so there is no hierarchy of saints or angels to intervene on anybody’s behalf. Praying to holy relics is occult magic, and it hurts your brain, so don’t do it. All of God’s children are equally blessed.

A: You don’t give an inch to tradition, do you? Not one tiny inch.

J: No. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and others didn’t go nearly far enough with their “protesting” reformation of Western Christianity. The work of reforming the church to reflect the core values of God the Mother and God the Father still remains to be done.

A: A make-work project for the church of the third millennium. Okay. I’d like to return to the original question about the “Prayer of Transfiguration” above. What about this prayer feels “out of synch” to you, if I can use that expression?

J: It feels out of synch with the values of the soul because of the underlying assumptions implicit in the prayer. To begin with, I take issue with the imagery of “light.”

A: Why? Haven’t spiritual seekers long equated good spiritual choices with “light”?

J: My point exactly. Nobody’s questioning the metaphor. People say, “Oh, the light, the light, we’re getting closer to the truth! Hurray! We’re making progress!” But if people are moving towards the light, what are they moving away from?

A: The darkness.

“Jesus said to them: If you fast you will bring sin to yourselves, and if you pray you will be condemned, and if you give to charity you will damage your spirits. When you go into a region and walk around in the rural areas, whenever people receive you, eat whatever they provide for you, and heal their sick. For what goes into your mouth will not defile you, but what comes out of your mouth can defile you” (Gospel of Thomas 14 a-c). In other words, if you want to have a strong faith relationship with God, you have to give up the idea that God enjoys your displays of power, rote piety, religious ritual, and subjugation of others. Use your skills instead to help others find their own courage, faith, and humbleness. Photo shows a scarab commemorating Kushite victory over inhabitants of the Negev desert, carved from steatite, 25th Dynasty, c. 710 BCE. (On display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017.)

 J: Exactly. It’s an immature, dualistic claim. Good versus evil. Light versus dark. It’s so ingrained in people’s minds that they don’t even question the metaphor any longer. But let me ask you — what’s so bad about the dark? Is the night sky to be feared? Is the darkness of the ocean bottom to be despised? Why is light good and darkness bad? Why does “white” mean pure in Western culture, and “black” mean corrupt or evil? God’s Creation isn’t about good versus evil and light versus dark. Creation isn’t dualistic. So why have people recite a prayer that reinforces sloppy dualistic thinking? The human brain — the biological 3D brain — is kind of stupid at times, and it needs good guidance. It needs to be constantly reminded not to fall into overly simplistic thinking, which leads to overly simplistic “solutions.” A solid prayer of the genuine kind is a prayer that challenges people to acknowledge and respect the complexity of God’s Creation. A solid prayer does not speak of abandonment and surrender without first acknowledging the difficulty of this spiritual task (and spiritual task it is!). A solid prayer reminds people that they have an important role to play in Creation, even if they don’t fully understand that role. A solid prayer speaks of balance — both the difficulty of finding it and the difficulty of maintaining it. A solid prayer never speaks of people as empty vessels to be filled by pure Divine will. To speak of empty vessels negates the integrity of the soul. A solid prayer helps people remain humble yet at the same time courageous. The prayer typed above is a prayer of humility, not a prayer of humbleness. And you know what I think of false humility!

A: Yessiree. Do I ever! Any final words of advice for readers who want to be able to communicate clearly with God?

J: Yes. Don’t ever put yourself down while you’re engaged in prayer. Don’t ever say you’re unworthy of God’s love and forgiveness. Be honest about mistakes you’ve made, but ask God to help you learn from your mistakes. Be brave. Don’t whine. Remember you’re a child of God. And I mean that in every possible way. You’re a child of God, and nobody can take that away from you. That’s a pretty good starting point for finding the courage to make gradual changes in your life.

A: And yes, folks! You’re not listening to anything I haven’t had to listen to a thousand times myself. And yes! Angels really do talk this way. (Don’t you feel sorry for me?) And yes! Sometimes you just want to scream because your angels are so tough and so determined to help you make positive changes, and they’re so annoyingly dedicated to helping you be your best self! And guess what? YOU CAN’T MAKE THEM GO AWAY NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY. They stick to you like Velcro. SO IF YOU CAN’T LICK ‘EM, YOU MAY AS WELL JOIN ‘EM. That’s my humble opinion, anyway.

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Posted in angels (i.e. persons-of-soul), Church of today, dualism, humbleness, humility, intent, Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, prayer, relationship with God, Soul, spiritual practices and tagged | Leave a Comment
17 Feb 2011

JR11: More on John the Baptist

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

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

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

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

A: You thought he had insight.

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

A: I learned that one the hard way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J: And maybe John the Baptist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J: And many New Age gurus.

A: Yeah, that too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A: That’s so selfish!

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

A: You didn’t want it, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted in apocalyptic prophecy, dissociation, Essenes, Gnosticism, historical Jesus, Jesus Redux, Jesus' teachings, John the Baptist, Messiah, mysticism, occult themes, religion and mental Illness and tagged | Leave a Comment
23 Jan 2011

JR3: Some Family History of Jesus

“Jesus said: It is not possible for anyone to enter a strong man’s house and take it over forcefully unless he first ties his hands. Then he can steal from that house” (Gospel of Thomas 35). Photo of a side entrance of the Royal Conservatory of Music, Bloor Street, Toronto. Photo credit JAT 2017.

 A: On my Concinnate Christianity blog, I take aim at the Apostle Paul and try to show some of the ways that his teachings were very different from your own. I wonder if we can talk some more about that.

J: There’s a lot there to talk about.

A: One of the things that has surprised me most over the past few years is the shortage of people willing to examine the differences between you and Paul. Even serious biblical scholars — people like the scholars of the Jesus Seminar — have a blind spot around Paul. They seem to want to pretend that Paul was preaching the same core teachings as you. But it’s not that hard to draw up a list of the similarities and differences between First Corinthians and Mark. In fact, it’s one of the easier academic analyses I’ve tried in the past few years. The differences are blatant. I mean, scarily blatant. So I’ve gotta ask — what the heck has been going on? Why are so many Christians, even the ones who label themselves Progressive, so completely unwilling to be objective?

J: Brain chemistry.

A (rolling eyes): Why did I know you were going to say that?

J: It’s the brain chemistry. It’s the way most people have wired their brains — or have allowed their brains to be wired for them. Their biological brains are loaded with software packages about God and religion, and there’s a conflict between the existing software — provided in the beginning by Paul — and the “new” software I and other angels have been trying to reintroduce. Of course, it’s not really “new.” It was old when I was teaching it 2,000 years ago. But the Church tried very hard to eradicate it early on, and to keep eradicating it each time it sprang up again. So to today’s readers it seems “new.”

A: Can you give us an analogy that will make sense to today’s readers?

J: Yes. It’s like the difference between early Macs and PC’s. Groups were fighting over which platform was better. At that point PC’s couldn’t read Mac software. Mac software existed, and Mac software was useful and real, but PC’s couldn’t read it. So a lot of users missed out on good programs. The human brain can end up like that — wired so it can only read one kind of software, though others kinds of software do exist. For many Christians, their brains have become so used to the ideas of Pauline Christianity that they literally can’t “hear” any other ideas about God. Their brains can’t process the information. They’re literally the people who have ears but cannot hear. They’re not able to understand the “new” message at first because their brains aren’t used to hearing that kind of language.

A: What you describe sounds a lot like brainwashing. People conditioned to the point where they can hear only one kind of “truth.”

J: You could put it that way.

A: That’s scary.

J: Yes. But it’s not new. It’s a very old way to control a large group of people. You don’t have to put chains on everybody in your culture to get them to do what you want. A clever tyrant controls the mind — keeps the body free, but controls the mind. Nothing new there.

A: Except that 2,000 years ago your culture had real slavery — the kind where human beings were bought and sold and forced to do all sorts of things against their will.

J: The kind that continues in many parts of the world today.

A: Yes, that too.

J: One reason my great-nephew Matthew — the man you know as the author of the Gospel of Mark — went ballistic when he read what Paul was writing about “Jesus Christ” was Paul’s take on slavery. Paul never comes out and says that slavery is wrong. Instead Paul tries to preserve the status quo by persuading slaves to understand slavery as an illusion — something not worth fighting about because they have something more valuable than freedom: the higher “truth” of salvation.

A: Right. But can we back up the truck for a minute? I’d like to go back to that historical tidbit you just dropped in. The part about your great-nephew Matthew.

J: Matthew was the grandson of my brother Andrew. Andrew was the only one of my siblings who believed in my teachings.

A: And this Matthew who was your great-nephew . . . is this the same man who wrote the Gospel of Matthew?

J: No. The author of the Gospel of Matthew was not named Matthew. Just as the author of the Gospel of Mark was not named Mark.

A: Okay, well at least that part is known to scholars. But this is all very confusing. Is it okay with you if I keep calling the author of the Gospel of Mark, “Mark”? It’s much less confusing to call him Mark.

J: Sounds like a plan.

A: So you’re saying that your great-nephew wrote the Gospel of Mark.

J: Well, one of my great-nephews wrote the Gospel of Mark. I had a lot of great-nieces and great-nephews, but only the children and grandchildren of my brother Andrew carried on my teachings the way I taught them. More or less. The rest of my family didn’t like me very much.

A: You and I have talked about this a lot. But can you talk a bit today about why your family didn’t like you?

J: Basically because I was a shit-disturber. I disagreed with most of the values my family raised me to believe in, and I went on record to say my family and their social class were wrong about the way they were treating other people and God. I grew up in an aristocratic family where we held slaves and where we believed we were chosen by God. I said that was wrong. My family didn’t like it. I was embarrassing them.

A: The way a man from the state of Georgia, for instance, would have embarrassed his wealthy plantation owning family in the 19th century if he’d joined the Abolitionists.

J: Or if a son of the Kennedy clan had disavowed the Kennedy myth and run away to live in Canada in a small town where nobody cared that he was a Kennedy.

A: As Canada is to the U.S., so Galilee was to Judea.

J: As Port Hope is to Washington, so Capernaum was to Jerusalem.

A: So you picked Galilee on purpose because it was not a major centre of religious and political influence.

J: And because the people in Galilee had different priorities. They were interested in real healing, real teaching, and they had no use for arrogant priests or rabbis who had their heads stuck up their asses.

A: You always have such a way with words.

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Posted in First Corinthians, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Jerusalem Temple, Jesus Redux, Jesus' family of origin, Jesus' teachings, Mark (Jesus' great nephew), Mark vs Paul, Paul vs Jesus, slavery and tagged , | Leave a Comment
07 Dec 2010

CC49: Summing Up: Finding the Kingdom of God

Exeter Cathedral, England 3

Exeter Cathedral, England (c) JAT 1997

In wrapping up this blog, I’d like to talk about the 20th century spiritual teacher I most admire, a man whose writings greatly influenced my journey toward becoming a Concinnate Christian. That man is Dr. Viktor Frankl.

Many people on a spiritual path wouldn’t include Viktor Frankl among the great 20th century religious and spiritual leaders. Dr. Frankl, after all, was a psychiatrist, not a monk or a religious sage. He wrote books about Logotherapy and Existential Analysis, not lofty theological commentaries on the Bible. Yet this brilliant Austrian Jewish physician scholar, who endured the horrors of WWII Nazi concentration camps and went on to rebuild a life of integrity and compassion after the war, has more in common with the man who lived as Jesus of Nazareth than anyone else I’ve read.

Dr. Frankl’s well-known book Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy* is only 189 pages long, including the bibliography. Yet within the pages of this slim book he manages to evoke all the deepest aspects of the human experience. He asks the hardest questions possible about human suffering, and arrives at the astonishing conclusion that even in the midst of unutterable deprivation and torment, even in the face of terrible hunger and cold and illness and fear, human beings can still choose to love and forgive. Nothing can take this choice away from them. Nothing.

Dr. Frankl describes his redemption in this way: “A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved [spouse]. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way — an honorable way — in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.'” (page 48)

Further, despite his own deeply personal turmoil, Dr. Frankl retained his ability to objectively study and assess the psychological reactions of his fellow inmates in the camps:

“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

“And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become a plaything of circumstances, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.

“Seen from this point of view, the mental reactions of the inmates of a concentration camp must seem more to us than the mere expression of certain physical and sociological conditions. Even through conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone. Fundamentally, therefore, any can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him — mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.” (page 75)

Dr. Frankl’s fellow inmates taught him about courage — the courage “to say yes to life” in spite of pain, guilt, and death (page 139). He didn’t deny the reality of pain, guilt, and death, didn’t try to escape it (page 86). Instead he chose a different path — the path of helping others find purpose in their lives, of helping others find a way to turn suffering and guilt into accomplishment, change, and responsible action. He became a mentor to those who were searching for meaning, to those who needed help in reclaiming their free will to choose love. He also understood that each person’s journey is unique, that no two people will find meaning and insight in exactly the same way. Unlike so many others, he found faith in the true potential of God’s children.

I see so much in common between the teachings and methods of Viktor Frankl and those of Jesus son of Joseph! If you really want to understand who Jesus was and what he taught, please read Man’s Search for Meaning. Then read it again. And read it again. There is no clearer modern version of Jesus’ “Kingdom of God” teachings than Dr. Frankl’s book.

Thank you to the readers who have struggled along with me as I tried to put these thoughts on paper. Your support and encouragement have meant more to me than you realize.

I wish you many blessings on your own journey of love, healing, and redemption!

* Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. 3rd Ed. Translated by Ilse Lasch. New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 1984.

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, courage, faith, forgiveness, free will, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Paul vs Jesus, redemption, soul purpose, theodicy and tagged | Leave a Comment
05 Dec 2010

CC48: The Crucifixion and Resurrection

Today is Second Advent, so this seems like a good time to talk about miracles.

You’d think that, with all my talk about science and brain chemistry, I’d be the sort of person who would reject the reality of miracles. Because practical people who believe in science are sort of obligated to reject the reality of miracles. Aren’t they?

Sunset, October 2014 - I captured this dazzling ray effect close to my home when my angels unexpectedly told me to pick up my camera, get in the car, and go! (c) JAT 2014

Sunset, October 2014 – I captured this dazzling ray effect close to my home when my angels unexpectedly told me to pick up my camera, get in my car, and go! Photo credit JAT 2014.

Most United Church of Canada members seem to think so. They’re squeamish about the idea that the soul exists as a scientific reality. Same thing with miracles. Officially, they won’t talk about miracles. Off the record, some United Church members will confide they believe in unexplainable, God-given events. But when they talk about miracles, they speak awkwardly and self-consciously — the same way people react when they’re invited to sit at a formal dinner table where there are three different forks on the left and three different knives on the right, plus a whole bunch of spoons, and they don’t know which utensils they’re supposed to use first. So they spend most of their time trying to watch the other guests to see which fork they should use when. They’re so busy paying attention to their feelings of embarrassment and discomfort that they can’t enjoy themselves. The whole situation is stressful rather than enjoyable.

I’d like to be able to say that United Church members have gone on the defensive about miracles because of repeated attacks from atheistic scientists such as Richard Dawkins. But it’s not that simple. United Church members are on the defensive because they’ve been repeatedly bullied by “progressive” Christian theologians (e.g. Rudolf Bultmann) who have loudly proclaimed that the miracles performed by Jesus in the Gospels couldn’t possibly have happened.

In the view of Bultmann and others, no sensible Christian should believe in these miracles because to believe in miracles is to reject science. These theologians recommend that Christians read the miracle stories . . . symbolically. Symbolically — my favourite word (grrrr).

These same theologians call into question the reality of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. They insist we should understand the Resurrection metaphorically rather than literally. In their view, the Resurrection couldn’t possibly have happened for real. Naturally, this makes it easier to believe that Jesus himself wasn’t real, either, but instead was an invented religious symbol.

I think they’ve got it all backwards. They’ve started with the assumption that miracles aren’t scientifically possible (an assumption that’s not scientifically valid), and on the basis of this assumption they’ve concluded that the miracle stories (especially those in the Gospel of Mark) must have been invented by gullible, superstitious, scientifically uneducated 1st century authors who didn’t know any better. Or maybe by authors who were just following a popular ancient trend of inserting invented miracle stories into their biographical narratives. (The fact that today’s Christian televangelists are still inventing new miracle stories to dupe the public should remind us not to make blanket statements about the motives of all ancient writers.)

Queen’s University history professor Dr. Jaclyn Duffin, who is both a practising hematologist and a professor in the history of medicine (a modern day physician scholar, as it were), has recently published a book about the history of canonization and attested healing miracles in the Roman Catholic Church. She sums up medical miracles in this way: “The doctor is surprised.”

The doctor is surprised. The doctor is surprised that, on the basis of current scientific understandings of the disease process, the patient somehow manages to fully recover despite all scientific predictions of imminent death.

I would suggest that when the doctor is surprised, it can mean one of two things: (1) the doctor was wrong from the beginning about the diagnosis or (2) the doctor isn’t as smart as she thinks she is about the disease process, quantum biology, healing, and God.

Usually it’s the latter.

The Resurrection as described in the Gospel of Mark is very sparse on details. (I agree with biblical scholars who suggest the book originally ended at Mark 16:8, not at Mark 16:20). All we really know for sure is that Jesus was crucified, was declared dead, was taken down from the cross, hastily placed in a tomb, and somehow managed to disappear from said tomb. Mark’s account leaves a lot of scientific wiggle room for a doctor to be surprised.

It’s a powerful symbol, the cross that Jesus hung upon. (It’s okay for symbols such as crosses or a stars to be symbols; it’s just not okay for historical facts to be treated as symbols instead of as facts.) The story of the cross has something important to say to us, even today, because it’s still a story where the doctors are surprised and we, the regular people of faith, are filled with awe.

For me, the miracle in this story is not that a man died and was raised from the dead. (I don’t think that’s scientifically possible.) For me, the miracle is that the man didn’t die in the first place.

How did Jesus son of Joseph escape death on the cross? That is the miracle in question.

It’s a much bigger question than Paul’s Christ myth asks. Paul’s Christ myth asks you to believe with blind faith that a human man fully died but was fully returned to life after three days because he was divine — the chosen son of God. He furthers asks you to believe with blind faith that if you fully accept Paul’s teachings about Judgment Day, then you, too, will be resurrected on that day. Sin is the enemy and death is its consequence. The great question for Paul is, “How can I escape death?”

The Jesus reality (as told by Mark) asks a different question. The Jesus reality asks you to ask new questions about God. The Jesus reality tells a powerful story about the relationship between God and God’s children, and asks you to not rely on blind faith, but to use your own common sense, your own senses, and your heart.

The Jesus reality is a powerful story about the kinds of things that are possible in God’s Creation when human beings walk side by side and hand in hand with Mother Father God.

It’s a story about courage. And trust. And humbleness. It’s a story about God’s free will and our own. It’s a story about miraculous (though still scientific) healing. And it’s a story about grief.

One of the things we can be certain of when we read Mark is that Jesus is not trying to escape death. Jesus has no fear of dying. He tells his disciples he’s going to die, but then he gets on with his life of service as a teacher and healer. He ignores all the Jewish purity laws around disease and death. He puts himself in harm’s way by going to Jerusalem. His Last Supper is not a last supper but a first supper, where he rejects the Passover ritual of eating unleavened bread by choosing instead to drink water and to eat risen bread. He breaks all the laws designed to protect the pious from death. His message is not about escaping death. His message is about embracing courage and trust and gratitude and devotion in our relationships with each other and with God.

The Jesus reality is Mark’s way of saying that death is part of human life, and no one — not even a gifted physician scholar filled with learning and love — can fight this reality. Jesus had to die because he was a creature of Earth, and all creatures of Earth will one day die. It’s meant to be this way. It’s part of the fabric of Creation. It’s painful and emotionally overwhelming for us to lose someone we love, but it’s the way it has to be. Our lives here are only temporary. When it’s time for one of us to go Home to our eternal reality, God the Mother and God the Father (both of whom are brilliant scientists and brilliant healers), come and gently lift us out of our mortal body and tenderly carry us Home. There we’re reunited with our loved ones, and our hearts break open to pour out all the tears and sorrows of our lonely human lives so we can be healed and restored in God’s loving arms.

Yet, despite all this, we’re left with a mystery. Despite the reality of Jesus’ total trust in God, despite the reality of Jesus’ courage in the face of death, we’re left with the puzzling fact that God the Mother and God the Father in their wisdom decided that a man named Jesus of Nazareth would not die on the cross that day, but would, in fact, escape that terrible death, and live to tell the tale — for a short while, anyway, before he, too, surrendered his human life, as all of us one day must.

What is it that God was saying?

Thanks be to God the Mother and God the Father this Advent Sunday.

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Posted in "Escape", afterlife, atheism, Concinnate Christianity, Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, healing, healing miracles, historical Jesus, Jesus' teachings, life and death, miracles, Mother and Father God, resurrection and tagged | Leave a Comment
06 Oct 2010

CC36: No Room in the Inn . . . or on the Spiral Path

I was reminded again today how much the spiritual journey for human beings can be likened to a spiral path.

(c) Image*After

(c) Image*After

Well, maybe less a spiral, and more a helix. Like a Slinky — from one direction (end-on) it looks like a simple circle, yet from the side you can see it’s actually a long, continuous, spiralling wire. Another good analogy is a DNA helix — long, complex, and spiralling, with no two points exactly the same. Both the Slinky and the DNA helix capture the idea that the spiritual path can sometimes feel like a circle (as in “I seem to going round and round in circles”), yet a closer examination of your experiences from the side angle will reveal you’ve also made some forward progress.

But, you know, from a strictly artistic point of view it sucks to call the spiritual path “the helical path.” Like, you can’t even doodle a helix on a pad of paper and have it make any sense to somebody who doesn’t know what a DNA helix is. But when you draw a spiral on a piece of paper, everybody can recognize the idea of going round and round in circles, while at the same time never being in precisely the same place. That’s why the image of the spiral path has been used in many periods and in many places to represent the spiritual path. Don’t mess with a perfectly good symbol, I say. So I’m sticking with the image of “the spiral path.” But, really, it feels more like a Slinky.

I got on this train of thought today because I suddenly decided to revisit Tom Harpur’s book The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2004). I bought this book when it was first published because I’d been reading Tom Harpur’s column on religion in the Toronto Star and I was curious to know more about his theories. The book was attracting a lot of attention from Progressive Christians in Canada because it seemed to offer a way out of the dangers of dogmatic, literalistic Christianity. It didn’t hurt, either, that before Harpur turned to journalism, he’d been a professor of Greek and New Testament at the University of Toronto. The guy had credentials. He had credibility.

When I’m reading any book, no matter what the topic, I read at two levels. I pay attention with as much objectivity as I can to the flow of the factual argument — what facts are being stated, what facts are being left out, what inconsistencies exist. But I also pay attention with my intuition, with my mystical side. Sometimes when I’m reading an alarm goes off in my intuitive circuitry, and I know there’s something fundamentally wrong with the author’s argument.

I may not know at a factual level what’s wrong, but I’ve learned to trust the kernel of insight I receive from my mystical side. My task at this point is to accept the challenge of closing the gap between the factual reading and the intuitive reading — to do more research on the factual side so I can understand in an objective, logical way why my “gut” is reacting the way it’s reacting to a particular author.

It often takes me years — years! — to do enough academic research to get to the point where I can close the gap between the factual reading and the intuitive reading of a book.

To give a specific example, it’s taken me 6 years to close the gap between my factual reading of The Pagan Christ and my intuitive reading of The Pagan Christ. It’s taken me 6 years on the spiral path of spiritual (and academic) learning to figure out why I was so incensed at an intuitive level when I first read Tom Harpur’s book.

The information I needed didn’t appear to me in the form of a “revelation,” a “vision,” or a “prophecy.” I had to slog through sixteen half-courses in topics such as New Testament, Old Testament, early church history, and church liturgy, plus I had to research and write a long academic research paper (also called a short thesis or a cognate) on the topic of early doctrines of the soul. I had to work my ass off.

My goal in taking those courses wasn’t to challenge Harpur’s book. By the time I enrolled in graduate studies, I was focussed on other questions, other challenges, that occupied my time, energy, and enthusiasm. Nonetheless, with the hallmark unpredictability of all spiritual journeys, I accidentally discovered this morning that I now have the tools to challenge Harpur’s thesis. The tools didn’t come to me accidentally — but the realization of what I could do with the tools kind of snuck up on me.

Somehow the spiral path has brought me back to a book, an author, and a thesis that has been quite influential in the past few years.

Just for the record, I’m NOT going to do an about-face, and I’m NOT going to claim that upon revisiting Harpur’s book I’ve suddenly “seen the light” (pun intended). No way, Jose. To be ultra-clear, I don’t agree with Harpur’s thesis AT ALL — in fact, I’m more incensed today with the ideas in his book than I was when I first read them in 2004. The difference between then and now is that I’ve moved forward on my spiral path. I’ve added to my knowledge. I’ve added to my experience. I’ve added to my healing. I’ve changed, learned, grown. Most of all, I’ve worked hard.

God helped me at every turn (and I could never have accomplished what I’ve accomplished without God’s loving guidance), but the knowledge base I’ve built has come through conventional means — such as university courses, academic journals, and interdisciplinary research. Even though I’m a mystic, I did not acquire this new knowledge through revelation. I had to use the brain God gave me. What’s more, I had to use the free will God gave me. And I had to look after my body and my brain (i.e. choose a healthy lifestyle) so I could learn effectively. Just like any other person on Planet Earth. God did not make special rules for me.

Even though I’m a mystic, I have to follow the rules of healthy living and healthy learning that God wants everybody to respect. I’m able to communicate clearly with God the Mother and God the Father BECAUSE I use my free will to respect my body, my soul, my mind, and my heart in a balanced, holistic way. This life of balance lies at the core of the teachings of the man who once lived as Jesus son of Joseph.

I can’t emphasize enough how radically different this claim is when compared to the claims of traditional, ascetic, cloistered Christian mystics.

Or when compared to the claims made by Tom Harpur in his book.

Near the end of The Pagan Christ, Harpur says:

“So [Alvin Boyd] Kuhn can argue that you and I, in a profound sense, are never going to be more “dead” than we are right at this moment. He says, ‘Right now our deific souls are at the very bottom of the arc of death and can never be as dead again as they are now and have been.’ As we live our lives here, immersed in matter, we are gaining experience and expanding consciousness. But we are, in a deep sense, alienated from, or ‘dead’ to, the spiritual realm whence we originally came and to which we shall one day return (page 192).”

All I can say to this is . . . speak for yourself, buddy.

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Posted in Concinnate Christianity, ethical mysticism, free will, Gnosticism, Jesus' teachings, My Spiral Path, mystic, mysticism and tagged , | Leave a Comment
10 Sep 2010

CC32: Forgiveness: The Divine String of Pearls

Today I’m being lazy and posting something I first typed in 2007. When I say “typed,” I mean “typed.” I wasn’t the author of this piece. The author was the person whose name appears at the end of the lesson. He did a particularly fine job of describing forgiveness, and I can’t improve on what he wrote, so I’m giving his words a second airing.

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Lesson 6

So what is forgiveness? I will explain what I learned two thousand years ago, with the help of my angels and my loving Mother and Father, but I’ll put it in modern terms to make it more relevant.

Forgiveness is not a state of grace that mysteriously descends on you. The Gospels report (not to their credit) that the Holy Dove descended on my head while I was being baptized. These passages have led many a faithful person astray because “descent of the Holy Dove” wrongly suggests that God singles out “special people,” and confers on them special gifts through grace.

Am I saying there is no grace? Of course not. I’m saying that everything in God’s good creation is grace, and to single out one event for one person is to highlight 1% of God’s ongoing grace, and ignore the other 99%.

You are here, living a life as a human being on Planet Earth, so that you might understand, in your eternal life as one of God’s angelic children, the transformative power of forgiveness. You are not here because you’re unworthy of God’s love. You are here because God trusts you as an angel, and God knows that when you die as a human being, you will take what you have experienced here and transform it into forgiveness and wisdom.

However, you do not have to wait until you die and return Home to Heaven. You have the tools available to you here and now to begin this transformative process.

Your primary tool is your will power. Forgiveness, as a divine experience, is 100% pure will power. There is no mystery. There is no magic. There is no ritual, no potion, no esoteric way to go about this except to learn to use your divine free will in the same way your divine Mother and Father use their divine free will to forgive the harmful choices you make. Though the method of forgiving involves no mystery, the result is filled with unending mystery. When you accomplish divine forgiveness, God’s true beauty shines even more brightly for you, if such a thing is even possible (though it is . . .). In other words, I find it much easier to put into words how you can get to the place of forgiveness than to put into words what it will feel like when you get there. That is the sacred part of the journey for each person.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

String of Pearls (c) JAT 2013

Forgiveness is what you end up with when you use your soul’s Courage, Trust, Gratitude, and Devotion to make a permanent choice to wrap up a harmful choice in a permanent layer of love. The harm (caused either by you or someone else) is like the grit inside an oyster’s shell. The grit hurts. But the oyster painstakingly covers the grit in smooth, nacreous layers that take your breath away with their beauty. The grit inside the pearl does not go away. But it is permanently transformed into a thing of beauty. The task of forgiving is like the efforts of the oyster. The task of forgiving is not to erase or deny the pain. The task of forgiving is to use your will power to turn the pain into a divine string of pearls.

I used the word “permanent” three times in the above paragraph. This is because I wish to highlight the difference between “forgiving” and “shrugging something off.” What makes forgiveness divine is its immutability. Once God makes the choice to forgive a particular harmful choice you have made, God will never go back on the decision to forgive you. Their forgiveness for that action is permanent. They will not say to you, “We take it back — you’re no longer forgiven.” They will not manipulate your trust by pulling the rug out from under you. They make the choice, and they stick by the choice.

Human forgiveness is meant to be exactly the same. The forgiveness in your own heart must be an unflinching, unshakeable choice that nobody can talk you out of under any circumstances. If somebody can talk you out of it, it’s not real forgiveness. Another way to describe this is to think of it as integrity. Forgiveness is an oath you make, an oath you make to your own soul. Forgiveness is an oath you make to yourself that you will put a layer of love around the harmful choice, and you will never, ever remove the layer. You would not be a person of deep integrity if you broke this sacred oath. So you choose each day to keep your oath, and you choose each day to maintain the layer of love.

Each harmful choice that is forgiven is its own pearl on your divine string of pearls. You do not have just one big pearl that keeps getting bigger and bigger. You have separate pearls for separate acts of forgiveness. Each time you experience pain that must be forgiven, you build a new pearl using your divine free will and your own innate Courage, Trust, Gratitude, and Devotion.

This is the manner in which your loving Mother and Father forgive you.

I invite you, as my beloved sisters and brothers in Christ, to step through the portal of wonder that will open for you when you choose to forgive.

Love Jesus
December 16, 2007

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25 Jul 2010

CC27: Jesus: The Anti-Status Teacher

There is currently no major world religion that bases its doctrines and spiritual practices on the teachings of the man who once lived as Jesus.

There are several world religions that owe a significant doctrinal debt to ancient Egyptian mystery cults. There are several world religions that would not be recognizable in their current form without the legacy of ancient apocalyptic groups. There are several world religions that have incorporated the teachings of ancient Wisdom literature into their texts. But there are no major world religions that approach the deep questions of spirituality and relationship with God in the way that Jesus approached these concerns.

This isn’t new. At the time Jesus was teaching and healing, many different religions and philosophies were competing with each other to attract devoted followers. Many of these “pagan” religions were quite successful, far more successful than the modest house churches that sprang up in response to Jesus’ message. So successful were these “pagan” religions, in fact, that in the end they won out over the teachings of Jesus.

Most Christians believe it’s the other way around, that Christianity’s “truth” won out over paganism’s “heresy.” But orthodox Western Christianity isn’t based on the teachings of Jesus. It’s based on the teachings of Paul and his vigilant successors — men such as the author of Matthew and the author of Luke-Acts (whose writings were decreed canonical), and men such as Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Cyprian of Carthage (whose writings helped shape orthodox thought). These men took the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages, and repackaged them, rebranded them, into a “new and improved” religion called Christianity.

So while early orthodox Christianity had everything to do with Christ — an ancient saviour figure who was central to Egyptian, Persian, and Greek mystery cults — early orthodox Christianity had nothing to do with the teachings of the physician-scholar named Jesus son of Joseph. In fact, the doctrines promoted by Paul and the men of the “apostolic succession” are the antithesis of Jesus’ teachings about God.

Paul wanted desperately to preserve the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages because these three approaches to religion, though very different from each other on the surface, all share one fundamental feature: they encourage people to become addicted to status.

Paul offered people a new religion that gave them “bonus points” in their drive for status. Paul promised people more status, extra status, new and improved status, special status, irrevocable status. It’s a status-addict’s dream!

Jesus, meanwhile — as evidenced in the Gospel of Mark, the reconstructed Q source, and parts of the Letter of James — desperately wanted to get rid of the ancient teachings of the mystery cults, the apocalyptic groups, and the Wisdom sages. Why? Because he understood that the widespread addiction to status was the single greatest impediment to people’s understanding of God.

free_israel_photos_animals_two_camels_1024 - small

Photo credit Free Israel Photos

You’ve probably heard the biblical saying that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:25). This is usually interpreted as a condemnation of money and wealth, the idea being that if you give away all your money and wealth, you’ll be closer to the kingdom of God.

This is too simplistic. “Rich” people can give away all their money and wealth, and still not feel God’s presence because all they’ve done is exchange one form of status anxiety (wealth acquisition) for another form (asceticism, a.k.a. purity acquisition). Money per se isn’t the problem. Money can be used for hospitals, schools, meal programs, and so on. It’s not money that’s the root of all evil — it’s status addiction.

The only way for people to feel God’s ongoing presence in their lives is for them to acknowledge their addiction to status, and to make a commitment to heal this addiction.

It goes without saying that status addiction is rampant in our society. It’s not an easy thing to heal (about as easy as that camel going through that narrow gate). But it can be done. To be free of status addiction is to be kind and loving towards others in the guileless manner of a young child.

For this reason, Jesus compares those who want to enter the kingdom of God to little children (Mark 10:13-16). Young children haven’t yet been taught to hate others on the basis of class, race, or gender. They haven’t yet been taught that they’re “better” than others, that they’re more loved by God than others, that God will save them and their families but not others. They haven’t yet absorbed the cultural norms of competition, superiority, perfectionism (all forms of status addiction). Young children are still free. They still have free will. They still have the ability to love. They still have the ability to forgive. They still have the courage to look at other people, and see them as people, not as slaves, property, or lesser beings.

A young child knows nothing of Law or Covenant (both of which are hopelessly interwoven with status). Nor does a child care about “whole burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Mark 12:33). What a young child cares about is love — love that’s infused with respect, and dignity, and egalitarianism, and empathy, and mature relationship, and simple kindness. Love that doesn’t boast (since boasting is food for status addiction). Love that doesn’t presume to prophesy (since prophesying is food for status addiction). Love that doesn’t claim to be centred in the Mind (since pure logic is food for status addiction). Love that doesn’t punish the body through ascetic practices (since asceticism is food for status addiction). Love that never seeks revenge (since revenge is to status addiction what crack cocaine is to substance abuse). Love that can’t be taken away or withheld as a form of punishment. Love that isn’t co-dependent. Love that isn’t a synonym for “obedience.” What a young child wants is love that forgives. Love that’s . . . well . . . divine.

What children need, and what they in turn give to others, is divine love — the kind of love our God (God the Mother and God the Father) feel for all their children. The kind of love that Jesus wrote about in a text that Paul subsequently “borrowed” for his letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 13:1-8a).* The kind of love the orthodox Western Church doesn’t teach you about.

This is a love based on the power of the soul, the power of free will, the power of forgiveness, and the power of redemption. It has nothing to do with sin, separation, sacraments, and salvation. It’s a love that can be difficult for human beings to understand. It’s a love that can be difficult for adults to master (the whole “camel squeezing through the narrow gate” thing). But once it’s yours, nobody — not even an angry Church cleric or an angry Temple priest — can take it away from you, because it’s a sacred trust that exists between you and God.

It’s a sacred trust that fills you with wonder, and devotion, and gratitude, and humbleness. It’s a sacred trust worth dying for, as the man named Jesus once knew. It’s a sacred trust that opens the door to the kingdom of God while you’re living here as a somewhat confused but unquenchably hopeful human being on Planet Earth.

The keys to the kingdom are not found in the person of Jesus. The keys to the kingdom are found in the teachings that Jesus introduced to anyone who wanted to listen to his annoying and exasperating attacks on the status quo.

If you’re a Christian, and you want to start to work on the problems of status addiction in your own life, you’re going to have to let go of the doctrine that Jesus is your Saviour. This doctrine is food for your status addiction. There is no Saviour. You don’t need to be saved, because God don’t make no junk. There’s nothing wrong with your soul. Your soul is just fine, thank you very much.

It’s okay to think of Jesus as a teacher and mentor in the same way you think of Mahatma Gandhi or the Dalai Lama or Martin Luther King, Jr., as inspiring teachers and mentors. But please don’t put Jesus on a pedestal. That’s the last thing he’d want anybody to do.

Jesus wasn’t trying to teach his followers about himself. That would have been the height — the very pinnacle — of status addiction. He was trying to teach his followers about God the Mother and God the Father. He was trying to take out the “middle men” — the prophets, priests, and philosophers — whose grandiose, narcissistic musings about the One God had made it all but impossible for anyone to have a loving, trusting, forgiving relationship with the God who is Two.

If the church of the third millennium wants to follow the teachings of Jesus, it must let go of its apocalyptic, mystery-ridden, wisdom-elevated “Saviour,” and shift its focus to God.

Now there’s a radical idea.

* It’s fashionable these days for theologians and biblical scholars to express their profound regret that Jesus wrote nothing down because he was an illiterate Galilean carpenter who spoke only Aramaic. This is nonsense. No lasting Indo-European movement has ever got off the ground without an articulate, knowledgeable leader and a written record of the movement’s main tenets. To those scholars who insist that Jesus couldn’t write down his own original and penetrating observations about God, healing, and psychodynamics, I want to say, “Get a life , , , and a history book!”

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Posted in "4 S's", Concinnate Christianity, Divine Love, Gospel of Mark, historical Jesus, Jesus' teachings, Kingdom teachings, Letter of James, Matthew's and Luke's intent, Paul, status addiction and tagged , | Leave a Comment
12 Jul 2010

CC25: How the Church Puts Free Will On a Very Short Leash

Not long ago, on Canada Day to be exact (July 1), I headed out from Toronto on the 401. It was early afternoon and the weather was good. For all intents and purposes, the trip should have been easy and stress-free. There were no construction sites (a miracle in itself), and there were no accident sites (thank goodness). The traffic should have flowed smoothly. But it didn’t. If someone had been watching from a helicopter, they would have seen an accordion pattern on the highway: traffic speeding up and spreading out, then suddenly squeezing together into compressed knots as large groups of drivers hit the brakes at the same time.

Now, I’m a person who enjoys driving. I like to feel the sudden kick of acceleration when I hit the gas. I like to go down country roads just to see where they go. I like a road that demands you pay attention to what you’re doing as you navigate tight curves and steep hills. So I find driving on the 401 kind of boring, to be honest. But I’m a careful driver, too, and I think it’s asinine to tailgate. So when traffic is heavy, I usually stay in the right-hand lane, and I keep my distance from the vehicle in front of me. This way, I have choices open to me in the event of an emergency or unexpected problem. I have choices open to me because I have time and space. I have time to see a problem, assess a problem, react to a problem, and hopefully get my car (along with me and my passengers!) safely out of harm’s way.

Many other drivers don’t share this opinion about driving on the 401. They inexplicably believe the laws of Newtonian physics don’t apply to them, which, of course, gives them an excuse to join the large pack of vehicles spaced a mere 3 car lengths apart in the left-hand passing lane.

(When I took driving lessons many moons ago, the rule of thumb for determining a safe distance between cars was one car length per 10 miles/hour of speed — in other words, six car lengths between you and the guy ahead of you if you were driving at 60 mph in dry weather. And this was the minimum recommendation!)

As reality would have it, the laws of inertia bow to no man.* This strikes home when the driver at the front of the left-hand string of traffic suddenly decides to hit his brakes. All the drivers following close behind him must hit their brakes, too. They have no other option, except, of course, to swerve onto the left-hand shoulder or smash into the neighbouring cars. A chain of red brake lights appears. This in turn causes the people in the right-hand to brake, and within moments everyone on this section of the 401 is travelling at a snail’s pace. There’s no external reason — such as a lane closure — for this slowdown. This kind of slowdown is entirely the result of the choices these drivers are making.

Although each of the drivers in the left-hand lane might like to blame somebody else for the slowdown, in fact each person who chose to travel at high speed with no safe buffer of time and space ahead of him is a co-creator of this mess. Each of these drivers has free will. Each one used his free will to make an initial choice (the choice to drive this way). No one forced these drivers to drive 3 car lengths apart. Each driver chose this action independently and autonomously of his neighbour (free will). Yet, in doing so, each driver independently and autonomously volunteered to give up — surrender, eliminate, erase — some of the choices open to him. Each person willingly decided to give up his time and space, the precious and irreducible time and space that would have preserved for him a wider range of options.

You could say — without exaggeration — that each driver used his free will to intentionally (if temporarily) relinquish his free will, and hand it over to the lead driver in the string. Why so? Because it’s the lead driver who sets the speed and who chooses the time when everybody else will have to brake in unison. Once you agree to join his string, his pack of drivers, you don’t get a say in these things.

The Church’s teachings on free will remind me a lot of these traffic strings on the 401. In the orthodox Western church, theologians like to remind their faithful flock that God gives each person free will at birth. This doctrine of free will prevents people from falling into a tar pit of fatalism and despair, because people still have a glimmer of hope with regard to their own free will. Although the doctrines of original sin and grace dictate that they don’t have a lot of free will, they know they still have the choice to pay attention and brake on time, and thereby prevent a major pile-up!

Of course, if they make a mistake, and misjudge the timing, and cause a major pile-up, they’ll accused by the Church of a massive failure of piety.

The Church, unfortunately, has long conspired to prevent Christians from learning about the existence of the right-hand lane — the spiritual lane where people can more fully exercise their free will, the spiritual lane where there’s no leader of the pack to restrict the traffic flow.** In fact, the orthodox Western Church is founded on the premise that you — poor, weak, sin-ridden creature that you are — need to be in the left land and want to be in the left lane because you’re rushing as piously as possible toward the future goal of salvation. You’re rushing anxiously with the rest of the flock, and you’re following as closely as possible to the guy in front of you so you won’t get lost. And you’re grateful to the leader at the front of the pack — oh, excuse me, I mean the flock — because he’s so wise and strong and so much better than you that you can place all your trust in him. You can trust him to know when to brake. And you’re grateful when he decides to brake, because then you yourself have a rare opportunity to apply your free will and choose to brake! And what better way could there be to prove your love for God!

The path to knowing God is neither straight nor paved nor predictable. Photo credit JAT 2014

The path to knowing God is neither straight nor paved nor predictable. Photo credit JAT 2014

What Jesus knew, and what Jesus taught, is that the road to God is neither straight nor level (Isaiah 40:3 notwithstanding). The right-hand spiritual path — the path the Church doesn’t want you to know about because it would lessen Church authority — curves and climbs and enters the most unexpectedly beautiful landscapes. Sometimes you can’t see a darned thing on the road because it’s so foggy and misty. Then you have to slow down and try to listen to God’s voice. And that’s okay, because sometimes God’s voice is very, very quiet, and very, very shy, and you’ll miss it unless you tell yourself it’s okay to listen to God’s shy voice in place of the loud voice of the guy who’s leading the long string of Church traffic.

You should be aware, though, that if you decide to pull into the right-hand lane you’ll be considered a heretic. Or a Concinnate Christian. Or a person who trusts God. Or a follower of Jesus’ message.

Free will is a pain in the ass, eh?

* My apologies for exclusively using the male gender in these paragraphs. My intent is not to point fingers at male drivers, but simply to avoid the awkward use of he/she and his/her phrasing in my sentences. Next time I’ll try to remember to use “she” as the gender in my example.

** In countries such as the United Kingdom, where the convention is to drive on the left and pass on the right, these references to “right-hand” and “left-hand” lanes would be reversed for the purposes of discussion. I’m not in any way endorsing the ancient and misguided view that lefties and left-handed things are somehow tainted or inferior to right-handed people or things.

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Posted in "4 S's", boundary issues, Church of today, Concinnate Christianity, free will, Jesus' teachings, Original Sin, sense of time & timing, status addiction and tagged | Leave a Comment
05 Jul 2010

CC23: Seeing God in Black and White: A Parable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lilies of the Field (c) Image*After

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

As if God even wants to talk to regular people!

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

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