Jesus the Biochemist, Pt. 2

Jesus lived a relatively short life. He only needed to be around as long as was necessary for his message to be “absorbed.”

In the world of the cytoplasm the life of the Son, messenger-RNA, is short. Once the ribosomal-RNA is “keyed in,” the messenger-RNA is quickly broken down into individual nucleotides, which are put to a variety of uses in the cell. Thus, as the Son, messenger-RNA, completes its work, its “flesh and blood,” or body, is given for the life of the world of cytoplasm.

Once the Son has done His job, the apostles are the ones left to disseminate His message:

In the cell, there is a “transfer” or “missionary” job to be done. This work is accomplished by small fragments of RNA, fragments so small as to be freely soluble in the cell. These are often referred to as transfer-RNA. There are a number of varieties of transfer-RNA, and each will attach itself to one particular activated amino acid and to no other… In parallel, one might say that each factor of the superego can transmit only a portion of the truth, and thus brings only its “understanding” to be “attached” to the Son, messenger-RNA, so that many prophets and apostles are necessarily involved in the whole story that the Son, sent into the world, must reveal unto it.

In the Gospel of John Jesus says: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” “My teaching is not my own, but comes from the one who sent me.” “Yet even if I should judge, my judgment would be valid, because it is not I alone who judges, but I and the one who sent me. “ Harold tells us that…

The world of the cytoplasm can see the Father, DNA, only in the Son, in messenger-RNA, which is somehow sent from the nucleus to give itself to “key-in” the “truth-blanks” in order that the world of the cytoplasm may partake of the Father’s word and the Son’s body, and thereby live. The Father, DNA, does not leave the nucleus; the “doctrine” of the messenger-RNA is not its own; it is the doctrine of the DNA that sends it. Whatever the message it gives, its judgment is true, for it gives DNA’s judgment as to the particular imprint (of the particular substance) to be impressed upon the ribosomal-RNA.

We’ll finish up today’s post with this potent paragraph:

In the cell, the message is expressed in a “chemical language,” which may now be the only “language” left to the Father, for to the Son, man, is given the power of the word. The “chemical words” of DNA brought by messenger-RNA are life to the cells. Jesus indicates that the words of truth, sounding from the depths in man and voiced through his Authority-Ego, are life to consciousness. As it partakes of them it is partaking of that which gives it eternal being, for truth and love are the “us” of God, eternal. Thus, He says, “the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life.” He insists that the spirit quickens the flesh, and thus that life itself is a nonmaterial force.

And where do we find life, spirit, within the body? That will be the focus of our next post. Until then, peace.

The Truth Shall Set You Free

Finishing up Chapter 4, we look at what frees us from the suppression of our humanity due to the limitations of the Group-ego. Harold tells us:

Jesus saw that man is, first of all, in bondage to the sin and error he embraces – “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” (John 8:34) But He saw, too, that truth frees.

Truth, parent in man, will not forever allow him to embrace a false ideal. And truth, parent in man, leads the mortal parent to drive the child from parasitic bondage – both suffer the traumatic effects.

So freeing ourselves from deriving our physical, biological, and psychical sustenance from other humans is a traumatic event for us. Harold says that not only truth, but this trauma also frees:

When Pavlov’s conditioned dogs were caged in a cellar that flooded one night, that single stressful exposure was so shaking that much of their conditioned learning was lost.

Every human being, if he lives a normal span, suffers five traumatic events that serve to expand his consciousness and increase his need to know the truth of himself in being: the trauma of birth, of puberty, of recognizing himself to be cast out in solitary being, of losing his sexual competency, of anticipating the loss of his life. Thus, built into his nature are the stresses that periodically “flood the cellar” of his subconscious mind and free him of much of the “conditioned learning” society and Babel Tower builders have imposed upon him. Therefore, before death overtakes him, he is free of much of his spurious “conditioning.”

And of course it is death that completely sets us free. Which is why Jesus tells us we must die to self, pick up our crosses and follow him. We must “hate father and mother, wife and children, brother and sister, and yes, even our own life.” If we are truly free of conditioning, then like Him we will have “nowhere to lay our head.” We will be completely open and present to the “here and now” moment, eternity.

I hope you have enjoyed the considerations presented in Chapter 4! With the next installment we will begin digging into Chapter 5, “Original Sin and Saving Grace.” Until then, peace…

Historical Judaic Messiah

What is the prophecy that Harold says “no man can fulfill?”  If Jesus in His person is not Messiah enough, then what else is needed?  For me, this is where THE SHINING STRANGER really started to get interesting.  Harold says:

Jesus appears to have realized that the Logos in man is man’s understanding of who and what he is, the “truth that I am” [not “the truth that I have”], and that the truth of man’s being is the truth that governs men; He appears to have understood also that if Messiah is to bear the truth of man’s being to humankind and dwell in a body among men, then words of truth must take a form of their own: Messiah could come only in the advent of a Book. By insisting that His words would not pass away, (Matt. 24:35) Jesus prepared the ground for His return in the advent of the book written of Him.  

This can certainly be a challenging statement.  Not impossible, but challenging!  Harold goes on to explain his point…

If one sees His second coming in the advent of the Gospels, the mystery of His statement, that the disciple, John, was to survive until He “came back,” (John 21:20-22) is reconciled… Jesus lived until his record was set forth – that is, John’s understanding of Jesus lived until Jesus came back and spoke again in The Gospel According to Saint John.

Well, THAT is certainly an interpretation I’ve never heard before; and I LIKE it!  What else does our insightful author have to say about the Bible?  

The Bible, as Messiah, possesses glory, grace, and reality – not as THE only expression of the Logos in man, but as an only or one whole expression of it.  The Bible was centuries in the writing, product of authors widely separated in time, but it has a marvelous unity of thought although it has also many contradictions – as many as man himself.  It continues to be the most controversial book in the Western world because, like man, it is a supreme paradox.  In sum, it contains the expression of humanity: it is Homo sapiens’ complete picture of himself, from Genesis to Revelation.  Beginning with the advent of man’s realization of God-consciousness, symbolized in Adam, it reaches it’s climax in man’s realization of God incarnate in his being, symbolized in Jesus as Son of man, Lord, with which one’s consciousness may have but brief encounter – and then it bears witness to the transformation in consciousness this encounter evokes.

What a beautiful description of the world’s most popular book!  And an effective vaccine against fundamentalism of all stripes!  

Oh yes, what about that prophecy?!  Here it is:

Thou hast no desire for sacrifice or offering;

it is a body thou hast prepared for me – 

in holocausts and sin-offerings thou takest no delight, 

So I said, “Here I come – in the roll of a book

this is written of me – 

I come to do thy will, O God.

(Psalm 40:6-8 and Hebrews 10:5-7)

We’ll finish today’s post with Harold’s understanding…

In Jesus’ time, a book was a roll – a scroll… Jesus gave this command:

“Go and learn the meaning of this word, I care for mercy, not for sacrifice.” (Matt. 9:13)

Thus, one must seek to understand His mission through the prophecy quoted above, for in the face of this command, He cannot be viewed as seeing Himself in terms of a sacrifice or sin-offering.  …if Messiah is to fulfill this Scripture, the one who filled the Messiah role could not be an atoning Lamb to ransom man, a sacrifice for man’s sin.  

Viewed in another light, the poetic words of this prophecy also say that Messiah’s advent is in the “roll of the book” written of the one who comes, a prophecy no man could fulfill.  If Messiah is to “tell us all things,” only a book encompassing the words spoken by countless truth-bearers to span the last reach of human consciousness could be Messiah to all men.

The “body…prepared for me,” for the one whose work would bring forth the book, is to be seen in the Scriptures into which Jesus wove His life and words, but it is in the volume of the book “written of me” – God, Son in man – that Messiah, the Bible, comes, comes as a roll, as a wave that surges upon the shores of the world through fulfillment of the missionary task Jesus imposed.  Through the Bible, He came back.  Through it, historical Messiah comes, fulfilling the Judaic promise to bear the whole body of truth to man: the truth embodied in man’s sacred writings in every language, in legends, for all these speak the same word and the Bible enfolds their like.

And there we have it.

At this point on our journey I’d like to step aside a bit and look further into the concept of a “book.”  We’ll do that in the next couple of posts.  Before that happens, though, I’m taking a week off for Holy Week/Spring Break.  Have a blessed Easter, and I will see you in April.  Until then, peace…

THE PROBLEM, THE OBJECTIVE, THE CRUCIAL QUESTIONS – Part 3

It’s time for the last of our 3 foci, “the objective.”

To understand the objective of THE SHINING STRANGER, we will all have to become poets.  But what exactly is a poet?  Of all the definitions I’ve heard, I enjoy Dr. Cornel West’s the most:

The great (Percy) Shelly used to say that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ What did he mean by that?  He wasn’t talking about versifying.  To be a poet in the most profound sense is to have the courage to release your imagination and your empathy…

True poetry is full of contradictions, paradox, mystery, conundrums, and riddles.  Many people say the Bible cannot be trusted because it contains many contradictions.  Others say “if the Bible says it, it must be so,” and can’t see any meaning beyond the plain sense of the text.  Both sides are barking up the wrong tree.  Harold says…

Dr. Henry A Murray writes that an “important fact not generally acknowledged is…the Bible is poetry, in its best parts, magnificent and edifying poetry….Some devout Christians overlook the fact that the stirring and sustaining power of the Book they live by depends on the wondrous emotive language, the vivid imagery and figures of speech, with which its wisdom is transmitted….If the New Testament…had been written by a modern social scientist in the jargon of his profession, it would have died at birth.”

As does (George) Santayana, Dr. Murray sees that the playing down of the “crucial import of the Bible’s poetry,” hand in hand with the playing up of its historicity, is the greatest fallacy of Christianity, for thereby the scope of its traffic with and judgement of reality is severely limited.  Poetry does not obscure fact – it presents it in words that act as leaven in the mind to make room for it to house there.  Poetry is dazzling in its completely open and full use of words that have, as John Ciardi puts it: “…far more meanings than anyone thinks about in reading factual prose.  A word is not a meaning but a complex of meanings consisting of all its possibilities: its ability to identify something, the image it releases in making that identification, its sound, its history, its associations-in-context…” (emphases mine)

Plato equated poetry with creation: “All creation or passage of non-being into being is poetry or making.”  Poetry comes from the subconscious, and Harold sees in Jesus the universe’s Poet Laureate…

Jesus spoke poetically, but if His words are true they must be a correct, albeit poetical, description of reality.

Until a man has grasped the full implication of Jesus’ words, “the kingdom of God is within you,” he cannot begin to understand Him.  His every word is predicated upon this revelation.  It is the woking of the inner kingdom He reveals.  If the kingdom of heaven is within, there is no heavenly place of the abode for the “redeemed” to go – the realm of heaven is now an individual state of being, a potential mankind shall in time realize.  It is inward reality as opposed to the outward illusiveness of life (and of matter, which Jesus proclaimed long before the physicists discovered it).

Jesus saw life to be infinite, saw that man’s religions form one-to-one correspondences of truth, and that each man is a one-to-one correspondence with God, truth, life, and with each other man.

Jesus saw the Ten Commandments as classical psychic law.  He realized, however, that quantum psychic law underlies the classical law, and this secondary law governs the inner, real life of the individual – this is the law he enunciated.

In saying that the kingdom of God, an unknown realm, is within each person, Jesus proclaimed the existence of that psychic reality now called the unconscious – revealed its working and power.  He made of Himself a symbol of the Authority within this psychic realm: the vital Self-of-selves abstracted from consciousness for which man yearns – which is unto each his own, “the Lord, your God.”

Jesus strove to heal the breach in man’s thinking upon reality, strove to rejoin the divided physical and spiritual realms, saying, poetically, that the energy which gives life to man is, potentially, in a “stone.”  Identifying Himself and mankind with primordial energy, light, He dramatized and phrased in poetic terms the most important of the secondary laws of physics, enfolding His answer to the question of the universe in the sign positive (+)….whether by design or because he knew how to tap the fount of truth in His unconscious, He presented in drama, symbol, and poetry the underlying physical and psychic laws that are today being revealed.

From these observations Harold derives the objective of THE SHINING STRANGER:

The objective, then,  is not to present one or several new aspects, but rather a whole new concept of Jesus, for, as Albert Schweitzer points out, “What has been passing for Christianity during these nineteen centuries is merely a beginning, full of weaknesses and mistakes, not a full-grown Christianity springing from the spirit of Jesus.”

   

One here is reminded of GK Chesterton’s quote: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

Although THE SHINING STRANGER is a difficult work, we will not leave it untried.  I hope we are up to the challenge ahead of us.  Until next time, peace…

Jesus’ Messianic Mission

“Prayer for Messiah” by Ghenadie Sontu.

As promised, we now come to the point of exploring the main themes of Harold’s interpretation of Jesus’ mission.  In Gerald Heard’s introduction, he wastes no time in getting to the point…

THE SHINING STRANGER is based upon a revolutionary and, insofar as I am aware, unprecedented interpretation of Jesus’ Messianic mission which Harold develops as the discourse progresses, drawing upon Jesus’ own words and actions to support his thesis.  This interpretation involves the following points:

1. Jesus recognized the Messianic hope to be valid and universal, but misdirected when man looked beyond his individual being to find the Christ (Logos, God-Son) which Jesus saw to be incarnate in every person, revealed through humankind’s unique power of speech and expression of the Word, God, One, I.

2. Jesus realized that until the ancient Messianic doctrines were superseded by a valid, ethical concept of the Christ, of God, and of man, the individual and society would suffer the ravages of Messianic pretension, as well as the curse of Messianic delusion which Jesus suffered but from which he recovered before beginning his ministry, recognizing himself to be no more, no less, than any other human being.

3. Jesus was convinced that until man ceased to look for a Messiah to come and solve all problems, the development of human consciousness would be arrested because man would not seek his “inner kingdom” to find the Christ of himself, the Authority that governs his life and inevitably leads him to become responsible to and for himself as well as a responsible member of society in which truth alone actually governs and reigns, in time destroying whatever is false, spurious, and incompatible with man’s true nature and need.

4. Therefore, Jesus’ purpose was to complete and destroy the Judaic Messianic tradition together with any Messianic concept akin to it through a withering of this idea as the Messianic idea he espoused, the idea of the Christ in everyone, took root and flowered to overshadow prevailing Messianic expectation. He knew exactly what he was doing and was in no sense victimized.

5. Jesus’ mission was to destroy Messianic tradition creatively by making “Israel” and its history a symbol of human personality or consciousness, while making himself a symbol of the Christ in every person which insures his eternal life and the evolution of his consciousness through dealing with his own forces of good and evil which Jesus saw to be equally essential to life and satisfaction in it, but he saw also that each force was in process of regeneration; Jesus made himself a symbol of the Logos in humankind to establish the pattern of the operation of the Christ in Homo sapiens’ evolution from child to man free of destructive impulses by virtue of being fully conscious and completely empathetic, with dominion over himself, his flesh, and his life.

6. The Bible, one body of words encompassing the limits of human consciousness, truth bearer that can dwell always with men and which Jesus knew must be brought into being as a result of his works and his command to his disciples, is itself historical Judaic Messiah.

Pretty provocative stuff, no?  Hopefully some of these ideas are new to you, or if you are familiar with them the approach to them will be new.  Both of these are true of me when I first encountered this work, and I was certainly intrigued enough to delve into the book and explore further.  At this point I must confess that one of the main reasons for this blog is for me to “journal” my own thoughts as I read through the book, and to use the book as a launching pad for journaling thoughts and observations from other momentous works I have read in the past.  I would certainly appreciate any and all comments, and feedback from you, the reader, as there are many ways of understanding, as the Logos expresses itself individually and creatively through each human being.

OK, we’re almost ready to start Chapter 1.  But before we do, my next post will deal with the ground rules Harold sets if we want to take this journey with him.  We’ll examine his view of the historicity of the Gospels, and the importance thereof.  Until then, peace…