I Myth Jesus - whether he was, or whether he wasn't...(is)real

 

 

 

Your gonna Myth me, when I'm gone.

 

 

 

    'Mythical' charachters and stories are the collection and display of our understanding and realisation of the universality of certain individual experiences and the interplay and exchange of Identity: Personal, Collective and Archetypal which the mythological technique allows us to indulge in imaginatively.

     It makes it possible, though not certain, to learn from the experience of others; and allows access to the shoulders of the giants who preceded us. To ask, but is it true? is to miss the bus whilst reading the timetable to an extent. Not factually true in linear terms; but complete and instinctual truth as exemplified by the form which emerges from the chaos, and is experienced by your human being, as opposed to your ego or personal experience. That's one of the problems of using mythical realism; whilst heightening some dramatic and emotional aspects of storytelling, it also tends to lead us into being hung up on the veracity or otherwise of the tale.

      "A Million Little Pieces" - by James Frey is a classic example. Frey had a very interesting life to start with and he mythologised his life story into a powerful tale of rehabilitation; of his body, mind and spirit - as a proxy for the reader - after the bottom out encounter he had with drugs and modern western society. The mythological aspects of the tale were very powerful and allowed the reader to identify and learn with and from a 23 year old drug addict, they would have no time for in real life.
      It was an Oprah book club selection and was experiencing a huge response, both emotionally and in terms of unit-shifting; and then it was exposed that minor factual details were not correct, and Freys response was like d'uh, its a book, a story, I changed the facts to suit the story. (thwack! - sound of trap door closing). "But you called it a memoir!!" I was bewildered by the levels of anger and vitriol on display amongst Oprahs Audience members, this book went from being a very significant spiritual teaching, to a worthless story, instantly. He should of called it a 'Mythological Memoir.' I guess my basic point is that it was precisely these universal mythological aspects of the story which allowed me to connect with it and the character of james, so powerfully in the first place. And that the same is true for the story of jesus, as one among many culture heroes and their narrative framework.
      I believe we are all hung up on truth, because of the intensive programming from Mum and Nana that good boys and girls always tell the truth. Their pre-emptive shot across the bows of teenagerhood; hoping that an automatic truth response will prevent full engagement with the debauched initiations of youth which generally signal the end of the until now truthful parent-child communications; rears its ugly head. Furthermore, that because of this overidentification with truth and righteousness and goodness, we are biased against story based, or mythical, truth. Our obsession with factual truth, and our need for superheroes who are better than us; blind us to the goodness of lies, and the need for imaginative and creative truths, along with the factual kind. And rob us of our once finely honed ability to find and share wisdom and joy among tales of our mythologised selves.  Our deeply nuanced skills of narrative interpretation have suffered from the technological revolution.  Where it was once encumbent on each of us to be able to tell a good and appropriate story, for the entertainment of all -  and depending on the level of skill, the edification of the few -  the outsourcing of these tasks to the hands of the technical wizards and the political agendas of their corporate overlords has seen us descend to zombie like consumers. Robbing us of our ability to winnow the esoteric meaning from a story about chaff and wheat, so to speak. Getting so hung up on whether Jesus was a real man; that we forget to become Christ ourselves. Which is surely a tragedy.

I Believe in... The Buzzcocks

 

on the nature of Belief... and sex and drugs and rock n roll,

  

      I was born in Australia in 1965 and raised in a typically working class irish Roman Catholic environment. they did a good job on me, making a true believer of me even though (maybe because?) their materiel was obviously gobbledgook, even to my infant self. It didn't matter. It took a lot of hard work and good drugs to undo the handiwork of my environment, ably assisted by the magical workings of Franciscan Friars followed by the rigid discplinarianism of the Christian Brothers. Our family just spontaneously stopped attending mass. I had been to mass, every Sunday of my life, and one week when i was fifteen we just didn't go. No one mentioned it at the time, we probably didn't want to put the jinx on what we considered genuine good news. But even I found it passing strange that silence continued for decades between my parents and their offspring. There was shallow acknowledgement amongst myself and my siblings of the new world order, it seemed we were all essentially left to our own devices to process what the new state of affairs meant as far as our self identity was concerned. The whole world was changeing, it was 1980, the innocence of the 60's, and my spectacularly idyllic childhood of the 70's were done. The world as i had known it was about to be rent asunder by the siren call of Sex and Drugs and Rock n Roll.

 

    I think the fall from the garden can be looked at as a psychological allegory for the process children go through en route from their initial state of wholeness and grace, (adam AND eve) to the fully self conscious, gender appropriate, fig leaf wearing egoic selves; rock bottom.  The myth of the hero/fool's journey and mystical techniques; both now available, thanks to the miraculous process that is the internet, with more varieties and flavours than Heinz; provide a map and a horse, that other wise people have found both solace and joy in, as a means of understanding and taking what joy may come from the journey we must make all by ourselves. Hopefully managing to escape from the prison we can become trapped in where we fully identify with the ego identity our consciousness unit constructed to facilitate our journey Home; through the gate of death, to the conscious reckoning, the reckoning of consciousness, that will finally bar all self deception and allow us to see and understand our true progress on that journey back to pure consciousness. Will there be implications? dependent on whether we have travelled the tao, (a tao, a way) back to origin points wholeness and grace. Who knows? But the accumulated wisdom of humankind; an ongoing intergenerational effort resulting in a shadow being who truly knows the hearts of men; has found that to choose a way, has been conducive to harmonious relations with ourselves and others.                                                                    Shamans, and others selected and trained specfically to venture to realms of the spectrum of reality which lie beyond the ken of our fivefold interpretation of that spectrum, all agree in their own way that story and symbol are the tools par excellence for leading a suitably primed candidate towards choosing to have direct experience of the Organic Light, a knowing that allows no doubt about the existence of god like archetypal energies and forces. Though, the one true creator God, is conspicous only by his total absence. He becomes superfluous almost. And one may always choose to go 'beyond', or even 'beyond the beyond', if they have maxed out on hierarchies of light, but i digress.
     I sometimes think, that like ego, belief is best used as a tool. For  short term use  of specific purpose. Gather the experiences as data, put the tools away, with the pocket calculator. Consult and allow the sub conscious to do its thing processing your experiences. Try to learn the language, in which it whispers its secrets and listen and attempt to reconcile the accounts that it brings through symbol and story, both internal and external, and integrate them back to a new state wholeness and grace. Sounds simple. Consciousness has no permanent boundaries. Temporary vessels and factors of constraint freely chosen, as much as that is an actual thing. it seems like free will, but maybe illusory. maybe.