lulay

Jesus is not some historical character who was crucified some long ago date on a cross, and spoke to his Father etc etc. all that is literalism. a story.

really, deeply madly deeply, Jesus IS you. yes you. THIS is the really good news. not some more literalist rant that makes no sense whatsoever. so what do i mean?

Don't know if many of you are familiar with the current theories that show paganistic influence for the formation of the Chritian myth. there is much on offer if you care to look

Bascially, Jesus is the Hellenistic-Judaic version of the pagan god-man who was the ever-living ever-dying ever-regenerating god-man, Son/Lover of the Goddess

This god-man was to be eaten.drunk. i mean you know of the central ritual of the Christian myth don't you? The eating of the flesh and blood of Jesus. Well, that is precisely the pagan ritual of eating the sacred god-man-plant/hallucinogen

What happens is that this plant/mushroom is taken up an pulled apart (the meaning of "crucifixion"), ingested and hence is sacrificed

When the god-man then dies, simltaneously he is resurrected. Further, and this is where you come in. Your egoic boundary dis-solving, IS the resurrection. they happen simultaneously.

what egoic boundary dissolving means is that your rigid mindset becomes ever so more flexible, and open to the flow of things. Song, dance, sensuality, sexuality, awareness of Nature in all its deepnesses. This is spirituality in its essence.

so what happened? why did Jesus become an historical figure? what do you think?

Vorkosigan

Seems to be a better fit here.

Clivedurdle

My thinking has always chimed very strongly with the concept of Emmanuel- God with us - and the mystical side of xianity.

The snag is it feels woolly, psycho therapeutic, new agey, lentils and sandals!

Not quite the same as your heavy Billy Graham, this is what it is all about messages you get from heavyweight xianity!

Programme on the radio this afternoon about building stone walls in Northern Britain. To do this well they said, you switch off thinking and go into a state of consciousness where your hands, eyes and brain are working too rapidly to make words. And successfully building a wall where a mess of very different stones are put together to build a wall that stays up several hundred years!

Is it possible that we have made words and thinking a type of fetish that is actually an inefficient way for our brains to work?

I don't think this reduces to male female differences, it is related to the direction we percieve the world from - a word rule following religion or a mystical, person centred direction. Mods, before this gets moved to GRD can we stay with how these themes have been developed in the Bible and church history?

Extreme examples might be the Quakers in contrast to Calvinists.

OdysseusTheInnkeeper

Of all the archetypes available to me personally, Jesus only rises to near the top of the dynamic hierarchy so often because our culture is so swamped by the xtian take on all this. One booklet, by some witness, called the economy of god, stated that the holy ghost wasn't passed unto you, but into you, and distributed through the population of the world.

The other part that is significant is the Jungian subconscious, or its primary operative archetype is the opposite sex for a person. In short, the Jesus archetype can more easily rise as primary archetype within a woman's subconscious than a man's. Unfortunately, much of Jesus's actual personality wasn't seen as important for getting his point across, and was truncated for centuries- literally edited out. Although the movie series "Jesus of Nazereth" does the best job of resurrecting him as a person, Jesus is still very difficult to piece together as an individual. Odysseus is better. :devil3: :angel:

spin

Whoa thar, lulay. This is rampant Allegro hype. And crucifixion is a nice clear Latin word constructed from Latin parts, crux (meaning "cross") and figere (meaning "to fix (to)"), so "crucify" literally means "to fix to a cross". The Greek version wasn't as specific as the Latin, it meant "to fix to a stake". So I'd recommend you drop the "pull apart" story.


spin

Chili

Why not just the Catholics and the/most protestants?

To fight off and erradicate biblical literalism many Inquisitions were held and in the end the Reformation was fought to prevent all hell to brake lose in Christendom.

Chili

No and no again. At best are we followers of Jesus and Christ is, or is within us. Jesus had two natures, one was Jesus the Jew and the other was Christ the son of man and it is in the son of man identity that we are like Christ but different in our origin as Christ-the-son-of-man that is represented by the woman who first gives birth to us and later becomes our bride.We consume and identify with the body and blood of Christ and not the body and blood of Jesus. The difference here is crucial.The god-man never dies but the go dies and it is crucial that the ego dies or it will become the final imposter to claim that salvation is his and things will get better after he dies (Mt.27:64).He very well may have been a historical figure and actually must have been
historical along with many more just like him except for maybe the depth, duration, extent and general utility of the event. But that does not make the crucifixion a literal or physical event except in the myth . . . which is real nonetheless since only eternal life is real.

Where we go wrong is that we, or many of us want to be counted among the righteous while we forget that Jesus was counted among the wicked. Does this mean that we are cowards? or must we blame our leadership for this? "Be not afraid" is a good final message here.

lulay

really to understand what i am communicating is to look past literalism......someone pointed out hrere about stonebuilding, and the art of it is to forget words as such and rely on body language...or something like that

well, hallucinogenic experience is like that. suddenly you are not just seeing with the head, but with the whole organism
So really understanding about this--even if you've never had experience with hallcuinogens....

it is seeing associations. i am sure that in pre-literal cultures the experiencing of asscoations was paramount to the abstractive seduction of the printed text

Someone here criticizes J.Allegro, Yet he shows very dramatically what i mean. how mythic writers drew on associative idea about plants and gods etc. although this was text, it was written in layers of meaning, and there is wordplay, pun and so on, which is associative

It is not only Allegro who shows the continuity of paganism to the Christian myth, but it is he who had the courage and boldenss to really explore the hallucinogenic connections too

do you remember those computerized pictures where in order to see a pattern/picture you had to relax the eyes and eventually a pciture would emerge--a 3d picture? well that is how you should read mythology

the looking at pattern. not only what you are reading, but how its sense and meaning interelates with other stuff.
It makes absolutely no sense the literalist surface text. of A man in history, being sacrificed for our sins.
But when you realize that the sacrifice is your own rigidity then it does. that brings the myth to you. it gives it actual meaning

but you also have to examine the deeper layer of this Christian myth. it is NOT commensurate with pagan myth in respect of its historical surface message and its semen-centric message. you have to understand its patriarchal bias

For example, Jesus is 'son of "GOD"/ who is his "Father".....this is a dramtic subversion of the pagan god-man myths where the god-man was son/lover of Goddess, and came from her
in the 'secret' layyers of the Christian myth, it is 'his' semen that is formost..........so you read this, and low and behold what Allegro says fits a pattern of other writers who probably dont even know Allegro, who inform us that as patriarchy took hols semen becomes predominant and woman becomes the receptacle. We see gods giving BIRTH to women. of course this was shown in the Genesis story of Adam giving birth to Eve, and in Greek Myth, Zeus giving birth to Athena, etc etc......are you with me

so the point here is is that EVEN the Christian myth as secretly told, and SEEMING like previous pagan myths, is patriarchally bias

Christ goes to he Father. not Mother. unlike the pagan god-men who were "ever living ever dying ever regenerating', Jesus escapes death, and regeneration, thus divorcing its deeper message from the reader it is meant to touch

WE are ever living ever dying ever regenerating....yeah. so is Nature. we ARe Nature. the hallucinogenic experience IS this insight. THAt is what deep mythology is poetically reflecting on, but the Christian myth historicises this for political reasons of divide and control. making you feel a split betweeen 'good' and 'evil'

spin

Allegro based magic mushy reveries have their place I suppose, but they are extremely light on evidence and big on associative thinking, which often is the road to sidetracking and losing the thread.

The magic mushy story falls over itself because there is no reason to believe it, no evidence from the past to support it (other than the associative thinking of its proponents) and falls into the practically useless category.

When we talk about the past we start with what we know and introduce strong evidence for what we assert. There is no evidence behind the magic mushy assertions. Allegro only followed the line of associative thinking on the matter, but understand his position, in that he'd staked his reputation on working on the scrolls and the narrow minded loons who were the majority ostracised the guy. You can understand him going a little whacko over magic mushies with his career in ruins. That doesn't mean we should join him. Hey, wouldja like another mushroom infusion?


spin

lulay

NAY spin, you have not really understood what i had posted. the ESSENCE IS associative feeling-thinking...! that's IT

look, lets go back (picture goes all wavyyy~~~~~_ to pre-literate times. many people have pointed out that the introduction of script via an alphabet had a dramatic influence on our experience of reality, right?.....so, pre-literate. not lines of abstract letters read mechanically right to left or left to write.
So people would have been more attuned to OBERVATION. Associative and thus POETIC, metaphorical perception and feeling

so a snake...a serpent would have associations of moving like water--its ripple motion, the slouging of its skin, being associated with changes in nature,
its habitat similar to how mushrooms come out, the poison on its darting tongue (did you know that some serpent venom is hallucinogenic too? yip)...etc etc

same with a Tree. it is not merely a commodity as in our materialstic world.....anceint people had much respect for trees. its roots in the earth, trunk in this world and its bracnhes raching to the heavens, thus for the poetic observation, it is interconnecting cosmos and Earth....hence its central position in the Genesis garden myth which was a rip off from Goddess mythology, as the Serpent etc

Wehnyou take hallucinogens you are
immersed IN this deimension os ASSOCIATION par excellENCE!...there is association, and sychronicity abounding. i haven't got that merely from books, but very much personal experience. There is MEANING. The term 'associative is really meaning how 'things' are interelated, with other things, all having meaning


you see spin, and i reading you. i can tell by your choice of the term "magic mushy" your attitude to this--with repoect (i'm sure you'll say i am wrong..heh), but i am just sharing with you this isnight----when you use that term "magic mushy" it gives me the feeling you think of this subject as "mushy", "wooly" "ridiculous" "not academic" "not scientifically sound" and of course "magic" is much dis-respected in this 'scientific world. in fact it is dis-missed utterl. out of discourse , 'ob-scene'..meaning'off-scene.

so how do we get out of that prejudice? you have to then explore THIS paradigm we are in. materialistic-mechanistic science. which is A myth!