The Marketing Mecca

This should be required study material in all Marketing curricula, it is a better story even than the Tylenol scandal. It's the story of Christianity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular.

Original material  of Jesus warns that the world is not too interested in his real teaching. In the Thomas material it is Logion 13 in particular, where Jesus warns the disciple Thomas to expect no ready acceptance of his real teaching, and in fact tells him to shut up about it, even to his fellow apostles, for they are not ready to hear it. The same theme comes  up in A Course in Miracles in a variety of ways, and of course there is the famous story of Helen Schucman who was the scribe of the Course, and who thought that maybe a handful of people would ever get it. She clearly understood the enormous resistance against the teaching. Here is one of the key passages from the Course which gives form to this issue:

There is no world! This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it, and each one must go as far as he can let himself be led along the road to truth. He will return and go still farther, or perhaps step back a while and then return again. (ACIM:W132-6:2-5)

Obviously Jesus is being cute with "not everyone is ready to accept it," you might just as well say: "Nearly nobody is ready to accept it," but his way of wording it represents an open invitation, because it implies that it can be understood if you really want to, while also making you aware of the tremendous resistance that the world has against it. And of course the world is "too much with us," a lot of the time, so we cling to it, and shut Jesus and his message out. So what is the world to do? Clearly Jesus's completely unconditional love was an attraction to many during his ministry, even if his teaching wasn't always well understood, and several instances of his warning people not to blab to the neighbors about his healings etc., even made it into the canonical literature. To the established powers, Jewish and Roman alike, his teaching was a threat, for he taught (and teaches) of a Kingdom not of this world.

So what is the world to do to counter this? I wrote recently about the fun book Operation Messiah by Thijs Voskuilen, which on one level, literally, I don't take seriously, but in a symbolic level it makes a lot of sense, namely that Paul would have been a secret agent for the Romans, sent out to corrupt the Jesus movement, and teach them proper subservience to Rome, so that it would have been an accidental success that a Roman Emperor subsequently adopted the religion himself, and eventually it would become the official religion of the empire. Thus a religion founded in the name of Jesus, who taught give to the Emperor what is the Emperor's ( a few shekels), and give to God what is God's (your heart and mind), turns it around completely by having the state co-opt the religion, and so to win the hearts and minds of a potentially too independent movement. That process of turning things completely upside down really begins with Paul, who cleverly implies that he speaks on Jesus's behalf, and obliterates all distinction between his interpretation of Jesus and the things Jesus actually said and did. Naturally this only could happen after Jesus was dead, for it would not have been convenient if he could talk back and speak for himself, as their is no evidence that he ever intended to found a religion of any kind. Paul's pretend humility by leaving the impression that he was only saying what Jesus said is a classic literary device, similar to what Plato used with Socrates, and which was very common in the classical world. From a marketing persepective it is brilliant, for it ensures that Paul himself does not become the issue. Jesus however advocated essentially "when in Rome do like the Romans, except don't take it seriously, as in Logion 6 (which in the Pursah version is a contraction of 6 &14 in the Nag Hammadi version).

The tour de force really was to reinterpret Jesus so as to imply that he validated the world, and this is accomplished through reinterpreting his teachings which were all about the mind and our spiritual life, and refocus them into worldly concerns. The central feat was to undo Jesus's teaching of the Kingdom as something immediate, and something of our inner reality, our spiritual life, as you will find it in his original words in the Thomas Gospel, as in Logion 3, et al. and turn it into something external, which however would arrive at a later date, so that it became an event in time, again validating the experiential world of space and time. The clincher then was to create the teaching franchise, called the church, based on the nonsensical logic of the apostolic succession, the logic of which is in direct contradiction to the teachings of Jesus, if you look e.g. at Logion 99, where Jesus poohpoohs family relations and blood relationships as an irrelevancy, saying that his brothers and sisters are those who are doing the will of the father, for that is the only thing that brings us together. Lastly, the closing stone of the arch is to interpret the resurrection and the second coming as something of the body, so that instead of us joining Jesus in the resurrection by accepting the atonement for ourselves, now the story is turned around to where he will physically come back to get us in his second coming into the world (which all the time he was telling us to leave, so why would he bother to come back?).

Voilà, here you have the creation of one of the most powerful business concepts and marketing brands in the world. While the teacher is absent, the church claimed a monopoly on teaching his message or at least their version of it, and the buy in was that by joining with them you basically bought yourself a ticket to the second coming and all the good stuff that would come afterwards. In this process all personal responsibility for changing our mind as Jesus has advocated, is now wiped out, and replaced by a passive process of waiting for him. The church of course has a vested interest in his not coming back, so this is how the ego puts itself in charge as the vicarious spiritual authority, borrowing the authority by claiming a unique right to it, and maintaining its sway over the ego which lives on borrowed time anyway, in short the church becomes very much a worldly authority, not a spiritual one. Hence all the conflicts between church and state over the long history of Christianity. Now in turn the church can serve the Emperor instead of Jesus, performing various civil functions from blessing marriages, to meting out punishment and or validating it by its teachings of sin, guilt and fear, and in a worldly high point to the Emperor Constantine and his "In Hoc Signo Vinces" which is always mischaracterized as a triumph of Christianity, though it was certainly the most abysmal betrayal of everything Jesus ever taught. The phrase continues to be proudly sported by Catholic buildings such as St. Helena's Church close to my house, (named after Constantine's mother, Helena). So there you have it, the most spectacular marketing story in the world. Procter and Gamble, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs may be masters of branding, they are mere pikers by comparison.

None of the above is to deny the many good things that have also been done by churches. This is not about that at all. What it is about is to separate the church as a worldly institution from the teachings of Jesus, which are purely about our inner life, not about our worldly pursuits. Following him means to shift the anchor of our life from our worldly persona, which likes to believe it came first, to the primacy of God, our source, as expressed by Jesus in Logion 99, but also in the famous first commandment that has been retained in the New Testament,

36"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'[a] 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'[b] 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." (NIV, Matthew 22:36-40)

The crux of the matter is of course that the world invariably puts the second one of these always first, because we substitute the special relationship to ease God out. What Jesus meant however was what is expressed in the language of the Course as "I choose the second place to gain the first." (ACIM:W-328):

1.    What seems to be the second place is first, for all things we perceive are upside down until we listen to the Voice for God. 2 It seems that we will gain autonomy but by our striving to be separate, and that our independence from the rest of God's creation is the way in which salvation is obtained. 3 Yet all we find is sickness, suffering and loss and death. 4 This is not what our Father wills for us, nor is there any second to His Will. 5 To join with His is but to find our own. 6 And since our will is His, it is to Him that we must go to recognize our will.

2.    There is no will but Yours. 2 And I am glad that nothing I imagine contradicts what You would have me be. 3 It is Your Will that I be wholly safe, eternally at peace. 4 And happily I share that Will which You, my Father, gave as part of me.

The Alpha and the Omega

Annelies wrote about  Logion 18 in her Dutch blog, in a post titled Het onmogelijke heeft nooit plaatsgevonden (Tr.: "The Impossible Never Happened" - She does have common sense!). The  post provides there an important connection with the Course, as well as some great music (Bach).

Logion 18 reads as follows in the Pursah rendering (from Gary Renard's Your Immortal Reality:

The followers said to J, "Tell us how our end will be." He said, "Have you discovered the beginning, then, so that you are seeking the end? For where the beginning is, the end will be. Fortunate is the one who stands at the beginning: That one will know the end and will not taste death."

The Course passage she connects this to is the following:

A timelessness in which is time made real; a part of God that can attack itself; a separate brother as an enemy; a mind within a body all are forms of circularity whose ending starts at its beginning, ending at its cause. The world you see depicts exactly what you thought you did. Except that now you think that what you did is being done to you. The guilt for what you thought is being placed outside yourself, and on a guilty world that dreams your dreams and thinks your thoughts instead of you. It brings its vengeance, not your own. It keeps you narrowly confined within a body, which it punishes because of all the sinful things the body does within its dream. You have no power to make the body stop its evil deeds because you did not make it, and cannot control its actions nor its purpose nor its fate. (ACIM:T27.VIII.7)

Eternity - the Kingdom of which Jesus speaks - has neither a beginning nor an end. Only time seems to have a beginning and and end and all things certainly have beginnings and an end within the scope of the space-time framework. The "beginning" in terms of the thought system which Jesus teaches in ACIM is the thought of separation from God, aka. the ego. As a spiritual discipline, to get back to that thought, to learn to see where we made that choice, is absolutely necessary in order to make the other choice. Or, to put it differently, a mistake can only be corrected if you understand what the mistake was. Until then, you're running around like a chicken with your head cut off, for you'll be fixing everything except that one mistake. The above passage portrays just exactly how that thought starts in the mind, and sets us up with the set of expectations that is part of our experience in this world. Undoing that thought is possible only by means of a return to the original decision moment, as implied also by Logion 18.

And so life is a bit like a labyrinth, and we are busy finding our way back to the beginning, for if you know how we got into this mess, then you have found the way out as well.

Tiny, Mad Idea

First of all, Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler is exemplary in terms of its even-handed presentation. His absence of judgment lets us see how banal the ego really is, in all its insanity. Throughout, you wonder why people gave this nobody their faith, and certainly after the reverses set in, in the winter of '41, his all or nothing approach became so evidently idiotic, when he always argued "all" but the evidence was showing that he was achieving "nothing," yet his generals constantly went along with him, despite some grumbling, and so always maximized the disasters. Reading his life this way becomes a sobering reflection on the ego-insanity that drives us all. For if we do believe in the ego, if we do believe we are lonely individuals in a hostile world, separated from God, their source, we always do fall into the conflict of Cain & Abel all over again. That can be dressed up "scientifically" in terms of the "survival of the fittest" and some of that type of rationale was only too evident in Hitler's approach, but it's always the same. And the fundamental logic of the ego is always all or nothing. So why our allegiance to it? Why if any clear mind could see that it's only leading us to perdition? The devil we know versus the devil we don't? And we continue headlong into disaster? Why? Why? Why? There has to be another way!

Once you look past the enormity of the situation, realizing that differences of degree are not material, it begins to make more and more sense why the Course calls the ego a "tiny, mad idea." And, it is nothing more than that, an idea, a dream, and the mind is thoroughly capable of making another choice:

Let us return the dream he gave away unto the dreamer, who perceives the dream as separate from himself and done to him. Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time. (ACIM:T-27.VIII.6)

In the context of the Thomas Gospel, Logion 87 reminds us of how much special relationships, the relationships of the ego, which are substitutes for our one holy relationship with God, make us miserable, and keep our soul mired in misery in the world. It is the perfect picture for the criminal cameradery of something like the Nazi "leadership" in Germany, and the world repeats this a thousand times. These are false relationships based on the ego's despair. Logion 67 reminds us how the ego's "all" is really nothing. And again, the example of Hitler is only an extreme example, but the pattern is always the same. All the conquerors of the world always end up with nothing, for the world is nothing. And the need to conquer the world permanently pits brother against brother, for it is born from scarcity and will therefore only yield scarcity. Logion 56 reminds us of this in starkest terms - if you've conquered (understood) the world, all you've found is a corpse. Once you figure that out however, you will transcend the world. Logion 45 reminds us that the world's logic is always false. War and scarcity only beget war and scarcity, never anything good. Logion 26 meanwhile is always a good reminder that our job is not judging our brother, but rather to remove the "log" from our own eye, for else we can never be of help to anyone. As long as we judge any of our brothers at all, we exclude them however, and we continue to exclude ourselves from Heaven, but oneness speaks of a very different reality:

   If you were one with God and recognized this oneness, you would know His power is yours. But you will not remember this while you believe attack of any kind means anything. It is unjustified in any form, because it has no meaning. The only way it could be justified is if you and your brother were separate from the other, and all were separate from your Creator. For only then would it be possible to attack a part of the creation without the whole, the Son without the Father; and to attack another without yourself, or hurt yourself without the other feeling pain. And this belief you want. Yet wherein lies its value, except in the desire to attack in safety? Attack is neither safe nor dangerous. It is impossible. And this is so because the universe is one. You would not choose attack on its reality if it were not essential to attack to see it separated from its maker. And thus it seems as if love could attack and become fearful.
    Only the different can attack. So you conclude because you can attack, you and your brother must be different. Yet does the Holy Spirit explain this differently. Because you and your brother are not different, you cannot attack. Either position is a logical conclusion. Either could be maintained, but never both. The only question to be answered in order to decide which must be true is whether you and your brother are different. From the position of what you understand you seem to be, and therefore can attack. Of the alternatives, this seems more natural and more in line with your experience. And therefore it is necessary that you have other experiences, more in line with truth, to teach you what is natural and true. (ACIM:T-22.VI.12-13)

What's the Point?

This is just something I have to write down periodically, for it is one of my favorite things in all of spiritual literature.

When Franz Rosenzweig was working with Martin Buber on their famous new German translation of the Bible (Old Testament), they would meet mostly once a week, and since Rosenzweig had an illness which made it impossible for him to speak, and he would type out his notes for Buber, so they could discuss them.

On December 10th, 1929, Buber came in for his weekly visit, and found Rosenzweig slumped in the bed, with his typewriter, and the usual paper sticking out of it, except he had stopped in the middle of typing, for he had died overnight...

here is what he wrote:

... jetzt kommt sie, die Pointe aller Pointen, die der Herr mir wirklich im Schlaf verliehen hat: die Pointe aller Pointen für die es...

... here it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord truly has granted me in my sleep: the point of all points for which it...

It always reminds me of the Course:

Oneness is simply the idea God is. And in His Being, He encompasses all things. No mind holds anything but Him. We say "God is," and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless. There are no lips to speak them, and no part of mind sufficiently distinct to feel that it is now aware of something not itself. It has united with its Source. And like its Source Itself, it merely is. (ACIM:W-169.5)

Or, in terms of the Thomas Gospel, among others Logion 113 is a reminder of the simplicity we overlook...

It Ain't What You Know (It's How You Know It)

Knowledge is often times misunderstood as the knowledge of things. Hence people think there is such a thing as computer knowledge, and people do not understand that the term itself is an oxymoron. The Greek word was "gnosis." It was preserved in the term gnosticism, as a denominator for a set of philosophical/religious groups which existed among the mixture of religions around the time of Jesus, and in which the idea of gnosis, as an inner knowing, that is quite different in quality from the objective knowing of "things." This type of knowledge is an inner knowing that reflects a connection to our Self, it is the knowledge that is able at some point to recognize the Christ in our brothers, and to recognize Jesus, because we know at an ethereal level that he Is, what we Are in reality, pure spirit. As the proto-orthodoxy of Paul and Peter gained more prominence, gradually numerous forms of gnosticism were dismissed by these early would-be Christians as heresy, and ultimately their literature was to be excluded from the New Testament. As so often it became a matter of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

In the Thomas material we find Jesus using this word gnosis, knowledge in this original sense, starting in Logion 3, as knowing yourself, Logion 5, as knowing what is "in front of your face." This knowing is different than knowing the price of beans, it is an inner knowing, understanding. In the later gnostic tradition this usage becomes distorted again sometimes as if after all it is a something to be known, even in the sense of tradition. That is not the meaning it has in the Thomas Gospel, and clearly Jesus was not a gnostic. Conversely however some of the gnostics quite evidently did a better job of retaining some of the teachings of Jesus, than the so-called Christian orthodoxy which was to become the church later. An example of that might be the Roman teacher Valentinus, whose 2nd century Gospel of Truth is quite remarkable, and reflective of the original spirit of Jesus's teachings. But Jesus was neither a Christian, nor a Gnostic, that was not the point of his life and his resurrection. Jesus is who we know we would be as and when we do remember that we are the Son of God, so he is the living example of who we could be and should be. Hence he refers to himself sometimes as "the living one," since we have lost this consciousness, this inner knowing of who we really are in truth, and he is there to remind us and to wake us up from our stupor. Logion 28 reflects that sort of view of the human condition. 

Something within us knows however, and Logion 108 powerfully gives expression to our ability to fully learn who he is and thus to become like him. Our awareness is capable of shifting from our identification with the ego-self, to identification with our true Self, and on this path he is the teacher. This change of mind is the metanoia the Course talks about, and it is NOT a conversion of faith, or repentance, it is a total shift of thought-system, to a completely different frame of reference, that of the Holy Spirit. In A Course in Miracles he presents himself as an older brother, which implies a sense of recognition and familiarity. The difference between him and us is thus merely in the fact that he knows the way home and we don't so we'd be well advised to listen to him more. It is that inner sense of recognition of authenticity and of our own essence, which gives us the knowing, the certainty to proceed, while our ego still yanks us in every other direction, but meanwhile cannot offer us that quiet, inner calm of knowing, just knowing. If you truly know, you don't doubt, you don't have to defend your position to anyone, for the truth is never harmed by anything that seeks to contradict it. It just is. This is why inner peace is such a huge tip off of living in truth. There is nothing to defend, just like Jesus had no need of defend himself.

This is the closest way I could describe the feeling, which I've known in various ways in my own life, when I've recognized that voice, sometimes through others, sometimes within myself. One of the moments that stands out for me was a time when I was in my early twenties, and contemplating learning Aramaic and Coptic, simply because I was then very interested in the Thomas Gospel, as well as in Aramaicisms in the New Testament, and suddenly I "heard the thought" (that's one very descriptive expression for this phenomenon), that if Jesus really was who I thought he was, no way would I or anyone have to learn Aramaic, or Coptic, or some other dead language, in order to be able to understand him. Obviously he could speak to me in my own language right then and there. The thought itself of course attested to the truth of the statement. That sort of completeness within itself gave it a finality, where you don't doubt what the source is, you just know. Of course later I was to find A Course in Miracles, where he certainly speaks quite at length in contemporary language. Just to be sure, through Gary and his teacher Pursah, we also now have a very good contemporary version of the Thomas Gospel.

P.S. The title of this blog was chosen with the unforgettable song from the J. Geils Band "It Ain't What You Do (It's How You Do It). I could not find it on YouTube, otherwise I would have included a link to it here.

Is that you?

Docetism, so-called, was reviled by the emerging Christian orthodoxy. I am here to suggest that it may be fruitful to take a second look at what it is all about.

The author of the Acts of John, said to be Leucius, a real or fictitious companion of the apostle John, narrates his miracles, sermons, and death. The sermons display unmistakable Docetic tendencies, especially in the description of Jesus and the immateriality of his body:

.... Sometimes when I meant to touch him [Jesus], I met with a material and solid body; but at other times when I felt him, his substance was immaterial and incorporeal, as if it did not exist at all ... And I often wished, as I walked with him, to see his footprint, whether it appeared on the ground (for I saw him as it were raised up from the earth), and I never saw it. (§ 93)

The author also relates that Jesus was constantly changing shape, appearing sometimes as a small boy, sometimes as a beautiful man; sometimes bald-headed with a long beard, sometimes as a youth with a pubescent beard (§ 87-89). (From the introduction by Glenn Davis at www.ntcanon.org).

Some of the dialogue you will find there is absolutely fascinating, and in a sense it makes you wonder why the Christian Orthodoxy was so dead set against information of this nature, which clearly was very popular in the Johannine communities. If the symbol of Jesus does play a role for you at all, one of the very recognizable sentiments is that nobody would recognize him if you met him on the subway, and he would probably end up being pushed under a bus some place, and die unknown. So what is it then within us which does recognize Jesus when it matters? What is it that made these apostles in the conversations reported in the acts of John so certain that they'd seen Jesus?

None of this will make any sense from a standpoint of Newtonian physics, which is the knee-jerk frame of reference for most people, for in that context bodies are different, and moreover "reality" rests on the ability to discriminate deterministically between different bodies and things in the world. And it is their differences which determine their reality in this sense. Such is the way of the world, a world of differences. But in God's world, sameness is the law because it is the world of spirit, and not of the five senses, so it is a world of like knows like, and the thought of differences has no meaning. So when people report seeing Jesus, or experiencing him, if it is genuine, there is this gentle but unshakable inner knowing, a recognition of the real thing, because he represents who we are in truth, and he will appear to us in whatever form is most useful to us (including no form!). It may be just a thought, a voice, an intuition, along with an inner certainty that transcends the certainties of the world. For the seeming certainties of the world are all transient in nature and therefore not certainties at all. My fingerprint is good as long as my finger is not chopped off, or otherwise damaged. My iris scan is good until my eye is damaged, etc. etc. nothing lasts. And the world does not and cannot know who I am, because the only practical answers are by proxy, yet I am none of those proxies, and I survive all of them. But the world of spirit is the world of eternity. There is no death. And self recognizes self, no matter what the form, and will also be quite able to recognize the essence in many different forms, and therefore the docetic stories are quite perceptive and instructive, and a good suggestion that many of the so-called apocryphal writings are potentially of great value.

Within the Thomas material there are several Logia where this theme of recognizing Jesus is touched on, in a wide variety of ways such as Logion 24, Logion 31, Logion 52, Logion 57, Logion 66, Logion 67, Logion 72, Logion 90, Logion 99, Logion 108, Logion 110, Logion 111. It may pay to think about why all of these in some fashion do have a bearing on recognizing Jesus. One thing to notice for sure is that none of them say: "I'm the tall, dark handsome guy with the sunglasses, the red t-shirt, and blue jeans." He will appear to us as is most helpful to us at the time.

How To Know What Time It Is?

I am the one who comes from what is whole. I was given from the things of my Father. Therefore, I say that if one is whole, one will be filled with light, but if one is divided, one will be filled with darkness.

Gospel of Thomas, Logion 61 (Pursah version)

This saying is so beautiful and simple and it expresses the core of what Jesus is to us, in a way that would be immediately comfortable to anyone who has studied A Course In Miracles. He is the elder brother who has gone before us, who has remembered what we are spirit, and the wholeness of God's Son, where all is one and we know we are one and whole. The Love of the Father was extended to him, and so he knows what it is to be filled with light, by remembering that wholeness. However if we are "divided" i.e. believe we can exist separate from God, conducting these dream-lives of ours in the world, we will be filled with darkness, because we will not remember the light and the wholeness of heaven while we're playing at being somebody in this world. It is all very straightforward and plain for anyone to see.

So, Jesus holds out a simple choice, either we follow him back to the light, or we follow the ego, and stay in division and separation, and live in darkness. That's how simple it gets, and that's how you know what time it is.