All the Dumb Questions

Once when Krishnamurti was asked by a reporter what he would think of when the same question was asked for the umpteenth time, he said "tennis." This was late in his life, he might have been ninety at the time. By this time also he felt at times at least, that for all his sixty years of teaching, and God only knows how many books, no one or nearly no one had ever truly understood him. Dr. Helen Schucman, who was the scribe of A Course in Miracles had similar feelings at the end of her life. The Thomas Gospel talks about "hidden sayings" (Logion 1). None of that is elitism, though it has often been misinterpreted in that kind of light. The simple truth is that very few people really want to be bothered with the wisdom of the ages. Too much hassle. As the Romans knew, the people want bread and games (panem et circenses). Don't bother me with the Truth. No need today.

In the Gospels the scene at the end of Mark, when Mary Magdalene tells the other apostles of the resurrection, is priceless. The arguments that followed are equally telling, including the endless disputes of whether the resurrection was of the mind or of the body. What became Christianity adopted the latter position, though some other schools toyed around fairly seriously with the notion that the resurrection was of the mind. Certainly with the advent of A Course in Miracles it could not be clearer that this is the only way that the story makes any sense at all. But again these are concepts which we don't know right away what to do with, since on the face of it we seem to be a body that has a mind, whereas in the Context of such teachings as A Course in Miracles, it is clear that we are a mind projecting a body, and watching the experience of "My life," which is one of many thousands we could have ordered from Netflix, or picked up at Blockbusters. The main thing is we get so engrossed while watching, and we identify with the hero of the story, we end up completely believing we are him or her, oblivious to any other way of looking at the story. The Course however does tell us to learn to look at things from Above the Battleground:

     Those with the strength of God in their awareness could never think of battle. What could they gain but loss of their perfection? For everything fought for on the battleground is of the body; something it seems to offer or to own. No one who knows that he has everything could seek for limitation, nor could he value the body's offerings. The senselessness of conquest is quite apparent from the quiet sphere above the battleground. What can conflict with everything? And what is there that offers less, yet could be wanted more? Who with the Love of God upholding him could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make? (ACIM:T-23.IV.9)

In short, whenever you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, you may remember this kind of advice. In Logion 42 of the Thomas Gospel Jesus expresses the same idea with fewer words: "Be passersby." Learn to watch what you're doing, observe it, don't identify with it and lose yourself, for that leads you to the way out.

It is only when we don't really like the story any more (our own damn fault for taking out a tragedy, when we could also have picked a comedy for the same price), that we begin to look at things a different way. And then when we find a teacher, like Jesus, Krishnamurti, or the Buddha, who hangs out not where the crouds are, but "in the wilderness," or "the desert" etc. this means we're now turning away for a moment of our ego's bread and games, and we immediately start having questions. This is what I read, when I look at the stories of the apostles, when I read the transcripts from Krishnamurti workshops/lectures, when I listen to tapes of workshops of the foundation for A Course in Miracles. These people are all asking all the questions that we all want to ask. Sometimes we haven't realized it yet, but if we haven't yet, we will realize at a later point that we're asking a question we heard somebody ask at a workshop, etc. Ultimately what will answer the questions however, is if we do so through our own experience, as long as we stay stuck in answering questions, we are really throwing up roadblocks against the experience that part of us wants, and part of us is deadly afraid of. Ultimately this is the type of reasoning which Jesus offers in ACIM: if you're in doubt if this is for you or not, try it for a while, and see if you like it. The great big risk is that you might feel more peaceful. Another important clue is in Logion 108 from Thomas, "Whosoever drinks form my mouth shall become like me. I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that person." As usual this should not be read literally but figuratively. It is about sharing his experience, and becoming one with him on an experiential level, for only the experience will tell us where words fall short. It is not about the words, it is about a willingness to have the experience, and that means giving up on the ego's next ride (because we already know to expect the same old result from the same old actions), and following him in deed, not in word, and the means for that, as they appear in the Course are the practice of his forgiveness practice, which are a way of switching from the way our ego sees the world to the way Jesus sees it. A way to get out of our bad old habits which are making us miserable. And while we are at it we can listen to all the dumb questions, or ask our own dumb questions, which will only fade away when the experience catches up to us and we finally realize what he was talking about. As I pointed out in an earlier post, in Gary Renard's books he is really asking all the dumb questions for us, AND his teachers help him to experience the answers as much as answering him in words, so vicariously through him, we get the point that it is about opening ourselves up to the experience, instead of closing our minds, thinking we have all the answers.

Making a Christian out of Jesus: Stevan Davies

I would like to weave together some thoughts on the process that turned Jesus into a Christian, posthumously. I think it is always a good, refreshing conversation starter to make it clear that Jesus was not a Christian, as is now increasingly evident from what we are starting to understand of the Thomas gospel and its historical relationship to the other Gospels, as in, the fact that it was earlier, and that it lacks the explicit theological ideas,which defined Christianity. Ergo, those were added later, and were never part of Jesus' teachings. In and of itself there's nothing wrong with that, and if Christianity is working for you, that's fine--if it ain't broke don't fix it. But if you're at all like me and have an experience of cognitive dissonance with Christianity, understanding what Jesus said originally may be of some interest. I myself always was tuned in to wanting to understand the historical context, and hearing the teachings of Jesus without anyone else mixing in anything. Later I began increasingly to understand that the most critical thing is of Course my own inner understanding of him, and alongside that, my discernment of the historical picture deepened as well of course.

For me the whole thing started at a very young age, in a manner that I imagine was not dissimilar to the process that led Thomas Jefferson to his Jefferson Bible: just plain being bothered by the sense that there was too much redacting of the sayings of Jesus and too much editiorializing going on, and I always wanted to hear him without the clutter. What was the unadulterated voice like? I was made aware very early that particularly since the time of the enlightenment many serious theologians had begun asking such such questions (o.a. Radikalkritik). So many years later it became clear to me that the Thomas Gospel was the single clearest means history has now given us for cleaning up these misunderstandings. In the process of writing my book I became aware of lots of materials that is available today, some of which might have pulled the book into another direction entirely, and lose focus. So there are always things you can't cover. The purpose of this site however is definitely (among other things), to provide a home for some explorations which might have been too detailed for the book.

One fascinating piece of research in this category was by Prof. Stevan Davies, and his main site on the Thomas gospel is available through the link of his name here, and the piece that caught my attention was an extensive analysis of his of how, in the transition from Thomas to Mark, the sayings were combined, and given a context, which set up the whole process of viewing Jesus a certain very specific way, namely the Christian way, as it was then beginning to emerge. The greatest influence in which was the theological influence of Paul. I want to discuss some of his findings here, not from a formal scholarly standpoint, for that I'll refer you to his original article, but from the point of view of the content, as we might understand it today based on A Course in Miracles. I will provide the links to the material, will avoid the detailed discussion, which invariably will boil down to the difference between choosing the ego or the Holy Spirit, since that is the only meaningful choice ever. I will simply expand on his comments with an eye to how you might look at the material from a Course standpoint.

In general terms then, it may pay to recap here something about the issue of level confusion as the Course sees it, which is really the psychological mechanism which the mind uses to defend against the teachings of Jesus, while conversesly the miracle is Jesus's way to undo the level confusion. And, as the Course makes abudantly clear, coming and going we have the need to defend ourselves againt his teachings of a Kingdom not of this world, since we prefer our own little kingdom which is very much of this world, for the very good reason that here we get to be the boss. So level confusion is in effect the ego's way of reinterpreting Jesus's sayings on the level where it operates, the body and the world, and as a result it now gets to tell Jesus what it is he means, rather than the other way around. It's a simple case of the ego telling him to play by its rules, or not at all, for the simple reason that it's the ego's ball.

After we kill him, we feel guilty, but then we turn around and we then sugar coat it by making an idol out of him, and creating a religion in his name, which acts essentially as a justification of the ego. The way the truth is preserved in spite of all the world's violence directed at him is exactly because he does not defend himself, since he knows that he is not his body. Here is one of the key passages from the Course:

    Since you cannot not teach, your salvation lies in teaching the exact opposite of everything the ego believes. This is how you will learn the truth that will set you free, and will keep you free as others learn it of you. The only way to have peace is to teach peace. By teaching peace you must learn it yourself, because you cannot teach what you still dissociate. Only thus can you win back the knowledge that you threw away. An idea that you share you must have. It awakens in your mind through the conviction of teaching it. Everything you teach you are learning. Teach only love, and learn that love is yours and you are love. (ACIM:T-6.III.4)

Since our behavior reflects what we believe, we are always "teaching," i.e. expressing a belief system. Any one with parenting experience gets to find out how children respond to what you do, not to what you say they should do, although they can get pretty confused in the process, if as parents we are of a split mind, and take our confusion out on the kids. And it's not only the kids who get confused, we're confusing ourselves as well, and often times don't realize that the kids merely reflect our own confusion back to us. He is even more pointed in an earlier paragraph, dealing specifically with the crucifixion, in effect correcting our level confusion:

    That is why you must teach only one lesson. If you are to be conflict-free yourself, you must learn only from the Holy Spirit and teach only by Him. You are only love, but when you deny this, you make what you are something you must learn to remember. I said before that the message of the crucifixion was, "Teach only love, for that is what you are." This is the one lesson that is perfectly unified, because it is the only lesson that is one. Only by teaching it can you learn it. "As you teach so will you learn." If that is true, and it is true indeed, do not forget that what you teach is teaching you. And what you project or extend you believe. (ACIM:T-6.III.2)

In other words the only way to be consistent is to choose for oneness, is to choose for Love, since if there's oneness, there cannot be conflict, so teaching anything else creates conflict. The simple fact that remains is that truth is true, and everything else is a lie. Thus the way Jesus teaches--he did then, and he does now--is that it's all on the mind level, he asks us to follow him to his Kingdom which is not of this earth. Or to paraphrase that, here in this world, everything is dualistic, and therefore conflict ridden, for the world arises from a thought of conflict, which is the thought that I could be separate from God. So as long as we take the world and the body as our point of departure in our life, and our thinking, we have conflict built in, and the consequence are in accord with that. If we follow Jesus, we take spirit as our point of departure, on which level their cannot be conflict, since everything is one. This is why the Course constantly urges us that the answer is not in dragging Jesus into our messes, and making them good and real, but rather that we should take the illusion to the truth, and turn to Jesus or the Holy Spirit for help, which entails returning to the mind, and joining the solution instead of making the problem real and thus preventing the solution.

The Atonement does not make holy. You were created holy. It merely brings unholiness to holiness; or what you made to what you are. Bringing illusion to truth, or the ego to God, is the Holy Spirit's only function. Keep not your making from your Father, for hiding it has cost you knowledge of Him and of yourself. The knowledge is safe, but where is your safety apart from it? The making of time to take the place of timelessness lay in the decision to be not as you are. Thus truth was made past, and the present was dedicated to illusion. And the past, too, was changed and interposed between what always was and now. The past that you remember never was, and represents only the denial of what always was. (ACIM:T-14.IX.1)

So, as with Jesus before Pontius Pilate, to the world it's the other way around, as is explained here:

Much of the ego's strange behavior is directly attributable to its definition of guilt. To the ego, the guiltless are guilty. Those who do not attack are its "enemies" because, by not valuing its interpretation of salvation, they are in an excellent position to let it go. They have approached the darkest and deepest cornerstone in the ego's foundation, and while the ego can withstand your raising all else to question, it guards this one secret with its life, for its existence depends on keeping this secret. So it is this secret that we must look upon, for the ego cannot protect you against truth, and in its presence the ego is dispelled. (ACIM:T-13.II.4)

So this is the point also why Jesus's message is never lost, never mind how badly we mangle it. It also explains why across the ages people have found their way to him at all times, in spite of religious beliefs that sometimes seem to make hit harder, for his message never dies. That is its exact point, that is the resurrection. He taught to the seeming end that he was in the world but not of it, that he was spirit, not his body, and the final expression of that was to experience the crucifixion of his body, knowing full well that he was not his body. Thus the inner peace he demonstrated is the appeal to the heart, to value only truth, and no words, no theology can undo that message, since it is beyond words. It is the living reminder that his reality of Love (the Kingdom), is ultimately preferable to the substitute reality of the ego, in which we stubbornly believe we are the role we play, even after the play is over. The choice in the end is simply between disssociating the role, and remembering who we are in truth, as spirit, or justifying the role as our only reality and thus continuing the murder of Christ, or the crucifixion, as the Course usually refers to it.

What Christianity did with the teachings was to pull them down into this world, even while Jesus as appealing to our better knowledge, such as in Matthew, when he is quoted as saying: "How is it you don't understand that I was not talking to you about bread?" In short he is teaching in parables on what is going on in the mind, and so leading us back to the abstract reality of spirit, while we insist on dragging him down to our problems in the world, be they about bread, or finding a parkin spot.

Introductions

If there is anyone who put me on the track to consciously seek out a path to the teachings of Yeshua prior to him becoming Christianized as Jesus, it was the Dutch author Johan Willem Kaiser (JWK), whose main body of work dates from 1946 to 1960. By the mid sixties I was beginning to very seriously explore ways to seek out what I sensed was Jesus's original meaning, which I was pretty clear was not at all what Christianity said he said. Since I was learning classical Greek in school, reading the Bible in Greek was a logical first step. The work of Kaiser became an important guide to me since about age fifteen, both in the form of his book Beleving van het Evangelie, (Experiencing the Gospel, not available in English), which was a thoroughly new translation and commentary of the Gospel according to Mark, as well as in the awareness that is ingrained in all his work that a relationship with Jesus is the essence of what he meant by "following him," i.e. learning to follow his guidance rather than relying on our own council, in the understanding that the "Kingdom" he spoke of was not of this earth, but of spirit and in spirit. Hence he would not be a teacher of morals, but a teacher of spirituality and spiritual development.

One central concept that is pervasive in Kaiser's work is that "to follow Jesus" is about inner experience, while the evolution of Christianity was all about morality and behavior, and confessions of conscious beliefs, in other words, it became primarily all in the head, and external, which is not what Jesus was talking about, but it evolved that way under those who came after him, starting with Paul. The latter becomes very true if you begin to study Paul's struggle with concepts in his writings, and how he resolves his own inner contradictions in his evolving mythologizing of Jesus, founded on his famous conversion experience on the road to Damascus, which I still sense was a completely legitimate experience, the problem being that our ego has a fair way of co-opting absolutely everything, and reinterpreting it to suit its purposes.

Before I found my way to Kaiser's work, I had been familiar since early childhood, at least age 4, with Ms. Margaretha "Greet" Hofmans, aka. "Tante Greet" (Auntie Greet). She was a student of his during the Second World War, and she had a channeling-type experience of what I would today call Jesus. Her preferred way of referencing him with me was as "the Help," or "God's Help," (the etymological meaning of his name in Hebrew), explaining to me from time to time how this Help was available to me whenever I wished, except on the condition that I should understand that this Help was not like Santa Claus, fulfilling wishes, and giving you what YOU thought you wanted, but rather, it meant that you should be willing to let go of your definition of the problem, deferred (ego-) judgment was the key. Only when I was in my forties and fifties and studying A Course In Miracles did I truly realize how utterly profound this explanation was, and how wonderful as a way to explain the situation to a child. This theme is pervasive in the Course, that we have to go up to the Answer (the presence of the Holy Spirit in our minds), instead of dragging the answer down into the world by making the world, "the problem" good and real. In short his Kingdom indeed is not of this world, he did not say that by accident. Kaiser had an inspired work partnership with Ms. Hofmans, in which he did write books, and give public presentations, and she worked one on one with people, to help make them aware of their own inner access to the Help, as well as channeling answers to questions for them. So it was only natural that my acquaintance with her should lead to finding my way to Kaiser's work later on.

Since then things have for me come full circle on a number of different levels, some of which I am no doubt not even aware of yet, as I write this, but some of them are very clear. Number one, as much as Ms. Hofmans and Kaiser put me on a track to at least some awareness of the inner access to this living Presence of another knowing, that is somehow present to us all  if only we stop denying it long enough, they taught me to see the distinction between that direct inner awareness and inspiration, and the rationalizations of the dialectic mind (what the Buddhists call "monkey mind"), which in the Christian tradition are symbolized in terms of the Pauline reconstruction of Jesus' teachings into Christianity, and later the Nicene Creed, which really reduces things to conscious beliefs and rationalizations only. Parallel phenomena occurred in Vedanta and Buddhism, e.g. "what's known as the teachings of the Buddha are not the teachings of the Buddha," while a pure non-dualistic teaching in Advaita deteriorated into a very dualistic Hinduism, though from time to time some inspired teachers emerged who returned to the source, similar to the Christian experience. Inspired living begins only when we stop taking the ego's rationalizations, and our concomitant perceptions totally seriously, and make some room for spirit, and the first step therefore must be to learn this inner discernment, since we cannot prevent the ego from literally running us into the ground, lest we begin to learn another way of living, by making a deliberate choice.

A Course in Miracles was born from Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford's realization that "There must be another way," (for the full story of the scribing of the Course, see Ken Wapnick's biography of Helen Schucman, Absence from Felicity). The Course is totally geared to an emphasis to the experiential "following" of Jesus, by letting him take us by the hand and teaching us another way of looking at the world, and thus engaging on a path that will loosen our abject slavery to the ego until we learn to live in inner freedom again. I became aware of the Thomas gospel in the early sixties, and was always intrigued with it, and I followed the evolution of the scholarship which gradually led to date it earlier than Paul and the Canonical Gospels. However, it was not until Gary Renard's books came along, that I fully realized that the Thomas gospel was indeed the voice of the pre-Pauline Jesus, who had not yet been redacted into a proto-Chrsitian, but the more I realized that connection, the more it grew in importance in my mind, and thus the idea for Closing the Circle was born.

There were more circles than one being closed however, and here's a collection:

• In the Course, Jesus frequently offers corrections to the Bible, or our understanding of it, and states that he meant something else than what has been "made of him."
• In the Thomas gospel the Jesus who speaks is free from the editorial influences that "made him" into the "bitter idol" of Christianity, who died a sacrificial death on the cross. (cf. ACIM:T-C-5.5:7)
• With roots in the enlightenment, the German school of Radikalkritik explored the disparity between Jesus and Paul extensively since the mid nineteenth century.
• Johan Willem Kaiser voices it as follows in a vocabulary entry in his book De mysteriën van Jezus in ons leven, (Eng. The Mysteries of Jesus in our Lives, not available in translation), voices it as follows "Presently the newly awakened psychology will gradually accomplish what pure religious devotion might have done: throw out Paul, and let Jesus in!" (as quoted on p. 115 in The Gospel as a Spiritual Path)
• Thomas Jefferson in his editing of The Jefferson Bible, which he titled, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth followed the same logic of taking the Pauline/Christian wrappers off of Jesus.
• During the writing of the book then showed up the brilliant book of Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Vieira, Take Me To Truth, which offers an interesting insight in the ego's tendency of skipping steps in the process the Course refers to as the Development of Trust, and which provides a very interesting way of looking at Paul's development. (See their comments on "Bypass" on page 162 of their book.)

And all of the above are merely different ways of learning to tell apart the "raucus shrieking" of the ego (ACIM), from the still, small voice inside, which does offer us inspiration and guidance, the more we get the ego out of the way. Included in this process, is learning to tell the ways in which we can fool ourselves completely about just how spiritual we are. It is to the eternal merit of the Course that it finally puts us in touch with our own inner resistance, and gives us an understanding of why we don't want Jesus around, even though part of us knows that the only way we can be truly happy is in our relationship with him. The Course stresses our need to forgive Jesus for not being who we would like him to be, because that is our path to dropping our resistance to him. But until we know we have that resistance, there is no hope of overcoming it, while through forgiveness we can take the sting out of it, and ultimately let it go.

And so, if Ms. Hofmans introduced me first to "the Help" and then to Kaiser, and he gave me the "formal" introduction to the original teachings of Jesus, I subsequently followed that path and kept seeking until I found his voice in A Course in Miracles, and I ended up in turn being re-introduced by Gary Renard to that original voice, as it speaks to us from both ACIM and the Thomas gospel, but that time in the vernacular, leading me to write Closing the Circle. My earlier book about Kaiser's work, The Gospel as a Spiritual Path, really returns the favor, by affording the modern reader a glimpse into the work of and an introduction to this important teacher, who knew so well (as all real teachers do) his own unimportance, because truth can come through us, but it is not authored by us. Meanwhile he is one of the most important spiritual authors of the twentieth century in my book, on a par with (at least), Blavatsky, Gurdieff, Rudolf Steiner, Alice Bailey, et al. Unfortunately he has been nearly forgotten, even in his native Holland, a situation which I hope can yet be changed.