The Limits of Jesus in His Church

But only a fool of a Christian does not believe that God is all there is to the spiritual world. The Bible is quite clear that there are others who are spiritual (read anything non-physical). There are angels, demons, Satan and other forces we cannot comprehend.

For example, in Daniel nations are spoken of as if they are represented in the spiritual world - led by forces greater than humans. As another example, throughout the history books, YHWH makes war on the gods of other, lesser nations. In Ephesians, Paul speaks of wrestling with forces greater than flesh and blood. In Colossians, he deals with those who worship angels.

I will admit that modern Christianity may have tried to downplay the existence of other forces, but that is a relatively recent phenomenon. The biblical world was filled with spiritual forces, and there is no reason they do not exist today.

However, to speak of exploring these “taboos” as part of Christian “science” is foolishness. YHWH is the one God we are called to love and honor. Those who know him and choose to follow false gods are in danger of punishment from him. Remember the golden calf?

I would like to ask Sun Warrior a question. The gist of your argument is that we have put ourselves in an untenable position and that we need to break out of it, in order to do what?

Is it esoteric knowledge or something else that you seek?

Knowledge could be a sort of a ‘holy grail’ and perhaps it always has been for humans but one thing that we do know is that the bible teaches us that knowledge is not salvation. Salvation is only in Jesus.

If you find Him limiting then I think you don’t know Him well enough (no offense intended).

Live to serve : Serve to live

In the 1930s the Church of England experimented with home-grown ‘sensitives’ within that community (e.g. Vivian Deacon, Gerald de Beaurepaire ), in communicating with those who had ’ passed through the Veil ’ in any epoch.

Apparently, contact was established with certain persons : e.g. Archbishops Randall Davison and Cosmo Lang ; also various eminent persons including Judge Edmunds.

The general tenor of the ‘communion’ (their word) was that the Church was hopelessly weak because of the break in the ’ Communion of Saints both Living and Departed ‘, that link which in the Early Church was apparently much stronger…… and in Patriachal times even more so. There was crystal-clear two-way traffic between God and the prophets, God and the Apostles, between humans, Angels and Archangels.

Why has it all gone pear-shaped?

Pastorerick,

Yes, the Bible does speak of some of the spirits in existence. Modernity is at a disadvantage from the First Century Christians. Spiritual knowledge, as opposed to spiritual wisdom, was in abundance before the Church strained it out of popular culture. Though today we can conceptually understand the existence of a spirit world, we have no first-hand experience outside of the God/Jesus/ human pipeline.

The taboos in the Church are called ‘heresy.’ That which is outside of the conceptual doctrine of the Church. The reality of the spirit world is effectively a taboo, precisely from your attitude towards it. There is no need to explore it. We only need God and Jesus and we will be fine. Don’t worry ourselves with things we cannot understand, and may be dangerous.

The quest for the Emerging Church is to connect with the post-modern world to make relevant Christ’s message in a new cultural milieu. Does this segment of the Church know the conditions of post-modern man and the freedom of thought and exploration that science affords? This is a condition that calls into question the constraints of Christian dogma that has not changed in two millennia. The attraction of non-Christian spirituality is caused by its claims to be able to explain spirituality outside of the God-human pipe that constricts Christianity. How can the Church compete, depite its remarkable depths, when it does not have any real spiritual knowledge outside the primary duality?

I do not speak of a Christian ‘science.’ There are enough groups around claiming to harness the natural laws of spirituality to help achieve our ambitions. I am talking about Creation. God Created and Is everything. What does this mean if we conceptually know more spirits exist? What is their relationship with God? What is their relationship to us? Would this help to explain the reality that Jesus lived versus our relationship with the material world, when He obviously related to reality in a totally different way than we do? It could go some way in helping to solve the debate on the nature of Christ, or at least infuse something new into the debate.

The ancient Israelites worshipped a golden calf instead of God. Yet Jesus had a relationship with a tree that would not provide a snack for Him, and sent some pigs over a cliff with some sort of demon in them. He had a relationship with the spirit world that didn’t involve mistaking who and what God is. Everything started with God, anchored in God, directed from the Wisdom of God.

What is the element in the civilized that made such explorations a taboo? Have we evolved intellectually, theologically, spiritually to begin to explore the spirit world anchored in God? Traditional theology says there is no need. But artificial, post-modern man is a little different than historical humans who still had a relationship with nature and not so dependent on conceptual thinking. Having recognized the problem, where do you begin?

It is odd that there still exists cultures that did not need that one Commandment. Native North Americans, for example, never confused spirits with God. For this reason they maintained a deep understanding of the spiritual nature of Creation which is lost to the civilized. We had to be cut off because we could not intellectually handle that reality. Why?

Semicar,

What is our untenable position? If we broke out of it, what would we do? Don’t those questions speak volumes?

Do you like the position civilization is in right now? Christians are not supposed to accept it. But in a way we are asked to accept it. Genesis tells us that we were put in this situation for a reason. Now it is up to us to fix it. So accept it, and change it.

How are we doing so far?

What good would knowing more about the spirit world do for us? Theology tells us that all we need is Jesus and God. And for those who have experienced Christ its a pretty satisfying experience. What could some esoteric knowledge do for us that could exceed the wonder of Jesus in our lives?

The word ‘esoteric’ reveals much. Perhaps its cousin word is ‘trivia.’ What purpose would we have for it? Looking at our Biblical libraries we have our hands full with what we already have!

It also tells us of our relationship with Creation. We can romantically see God in nature. We can see how coincidences of events come together forming an answer to a prayer. We are here to work on ourselves with the mystery of Wisdom entering our acceptance to blossom our relationship with our fellow humans, and thus ourselves. A pretty full agenda.

Knowledge is not Salvation. Actually it is The Original Sin. You don’t need a Ph.D to realize that Adam chose to live by knowledge over Wisdom, so God granted his wish. God shut down access to spiritual reality over time, as the mind grew stronger to dominate the heart. History is the evolution of the ascending mind over wisdom. We are a knowledge culture, not a wisdom one. We have ‘values,’ a mathematical term involving the freedom of variables in an equation. We don’t have morals now. And if you don’t think the Church is infected, read the sophisticated conceptual language on this site. The eternal debate persists because the mind still has not come to grips with the spiritual reality of Jesus of Nazareth. Wisdom is but a word or phrase that speaks volumes. Theology takes a library.

Until civilized humans understand themselves as knowledge-dominated animals, they cannot begin to realize a reality that is not dependent on the ascendant mind. Strange, but we must see ourselves before we can comprehend what is outside of us.

Finding Jesus is a remarkable experience. Just as encountering the specific Consciousness of God is. My experience with both of Them has invited me into this unknown territory. Initially I resisted. I told God this was not allowed. He told me to think again. It seems He is not bound by the rules that we have placed upon ourselves.

If I understand you correctly (which is highly unlikely), you are calling for us to pursue an other-worldly “wisdom” in order to appeal to a pseudo-spirituality in our post-modern culture.

If that is what you’re saying, then you are bordering on a gnosticism - the worship of the secret “wisdom.” I hope I am misunderstanding you.

Pastorerik,

What I am saying is that we do not recognize Creation.

The Gnostics were no different than Christians. Whether you worship the Bible or some ‘secret’ wisdom is the same thing. It is a civilized malady for conceptualizing and controlling wisdom for one’s own purpose, not the worshipping of God or acknowledging the nature of wisdom.

The Gnostics loved to explain everything, just like Christians do. But Wisdom is not a possession. It is merely a word or phrase that comes to you when you need or ask for it. By accepting it, the meaning helps you live.

There is no difference between wisdom, truth and love. They are all the same thing, ‘of God,’ and the recognition of how we are part of Him. If we sincerely live a Christian life then our hearts are aligned with the Creator, though our minds cannot perceive beyond the God-human pipeline. And God is only looking at our hearts, not our minds. We are dropped into this reality to see what this condition will do to our hearts, strengthen or weaken it.

It is based upon Adam’s choice to live by knowledge instead of wisdom. We may choose God in our lives, but we could never escape the compromise that knowledge and the dominant mind placed upon us. Choose between good and evil, love and pain. Do I stick by my love of God as the Nazis arrest me, knowing that my principles will endanger my family as well? Or do I compromise with Nazis for the love and sake of my family’s safety? The choice is always there. Choose. The horror is on either side of truth.

Christians are in a strange place. On the one side is Islam, that only believes in one God, the specific consciousness of God. On the other are the Hindus that do not believe in a specific consciousness of God, but know ‘Him’ as the manifestation of love through all things in the universe. Christians have Jesus and the Holy Spirit, taking us away from the duality of God and human of Islam, but not giving much more in the spiritual realm outside of two spirits, a human soul and the other manifestation descended on Pentacost. Hindus recognize the infinite manifestations of consciousness in everything, we have but three. Though the First Century Christians may have recognized other spiritual entities, today we are so removed and refined, that we are more like Muslims in our God-human duality focus than we are on the greater spiritual realms that exist. Just look at the parishoners eyes glass over when you preach about the Trinity.

What is Creation? St. Francis and Jean Vanier can make our jaw drop in their description of God within our material world. Listen to the bird and hear God sing. Watch the raging river and feel the force and the majesty of what God commands. A bird is a conscious thing. A river follows its own path. God is everywhere.

But for all practical purposes, Creation is here for our use. And the wealth that we can derive from this material needs to be shared with everyone to live life in the love that is the reality that Jesus spoke of. Taking on fantastic Gnostic explanations of reality is just asking us to balloon our imaginations when Genesis tells us that we are rooted to this material world for a reason, so don’t ignore it.

So how do we keep ahold of what we know, the precious specific consciousness of God, rooted in this material world, and still break out of our limited perception that reality is only God, humans, and inert matter? The two become one in us, soul manifested in dust.

It begins with the simple recognition that God cannot Create inert matter. He can only Create spirit. Spirit by its nature is conscious. Consciousness demands structure, which is meaning. Modern civilization has figured out structure-consciousness within the present paradigm. Meaning is malleable and variable, depending on your point-of-view. Our minds have reached a parallel recognition of the basics of consciousness, though in relationship with a traditional material perspective on reality. It is solely based on human consciousness, what it is and how it acts in an environment of natural laws and molecules.

God’s consciousness in all things is already recognized in theology. The big step is to see the hidden, silent consciousness in all things. We are ‘of God’ but separate consciousnesses from God. So is everything else. How is a tree the same thing? A flower? A hawk? We think of them as perhaps lower life forms, lower consciousness from our exhalted heights of intellect. But is this true? Or, living under Adam’s curse of knowledge over wisdom, dust over spirit, are we blinded from knowing that which has never ‘fallen’ into this state?

There is no esoteric, secret wisdom in all this. It is simple recognition of what is all around us everyday. What is reality and who are we? The two oldest civilized questions that have never been answered to our satisfaction. We know there is a Veil separating us from God. Jesus gave us a glimpse behind it. We marched on from that. But we do not need to go off into some endless shamanic trance, convinced that our imagination can perform infinite alchemy if only we can punch through our limited perception. It is merely recognizing the reality that Jesus saw as He walked this earth. Jesus asked and God healed. Knowledge was ruining the hearts of tax collectors and Jesus sat with them in recognition of their true hearts. The fish and loaves multiplied so that Creation Provided for the multitudes. He did it with confidence, in a matter-of-fact way, for that is the nature of reality.

Jesus saw the heart of the tree that bore no fruit and cursed it. The drawing line of our perception begins there. Why did Jesus beat up on a tree? Bizarre, odd, it must just be allegory. A tree is just short of inert matter.

What is available to us to understand this in another way? It is interesting that what is fantastic to us is considered matter-of-fact to another people. We look down our noses at other perspectives on reality, knowing that reality according to Jesus can be reduced down to one thing, love through God. Nothing is superior to this.

Without focusing solely on this we are lead astray from God. But there still exists people who understand the reality that Jesus was walking in, that was love writ larger than man - alone in an inanimate universe. For 500 years missionaries have crushed them. Those people recognized Jesus matter-of-factly, but found the missionaries strange and confused. Why couldn’t the missionaries see what was in the Words that they spoke? What was wrong with the civilized that they could not see the spirits of Creation and the love that Creation’s spirits have for their Creator?

Christianity exists as a service to civilization. Recognize the limits of civilization and you can walk into a forest and see it differently, closer to the way Jesus saw it. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in an environment where love, wisdom and Truth was more than the imposition of our mind’s will to effect it among humans living in a desert?

The catholic and orthodox traditions have a lot of history in the spirit world that goes beyond the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The communion of Saints is still a vital ingredient to these faiths. To the catholics there is the church triumphant, and the church militant, (saints in heaven and saints on earth) which comprise the universal church. We believe that the saints, as well as angels are all part of the christian experience. The Trinity is the absolute center of all our worship, yet we believe that our prayers and the prayers of all the saints are available and important.

mike

We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. G.K. Chesterton, Othodoxy.

Pastorerik,

It is a question of both cosmology and authority. You have outlined the orthodox explanation of both. With that kind of firepower behind our restrictions the questions of the limitations of the Church must appear quite odd.

There is little ground to discuss the existence of Mother Earth, for example, as a spiritual entity because it is not allowed. There is no purpose and it is forbidden. Who knows what errant ways could come from it.

I would have agreed with you before one moment in my life. But in the next all those restrictions were lifted by God. Strange but true, though I do not beg you to lift your skepticism.

The introduction of Mother Earth, not by Her, but by God Himself, gave credence to Her existence and Her alliance with the Creator. Though this did not throw Paul or Salvation out the door, it certainly raised a number of questions about the assumptions we hold after encountering the consciousness that is the planet. What gives? Why has She been so silent? Why have we, the children, been given the run of the house all these years? Odd.

Encountering other spirits, like the Owl and the Hawk, and finding their wisdom aligned with the Creator, two separate consciousnesses that have the Creator’s wisdom and love, was an eye-opener. They love to help us just as God and Jesus do. Quite interesting. If we are surrounded by all these consciousnesses then what are the implications for our faith? They exhibit all the Love that Jesus expressed about Creation and God. And they are not some wild Gnostic rendition, but simple everyday creatures that exist in the material world with us. Paul told us not to acknowledge them or we would end up worshipping them instead of God. But God seemed to think I could handle the revelation.

Other odd things happened. I was introduced to past lives. This, again, is beyond the scope of the religion that I was born into. I resisted for the longest time, but in the end God won. Christianity teaches us the ‘zero-sum’ theory of life: the soul is formed in the womb with the embryo, has one life to live, one chance to get into heaven, and then its off to eternity. If past lives were realized by the faithful, what would it do to our theology? What impact would it have on our interpretation of the Resurrection, our life stories, let alone discovering that our souls have their own stories that involve many lives. The Church is not equipped to handle these questions. It is not allowed. But it was God who forced these realizations onto me, so I must accept authority as well. I tested the experiences against all my academic training and skepticism, and God beat it every time.

Does this not make me a Christian? Jesus is still the Son of God. Everything He said was true. And thank goodness for Paul, who took all these crazy mystical things of Jesus and made it reasonably rational to get our heads around.

Despite your skepticism, consider the implications. Almost all of Creation recognizes and is aligned with God’s wisdom. Are we sufficiently embedded in our faith in God to actually hear something new from Him? It depends on your relationship with God Himself versus the God-through-the-Bible. Many have faith without an actual confrontation with the specific Consciousness of God. That is a wonderful thing. I, on the other hand, had long ago given up on religion and then was Given the shocking, traumatic, exhausting experience of His actual Consciousness. Others have had it. Mine mirrored much of their encounter. We would have to dismiss much that we believe if we dismissed their experiences.

From these two examples one is left with many questions about why God didn’t tell us this stuff earlier. Why would He do that to us? And what new explanations of the Jesus phenomenon can we deduce?

I do not wish to prick the pride of the Church. It did what it was meant to do during the time of the ascendant mind, civilization. And it would take more than a few posts on an Internet site to move that mountain. It is heavily fortified with explanations and assumptions that were built to resist the errors that lead Israel astray in the past.

Much like the early Christians who needed the actual spiritual experience of Christ to solidify their faith, to understand the Church from outside of the doctrine takes experience that is considered heresy but condoned when it is within God. The wisdom does exist outside the Church to help safely do this, but one must first understand oneself as a part of civilization, mind culture, and what this entails. Until you know yourself, it is difficult to get beyond it. The mind has a way of resisting the dominance of the true heart. It is in control, an unnatural condition that is unacknowledged in our society.

After 200 years of secular assault, the Church may be weary of yet another challenge to its orthodoxy. The Resurrection showed that souls could pop in and out of bodies. We just misinterpreted it as an exceptional occurance. We were not allowed contact with any other spirit but God and Jesus, and if you want to throw in some saints and angels, that is okay. We interpreted this to mean we were to concentrate on our lot in this one life within civilization. That was correct. But we demonized most of the spirits of Creation in the process, and extinguished cultures that knew something about the spirits’ wisdom within Creation. We didn’t realize that we were on the journey of the ascending mind, just that we had the only Truth. Still to this day the debate rages on about the historical life of Jesus and the nature of Christ. So we obviously don’t have enough information to put that question to bed.

The basic message to me from God was ‘I am All.’ What does that mean when we have such a limited perception of Creation? If Mother Earth does exist, then what is Her relationship with God and us? If we live surrounded by other consciousnesses then what does that do to our assumptions about reality and our place in it? If we live more than one life, then what gives with all the stress over Salvation? What is really going on??? Why would God do this to us? Does He not respect us? Why has He treated us like we could not handle the Truth?

It really gets one out of the circular arguments that the Church has been in for 2000 years. Perhaps your Christianity is limited to the doctrine of the Church. My Christianity merely explains Jesus a little bit more. How many times have we had to adjust Paul in the past. First slavery, then women, now homosexuals… The spiritual reality of Jesus has not changed. His Light is just not standing in so much darkness anymore. After all, that mystical gobble-de-gook that Jesus babbled on about at the Temple sounded pretty strange to those Jewish priests as well.

This does not take the focus off God by diverting it to ‘Creation.’ Both are One, as you have observed. But could there be a possible benefit acknowledging more aspects of Creation, instead of the priest blessing the dynamite before blowing up a river to make a dam? Let alone perceiving our souls’ Salvation as part of the greater reality of Creation?

Pastorerik,

No apology necessary. I respect your faith and your interpretation of the Bible’s instruction.

I recently saw an interview with Tom Caldwell, a devout Christian and the head of Caldwell Securities. He uses his faith to guide his business activities. In support of his faith in God, Tom set up a foundation to help the unfortunate.

Upon helping a young man, Tom told him that it came from God. How could it, the young man asked, it came from you? Tom told him that if he had not found Jesus then the help would not be there, so it was coming from God.

One of the things God reassured me in the beginning is ‘the divine is real.’ If we recognize this, we can see God in everything. The instruction from the Bible is to have no other God but God. The Israelites were confused. They worshipped a golden calf INSTEAD of God. They thought that would be more effective.

But, as we can see in Tom’s example, Tom wasn’t asking the man to worship him instead of God after providing for him, but that God was working through Tom. So too God works through all of Creation, because He is Creation.

Certain groups in feminism worship Mother Earth instead of God. They see Her as the source of life and stop there. What they do not understand is the single most important principle of Mother Earth. She begins with Her love of Father. Until you realize that, one falls under the admonition of the Bible verses you quoted. Just as Tom acted in his love for God, so does Mother Earth.

Christianity is a religion of sacrifice. Jesus sacrificed His life for us, so that we may live. Tom sacrificed his earnings so that a young man may live and know God. So too Mother Earth sacrificed Her Creation in Her love for God.

God asked someone whom He had Created to allow others of His Creation, souls, to use Her to learn and grow as spirits. He told Her that it would be painful, that they would be blind, and that She would suffer much destruction during this time. She loved God so much that She agreed. Mother Earth begins with Her love of Father. She was asked to choose of Her own free will to sacrifice Her Creation, who She is.

Does simple acknowledgement of Her existence constitute ‘worship?’ The Biblical instructions involves two components: worshipping something instead of God, and that ‘something’ is perceived as inherently superior to the worshipper. Accepting the dominance of that which is greater than you.

We acknowledge as humans many things that are greater than us. The forces of society, the weather, terminal illness are all out of our control. Do we worship them as we exist within them? No. Should that young man worship Tom Caldwell? No. The thing that is disturbing about the existence of Mother Earth is that She is spirit and superior to us. She never ‘Fell’ as we did. We know God. He is love and all-powerful and creates security for us. The acknowledgement of Mother Earth’s existence is strange and unsettling. But if you understand that She begins with Her love of Father, it is more like sitting in church with your mother, singing and praying to God. She is a sister spirit, older, more mature, wiser, having never succumbed to the error of choosing to live by knowledge over wisdom.

Humans cannot create Her by moulding a golden calf. The kernel of truth in those idolizers is the need for themselves to be in control of unseen forces. Can’t be done with Mother Earth. You’re rooked because She worships God and is not lead astray by ego. Golden calfs point to a humanity that does not know who or where they are.

Jesus taught us how to recognize God. Using these basic principles, it is easy to recognize the same qualities in the other monotheists in Creation outside of humans.

If we have a problem that by simply acknowledging the existence of other spirits in Creation constitutes ‘worship,’ we need to remember what we already know. Souls are spirits too. Do we mistake these spirits for God and worship them instead of God?

The wise man built his house upon a rock. David did so by slaying a giant with a small rock, and then cut off his head. God was using a stone to make a point about the dominance of the mind and knowledge. The rock spoke.

Jesus renamed Simon ‘the rock,’ and founded His Church upon his heart, not Paul’s mind. The consciousness of the heart embedded in the earth, of which the body is a part of. Why would God use ‘rock imagery’ twice when He was obviously recognizing the lives of two devoted hearts? It seems incongruous. How could the two be one? How could a rock, this world that leads us astray, be metaphorically chosen to speak for the true heart?

Creation is an endless duality. Our meaning is derived from relation, to God, to our fellow humans, to our material environment. We have a problem combining separation and oneness. Theology struggles to perceive and then turn this perception into experience. Part of the problem is that in all practical sense, despite our concept of God’s immanence and transcendance, our daily life depends upon relating to the material world as ‘lower’ than us. The cows, trees, and vegetables are there for our use and survival. They may technically be alive, and thus not inert, but we treat them like we do rock in a mine. Our dominion over Creation must be wise, but we are in control, today with science more than ever. Knowledge has given us this ability. The dominant mind has grown strong. But the separation remains. There is no consciousness that is as special or rivals humans. That makes us special to God. We can point to a theory to say otherwise. But then we go to McDonalds and throw out the new packaging ten minutes after receiving it. The apologetics is divorced from our actual reality. We cannot survive without the grocery store and money. Death and suffering would ensue, and that would be un-Christian to our fellow humans.

This is the gap between the heaven-on-earth that Jesus spoke of, and our knowledge-compromised existence. The mind is on top, not wisdom, the heart. It is so interwoven into us that we cannot appreciate it. We are human-centered, in relation to God and the material world, and here we sit. Until we understand this situation for what it is, we cannot begin to accept another reality. We know God, humans and inert matter. But we do not know the spirit layers of reality, the consciousnesses, that create the small spectrum of reality that we derive meaning from.

Do Christians really believe that they can, alone, stop the rape of the planet from business and armies? Do Christians really believe they have enough spiritual knowledge to counter the exponential expansion and choice that scientific knowledge is providing? Do we really understand how it actually warps us, eventhough we cling to our Bibles and our prayers? Do we really think we can ‘manage’ the environment from our ‘dominion’ perspective to avert ecological disaster? Do Christians really have enough of the ‘story’ of how God directs everything yet lets humans hurl toward disaster and death?

The limits of our cosmology, the limits of our interpretation of the Jesus Story and realization of the true spiritual existence of Creation hinders our grasp of Jesus’ Promise. Until Christians begin to expand beyond its human-centered doctrine it will continue to fall short by only offering ‘Salvation’ for the single individual human being.

Jesus was the extreme counter-weight to mind culture. He was necessary to get mankind through the time of the mind in one piece. He created the ideal that took our growing knowledge culture 2000 years to get to. Today, secular culture has created the best facsimile of Jesus’ heaven-on-earth. We heal the sick with fantastic medicine, our prosperity limits poverty, tolerance and democracy limits abusive dominance, war is unthinkable between the democracies, and the mind has even figured out how to bring the dead back to life on the operating table. And we can do it more reliably than through prayer. A remarkable achievement based on the ideals and heritage of the formerly dominant institution, the Church. Even more remarkable based on how little the mind had to go on, perceiving reality as inert matter.

But now the curse of Adam, the limits of knowledge, the choices we have made to create this ideal life has reached a critical mass. We are going to destroy ourselves. In achieving this victory, the dark side now looms. The polar ice caps are melting. Pollution from China covers the arctic. When 3 billion Asians reach the lifestyle of 600 million Westerners, the biosphere will collapse for our survival. We thought we could manage without wisdom, using knowledge, but we see both pain and pleasure in everything we do. Our intentions may be good, but the down side to feeding the poor of the world will destroy us all. Yet much of the Church believes that Jesus was not apocalyptic. He knew more than we did. The times have changed. But has the Church changed since the Council of Nicea? What can it offer that it has not in the past? How can it speak to a culture that is so artificial now that it does not even ask the question anymore, ‘what is natural man?’

It has to offer more. It has to compete and offer what post-modern man is conditoned to, expansive, unrestricted knowledge. But what they are really looking for is an avenue to wisdom through their paradigm. That is the crux of this ‘spiritual yearning’ that rejects traditional Church. But the Church is in no shape to deal with it on a mass scale. It cannot diagnose the problem that cuts through all the academic-speak of theology to give the average citizen the ‘aha!’ in plain, simple language. It cannot describe Creation, actually connect with it in an experiential way, better than science can. Until it does so, the blind cannot see. The language of the Emerging Church is highly academic, conceptual, hair-splitting in the best tradition of theology. But it is dismissed by post-modern citizens as just more concept. How will this combination ever have an effect if it does not recognize itself, let alone find the courage to go beyond itself? The Church now has an opportunity to return to being the best hope for mankind, and become a blessing to all of Creation if it can break out of the limits of the human-centered focus of a cosmology based upon the soul of Jesus and the services God grants to us, alone in the dust.

Samlcarr,

I totally understand where you are coming from. And it is quite legitimate. I too believe that Christ is The Way.

I am not talking about other spirits ‘saving’ us. Such a situation is not needed. Christ reflects God, and so do they. What I am talking about is simply recognizing Creation. Christ was sent to help mankind through the time of the mind. One must make the distinction first between living from the mind and living from the heart. As much as we want to live solely from the love and wisdom that Christ showed us, we are born into a mind culture that structures our consciousness in a certain way. We can make great steps toward a heart-centered existence, but we cannot, as civilized human beings, take the blinders off enough, or lift the Veil to put it another way.

Civilization is divided into two. The West has an intimate knowledge between the human and the specific Consciousness of God. The East has a spiritual tradition that believes God does not have a specific consciousness but is manifested in all things. They retain much spiritual wisdom that was lost when monotheism conquered the non-Christian world. They are two solitudes.

Both are products of civilization. It began in China, India and the Levant some 5 - 12,000 years ago, depending on your archaeologist. Knowledge began to grow with the discovery of fire, agriculture, technology, writing, and increasingly hierarchical structures of social organization. All of this involved increasing quantities of mental labour using knowledge, relating to the world as objects. With this rise in knowledge, the dependence on wisdom declined as society became increasingly self-confident to provide for itself from these new systems.

Religion itself is a product of civilization. Mind culture systematized and contained wisdom in institutions until roughly 1960, when the dominance of the Church receded amid the social, economic, technological and social welfare revolution of that decade. Today our Western world is so artificial that we cannot survive without equation and conceptual thinking, in a complex survival system known as grocery stores, the office, money, central heating, etc. We are mind man, complete and unadulterated. Theology is the conceptual expression of the mind’s interaction with wisdom. It has been since Paul. We have refined it to a fine powder.

The Church is the expression of our faith in this social environment. It is not concerned with nature, but humans. The time of civilization is part of the Great Story. Jesus was inserted into it to give direction to its history. Today, the Church’s child, the West, is spreading its historical development throughout the world. There are many benefits to it.

However, one of the drawbacks is that, despite Christ’s promise to Save us, the human forces in the world are propelling humans toward a fate that will ensure our doom.

This is fine, if one’s only concern is with souls getting into heaven. We all have to die sometime. Gets us into bliss a little bit early.

What the human-centered cosmology of Christianity doesn’t realize is that there is more to Creation than themselves, God far away, and inert matter. There are more spirits than just souls and God. This is completely foreign to the Christian worldview. It takes a lot to make the leap.

One of those spirits is Mother Earth. God loves Her as much as He loves us. He has a responsibility to Her well-being as He does to our own. More so, because She sacrificed Her Creation, the Earth, so that our souls could grow as spirits within this thing knowledge culture that Adam chose for us.

Everything around us is conscious. The trees, the rock, the rivers, the animals and plants. We, as Christians, are conditioned to reject this reality. If we ever wondered about the spiritual reality that Jesus lived, we need to know more about Creation. We have focused on the Jesus-is-God issue, as if there was nothing more to Creation. We have been ignorant of much of the spirituality that Jesus exhibited in the Bible.

If we are truly interested in creating Jesus’ heaven-on-earth, a heart-based existence that Adam once knew, then we need more information on the spiritual nature of Creation. The human-God pipeline won’t do. If this does not interest us, then our confusion over events will propel us with our secular friends into our fate. It will demonstrate to God that our hearts are not open, that we have not learned enough spiritually to love Him. If we do not understand that He IS Creation, and what that means beyond our Christian paradigm, how can we ever help fulfill the promise that Jesus made?

We are currently confused about Jesus’ prophesies. On the one hand the world will end and we will be Judged. On the other hand, the world will be wiped clean and we’ll have 1000 years of living on earth that is much better than mind culture. What we don’t understand is what good is this for us, if we are already dead and just waiting for Judgment Day. Nothing is clear.

Without a little more knowledge of the spirit world we will remain in our confusion, debating small points about verses written 2000 years ago. We will not go where Jesus was pointing to. We will remain in the seeming contradictions that He espoused.

It is not about bowing down to other gods. It is simply realizing that we live in a ‘community’ of spirits, not just souls. It alters our cosmology and our understanding of the seeming confusion that Jesus introduced. Our minds pride ourselves in feeling secure that we have figured Him out. We are not seeing the bigger picture. We are still mind-centered, unaware of it or its implications for us. Jesus’ heart-centered reality will forever elude us if we don’t have the honesty and courage to explore what we have forbidden ourselves as knowledge-based humans.

I think what I am saying is something that we already know, we just need to look at it again.

We’ve always had a sense that civilization is superior to other ‘primitive’ societies. Today we assume it more than ever, and even apply it to other civilizations that don’t have the freedom and democracy that we enjoy.

We use the term ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ interchangeably. I define the mind differently from the consciousness of the heart. The mind of civilization objectifies reality and in so doing preys upon it for its own ends without regard for that reality. Treating it the equivalent of ‘inert matter.’ The only thing that is sacred, truly, is human life. We put dogs to sleep. We keep human vegetables alive. We go to extremes for human life where we would not think of it for anything else. The United States kills 2.5 million cows a month to feed itself. We are thankful to God for Providing. But don’t think about the cow when we open the cellophane wrapper. We may feel sad when our dog dies. But it does not compare to the loss of a child, a wound of the soul that never heals.

We love to define the rest of reality. But when it comes to human consciousness we recoil. Small schools of scientists want to reduce consciousness down to the chemical firing of synapses in the brain. But we resist. No one wants to think of themselves as just a bunch of chemicals. That would open us up for the kind of manipulation that we treat the rest of reality. We are special.

This is part of our human-centered existence. Christianity reflects this. It was fine during the time of the mind, civilization. From this tiny self-centered focus out of the entire Creation mind culture, through the Church, has discovered so many deep deep spiritual truths. It is quite remarkable.

I know I beat up on the ascendant mind. But I am in true awe of it. We were sent here by God to learn from knowledge, not wisdom, deciding what was truth, not just accepting it. Instead of the natural heart-centered existence of natural man, we have been existing in the inverted reality of the mind-on-top, forcing the heart, body, emotions and will, let alone the rest of reality, into its submission. Since this state was unnatural, all the faculties rebelled against the mind that did not use wisdom as its primary source of dominance to create meaning. The mind has learned how to govern this rebellion with a lot less force. Kudos to it.

But the mind has grown so much using knowledge that it has created a society that is a parallel universe to wisdom. Western society, the most rational of civilizations, does not stand for poverty like they do in India. Power has been converted from the abusive dominance of princes, to business which must sell pain relief to stay in business, and realizes it must treat its workers with a minimum of respect and comfort to maintain production to make money/power. Our medicine is incredible, especially since it is produced by the greed of business (ironic). And tolerance and freedom are prized.

We are at a stage now in mind culture to take the blinders off. The mind has grown up and has a rough equivelancy, or at least recognition, of what wisdom knew in the first place.

The truth about Jesus that is not appreciated clearly, is that He was sent to get mind culture through this phase of history in one piece. Remember how the Jewish Temple in Jesus’ time had taken the simple truths of the Ten Commandments and warped them into the abominable abuses that Jesus protested? That was the mind at work, taking the wisdom and using it as knowledge for its purposes of control and security.

Upon seeing this, God decided that the mind needed something that it could not figure out. He sent Jesus. And there has never been anything more confusing than Jesus. Why was Jesus so confusing? Why not just be plain and simple like the Ten Commandments? We still haven’t figured Him out. Did He rise bodily from the dead or just appear as spirit? He talked about love AND bringing fire and the sword. He did bizarre things like the Transfiguration. So many bizarre things that were beyond the mind’s reference points of being able to control the world as object matter.

Then Jesus was married to a mind institution, the Church. The mind wanted to control this phenomenon like it did the rest of reality. But Jesus was a rebel. Everytime we thought we had Him figured out, He rose up and contradicted us. The dialectic between Jesus and the Church set the ideals for our society. When the secular revolution occurred, all it was doing was trying to create those ideals, just without the spiritual part. It did a pretty good job. My dad had a hip replacement. Pain gone. I’ve never experienced poverty or hunger. So, eventhough we have created the closest facsimile of Jesus’ heaven-on-earth by just using knowledge, we still have not figured out Jesus. The mind got so fed-up, and so confident in its own abilities, that it pretty much gave up on Jesus, and the Church, forty years ago. He is popularly dismissed as quaint myth. Most kids don’t even know the Bible stories today.

We all know this. But do we look at it this plainly? Do we appreciate the Great Story of the mind as a whole? We recognize that Jesus did not live from the mind. He pitied us. We have been able to glean quite a bit from the little information passed down to us, however. The mind has done an incredible job with what it had to work with.

If we are really interested in helping to create Jesus’ heaven-on-earth, what is missing? We haven’t been able to do that yet, spiritually. What is a wisdom culture versus the mind culture that we are bound up in?

As I have said, the world is split between the Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Both are civilized. It seems each got half the story. Is there still a culture in existence that can remember what it was like before mind culture split everything up?

Of course there is. That is the indigenous people of the world. The Native North Americans instantly recognized Jesus when they were preached to. They just didn’t understand why the missionaries didn’t see it. The Natives have had 500 years of mind culture, versus our 5000 years. They cling to their Original Wisdom because they can see the truth of mind culture, what it cannot see because of the conditions of its dominant, human-centered mind. They respect Christianity, but can see through it as well. Jesus is obvious to them. What can they see that we don’t?

To them, Creation remains whole. There is one God, and He is Creation. There is no debate about transcendant versus immanent God. The debate is ludicrous. But it is important to mind culture. Why?

And they maintain a healthy understanding of the spirit world. Their ‘devil’ is called ‘trickster.’ It is merely a nuicance. It is mind culture that has fed the fear and made it almost equal to God in some quarters. They know that 99.999% of the spirits of Creation recognize the one true God. So all of Creation is positive. They are not at war with nature, as our heritage has bestowed upon us.

And they know how to listen to the wisdom of the spirit world. They have a connection to the Earth that we have lost. They understand it as whole. They recognize Jesus in that reality. Nothing special. Quite obvious. They have known His Original Wisdom since time began. But mind culture, including Christianity, nearly wiped them out.

So what use is the spirit world of reality, Creation, to us? We’ve got Jesus and that’s enough. But if God IS Creation, and not separate from it, then the way we relate to reality is, in fact, preventing us from seeing God in a much clearer light. How we understand the manifestation of consciousnesses all around us gets us closer to God and ourselves. Who are we, and what is reality? The age old civilized questions. Do we seek God? What if more is available to us and we ignore Him? Does that show love for God? If mind man treats God’s Children of Creation like an object, in effect we are treating the love of God as such as well. The two are one. We treat our fellow humans as special because of our unique consciousness. We need to treat the rest of Creation the same way. They have not Fallen. And they are as sacred as humans and God is. Do we not want to respect the sacrifice of their silence and their creations while we lived during the time of the mind? We respect Jesus for His sacrifice?

I could not make any sense out of that…

Samlcarr,

What is the nature of these other spirits of Creation? Are they fellow travellers in this Fallen world? No, they aren’t fallen. Our perception makes us Fallen, using knowledge instead of wisdom. They do not have to struggle and learn to perceive reality. We would like to be in their state, living from the truths of the heart instead of compromised by our limited mental perceptions. Because of this condition, they are able to guide us. ‘Basically, good beings, in unbroken communion with God.’

Natives realize that Original Sin is living from the dominant mind, not the heart. The myth of the Fall sounds like a sudden thing. Actually, it was a gradual thing. It is the myth of civilization. Knowledge culture grew stronger over time, as the mind chose it over wisdom. Natives live in the Original Wisdom of who we are as part of the spirit world, limited in perception being human, but recognizing that there is no such thing as objective matter. Everything has its own spirit, its own consciousness. God only Creates spirits, which is inherently conscious. And those spirits create from themselves. So everything is imbued with the spirit of its creator, in itself part of the ultimate Creator who Created them. It is a ‘middle level’ of Creation that we have forgotten as the strength of the mind grew. So our sin grew worse over time because of that. Today we live such artificial lives, with little connection to nature or spiritual knowledge outside of humans, that you can really see how we are ‘born into sin’ without any choice. Its how we live.

In Jesus’ time, most of the Levant still believed in the spirit world. Polytheism was rampant. But the nature of the dominant mind wanting to be in control lead it to misinterpret these spirits as deserving undo devotion. In this state of mind, God told Moses to just shut it down. We are here to learn through Adam’s choice, to live through knowledge. We only needed God/Jesus to get through this time of the mind, if we wanted some real wisdom. They were at a certain stage of civilization where the mind was getting very strong but could still remember the spirit world and tried to manipulate it for their narrow ends.

Are Natives Fallen? Yes and no. They realize that we are like children, and are here to learn as souls in this version of reality. But they recongize Creation, where they are in spiritual reality, and so do not fall under the spell of having dominion over their environment that we do. They realize what they are a part of. So they retain a connection to the spiritual reality of where we are and live from that perspective.

From our Christian perspective we could point to the ‘but’s.’ Look at how horrible the Incas and Aztecs were. The Iroquois regularly barbequed their prisoners of war. Every tribe has their own distinct customs, so what is the bottom-line truth of spiritual reality if they disagree on as much tradition as Christians do.

The Aztecs were further along the line in civilized development of the mind, much like the ancient Romans. After all, our own farmer grandfathers had a better relationship with ‘nature’ than we do. They depended upon it and thus a connection with it. And the Iroquois were very skilled in war. The Western Natives took pride in stealing others horses, etc. Despite these social conflicts, they did not confuse who they were or the spiritual reality they lived in. To be human is to learn from our mistakes. But we must not confuse pain as the central issue. It is an issue of where wisdom and spirit are in your life.

We have to understand our own interpretation of pain to begin to see their’s. God is ‘love.’ Love does not inflict pain. Jesus told us to stop pain. This has warped our avenue into the wisdom of pain. God does create pain. It is one aspect of growth. We can do one of two things with pain. Ask God why it was sent, and receive its wisdom. Or just reject the pain and try to stop it. Then pain becomes static, and we never learn its lesson of why it was sent. And most times it will return in another form. Did your second marriage end the way the first did? Then you didn’t learn the wisdom in the pain. Perhaps, if you have colitis, you should look at how your anal retentive nature is keeping you from what you need to learn. Too often our ‘aspirin culture’ isn’t asking the right questions. We want to be in control of meaningless pain. As Christians we are instructed to relieve pain and also not inflict it. But we do cause pain inadvertently, so we do try to correct it and learn from it. But too often we believe that the pain is the sin, and get confused about it being ‘punishment.’ Its just a symptom leading to the truth. And a lie is just the truth waiting to come out.

Our interpretation of God-as-love in relation to pain contrasts to the Native one. We may protest the Old Testament God inflicting punishments on the enemies of Israel. That’s not the God of Jesus. But the Native symbol of God is the Owl. Why is He a killer? Both wisdom of the eyes and talons of death? We domesticated God by cutting off the talons. Thus we have de-emphasized the wisdom in the talons. God-as-killer. Now that’s a sermon that would keep the congregation awake! It is a very deep subject that Western religion hasn’t come to grips with in a macro way. How could God allow the Holocaust? We have our rote answers. But God did have a hand in it. He is All. So what is really going on with our interpretation? What limits does it point to in our theology of pain, death and what our life is in God’s scheme of things?

All mankind had to enter into the dominant mind. The destruction of Native culture for 500 years by mind culture mirrors the course of 5000 years of civilization as it conquered our own ancestors and the globe. But they have not forgotten the Original Wisdom. The Native Heart was distilled by it. They see the Original Sin of the dominant mind. What is left of all these different cultures after the fire of all that they once knew? It is the truth of their hearts. That is what they offer the world. The True Heart. Wisdom culture remains within them. Spirit first, the center, not the mind infection.

What does the Native wisdom have to offer both the East and the West? It is a wholeness in this material reality that we have had difficulty putting our mental fingers on. It does not split up reality that the mind is prone to, in its pursuit of control. God is imbued in all reality, through the different spirits, as the East believes. And the Creator has a specific consciousness, as the West believes. Added to this is a relationship to the earth that both traditions have moved away from in objectified hierarchial society. Spiritual reality, not as esoteric knowledge in the mind’s imagination, but recognizing and respecting the consciousness and creators in every aspect of reality, including the waters, the trees, the wind, animals and rock. We can apply our skill in discerning the invisible God in everyday reality to expand our relationship with the ‘environment.’ The environment is not a spiritual term. It is a management one. It comes from our dominion over the earth. It was allowed because we were sent here for the time of the mind to learn. The mind has now matured. It can now discern with all its knowledge what wisdom knew all along. It just needs a little more information. Then the fruits of mind culture can be used in wisdom, instead of a vehicle for human-centered control for security.

In the simplest terms, yes, Jesus was just a pointed reminder of what spiritual reality is as mind-man developed and was going astray. That is our Salvation through Him. We hold on to His wisdom to get us through our civilized lives without ruining our souls. That is not as ‘high falluting’ as our complex, rich theology. It is simple. We have made a cult out of His suffering and sacrifice. But that is our interpetation of the pain. Do I dismiss the actual suffering and sacrifice of Jesus as a human agreeing to such suffering? No. But the whole life and death of Jesus was to present such a bizarre reality that civilized humans actually witnessed, a control over reality that was so far beyond the mind’s reference points in objectified ‘inert’ matter, that the mind was seduced by its own control impulse to master the Jesus phenomenon as it did everything else. The ascendant mind wants to be dominant, in control for its own safety, security, freedom and survival. When it cannot, it feels threatened. And Jesus was the biggest threat ever. Sent from God, Judgment, power, love AND the sword, contradictions and confusions that we have been sorting out from the mind perspective for 2000 years.

Jesus basically said: you’re going through the human-centered time of the mind. You screwed up the simple Ten Commandments by the abuses of the Temple. Now I’m going to show you so much bizarre spiritual reality that your controlling, limited minds will ache to control it like you do everything else, but you never will because you don’t understand what you are going through. But the kernels of truth you get from me will eventually direct your mind culture in the right direction. I will be with you spiritually while you are on your mind journey, so that your journey through the falsehoods won’t ruin your soul. If you trust me despite not really understanding because of the mind, the spiritual recognition will be there when you die. Then, when your soul awakens after death, you will see true reality. That is the Salvation in the sacrifice of the Christ. You will put many meanings on me. But ultimately your time on earth will not destroy you if you trust me. The wisdom in the sin will be revealed by God.

It is just that simple. We know it. We can see it. Its right there. The simple explanation of why God sent Jesus. Clarity. Wisdom is very simple. The mind complicates meaning. The pride of the mind prevented us from that clarity. The condition of the dominant mind prevented us from this simplicity. But when it is said, it is so obvious we realize we knew it all along. There was just pieces missing to make it that simple.

The first shall become the last, and the last the first. The meek shall inherit the earth. We nearly destroyed the people who could show us back into the Original Wisdom, the time before the dominant mind, when we knew who we were and what reality is. Ironic. Perhaps there was something more to Peter meeting, one day, a strange people who would guide us back. Peter was every human, cock-a-doodle-doo!

Jesus is described as Adam before the Fall. Jesus called Himself the Son of Man. The circle completes. Where we are going. The keystone at the top of the arch is the ascendant mind. Put that stone back on the earth from which it came, and the Temple will fall. When the walls come down, you will see the Garden. And in the forest we will comprehend, from the true heart, who we are and what reality is.

God is All. What does that truly mean, All? Our journey has reached a new stage. We all want to be whole again. It is not the keys into the Kingdom of Heaven we seek. But the door out of the dominant mind. You are in heaven right now. Death to the usurping mind now beckons.

This is The Great Story. It is time to see the Creation in Time. We are asked to choose once more. God is All. We have to let go to know what this means in a new beginning.