Recognizing that "what we loose on earth is loosed in heaven," Jesus tried to give the kind of loosing we should do, the kind of representation we should make of God, or life, if we want the non-judging mirroring process of reality to work to our best advantage. It was a purely practical, pragmatic venture. He set up a pattern of representation, an image of transference, a pivot for restructuring, by which we can, "becoming as little children," achieve a new hierarchy of mind, a way down and out to freedom from fate.
On the other hand, he recognized and warned that any representation of God or life was true insofar as believed in. Any leavening fills the flour. Kataragama is as true and real as his Hindu followers. He works. Science works. Carlos found Mescalito a functional fact.
The unknown continuum of potential, the dark forest with its circles ad infinitum, the large category of the unknown, rains on just and unjust alike. This function "judges not." Any question asked with ultimate seriousness merges into this unjudging ultimacy and tends to express itself. Any sowing enters this contingency and tends to set up its own reaping. Any world view organizes a world-to-view. Any representation of God produces accordingly. Understanding and accepting responsibility for this function can make us free.
The whole character of don Juan's or Jesus' system was interlocking. The only way by which the ally could be brought about in the mind was by surrender and commitment to the initial transference figure, who was also the content of imagery by which the synthesis could organize. Recall how P. W. Martin's Experiment in Depth, carried its own materials for synthesis. The same self-verifying procedure takes place in physics.
Fasting entered into Jesus' Way as it does in all non-ordinary systems. His forty-day fast in the wilderness, duplicated in our day from necessity by marooned travelers, was the way of breaking with the world of necessities and statistics. Fasting bypasses the logical blocks. Jesus refused food, saying he had nourishment his followers knew nothing about. Don Juan commented casually that food would not be needed for their several days' trip to the mountains where they would be guests of the god Mescalito. The ways of the world would not be essentials when one had opened to the ways of the god. Don Juan never made an issue of the two- and three-day fasts that preceded new steps along his path, such was simply a natural part of the tradition.
To move against the certainties and energies of "the world" calls for an equally sure conviction and a concentration on balance of mind. To center all the forces on the restructuring of an ordinary event in a non-ordinary way called for exceptional organization of self.
Jesus sighs heavily as he goes to raise Lazarus. In his growing and reckless confidence, he delayed two days, not only to make sure Lazarus would be dead but to gather the forces of mind necessary to illustrate this extreme example of the "glory of God," the open-ended-potential of being. Jesus sighs heavily as he moves to heal the deaf man. The fire-walker sighs heavily as he walks to the pit of fire. There is a childlike quality in bringing the dream state through the crack to fruition. Such an inner state is balanced by a tough and resilient clarity of mind in the outer self. One is like a lamb to the inner spirit but like a fox to the outer world. This is the balance of mind.
As with don Juan's "ally," Jesus' "Holy Spirit" would instruct in the "right way to live." This "instruction" was only a synthgsis of the instant moment itself, however, not any sort of foreknowing. The "ally" is only a catalyst acting on all parts of the immediate context. In Jesus' move-for-the-world this means all those other persons who are also the autistic, also the "father son"; they also contain the kingdom of heaven within them. To prestructure, or "take thought of the morrow," would set up logical blocks of expectancy preventing free synthesis. The synthesis would of necessity have to include the instant moment of, and move for, all parts of the context equally, since all parts are equally the context to the non-judging autistic.
Eternity is still in love with time. The desires arising out of time are the organizing nucleus for whatever "eternity" might be. In every case of Carlos' meeting with Mescalito, the god could only ask: "What do you want?" Jesus promised his followers: "Whatever you ask in my name will be given you."
"What do you want?" is the only question eternity can ask of time, and it is our divine gift to answer by asking our own question. Desire, passion, curiosity, longing, novelty, daring, creativity, productivity, lust for life, ecstasy, joy, adventure, all these are the highest thrusts of life, the most divine of attributes, the most sacred of possessions. And all these have been the attributes mistrusted and condemned by that dark priesthood probing for control, domination, and battening on the brother's blood. Without these seeds from time, however, without these vital. gametes from the larger body of man, the womb of eternity is barren.
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 al
l 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 Crack in the Cosmic Egg Page 21