JR40: Recap: Some Reflections From the Author

Today I'm going to post a few of my own thoughts as a sort of recap. I think it's important for people to stop once in a while and take a deep breath and reflect on all the activity of the previous few weeks -- whatever the activity might be.  

The path of knowing and loving God is filled with unexpected pathways, bridges of hope, and places of deep and abiding peace. Photo credit JAT.

If you're new to this site, and you haven't started reading at the beginning, you're probably wondering what the heck I'm trying to do here. Am I pretending to write a dialogue with Jesus in the way Plato once pretended to write dialogues with dead people? Or in the way Neale Donald Walsch (he of "Conversations with God" fame) has been pretending to write dialogues with God?

No, actually. I'm exactly who I claim to be. I'm a mother and I'm a science-loving quasi-Christian cataphatic mystic who talks every day to one particular angel who happens to have acquired a lot of fame.  

The dialogues I write are exactly what I claim the dialogues are -- dialogues with Jesus. You can accept that or not as you wish. It makes no difference to me whether or not you believe me. I'm not trying to convert you. I'm not asking you for money. I'm not asking you to put me on a pedestal and admire me. Heck, if I wanted those things, I'd have posted my name long ago and built up a clever marketing campaign (as many other spiritual gurus have done). I'm trying to share some insights that have been important to me on my journey, insights that may prove helpful to you, too. That's my goal. That's my intent. If it feels right to you, great. If not, well, I'm not going to lose any sleep over your rejection. I know who I am and I won't apologize for it. 

I wrote my first 49 posts on Concinnate Christianity without bringing Jesus overtly onto the pages. But Jesus helped me write every one of those posts, just as he's helping me with this one, even though he's not speaking out loud today. Maybe you think it's all baloney, that if I'm not inventing the dialogues or inventing my belief in Jesus' presence, then there must be something seriously wrong with me. Maybe a split personality or something. If you're determined to put me in this category, there's nothing I can do to stop you. I know from harsh experience that all the proof in the world won't stop a person from believing what he or she is determined to believe. You've gotta do what you've gotta do, and I've gotta do what I've gotta do. However, you should know that I'm not the tiniest bit afraid of being assessed by an objective third-party psychiatrist in a normal clinical setting. I have great respect for the field of psychiatry. In fact, I probably have more in common with a psychiatrist of faith (by that I mean a psychiatrist who is also a person of faith) than with any other sort of specialist. (As you may have noticed, I have little regard for most theologians.)  

I decided to make this blog different. I wanted people to have the chance to get to know Jesus better as a person, and the only way to do that is to give Jesus a chance to speak in his own voice. Hence the dialogue format. These dialogues aren't pre-written. I write spontaneously on the date that actually appears at the top of each post. I usually write in the mornings because I happen to be a morning person. I also write in the mornings because I often start work around noon. Today I'm scheduled to start work at 10:00 a.m., though, so I have to type quickly because I need to get ready for work. As usual, I'll probably leave behind a few typos. I'll catch them sometime. Maybe later today, maybe not for a few weeks. I'm still finding typos on the Concinnate Christianity site.  

Meanwhile, I'm struggling to find the best way to introduce my thoughts on the spiritual journey on the Blonde Mystic site. It's no easy task to find the right pedagogical approach to a field of inquiry that has barely been touched by anyone because of its complexity. The journey of the soul can't be reduced to simplistic models -- which may be the only point I've managed to communicate effectively so far on the Blonde Mystic site. 

I didn't set out to be a channeller of the man who once lived as Jesus, and when I finally realized who it was that I was actually talking to I was some pissed. I was pissed because I understood even then (in 2001) the implications of trying to tell other people I can talk to Jesus. Yeah, right. Like, how bizarre is that? All I can tell you is that he really means it and I really mean it and hopefully you can feel the truth of his -- our -- words in our posts. 

I also hope you can feel how important it is for me to stay within the bounds of respectable science. Have you noticed I never prophesy? I don't prophesy because I think it's wrong to invent claims about what will happen. How can I know what will happen? I can make guesses, like everybody else, about what might happen. That's why I like science-fiction (as opposed to sci-fi, which I don't much care for, except for Star Wars). But science fiction is story telling. It's not prophecy (well, not intentionally, anyway). I don't waste my time trying to predict things. I have enough on my plate just trying to figure out the present. Of course, in order to understand the present, I need to have a grasp on the past, too. This is why I do so much historical research.  

The soul I know as Jesus is a real person, a real person with his own personality and his own talents and his own interests. He's not a clay figure who can be moulded and shaped into anything you want him to be. It's not right to treat anyone that way, including Jesus. He's his own person, his own self. 

I can tell you right now what you would "see" if he were here on Planet Earth right now in his own body (which he's not). You'd see a tall, dark-haired man with a tan complexion and dark brown eyes. You'd see a man who smokes (yes, I know what I'm saying here about the smoking thing -- and no, I don't smoke, and never have, except for two or three packs when I was 18). You'd see a man who loves vehicles -- sports cars, bikes, planes. You'd see a man who loves hard rock and plays guitar, piano, drums. But you'd also see a polymath -- a particularly gifted all-round scholar who can effortlessly handle science, philosophy, history, writing, music, and math. You'd see a man fascinated by medical science. You'd see a man who wants to be in the heart of the action where people need a lot of help. I could easily see him as a surgeon in a war zone. He's just that kind of guy -- brilliant but also a bit wild and reckless. 

Oh, and he swears a lot.  

This is who Jesus is. This is who he has always been as a soul and angel. It's who he will always be. He's gritty and funny. He's very shy, but he also has a "showy" streak in him, and once you get him going, you can't get him away from the microphone. He has a huge hole in his heart from the time when his human daughter died in Nazareth. (This sort of grief never goes away, even for angels.) He has terrific fashion sense. He sings like Josh Groban. He's left handed. He prefers tea over coffee.  

These things are hardwired into his soul. I've spent so much time with him that I can "feel" these things about him. Sure, I've translated them into "humanese" (not really a word, but I hope you get the idea). But everyone's soul personality gets translated into "humanese" when they choose to incarnate on Planet Earth, and it's really not that hard to see a person's true soul personality once you understand that God's children are always God's children -- no matter where they happen to be living in the space-time continuum.  

Gotta go. Time to go to work. Catch you later. Best wishes to you all. 

Love Jen

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.