In another study I have attempted a defense of Jesus as a genius with
radically new ideas, an evolutionary
Eureka!
development by which life
tried to develop a new aspect of potential. I have tried to outline how
completely the massive "failure of nerve" of that period, epitomized in
Stoicism, and seen by Singer to have destroyed early science, was the
victor in the struggle for man's mind. This same failure of nerve is the
very psychological contradiction dominant today, the perennial cause of
the split mind. This frozen logic of Stoicism not only triumphed but then
incorporated the imagery of Jesus, inverting and negating his entire
thrust. Thus was the "rushing torrent of the river of God" turned into
a "broad but feeble stream" called Christendom, to use Edwin Hatch's
metaphor.
One or two comments by Augustine, that final death-knell of Jesus' Way,
indicate how the symbols of the Way had been absorbed into Greek logic
until indistinguishable. Writing of the Stoic Seneca for instance,
Augustine exclaimed: "What more could a Christian say than this Pagan
has said?" Concerning the Platonists, Augustine stated that "the sole
fundamental truth they lacked was the doctrine of the Incarnation." Since
this "doctrine" was itself purely Greek, foreign to a Hebraic background
and undetectable in the ideas, sayings, or actions of Jesus, we see how
the new wine had long since been put in old skins.
Considering the world an immovable fated cycle, and man a tragic
incidental on its surface, with God an absstract "pure essence" off in
his ninth circle or wherever, the Greeks were unable to ask or hear a
Job-like ultimate question. To the Greeks nothing could ever happen to
the cosmic egg, only to incidental man. And to the Greeks, boxed in,
by their own logic, no answer came.
Stoicism rewrote Jesus' crack in the egg as a mythological once-for-all
happening. Their projection placed the Way out of bounds for man. Thus
man was really no longer responsible for his world, but only responsible
to the priesthood organizing the dogma. The open-potential catalyst is
completely unpredictable, and the forces of social control, feeding on
predictability, quickly shut it out.
The "Will of God" shaped as the new metaphor for the old Greek Fate. The
"Son of God" was no longer rational man; the "Father" no longer the
logos-shaping mythos, the symbol of transference; the "Spirit" no longer
the threshold of mind; "God" no longer that divine-demonic, non-judging,
amoral, raining on just and unjust alike, the hard taskmaster reaping
where he sows not, doubling the talents, any talents, mirroring any
desire, and crying "More! More! Less than all will never satisfy." By the
Greek perversion these became Olympian figures rather than psychological
symbols of ontology. They were abstracted from all reality. Jesus' Way,
the greatest of human
Eureka!
ventures, became a fairy tale, a maudlin,
ridiculous, pious fraud.
Actually, none of the accounts of Jesus' "non-ordinary" reality maneuvers
need be discounted. A miracle is a non-ordinary state in the don Juan,
fire-walker sense, rather than in the Greek mythological fire-from-Olympus
sense. Christendom has largely ignored Jesus' insistence that acts greater
than his would be a product of his system. Based on Greek logic as it is,
rather than on the non-structured and open Way, theology never understood
or really believed in those happenings. Since miracles represented cracks
in the egg beyond all probability, the self-styled guardians of the egg,
determined to protect man
from
himself, projected those cracks into the
nethermost regions of inaccessibility.
The "interventions in the ontological construct" attributed to Jesus
and promised for his followers are as logical within his premise and
system as are different reality states in don Juan's, fire-walking in
the Hindu's, or atom bombs in the scientist's.
And surely, from the evidence I have tried to bring together in this
book, it should be obvious why Hugh Schonfield's thesis of Jesus' taking
a drug to simulate death so seriously misses the point, and places
Schonfield, in spite of his remarkable work, squarely in the camp of
those theologians he challenges. Such a notion of trickery on Jesus'
part, double-mindedness of the first rank, would have automatically
fragmented the very state of mind that was the only weapon Jesus had.
The technique, improbable as it sounds, by which one might open to this
Way even today has been outlined in this book. The Laski-Wallas-Bruner
outline of creative thought (Chapter IV) is easily traced in Jesus' own
seizure and translation, and was clearly established as the pattern for
his followers. The reason for the similarity is simple -- there is no
other way for newness to come about. We are dealing with the ontological
way of all things, not heavenly mysteries or occult secrets.
Surely the obstacles to any crack are many and formidable. The scientific
allegiances are no more powerful checks than the theologians -- those
standing at the gate preventing others from going through.
Greatest of the several tragedies of the Stoic inversion of Jesus,
culminating in Christendom and still operative under various guises, was
representing God as reason
, considering God to be
rational
. Again, it is a case of projection. Reason and logic
are the qualities of limitation
and definition produced by man's conscious thinking. We are, to use
religious imagery, "made in the likeness of God" in that non-logical,
autistic mode of mind, the mode we cannot get at directly and manipulate,
but which is closer than our very consciousness, the breath of life
making all things real. God became only an extension of man through
this classical view. This inverted view trusts only its own logic and
mistrusts God's unruly and unpredictable characteristics which then are
considered Satanic. The Classical view, as Blake and Northrop Frye point
out, inverts the true situation and mistakes reality-thinking for the
autistic, which is, ironically enough, claiming man to be God, the very
error theologians have been most strident in condemning. Down through
the centuries they have been yapping at their own image in the mirror.
Man is the imaginative tool or technique by which life "thinks" in a
rational, value-giving and limited way, selecting that which might be
real. We have received only a mirroring of our own limitations, and have
thus seen ourselves fated, by the Classical view. Calling God "Nature"
has not changed the resulting fate. A change of metaphor will not make
a bad idea good. To attribute human qualities to God is to have mirrored
back
just this quality
of limitation, trapping us in our own logic.
The man who challenges: "if there is a God, why doesn't he do something
about things?" must grasp that the part of mind thinking in this "why"
kind of way is the rational mode of life, reasoning man. The closest thing
there will ever be to a God responsible for the question is the
asker
of that question. The capacity to fill empty categories is not selective,
or the breeder of categories.
God's mode
for thinking selectively
is
man
.
There is no magician up there pulling strings if his whim and fancy
can just be tickled by the right words. There is no Moral Governor
of the Universe, no oriental tyrant able to grant amnesty if we can
but find flattering enough incantation. There is no divine mind with
beautiful blueprints. There is no super-computer behind the scenes able
to out-figure the statistics if we could but hit on the right combination
to trigger the mechanism.
The formative process of life is nonambiguous since it is equally all
possibilities. Any nonambiguous idea becomes an organizing point for
realization in this process. Ordinary logical thinking is ambiguous
and enters only indirectly as one of an infinite number of random
contingencies which may or may not be decisive. Nonambiguous impressions
and notions are generally "below the limen of feeling," and so appear to
happen as fate when becoming points for formative realization. Fear, for
instance, takes on an ultimate, nonambiguous nature and tends to create
that which is feared. Hatred is the same, trapping the hater in his own
hell. A conscious, passionate, singleminded intensity tends to dampen out
ambiguity and achieve a realization. Ultimate ideas in that "secret place
of mind," the rock-bottom of real belief, shape one's ground of being.
We
must
become aware of the force of mind and develop a balance between
the modes of thinking. The materials for achieving this wholeness have
been in the common domain for two millenia now, though continuously
evaded by our failure of nerve. The current dilemma allows no further
evasion. Langer's "boldness of hypothesis" is not just desirable but
crucial for survival.
Surely we see each nation groping for protection in this present
nightmare, and each further developing the capacity to obliterate all
life. But this is merely making outward and evident an inner condition
previously projected "out there" as fate. We are finally confronting the
mirror of our true selves -- we are that fate. We are in our own hands.
Our leaders, placed in positions of power, immediately succumb
to
that power and speak of "dealing from positions of strength," which
translates into power
over
and
against
-- a desire to be God. The
great hopefulness exhibited by that long-gone America of the Marshall Plan
and the young United Nations, moving for others as the best protection
for ourselves, has been eclipsed in a mirroring of our adversary's
paranoia. Now we find that it is we ourselves, not that perpetual enemy,
who are considered the "nightmare of the world," as Toynbee plainly
called us.
We could have risked our lives to serve and been saved. Inflated with
power we have succumbed to don Juan's first stumbling block. We have
undergone a temptation in the wilderness, hideously failed, and ironically
claimed divine sanction for our folly. What will we do about total power,
for soon we will all have it -- not just the "most powerful and richest
nation on earth," but even these tiny and backward nations whose faces we
have ground in the dust of our concupiscence and lust. Soon they, too,
will hold the trigger to our mutual demise. What then? Having cast our
bread on the waters it will surely be returned. Sowing, we must surely
reap. Nothing can mitigate the mirroring we subject ourselves to --
nothing but turning from this path that has no heart, this path that
can only kill.
Invested in a furtherance of life's thrust toward awareness and expansion
of potential, our power could lead to stars and all the "joys and
pleasures" in them if we so desired. Used against ourselves to prove our
"leadership," to prove that we cannot be pushed around, all development
will cease. Power will become ultimately demonic, and this little venture
into awareness, in this little corner of infinity, will simply cease to
be. Don Juan and Jesus understood this -- stood under and responsibly
accepted -- within their own framework of imagery and representation. And
we need their understanding.
We face new situations -- but new techniques are arising. Through these
current ventures, briefly mentioned in this book, we are creating pieces
for this new puzzle, and we will yet fit them together into an even larger
image of man. The picture must encompass those pieces already created,
however, for it is only by placing one foot firmly in the past that we
have firm ground for a step into the future. Our emerging picture will
find its true dimension in that frame of continuity encompassing our total
heritage. Our next step will hinge on opening to the total process of
mind and that means that shadowy area encompassing the whole development
of psyche. In Jesus, and even don Juan, we find such symbols for the
larger body of man. Triggered through such imagery of the total man,
the 'autistic' process can synthesize from that enormously rich trial
and error understanding reaching through the whole thinking phylum of
our living earth.
Do you not see why balance of mind and the nonambiguous process can
only be utilized by passionately holding to some symbol of
wholeness
,
a symbol that stands equally for
all
parts of the process itself --
which means the absolutely other to us, the neighbor? Do you not see why
anything
less
fragments us and isolates us in our surface limitations?
Do you not see how logical thinking, in order to even function, must
limit to a specific, and that this specific is then the only apparent
reality -- and how this fragmented form of thinking then orients quite
naturally around the notion of
scarcity
, the idea that in order to
have we must take from and deprive others, since only a limited amount
can be seen? Do you not see that fragmented thinking turns all others
into potential enemies, until we live, as Northrop Frye said, as armed
crustaceans, damned to a perpetual alarm and crisis, where life itself
is a threat to life? Can you not see that opening to the whole mind must
open to a constant yield always sufficient, always ample? The cause of
the need is the cause of the fulfillment of the need. The empty category
is an ontological function. Stepping out into nothingness is impossible
-- though nothing can be seen, something always forms underfoot. Our
universe is not a fixed and frozen machine grinding out in entropy. It
can always be what we have need of it to be. The eternal mental life
of God and Man has enough to go around -- eternally round and round --
by moving for and not against.
The new directions outlined here in my book can be seen as harbingers
of a new and larger season in our own cycle, and we will manage, I do
believe, to hold through this winter of confused discontent. Leonard Hall,
Carlos Castaneda, Levi-Strauss, Polanyi, Hilgarde, Bruner, Langer, and
all the rest -- these tend toward recognition of the arbitrary character
of reality. There is a growing acceptance of Carl Jung's understanding
of mind, though his insights are adopted under different imagery,
and his genius not credited as the source. The impressive impact of
Teilhard de Chardin may well resist attempts by cyclic thinkers to warp
his illumination into their deadly circles. Parapsychology suggested a
direction, but a more tangible and "scientific" approach will probably
be the key, since this is the path already taken. The scientific tool
may well prove the bridge, but even so there will come a time when such
intermediary devices and projection techniques are obsolete. Such a
transition will be gradual and natural; one stage will fuse easily into
the other. We may always be simply "discovering Nature's Laws."