The Jesus Situation

The Bible stories are true! not in a literal sense, but in a spiritual sense. We must resolve the religion-science disharmony, not to mention monotheistic bigotry, and it’s actually easy to do, because parables—allegorical stories—reveal universal truths of which science is completely ignorant. Any good scientist will, without hesitation, admit that science can say nothing about what it cannot measure.

Suppose that, like physics’ Conservation of Energy law (Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another), there is also a law of Conservation of Psychic Energy: Bodies are born and die, but the spacetime continuum—the universe—is subordinate to the omnipresent consciousness in which the universe is born and dies. Consciousness is not bound by time or space, is unborn and undying.

Extreme separation/isolation is generally not healthy (unless one is on an enlightenment quest, maybe). Realization of the unity of oneself with the cosmos, of one’s mind with the mind of the cosmos (“God”) is the feeling of coming home to the Father’s table after a journey that has lasted as long as one can remember. For their psycho-spiritual health, people need to feel connected to this larger whole, to feel their ego dissolve and merge into a psychic ocean. In tribal societies since ancient times, communal religious rituals included eating the body and/or drinking the blood of God (in the form of a psychoactive food and drink). Up to the early centuries AD, Christian rituals made use of psychedelic wine and incense, as had the Eleusinian Greeks before them, as had the ancient Egyptians and many other civilizations of the ancient world.*

In 392 AD, Roman Emperor Theodosius I closed the Eleusinian Mysteries. Over the course of the fourth century, the Bible was canonized, standardized; consequently, many beliefs of early Christian cults were declared heretical and punishable by death. New Testament apocrypha include: The Gospel of Marcion, of Mani, of Apelles, of Bardesanes, of Basilides, and the Gospel of Thomas (the sayings of Jesus, written in the first century). The psychoactive ingredients in the wine were also removed, over time and, as a result, since at least the late-fourth century AD, the meaning of many of Jesus’ sayings has been misunderstood, having been lost in translation (from Aramaic to Greek to English). Christians need to remember that, many times when Jesus said “I,” he was referring not to himself as a person, but to the Christ consciousness, the mind of God, the same consciousness spoken of by the deities and prophets of many ancient religions.

The following is taken mainly from an interview with Neil Douglas-Klotz, scholar of religious studies, spirituality & psychology (link at end).

Most scholars now believe that by the time of Jesus, no one was really speaking the ancient Hebrew that would have been spoken by Moses or by King David. Everyone was speaking the lingua franca of the whole Middle East, which was Aramaic…Jesus spoke Aramaic, so look at the original translations of the sayings that are attributed to him in the Gospels (the Gospels in the Canonical Bible, and the Gospels that are outside the Canonical Bible, the apocrypha).

There are several small things, like prepositions, which make a huge difference. Jesus primarily talks about not believing in him. He doesn’t say, “Believe in me” but, “Believe like me. Believe as I do.” It’s just a matter of translating the prepositions differently. You know, when [the Bible] went into a Greek version, which is what the Western churches ended up using, they chose to translate “believe like me” into “believe in me.” And that makes a huge amount of difference…

We need to let go of this division of reality into mind, body, soul, and spirit. This really comes to us from platonic Greek philosophy. And this division into heaven & earth—you could say transcendent imminent: mind, body, soul, spirit—doesn’t apply in ancient Semitic languages. They had an entirely different world view or way of looking at the psychology of the self and its relationship to nature, its relationship to the universe.

So when we bring this into individual words—for instance, the word that Jesus uses that is often translated as “spirit” really means “breath.” Spirit is sometimes seen in some theologies as something that is not of this world…In Genesis, the Holy One “breathes the universe into existence… “Breathing connects with the breath, the wind, the air that is all over the planet, and this itself returns to a larger breath, the “holy breath.” This was later translated as “holy spirit”which, again, brings up the image of something disembodied, something not of this world, disconnected.

Many Aramaic words and their literal translation were strained out through Greek philosophy, and language into a way of looking that Jesus and the ancient prophets could never have imagined. They couldn’t have even imagined some of the concepts that later came into Western theology.

If you like the translation of the Aramaic prayer, of the Lord’s Prayer that you have, the Our Father in the King James Version, stay with it. If that means something. If that’s something for your heart, stay with that because it has meaning for you, it has resonance for you. But there are deeper additional meanings to some of these more limited translations…The spirituality that Jesus was pointing his listeners towards, and is pointing us towards, is something broader. It doesn’t eliminate necessarily any of the literal translations that were done in the past. But what it does do is perhaps broaden and deepen a person’s spiritual experience.

The ancient Semitic languages seemed to revel in a paradoxical way of looking at life. Life was both heaven & earth. One way to translate “heaven” is “shimmering wave,” but it was also an individual particle; it was an individual essence with which each of us came into life—a seed that can, one day, blossom. The ancient Semitic peoples felt that “God” or “Sacred Unity” was infused in all dimensions of reality, including nature. The Holy One is infused in all of reality, everything we see, anything is possible at any particular time.

When Jesus says, for instance, “the kingdom of the One is within/among you,” this breakdown of dualism is there in the Aramaic language itself. And again, once we start to retranslate or insert the word “breath” wherever Jesus uses spirit, that gives us a real hint as to his way of prayer or meditation. There are many other things like this. In some of the later Gospels—not in the canonical Gospels, but some of the one that weren’t included—there are descriptions of Yeshua/Jesus doing some sort of circle dance with his disciples. In some of the Gospels, for instance in the Gospel of Thomas, there are descriptions of certain types of contemplation or meditation that Jesus was sharing with his disciples.

Aramaic has only one word that means both “prayer” and what we would currently call “silent meditation.” The types of prayer/meditation that Jesus would have done involve simple chanting, simple inner breathing with certain words, much as it’s done today in the tradition of Contemplative Prayer or Centering Prayer, from a more Middle Eastern standpoint, as opposed to a Far Eastern standpoint. The inner intonation of sound is very important in the Middle Eastern way of prayer. It’s much more of a tradition of breath and of sound than it is of sight and of the visual. So body awareness, breathing, sound, intoning, chanting, and of course silence—these are all tools that get us close to Jesus’ way of prayer and meditation.

In the Gospel of John, some of the sayings of Jesus are usually translated beginning with the words, “I am,” for example, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” “I am the door,” etc. In Aramaic, the word that is later translated as “I am” is really “I-I.” Aramaic doesn’t have a “being” verb. You can’t actually say “I am” in ancient Aramaic, nor can you do it in ancient Hebrew, as far as that goes. So really what Jesus is saying is, “I-I,” the small self (nafsha) that is growing, evolving, learning through life; and the greater (Alaha), the One, God. It connects one’s own sense of self, the way it is just in this moment, with a sense of awe or sense of unity that is throughout the whole cosmos, and builds & strengthens that connection so that there’s an easier pathway between the big picture of life and what one has to deal with in one’s everyday life.

The ancient Semites tended to look at time really not as a separate past, present & future, but more as a “caravan time,” the past pulsing ahead of us. The present is here now with us in a community with which we’re traveling, and the future is coming along behind us. So it’s almost exactly the opposite of the way Western philosophy looks at it, which is, “We’re heading toward the future and the past is behind us and it will never affect us again.”

By not having a “being” verb, Aramaic doesn’t objectify an object into particular states. If you look at what Christians call the Old Testament, you don’t find any “being” verbs—you have everything in motion. You don’t have any verbs that mean “to stand still, to sit still, to be still,” to be motionless. What is usually translated in the Hebrew scripture as “Be still and know that I am God,” really is the saying, “Be silent. Listen. Listen and hear.”

One often finds that with teachers, as they are about to leave, that they try to leave something, leave some transmission. They try to pass that on to a few people. Jesus wanted his close disciples, his close students—as he says in the Gospel of John very clearly, even in the King James version—to do the things that he had done and greater than these. The way that they would do that is not by idolizing him or putting him on a pedestal, but in trying to look towards where he’s pointing them. Look toward their own connection, the I-I, through him to sacred unity. It’s a sense of guidance or direction, which is the saying that was translated later as “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” In Aramaic, it’s “If you connect I-I, this will show you the path. It will show you the sense of right direction,” and “the life” but, in this case, it means “life energy,” the energy to travel. Come back to the breath, to presence, with a sense of connection, and there’s the path.

Because of the different nature of time in Aramaic, the whole notion of a Judgment Day is very problematic. It’s inconceivable that Jesus could have imagined a Judgment Day the way that people currently talk about it or that any of the Hebrew Prophets could have imagined it either. Some branches of Islam believe in a certain type of apocalyptic Judgment Day, but Mohammed couldn’t have known anything about it either, simply because the language wouldn’t have allowed them to do it.

Their idea of judgment was of discrimination, of decision, in the moment. When I connect to the Holy One through whatever prayer or through whatever meditation, then I have the ability to decide what is important in my life at this moment and what is not important. I have to discriminate. I have to discriminate what is ripe for me now, and what is unripe, and so does our society: our culture has to discriminate and decide, “OK, what we formerly thought was good to do as a culture maybe now is no longer ripe.” The Judgment Day, as many mystics have said, is really here and now. In each moment. Each breath can be a judgment day.

One of Jesus’ final sayings to his disciples, at least according to the Gospel of John, is translated beautifully in the King James, “Love one another as I have loved you.” The Aramaic gives us this additional dimension: the aheb—the word for love, in this case, in Aramaic—is like love that grows from a small seed. It grows in the darkness, unknown at first, and then slowly blossoms. This is how we have to look at life, at relationship these days. We have to respect, tolerate differences. This is the type of aheb love according to Yeshua. It begins with mutual respect and then, perhaps, we can learn to live better with each other. resources.soundstrue.com/transcript/the-aramaic-jesus/

*The Immortality Key connects the lost, psychedelic sacrament of Greek religion to early Christianity, exposing the true origins of Western Civilization…Before Jerusalem, before Rome, before Mecca -- there was Eleusis, the spiritual capital of the ancient world…The Ancient Greek sacrament was buried when the newly Christianized Roman Empire obliterated Eleusis in the fourth century AD. Archaeological chemistry has proven the ancient use of visionary drugs and, with a single dose of psilocybin, the psycho-pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers. www.powells.com/book/immortality-key-the-secret-history-of-the-religion-with-no-name