JR57: Suffer the Little Children to Come Unto Me

A: When I came home from work on Monday, Oprah was rerunning an episode about two twin daughters who had been being sexually assaulted and raped by their father and two brothers until a neighbour called authorities. Towards the end of the episode, Oprah offered the definition of forgiveness that she's found most helpful. It was something to this effect: "Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been different." How do you respond to that?  

J: Well, I find this definition demeaning and discouraging. Forgiveness is not about "giving up hope." Forgiveness is about finding hope.  

A: Maybe the person who coined this definition was using the word "hope" in a different way than you and I use it. 

J: Hope is one of those slippery, hard-to-define spiritual terms. About as easy to explain as forgiveness. And about as complicated. Basically, though, angels use the word hope as a synonym for "trust in God." It's a powerfully positive, uplifting emotion. It's an emotion that expresses an element of uncertainty. Perhaps I could rephrase that. Hope -- trust in God -- is an experience of emotional continuity in the face of apparent discontinuity in the Materialist laws of Cause and Effect. In other words, you still believe in God's goodness even when you can't see an obvious link between actions and the results of those actions.  

A: A leap of faith, in other words. 

“Jesus said: From Adam to John the Baptizer, among those born of women, there is no one greater than John the Baptizer, so that his eyes should be averted. But I have said that whoever among you becomes a child will know the kingdom and will become greater than John” (Gospel of Thomas 46 a-b). Photo credit JAT 2023.

J: Yes, but not a blind leap of faith. Trust, surprising as it may seem, requires an element of brutal honesty. Brutal honesty about oneself. Trust requires you to know your own limits, your own abilities right down to a "t." This knowledge allows you to recognize situations where you've reached the limits of your own abilities and experience. At this point, you switch over to your knowledge about other people's abilities and experience. You switch over the decision-making process to somebody who has more knowledge about the topic at hand than you have. You hand over the reins, as it were. Angels do this without an instant of shame or jealousy or regret. They simply accept their limits and gratefully hand over the reins to other angels. This is what humbleness feels like. Not false humility, as the Church teaches it, but divine humbleness.  

A: You're making my head hurt with all these different terms -- forgiveness, hope, trust, humbleness.  

J: These are all complex divine emotions. Not the same as each other, but interwoven with each other. Holistically. Hopefully, people will like the idea that God the Mother and God the Father are capable of experiencing and expressing the most complex emotions of all. 

A: This switching-over thing you're talking about . . . is this related to the research you've been helping me collect about the "gears" in the biological human brain that are supposed to help people switch smoothly from one idea or emotion to another?  

J: You mean parts of the human brain such as the anterior cingulate gyrus? 

A: Yes. And related "switching centres."  

J: Definitely. Angels don't have an anterior cingulate gyrus, but souls-in-human-form do. Angels who incarnate as human beings need a biological "toolkit," and a number of tools in that toolkit relate to the human brain and central nervous system. When those tools aren't used the way they should be -- when, for example, a "hammer" is used when a "screwdriver" is called for, or when the blunt end of the adjustable wrench is used instead of the adjustable claws at the other end, you can't expect the result to be pretty. The human brain is designed with an entire set of "ball bearings" and "lubricants" to prevent the various gears of the brain from grinding against each other and causing excessive wear. Unfortunately, in many young human beings, the ball bearings and lubricants are the first thing to go. After that, you see the onset of DSM-IV psychiatric disorders such as bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, problems with impulse control, problems with anger control, possibly even psychopathy. 

A: All because their switching mechanisms aren't working properly?  

J: The human brain is an incredibly complex set of tools and machinery. It uses many different types of switching mechanisms to help it balance incoming data and outgoing choices -- outgoing thoughts, feelings, and actions. The operative word here, of course, is balance. The brain has to be able to identify, remember, understand, and fix many different sorts of problems. It has to switch constantly between different spheres of reality, between logical thought and positive emotions and practical actions, between the needs of the self and the needs of the other, between active learning and quiet processing, between past, present, and future. Believe me, human beings need every scrap of brain tissue they can muster for this job of Whole Brain Thinking.  

A: So when the switching mechanisms aren't working properly, people get "stuck." They get stuck in one or two spheres. For example, a person who gets stuck in the past.  

J: Yes. Or a person who gets stuck in logical thought. These are the people who lack empathy, who lack compassion for others. They make all their choices based on logic alone. The Church has had an overflowing cup of bishops who were incapable of feeling empathy.  

A: I've also known some people -- mostly women -- who seem stuck in their emotional circuitry and can't make a decision that's tough. They don't forgive other people so much as put blinders on. They try to sweep great harms under the carpet so they don't have to deal with the fallout of taking a firm stance. 

J: Forgiveness is very much about taking a firm stance. The first step in forgiving somebody -- whether it's yourself or someone else -- is honesty. There must be an honest assessment of harm. This means you have to take a stance on the question of right and wrong. For the soul -- for all souls in Creation, including God the Mother and God the Father -- some choices are clearly right and other choices are clearly wrong. The soul knows the difference. The soul feels confident and clear when right choices are made. The soul feels abused when wrong choices are made. This is what many people call . . . conscience. 

A: There's been a trend among some New Age gurus and some Progressive Christians to claim there are no moral absolutes. Hence there is no need for forgiveness. According to these thinkers, all choices are equally acceptable to God because each person is really just a spark of God trying to express itself. Neale Donald Walsch has built a lucrative empire on this idea.  

J: Only a person who doesn't want to face his own life choices would find this theory acceptable.  

A: It does leave a lot of wiggle room for people who want to excuse their own behaviour . . .  

J: Forgiveness is a clear and conscious decision to call forth and believe in the best that a person can be and the best a person can do. Forgiveness is a refusal to accept excuses. At the same time, it's a gift of love that has no strings attached. Divine love goes beyond anything a Materialist philosophy of Cause and Effect can imagine. Divine love is an up-front gift, a conscious decision to offer the recipient (whether the self or an another person) a vote of confidence in his or her best self. It's a leap of faith. It's a boost-up. A helping hand. A sense of purpose for a person to hang onto. It does not require you to prove yourself before you get the gift of love. If you had to prove yourself first, one proof at a time, as many theologians have taught, you'd be looking at the vertical path of spiritual ascent -- anagogic mysticism. Anagogic mysticism is a form of Materialist belief. God the Mother and God the Father are not required to obey Materialist philosophy. They love us because they choose to love us, not because they "owe" us anything for our "obedience" and "piety." They believe in us, their children, so much that we simply cannot and will not let them down. They inspire us to be our best selves. But they don't force us to be our best selves -- we, as angels, choose to be our best selves. It's as natural as breathing for all angels. 

A: Including the angels who have incarnated on Planet Earth.  

J: Yes. Including the angels who have incarnated on Planet Earth. There are no exceptions among God's children. All angels are filled with trust and devotion and gratitude and courage BECAUSE God the Mother and God the Father believe in our best selves. They have faith in us. 

A: So in the case of a father who has raped his own daughters, how would God look at that?  

J: God the Mother and God the Father would recognize instantly the selfish, uncourageous intent of the father. They would identify the problem -- the father's dysfunctional brain circuitry -- and they would remember this as they worked to help him and those around him recognize the great harm he's been choosing to create. They would not condone or accept this behaviour as acceptable. They would identify the behaviour as "wrong." Nonetheless, they would blanket him in divine love. They would whisper to his soul, "We believe in you. We know this isn't the best you can be. We know you can make loving choices. We won't abandon you. We'll stick right with you and show you why your choices have been wrong. You won't understand at first, and you're going to be angry and confused and resentful for a while, but that's okay, because we know that more than anything in the world you want to be able to give love. We believe in you."  

A: And then God sends you through the human court system that'll cart you off to jail for "X" number of years. 

J: Somehow you have to get it through your thick human skull that you made an abusive choice that was very, very wrong. You have to accept that you made a mistake, you have to accept that you can learn from your own mistakes, and you have to accept that you can be a better person who makes right choices. If you receive the right kind of help.  

A: Locking up a person and throwing away the key isn't the right kind of help.  

J: Nor is revenge the right kind of help. Usually it takes a whole team to provide the right kind of help to a man who has raped his own daughters. A whole team of well trained professionals. Of course, if the professionals themselves don't believe in the soul or the power of forgiveness or the mystery of God's divine love, they're ill-equipped to provide the kind of mentorship the abuser needs if he's to have any chance of living up to his best self.  

A: In which case the abuser isn't likely to be healed.  

J: Healing follows insight for both the victim and the perpetrator of a crime. Forgiveness, as we've said, is a catalyst that speeds and facilitates the healing process. Healing is the path towards Wholeness. Not the path towards Oneness but the path towards Wholeness. Wholeness is the place -- the Kingdom, the experience of self -- where you know yourself and all your limits and all your strengths and all your quirks and you can be humbly proud of yourself anyway because you're being the best person you can be.  

A: Young children are like this. They have the ability to throw themselves into new relationships and new experiences to the best of their ability without any concern for status or "face."  

J: Yup. That's what I meant when I said that to enter the Kingdom you must become again like a little child. Humble and guileless, yet full of infectious enthusiasm and intelligence. Many three-year-olds are smarter than the adults around them because they haven't yet forgotten how to learn.  

A: And they still know how to forgive. Young children are born with an amazing ability to forgive.  

J: I rest my case.

JR52: Pelagius and Personal Responsibility

A: In our discussions lately, you've been emphasizing the role of personal responsibility in the journey of healing and faith, and I've been waiting for somebody to jump up and accuse you of being a Pelagian. How do you feel about the Pelagian philosophy of free will? For the record, Pelagius was born sometime in the late 300's CE, and died around 418 CE. He and his followers drew vicious attacks from Augustine of Hippo and Jerome, and Pelagianism was condemned as a heresy in 431 CE. 

J: Without getting too much into the details of the debate between Augustine and Pelagius on the nature of free will, I'd have to say that both of them were wrong.  

A: How so?  

J: Neither of them had a balanced view of what it means to be a human being. Augustine had no faith at all in the ability of human beings to consciously change their lives and their communities through human initiative. He thought people would be happier if they just accepted their miserable lot in life. Acceptance of Original Sin and concupiscence was the best they could hope for, in his view. His views on human nature have created no end of suffering for devout Christians over the centuries.  

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Pelagius preached the opposite extreme. He taught the path of spiritual ascent -- anagogic mysticism -- which says that people can achieve a state of holiness and perfection if they just try hard enough. He placed the entire burden on the individual. This is no less damaging to people's lives than Augustine's idea. Neither man understood -- nor wanted to understand -- that the path of healing and relationship with God is a path of balance. There must be a balance between personal responsibilities and group responsibilities, a balance between personal responsibilities and divine responsibilities. In particular, there must be a willingness on the part of individuals AND on the part of groups to be honest about their own limits. This honesty is the foundation of great strength for souls-in-human-form. Unfortunately, both Augustine and Pelagius hacked away at this foundation with all their might. They both snatched away a source of deep courage and strength for Christians, and insisted on despair and self-blame in its place. It was a cruel thing to do.  

A: So your understanding of personal responsibility isn't the same as what Pelagius taught.  

J: It's important to note that in the Peace Sequence we've been discussing, I've placed personal responsibility as the third "gear" in the sequence, not the first gear. Pelagius and others have tried to place personal responsibility in the first position on the Peace Sequence, not the third position. They've tried to equate free will with personal responsibility, as if they're synonymous, as if they're exactly the same thing. But they're not.  

A: Can you elaborate on that?  

J: Personal responsibility is perhaps the most complex, most advanced skill set that human beings can learn during their lifetime here on Planet Earth. It's not a single skill or a single choice. It's what we referred to earlier as a "meta-choice" -- a pasting together of several smaller choices into something bigger. A meta-choice is so well integrated, so cohesive, so holistic that it often seems like a single choice. But actually it's a blend of several other choices. It's a blend of the choice to be courageous, the choice to be empathetic, the choice to be humble, the choice to be intuitive, the choice to be well organized, and the choice to be self disciplined. It's all those things together.  

A: You mean . . . maturity. Emotional, psychological, and physical maturity.  

J: Yes. It's maturity. It's individuation. It's compassion. It's Whole Brain Thinking.  

A: Using the whole toolkit of the human brain instead of isolated parts of it.  

J: The human brain has long been treated as a single organ, though really it's an interconnected series of semi-autonomous sectors, each with its own specialized ability to "choose" on behalf of the whole. When all the different choices work together towards a common goal, the human brain works smoothly. If "feels" like a single whole, a single choice. But really it's a combination of choices. When a person has arrived at the stage in life when he or she "gets" the concept of personal responsibility, it means his/her biological brain is working in a balanced, holistic way. The fruits of this long process should -- if all goes well -- START to be visible in the actions of people 16 to 18 years of age. The process isn't normally complete, however, until about age 21 or 22. If all goes well.  

A: Last week, after Vancouver lost to Boston in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals, large crowds of young people -- many of them now identified as coming from "good" families -- rioted in downtown Vancouver. There was a lot of looting and vandalism. Something tells me these young people haven't developed the Whole Brain Thinking approach to personal responsibility.  

J: There were some people in the crowd who stepped forward and did the right thing to protect others who were being beaten. These Good Samaritans are the individuals who instinctively know "the right thing to do" in a crisis. Their sense of personal responsibility, of right and wrong, of courage and compassion doesn't desert them in an emergency. In fact, it may only be during an unexpected emergency that they themselves realize for the first time that they "get it." They act first and ask questions later -- fortunately for those they can help.  

“Do not give what is holy to dogs, or they might throw them upon the manure pile. Do not throw pearls [to] swine, or they might make [mud] of it” (Gospel of Thomas 93). Jesus taught several centuries before either Augustine or Pelagius, so of course we don’t expect to see any reference to these later theologians in the Gospel of Thomas. On the other hand, Jesus had unflattering things to say about both the Pharisees and the Herodians, whose teachings resembled those of Augustine and Pelagius respectively. It seems likely that in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus was using the metaphor of “dogs” to refer to the Pharisees and the metaphor of “swine” to refer to the Herodians. It seems Jesus wasn’t impressed with either group’s approach to God’s holy things. Recently, I visited a Toronto Conservatory where several generations of cardinals have learned to enter and exit through the automated roof openings so they can build nests for their young in a warm, safe place. These birds not only provide basic food and shelter for their offspring, but also, in this case, are teaching their young an unusual and complex skill set that calls upon them to maximize their latent potential without exceeding their limits. In other words, the parent cardinals are mentoring their offspring. Photo credit JAT 2017.

A: You're saying that maturity -- personal responsibility -- is the product of many years of education and mentorship of children. Is that right? 

J: Yes. Education is the first "gear" in the process, but education alone isn't enough to guide a child towards maturity and personal responsibility.  

A: As the well-educated youths who rioted in Vancouver proved all too well.

J: Along with education there must also be appropriate, mature mentorship. It's the older mentors who are supposed to guide children in their emotional growth with firm, consistent, boundary-respecting compassionate tough love. Parents, grandparents, teachers, sports coaches, medical professionals, and many others can all be mentors for children if they so choose.  

A: What about ministers and priests? Can they be mentors?  

J: Ideally, yes. However, realistically speaking, they rarely are.  

A: Why not?  

J: Because most of them have deeply embraced either Augustine's idea about human nature or Pelagius's idea. Neither approach helps a young person learn how to find the balance they so desperately need. In addition, those ministers who try to inject balance into their youth work are also the ones most likely to have rejected the idea of the soul and the spiritual life. It's lose-lose for ordained clerics.  

A: Unless they're willing to accept new doctrines of faith.  

J: For that to happen, they'd have to apply their own God-given free will. It's a choice each cleric will have to make on the basis of his or her own conscience. That's what divine courage is all about.

JR33: The Black Swans of Mysticism

A: You know what? I'm feeling pretty peeved this morning, and I have a lot of things I'd like to say about some of the mystical ideas we've been talking about this week. I think I know how the Gospel writer Mark must have felt when he first read Paul's First Corinthians. Some ticked!

(c) Hemera Technologies 2001-2003

J (smiling): I'm all ears.

A: Thank you! All this talk about apophatic mystics and anagogic mystics has brought up some issues that have been bugging the heck out of me for years. But yesterday was the last straw. Yesterday I was in the mood to do some spring cleaning, so I tackled a pile of papers that needed to be filed. There I found a church newsletter from November 2010 with a review of Karen Armstrong's book The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (Toronto: Random House-Vintage, 2004). The reviewer dutifully tried to capture the content of Armstrong's thesis about God, her discovery that "some of the most eminent Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians and mystics insisted that God was not an objective fact, was not another being, and not an unseen reality like the atom, whose existence could be empirically demonstrated. Some went so far as to say that it was better to say that God did not exist, because our notion of existence was too limited to apply to God." Oh yeah? thought I indignantly. The reviewer went on: "Most would agree with the Greek Orthodox that any statement about God has to have two characteristics. One is 'to remind us that God cannot be contained in a neat, coherent system of thought,' and the other, 'it should lead us to a moment of silent awe or wonder, because when speaking of the reality of God we are at the end of what words or thoughts can usefully do.'"

OH, YEAH? Really? That's the best you can do, huh? You're gonna just wimp out because intense emotions can't be explained by using pure logic? You're gonna just let yourselves off the hook that easily and give up on one of the best, most wondrous parts of the spiritual journey of redemption and transformation? You're gonna just listen to these dopey mystics? Get a life, people! And I mean that literally. Get a life, and then get back to me on the question of who God is.

And you apophatic mystics out there -- until you decide to get a whole life, a balanced life, a compassionate life, a forgiving life, I'm going to assume your biological brain circuits are seriously seized up in several crucial areas (your anterior cingulate, your amygdala, your orbitofrontal cortex, your right insular cortex, your caudate nucleus, and your hypothalamus). And if you think I'm wrong, then prove it to me. Volunteer to get your bran scanned. I've already had my brain scanned once. I'm game to go again. Show me your brain is healthy and fully functional and not damaged from psychoactive drug use. Then we'll talk.

J: As you've said -- and I totally agree -- there's no ethical mysticism without ethical scientific investigation.

A: I'm so upset about mystical claims that can't be substantiated or corroborated. I'm upset about the sloppiness of current scientific investigation into mysticism, too. I've looked at some of the criteria for different "Mysticism Scales" used by researchers. Researchers such as Hood want to know if potential mystics have had an experience of transcending themselves or losing themselves in an experience of oneness. But this is only one type of mysticism -- it's a measure of apophatic mysticism, an experience that's quite likely to be a highly dysfunctional dissociative disorder, not a true mystical state at all. There. I've said it. I think some of the highly revered mystics of the past have been severely dysfunctional. Especially the apophatic mystics -- the ones who claim to feel only a void and empty unity. There's something seriously wrong with a person's brain if all he or she can feel is an empty unity.

J: Yet this is the state of so-called transcendence that so many seekers have been taught to seek.

A: Well, it's not what I feel. And it's not what you felt. So I guess that makes you and me the Popperian "black swans" of falsifiability. And you're technically dead, which makes your soul mind pretty hard to study. So that leaves me, and others like me, as possible test subjects for a study of non-dysfunctional mysticism. Such a study can't come soon enough, as far as I'm concerned.

J: Unfortunately, such a study would only help distinguish between those whose brains are reasonably functional and those whose brains aren't. It would do nothing to identify the mystics of the past who were lying -- the ones who intentionally invented a mystical journey for their own narcissistic purposes.

A: Ah. Pseudo-Dionysius comes instantly to mind. Pseudo-Dionysius, the great 6th century CE apophatic-anagogic inventor of Christian mystical hierarchy. The inventor of Christian angelology. The inventor of mystical theology. The bolsterer of Neo-Platonic Christian thought. The bolsterer of mystical church authority for the church of the Byzantine Empire. The man who cemented the worst ideals of Platonic mysticism into a church that wanted to utterly eradicate all aspects of your own core teachings on inclusiveness, forgiveness, non-chosenness, and heart-based relationship with the Divine. You mean that kind of liar?

J: I mean that kind of liar.

A: As I said earlier, I think I know how Mark felt when he read what Paul wrote about you. If I were a cartoon character right now, I'd have steam coming out of my ears.

JR31: Jesus, the Man Who Was a Mystic

A: Sayings 18a and 18b in the Gospel of Thomas have some interesting things to say about our relationship to time -- to beginnings and endings. Stevan Davies's translation says this: "The disciples asked Jesus: Tell us about our end. What will it be? Jesus replied: Have you found the Beginning so that you now seek the end? The place of the Beginning will be the place of the end [18a]. Blessed is anyone who will stand up in the Beginning and thereby know the end and never die [18b]." Your makarisms -- your beatitudes -- don't sound much like the makarisms from the Jewish Wisdom thinkers who wrote books like Proverbs and Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon. Why is that?

J (shrugging): I was a mystic, not a Wisdom teacher. I believed in logic, but I believed more in Divine Love. My understanding of happiness was founded in my personal mystical experience. When people asked me how I could be so happy despite all the personal suffering I'd experienced in my life, I told them. They didn't believe me, but I kept telling them anyway.

An endogenous mystic doesn't live in isolation from life. You can learn a lot about God by going outside with other people and breathing in the beauty of your beginnings. Bourton on the Water, UK. Photo credit JAT 2024.

 

A: People today don't think of you as a mystic. They may think of you as a rabbi or as a wandering Cynic philosopher or as a political revolutionary or even as a shaman-like fellow wandering around Palestine in a severe dissociative state.* But none of the well-respected biblical scholars I've read have described you as a mystic. Why not?

J: There's nothing so poorly understood in the history of religion as mysticism. Having said that, the form of mysticism I practised has been rare in the annals of religious mysticism. I was neither an apophatic mystic nor an anagogic mystic. I was an endogenous mystic.

A: You're going to have to explain that.

J: Mystical experiences from different cultures can be categorized. And should be categorized. Unfortunately, they're usually lumped together in one big pot. They're assumed to be roughly equivalent to each other. But they're not. For instance, mystics who claim to have had an experience of timeless, transcendent oneness or union with the Divine come away from the experience with the belief that "less is more." These are the apophatic mystics, from the Greek word meaning "negative speaking" or "unspeaking." Apophatic mystics believe you can only experience union with God through the constant practise of mystical contemplation. This practice allows you to first "unknow" or "unspeak" yourself, to escape your frail human senses so you can become a pure empty vessel. If you do it correctly, goes the theory, you find yourself in a transcendent state where you no longer think of yourself as "you." In other words, the path to knowing God is eradication of the self.

A: The opposite of what you taught.
 
J: Yes. Another thing I taught was the futility of the anagogic path -- the vertical or upward path of spiritual ascent that's been taught so many times by so many different teachers over the centuries. Anagogic mystics may or may not also be apophatic mystics, just to make things more confusing. Basically an anagogic mystic is somebody who believes that the only way to know God is to achieve perfection by following a rigorous step-by-step set of instructions or laws in the correct order. This takes you one step at a time up the spiritual ladder. The ladder of perfection takes you closer to God and farther away from your sinful neighbours. It sets you above and apart from your neighbours. Benedict, the founder of the Christian monasteries and the monastic Rule that bear his name, was teaching his monks a form of anagogic mysticism.

A: Again, not what you taught. So explain what you mean by endogenous mysticism.
 
J: It's a term I've coined to suggest an experience of intense mysticism that's hardwired into a person's DNA rather than being imposed from the outside on an unwilling religious acolyte. True mystics are born, not made. Just as true engineers or true musicians are born, not made. An endogenous mystic is somebody who was born with a particular set of talents and communication skills aimed in the directions of philosophy, language, music, mediation (that's mediation, not meditation), and what I'm going to call for lack of a better term "the geek factor." True mystics are more interested than most people in offbeat stories and unusual phenomena. They show a life-long interest in stories and experiences that are somewhat unconventional. Not too weird, but a bit weird. You wouldn't find a mystic teaching an M.B.A. course. But you might find a mystic teaching a Creative Writing course. Most true mystics don't even know they're true mystics. Most often they end up as writers. Writers need more solitary time than most people, as mystics do. They need the solitary time so they can pull up from somewhere inside themselves the emotions and the insights they long to express. They're not being unfriendly or rude or hostile. They just need the quiet time so they can hear themselves think. This is true for both writers and mystics.

A: Well, you can count me in on all scores there. As a child, I spent a lot of time indoors reading. And drawing. And watching TV shows that had a science fiction or fantasy element. I loved the first Star Trek series when it first came out. Come to think of it, I still like it.
 
J: I was like that, too. I was fascinated by the Greek myths. As soon as I learned to read, I read the Iliad. Then the Odyssey. My strict Jewish mother wasn't pleased. But what could she do? She was a widow with a big family to look after. As long as I stayed on the family property, where I couldn't get in too much trouble, she put up with my unusual interest in books, books, and more books. I read everything I could get my hands on. I learned to write by studying the authors I most admired.
 
A: I'm thinkin' that Plato probably wasn't one of your favourite authors.

J: I liked plays, actually. I learned a lot by studying Greek poets and playwrights. I liked the comedies of the Greek playwright Menander. Much healthier than the doleful rantings of the Jewish prophets.

A: These aren't the literary influences one would expect you to describe.
 
J: No. I had to learn to read and write from the sacred Jewish texts because my mother and my maternal grandfather insisted we be literate in our religious heritage. So I knew my Torah and my Proverbs. But I was a born mystic, and, like all mystics and mystics-in-writer's-clothing, I was interested in -- utterly fascinated by -- the fine nuances of character and environment and insight. I wanted to know what made people tick. I wanted to hear how they spoke, how they phrased things, how they interacted with each other. I wanted to know why people fall in love, what they say, what they do. I wanted to absorb all the joys, all the nuances, of life and living.
 
A: As writers do.

J: Writers can't help it. It's what they do. They're so attuned to the rhythms and patterns of language and dialogue and everyday speech and sensory input and colours and textures and movement and nature and choices and especially change. Mystics are like this, too. Deeply attuned to patterns of communication that other people don't pay attention to at a conscious level. A mystic is somebody who's hardwired to pay conscious attention to subtle, nuanced communications from the deepest levels of Creation. Sometimes these communications come from God. Sometimes they come from one's own soul. Sometimes they come from somebody else's soul. But basically it's about conscious observation and understanding of specific kinds of communications. Mystics are tuned to certain bands on the divine radio, if you will. They can pick up stations that most other people aren't interested in trying to pick up. These "mystical" stations aren't better than other stations. They're just . . . well, they're just different. All the stations on the divine radio are good, just as different styles of music are all inherently equal. They're all inherently equal, but they don't all sound the same. Because they're not the same. They're different but equal.
 
A: As souls are all different but equal.
 
J: Yes. A lot of people imagine it would be wonderful and exciting to give over their lives to mysticism. But being a mystic is only wonderful and exciting if you're hardwired to be a mystic. If you're like most people -- born with intuition, but not born to be either a mystic or a writer -- you would find it very isolating, frustrating, even depressing to live as a mystic -- as many Christian nuns, monks, clerics, and mystics have discovered to their misfortune. The "Dark Night of the Soul" is not and should not be part of the journey to knowing God. At no time in my life as Jesus did I experience a Dark Night of the Soul. On the contrary, my experience as a mystic gave me only an ever deepening sense that I was in the right place doing the right thing with the right people for the right reasons. I trusted my "beginning." As a result, I stopped worrying about my "ending." I lived each day in a state of comfort, peace, trust, and love.

A: The journey was not about the end goal, but about finding your own beginning -- knowing yourself as you really are, then going from there.

J: This is the only way to find the freedom that comes from knowing and loving your Divine Parents -- to whom I would like to say, once again for the record, you both rock!
 
* In 1995, Stevan Davies, the same author who published the translation of the Gospel of Thomas I refer to, wrote a very puzzling book called Jesus the Healer (New York: Continuum, 1995) in which he claims that Jesus carried out healings during a trance state called "holy spirit-possession." He concludes, therefore, that Jesus was a "medium." If you've read my comments on The Blonde Mystic blog about psychic powers and psychic mediums, you'll be able to guess what I think of Davies's spirit-possession thesis.

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

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

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

A: Sounds good to me.
 
J: I've mentioned before that Paul and I had different motivations, different purposes behind our respective religious movements.* One of the few things we had in common was a strong sense of conviction. Paul believed in his cause, and was willing to argue for it. I believed in my cause, and was willing to argue for it. We both had strong opinions. We just didn't have the same opinions.
 
A: Part of Paul's cause involved arguing against your cause.
 
J: Definitely. Paul rejected -- even feared -- my teachings on the nature of the Kingdom. He was sure my Kingdom teachings would lead to anarchy. Widespread civil and social disobedience. His fears were shared by others.
 
A: Why was he so afraid?
 
J: Well, Paul, like so many others then and now, had allowed his brain to become focussed -- riveted -- on the perfection of Divine Law. Of course, he thought it was Divine Law he was giving all his time, energy, and devotion to, but really it was human law, human authority. He didn't see it this way, though. He convinced himself that he was doing the right thing in aggressively attacking me because he was protecting Divine Law. He believed that Divine Law justified -- gave sanction to -- his actions.
 
A: Where have I heard that before?
 
J: Rigid, perfectionistic thinking is a symptom of imbalance and dysfunction in the wiring of the biological brain. It's common in bullies throughout the world.
 
A: Paul spends a lot of time in his letters telling the people of his churches that they don't need to follow Jewish laws on food and circumcision. If he believed so much in the law, why was he dissing it? It doesn't make sense.
 
J: It makes perfect sense if you understand that Paul wasn't trying to protect the "praxis" laws of regular Jewish people -- laws about "petty little daily practices," as he saw them. To him these minor practices were nothing, they were of no consequence. He wasn't interested in the small stuff, the things that matter to regular people on a day to day basis. He was after the big stuff. The End Point. The Omega. The be all and end all. He was after the Power.
 
A: What power?
 
J: The power that he and many others close to him believed was woven into the fabric of Creation. The power to command the universal Law of Cause and Effect.
 
A: That sounds seriously creepy. And not even very Jewish.
 
J: Well, as we've talked about, there were different schools of religious and philosophical thought that used the sacred Hebrew texts, and these schools fought fiercely among themselves. In the 1st century CE, there was no agreement on what it meant to be a pious Jew, just as today there's no agreement on what it means to be a pious Christian. Most people forget that there was a civil war among Jews in Judea in the 60's CE. Sure, the Romans came in eventually and torched everything in Jerusalem. But before the Romans sent in their troops, the Jews were doing a fine hatchet job on themselves. This mood of dissension among Jews was already brewing when I was teaching and healing in Galilee. It's part of the reason I left my home in Philadelphia (modern day Amman) and went to Galilee. There was a measure of religious sanity that still existed there.

 
A: The Bible claims that Paul was a Pharisee.
 
J: In Philippians Chapter 3, Paul is very clever about the claims he makes for himself. He says that according to Jewish laws of bloodline, he's a member of the tribe of Benjamin. Big deal. Lots of people could make that claim. He says that according to prevailing Jewish customs around religious authority, he's a Pharisee -- a sort of rabbi/lawyer/teacher who deserves to be treated with respect for his religious knowledge. Then comes the clincher: he says that according to "zeal" (zelos in Greek) he was an early persecutor of the church and according to "righteousness" he was blameless in his actions against the church. When Paul talks about "zeal" and "righteousness," he isn't talking about "beliefs" or "opinions." He isn't saying he was just really enthusiastic or really committed. He's saying he had "the zeal" inside of him. He's saying he had a piece of Divine Law inside of him, a spark of God inside of him that was guiding him, commanding his thoughts and actions. He's saying he was a "vessel of humility" into which God had poured the divine substance called "zeal." Zeal is a kind of love, therefore -- a love for the Law. Devotion to the Law. Obedience to the Law. Adoration, even, of the Law. It sees the Law as a quasi-divine being. Sort of an embodiment of the Divine desire for orderliness in Creation. More than just a philosophical structure. An animated, conscious entity, if you will. Wisdom -- Sophia -- was also envisioned in this way as a semi-divine female being.
 
A: Plato talked about the Laws in this kind of weird anthropomorphic way.
 
J: Yes. And so did the Essenes. The Essenes were very much a fringe cult within Judaism. They had the most highly developed mystical rituals, the most "out there" beliefs about God and Creation and occult magic. They were also highly devout, highly wealthy, and highly powerful. They were a scary bunch. And Paul was greatly influenced by Essene teachings about God, the Spirit, the indwelling Temple, and occult ritual.
 
A: Would you say that Paul was an Essene? An accepted member of the yahad?
 
J: No. He wasn't teaching pure Essene thought. But he was influenced by their thought. He also had strong links to another important school of thought that's harder to track. He blended ideas from Essene thought and Hellenistic thought to create his "new and improved" version of the Law of Cause and Effect. By the time he began his "mission to the Gentiles," he was no longer interested in mainstream Judaism, with its focus on Mosaic Law. He'd "moved up" on the spiritual ladder of ascent, on that ever so narrow and hard-to-find ladder of spiritual hierarchy. He'd found an enticing and intoxicating blend of occult magic and hidden knowledge -- the kind of hidden knowledge reserved only for a few select apostles. He was drunk on the idea that this new knowledge would lead him to power -- power over evil entities.

A: What evil entities?

J: The corrupted versions of Law and Wisdom and Life -- their "evil twins."

A: Their evil twins? This is sounding like some of the "contemporary horror" dramas that are so incredibly popular in books and movies and TV shows these days.
 
J: Same old, same old. It's just a dysfunctional, distorted version of the Law of Cause and Effect when taken to occult extremes. It goes like this: "Well, if there's a Perfect Law, a semi-divine being who brings only virtue and righteousness to people of virtue, then, logically speaking, there must be an evil twin of Perfect Law -- a powerful semi-divine being who sows vice and corruption in the world." It's a nice, neat, simple mathematical formula to explain why evil exists. Sons of Light versus Sons of Darkness, as the Essenes clearly formulated it. What could be easier to understand?
 
A: It's so easy to see what you're saying by looking at Paul's Letter to the Romans. Romans is filled with paranoid, dualistic, judgmental thinking. Paul tells people in gory detail how they can fight the evils of Law, Sin, and Death, and overcome these evil cosmic forces through the power of Christ's name.
 
J: Yes. For Paul, Mosaic Law had become the evil twin of the pure Essene Temple Law. Sin was the evil twin of Wisdom (implying by analogy to Wisdom's femaleness that Sin was also female). And Death was the evil twin of Life. Paul called this evil trinity Law, Sin, and Death.
 
A: On my God. That makes a ridiculous amount of sense. It explains how Paul could go around telling people they wouldn't die if they believed in Christ -- a promise that soon proved to be a lie, because some of Paul's followers had already died, and he had to answer for it in his letters.
 
J: It's popular these days for theologians to make excuses for this kind of apocalyptic promise, excuses based on the naive assumption that people in the 1st century CE "just didn't know any better" and "can't be blamed for believing in salvation from death." This, I'm sad to say, is hogwash. No balanced, mentally healthy individual is going to accept the idea that human beings can escape physical death and continue to live for centuries on Planet Earth the way their mystical forebears had (e.g. Methuselah). It's just goofy. It's what Paul promised his followers in the beginning of his mission, but it's goofy. In his Letter to the Romans, he has to go through huge theological contortions to try to salvage people's belief in him. It's a pretty sad way to go, if you think about it.
 
A: Promises, promises.
 
J: You know what works best in the Gospel of Mark? The fact that there are no "Cause and Effect" promises. Everything's messy. Everything's unpredictable. Shit happens, but so what? It can't take away your courage or your faith or your trust in God or your desire to help other people. Even shit can be turned into very useful fertilizer.
 
A: So your Kingdom is about turning shit into fertilizer, and Paul's Temple is about the quest to stop shitting at all?
 
J: And you say I have a way with words!


* Please see also "Materialism, Pauline Thought, and the Kingdom" and "Mark's Themes of Understanding and Strength"