Do We Want the Problem or the Solution?

Duh, you think, of course I want the solution. Not so fast. Our ego system is a lot craftier than that, and as kids instinctively know, but frustrated parents often ignore, it pays to observe what we do do, and not obfuscate matters by paying attention to what we say we do. And what we do do is to hang on to the problem like a dog to a bone. Byron Katie is demonstrating with her work, The Work. In A Course in Miracles, it is expressed as follows:

Seek not outside yourself. For it will fail, and you will weep each time an idol falls. Heaven cannot be found where it is not, and there can be no peace excepting there. Each idol that you worship when God calls will never answer in His place. There is no other answer you can substitute, and find the happiness His answer brings. Seek not outside yourself. For all your pain comes simply from a futile search for what you want, insisting where it must be found. What if it is not there? Do you prefer that you be right or happy? Be you glad that you are told where happiness abides, and seek no longer elsewhere. You will fail. But it is given you to know the truth, and not to seek for it outside yourself. (ACIM:T-29.VII.1)

And we all think, when we first read this, that of course we'd rather be happy, and we are thus fooling ourselves, with the PR version of our own lives. As Byron Katie also asks, who would we be without our story? So the bottom line is that our ego identity is all wrapped up in the tale of woe which is our life, and we hang on to the problem like a dog to a bone, and no way do we prefer to be happy, all our protestations to the contrary. Everything we do is geared to validating our ego-identity. This is why Jesus was not understood 2,000 years ago. And the next point is to observe that it is completely natural that we would not understand him. Now if you've followed some of the examples of how the world reconstructed Jesus' identity in adapting the simple sayings of the Thomas gospel, and making something else out of them, then you begin to fathom the tremendous psychological resistance to accepting what Jesus was saying. For what our ego hears is that his "Kingdom not of this world" implies that we were wrong, and he was right. No way were we going to have that. Not then, not now. That's being honest about it.

Accordingly, my point in demonstrating this process of the reconstruction of Jesus in the transition from the sayings in Thomas (his actual teachings) to the story of the narrative gospels (somebody else's teachings about him), based on the analysis by Stevan Davies, is not to demonstrate that Mark (or anybody) got it wrong. The more important point is to see it as a mirror, and understand that we all get it wrong all the time, and the way he was misconstrued then, is an example of how we misconstrue him today. The joke in Course circles was often that we want Jesus to find us parking spaces, when we get to the workshop. In other words, we want to make the problem good and real, according to the way we have set up our lives, and then ask him to fix it. We completely ignore the fact that we created the problem in the first place and that the purpose of the problem is to keep him safely outside our doors, and our ego firmly in charge. We absolutely insist that instead of listening to him, we are in charge of defining the problem, and then telling him to fix it, as if he were a car mechanic. This is the process we are watching as it unfolds, when we follow the metamorphosis from Jesus the teacher, as he speaks to us in the Thomas gospel, to Jesus the Christian savior, as he is portrayed in the Pauline culture which became Christianity. All the narrative gospels were written after Paul started his preaching and writing, interpreting Jesus in his own way. And now we can understand why.

Much like Gary Renard, I like sometimes to try and shock people into this recognition by using as a point of departure the notion that Jesus was not a Christian. Then you can explain it historically, but few people realize the meaning of it. However when you see the examples I'm discussing here recently (and which I'll continue), then you begin to realize just how profound the change is. It is the transition from Jesus the Teacher of the way out of Hell, who asks us to take responsibility for our lives, and follow him, to Jesus-as-Santa-Claus, the savior who, through vicarious salvation makes it all-right, and meanwhile we don't have to do anything, except believe that it's so. That's the Maitreya role, and anything along those lines sees the problem and the solution to it outside of ourselves, so we get to have our cake and eat it too.