CCpart2ch21

26 September

Kansas City, here I come

Six hundred and seventy-five miles to Nashville from

where I spent the night (or rather, about six hours of

the morning) –that technically cannot be done by one

driver in one day, so I told USX that I am aiming for

a Monday morning arrival. No complaints yet. Over

2400 miles is four days is a lot to ask of a solo driver

when the first day starts after noon…and especially

when his head is spinning and he can’t sleep. Yeah,

I am sleepless in everywhere but Seattle.

I have been trying all day to get a Chronicle started,

but my head has been elsewhere, and the notebook

never felt quite right in my lap. Morning turned into

afternoon, afternoon into evening, Missouri came

and went, as “misery” always does. Now I am

heading south through downstate Illinois in the dark,

writing by the red “mood light” above my head. I

think that cleared up enough headspace so that I can

venture into some new ideas.

There are a few things I wanted to say about the last chapter. One: while this represents a very significant shift in my
perception of where the “open road” may be taking me, in terms of the Chronicles in particular, and the larger scope of the
Fish Out Of Water project in general, it was just another chapter. No matter what changes occur around it, this show will
go on, and if –or I should say, “when”—God leads me out of the truck, then the Camerado Chronicles will cease, but some
other kind of Chronicles will take their place. FOOW –which, I just noticed, is WOOF backwards, just as GOD is the
inverse of DOG—is not something separate from CAU in my mind; it is the one man’s voice that will be my contribution to
the collective chorus of CAU (which I imagine will be a kind of discordant orchestra striving for nothing collective other
than excellence in expression).

This chapter also helped me understand how any autobiographical material has to be introduced. It must be woven into the
fabric of the Chronicles as I am moved to do so. My previous idea that a section or entire Part of the Chronicles would be
devoted to such material was wrong, and for one positive, air-tight reason: I do not deserve the same billing as I AM. I’m
not even worthy of being God’s opening act. [Not, I should clarify, because “I” am separate from God as has been
assumed throughout the ages, but because the “I” I would be examining is not “me” in the present, but the vestige
of a non-existent past that I associate with me because of my ego. And no ego is worthy of the glory of the I AM in
the present; no, not one. This is what was realized at the end of Chapter 20.]

Devoting a section of the Chronicles to what would amount to a chronicle of the history of my ego would be making my
ego a part of the story, and it isn’t, it can’t be. I have memories of experiences that illustrate, or dramatize, the process of
God working through this one human life [even the present-day experiences of the Chronicles are memories as I write
them], and I’ll weave these into the Chronicles as they come to me. We need the human element, and that is what drama
brings.

Which is the very reason why we see Christ as Jesus, a man, and dramatize God’s sacrificial love for creation by telling the
story of the Passion. [ie. why we need theology to get to metatheology]

But it confuses the story tremendously to see Jesus as the Christ in anything other than dramatic terms. When
we look at the Gospels thusly, in historical rather than allegorical terms, many of the take-it-or-leave-it statements attributed
to Jesus are pretty damn egocentric, for the listener as well as the speaker. Clearly the majority of Jews in His own day
saw Him this way, and that is why He was condemned as a blasphemer; His words were misappropriated then, just as they
are now.

What do I mean by saying that Jesus’ statements in the Bible are both subjectively and objectively egocentric when we read
them historically (ie. literally)? I’ll start with the more complex side.

When we read the words, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes unto the Father but by me,” our reaction
tends to be somewhere on a spectrum between, “Yeah, right, this mortal man is ‘the way, the truth and the life’ –tell me
another one,” and “Yes, He’s right, and I’d better shape up and start doing what he says or I’m going to miss out on
heaven!” It is the rare skeptic or believer who looks at that statement and sees a metaphorical imperative that one must
follow to “come unto the Father” (ie. experience the presence of the infinite God) while living. As Christians we say, “I
have to be like Christ;” we rarely say, “I have to become Christ” –in the sense of surrendering our “I” so we can
join all of creation and become what or who this person was/is. Mother Teresa and the Christian mystics like Thomas
Merton, as we covered early on, are notable exceptions, and I propose the notion that their far more egalitarian approach to
inclusion in the “body of Christ” is a direct result of their surrender.

The rest of us tend to say that we have surrendered ourselves to Christ, but this is clearly still an egocentric transaction; it
is based on carrot-and-stick obedience and submission of the will, as if the will were the sum total of our individuality (our
ego, or “I”) and not a product of it. The result, to go back to the imagery of Part One Chapter 12, is that the seed [our
separate self, the ego] remains a seed, content to be “saved,” until the seed dies and rots, and its life-force
dissolves into the Uncreated Energy of the universe –never to germinate and spread in this created earth, which is
what Jesus did. This is no tragedy, there are no “eternal consequences” for remaining an ego all your life, but [the purpose
of a seed is to die unto itself and let God transform its life-force into something much larger than itself. And as Jesus told
us, that “life-force” is nothing less than the Kingdom of Heaven itself, so to let the seed die without releasing that into
the world is] a waste of a Good seed, if you ask me.

But this is what the Biblian churches inadvertently do by teaching the Bible as an historical record of the Word of God
[: they make obedience to the Church’s theological concepts into an egocentric effort to reach beyond the grave and save
one’s own skin.] If I could condense my indictment of the Western Orthodox Church into one sentence, it would be this:
Biblianity inadvertently teaches the eternal preservation of the ego rather than its dissolution. You cannot get
any more anti-Christian than that.

(It makes me very sad to see this everywhere I go to worship too, because I know that all of these Christian brothers and
sisters have the best intentions. I do not believe these good intentions pave a road to hell, but I do see it as something like a
NASCAR track, a circular road leading nowhere, and in that sense it is powerless to lead us out of our sense of separation
from God and each other –the most hellish experience there is.)

This leads us to absurd ideas, like the mother of the two apostles (I forget which) asking Jesus if her sons can sit at His
right and left hands in heaven. Jesus’ answer, to paraphrase, was something like, “Ma’am, you have no idea what you are
talking about.” It pains me to say this, but it is my humble opinion that if Jesus walked into the majority of Biblian churches
today and listened to the teachings being given, He would say the same thing.

As for the other side of the dichotomy, the egocentric nature of Jesus’ claim to divinity, this may be an even bigger
concern, since it touches on almost every theological concern about the Biblian path that the Chronicles have addressed.

But I am also 100% certain that this is a phantom issue, raised only by people who put too much reliance on words in a
book.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the “I am the way, the truth etc” passage is a direct quote of Jesus Himself.
Still I ask: to whom was He referring? Jesus, the man in the flesh [the seed]? Or Christ, the boundless
manifestation of God that He became by dying to himself [the product of the death of the seed]?

In other words, is it “I am the way”….or is it “I AM is the way?”

If we say it was Jesus the man, I say we are making a very costly
mistake (unless we let that change our entire concept of what
man is in relation to God, which is very possible and a very
potent metaphorical imperative in itself, and I’ll get to that in a
minute), because essentially we are trying to give Jesus back an ego
that He surrendered while He was alive, and that strips the crucifixion
and resurrection of every bit of its allegorical significance [ie. we
cannot “join Him” on the cross, dying to ourselves in His name,
unless before His death, in an act of self-surrender symbolized by
His death, Jesus sacrificed his own ego to become one with the
life-force shared by all creation, the Word of God]

Jesus surrendered His will to God, but not just His will –He surren-
dered His whole identity (“I and the Father are one”), and that is
the whole reason He spoke with any spiritual authority at all [and why
we can say He lives eternally, and why we feel Him inside us today].
This too goes directly back to Part One Chapter 12: Jesus the man
(the ego, the miniature “I am,” or the Peasant, if you will) died
to himself –let his seed-self go into the ground and die—so that
He could live in experiential union in this world with God (the
cosmic superego, the real I AM, or the King, if you will again),
and He did this at least three years before He was crucified. His
death on the cross was a dramatization of the sacrificial death that had
already occurred, and it is the metaphorical imperative to which all who
would follow him are drawn.

For us as Christians to pin that identity back on Jesus the man is to take everything out of this metaphorical
imperative that makes it powerful to deliver us from the ego and bring us salvation (aka. to sozo us , “make us
whole,” in union with God and all creation as one); or more accurately, it perpetuates the same mistake [made
originally in our “Adam-Eve” state in our personal Garden of Eden] that makes us feel “unsaved” in the first
place.

Go back and re-examine those statements in Part One Chapter 3: “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking
around shining like the sun.” (Thomas Merton) “She said she loved people because they are Jesus, each one of them is
Jesus, and this is true because it says so in the Bible.” (Mother Teresa) Do they make more sense now? If they seemed
like a blasphemy to you then, does it seem possible that we have been blaspheming God with our assumption that
Christ only dwells in a select few?

Mahatma Gandhi, with his unique combination of the openly allegorical Vedic tradition of his native Hinduism as a
background, and an education in the Christian West as an adult, saw this error in orthodox Christianity, and tried to point it
out with the statement I quoted earlier via Phillip Yancey:

“My reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world.
Metaphorically there might be some truth in it (italics mine)…I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice,
and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born. His death on the Cross was a great example to the world,
but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it my heart could not accept. The pious lives of
Christians did not give me anything that the lives of men of other faiths had failed to give. I had seen in other lives just the
same reformation that I had heard of among Christians. Philosophically there was nothing extraordinary in Christian
principles. From the point of view of sacrifice, it seemed to me that Hindus greatly surpassed the Christians. It was
impossible for me to regard Christianity as a perfect religion or the greatest of all religions.”

And in his autobiography, Gandhi wrote what to the mainstream Christian is one of the ultimate heresies:

“It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God, and that only he who believed in him would
have everlasting life. If God could have sons, all of us were His sons. If Jesus was like God, or God Himself, then all men
were like God and could be God Himself (italics mine).”

But is this really out of line with what Jesus was trying to tell us, both during His lifetime and in the sacrificial act of His
death?

In other words, what does it mean when we say Jesus as I AM is the Way rather than Jesus as “I am?” (And this is
where we will get into the idea of letting Jesus change our concept of man’s relationship to God.)

An Orthodox Christian theologian (Eastern or Western) would try to prevent this discussion from beginning by stating that
Jesus had a unique relationship with God from birth, that He was born fully human and fully divine. To a mainstream
Christian, in other words, Jesus was the only person in human history who could truthfully say, “Before Abraham was, I
AM.”

Now if I wanted to be oppositional and put the man in his place (I don’t know why I assume an Orthodox Christian
theologian would be a man, but I do), I could say, “OK, show me evidence of that unique relationship outside the Bible,”
and trust me: he couldn’t, he would be stymied.

But no. I am going to accept that answer. Jesus was 100% human and 100% God. And what does that tell us?
Humanity and God are not opposites. They are not mutually exclusive categories. You would never say something is
100% black and 100% white. So if you say that someone is 100% human and 100% God, you are breaking down
any semblance of a dualistic barrier between these categories.

(Those of you who have read the first public draft of The Peasant and the King will probably see what I mean by this: we
start out by seeing the peasant and the King as separate beings, but through the revelation of the protagonist as the Peasant
King, we realize the title refers to two aspects of one being. And when the final scene reveals that this Peasant King’s name
is only one of countless names written in “the Book of Life,” we realize this dual existence is not unique –it is universal.
That is what I believe Jesus was, and what we all are, and what we can all experience here in this life by following Him.
And not just Him, but the path of ego-surrender exemplified by Him and His teachings, as well as others --don't mistake
the moon for the finger pointing at it.)

In portraying Jesus as 100% human and 100% God, and in removing the dualistic barrier between God and God’s creation
(specifically humankind in this case), Christian theology has thus allegorically delivered us to the non-dual
perspective in which we can see the presence of God in all of humanity. Suddenly the “Virgin Birth” of Christ is no
longer a theological Sasquatch whose historical accuracy is to be debated without end –it is the ultimate metaphorical
depiction of how God “enters” our world continuously through the eternal act of Creation. To assign this
relationship to Jesus the man, and to him only, is to miss His point entirely.

The theologician would counter that by saying that Jesus had a “supernatural” relationship with God, while we are stuck in
the natural.

Again, I could say something like, “Well if Jesus’ relationship with God was supernatural, and part of the definition of being
human is to have a relationship with God that is something other than supernatural, then it is kinda hard to maintain that
Jesus was 100% human, isn’t it?”

But no. I am going to accept this answer too. Jesus had a supernatural relationship with God while we are stuck in the
natural. And what does that tell us? If you are wearing anything other than Biblian blinders, you should be able to see that
the supernatural is the natural with the veil of duality removed –or conversely, the natural is what the supernatural
appears to be with the veil in place.

If we look to the Bible for an allegorical reference to “the veil of duality,”

the

most obvious one is right there in the Garden of Eden: it is the fruit of The Tree

of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

It is here in contemplation of humankind’s

original sin –indeed, ours as a species and ours as individuals at the earliest stages

of our intellectual and social development—that we find the origins of the veil of

duality.

When Adam and Eve –our allegorical stand-ins—partook of the

“forbidden” fruit of this Tree, they lost their sense of God and the world as

a seamless Unity, and the sense of a “natural” world bereft and separate

from its Creator overcame them.

Thus followed all the neurotic behaviors:

self-consciousness (covering of their naked bodies, attempting to hide from a

God that suddenly seemed to be objective and external), finger-pointing (“it’s her

fault, not mine”), pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain –

but more than

anything else, towering above all other petty sins and misdemeanors, we

see that by taking the fruit of duality into their beings, Adam and Eve said

“I am.” The birth of the ego.

I could probably continue with this counterpoint-countercounterpoint discussion until this notebook is full, but I didn’t set
out to have a theological dialectic with myself, and I’d rather try to give it some closure now and let it be reopened for full
disclosure in Part Three.

So here is my take on the whole “Jesus said ‘I am the way’” thing: Jesus was a man who lifted the veil from his own
eyes –perhaps through the ancient original form of Kabbalistic practice as has been speculated, or perhaps through
techniques that came from points further east, but certainly something that included the three practices connected to Jesus
in the Bible: fasting, meditation, and prayer. In doing this, Jesus erased the mother of all dualities –he allowed to die
the “I am” that we all hold out in opposition to the I AM. In doing so, he was moved with compassion for those of
his brothers and sisters who lived in such woe and dispair –knowing not that the Kingdom of Heaven was inside them—
because the veil was still firmly over their eyes, and the legalistic approach to the practice of Judaism did nothing to remove
it. So he launched a public ministry to heal their bodies and heal their hearts, and make them whole by teaching them to
remove the veil of duality and let the ego die –thus undoing the original sin of Adam and Eve. This ministry
culminated with the ultimate dramatization of his self-sacrifice: his voluntary death on the cross, an act which
would serve throughout the ages, long after his death, as the metaphorical imperative for those who would follow
Him and seek to remove the veil from their own eyes, and see that I AM is here now.

In doing so, Jesus the man/God (or egoless Self or I AM or Peasant King, if you will one more time) became
synonymous with what in Christianity is called the Son --equivalent to what in Gandhi’s Hinduism is called
Atman. But what is the Son besides the Christ (Messiah)? And what is the Christ besides the Word of God? And what is
the Word of God? The spiritual essence of everyone and everything, the Light of the world, the Uncreated Energy
of God Manifest.

“(Mother Teresa) said she loved people because they are Jesus, each one of them is Jesus, and this is true
because it says so in the Bible.”

That’s right, Mama T, it does say that in the Bible, allegorically, just as it does in all the other holy books of the
world. I intend to dive right into that in Part Three. For now:

Christian friends: Jesus is within you –let Him out!
Jewish friends: The Messiah is within you –let Him out!
Pagan friends: Goddess is within you –let Her out!
Muslim friends: Allah is knocking at your door –let Him out!
Agnostic friends: Something is knocking at your door –let It out!
Taoist friends: The Tao is within you, and without you –do nothing.
Buddhist friends: The alarm sounds. It is time to wake up.
Zen Buddhist friends: Spring comes, the grass grows by itself –five tons of flax!
Sufi friends: Keep dancing!
Hindu friends: OM shanti shanti shanti…..

Friends: the Divine One is here now –stop searching and say Hello!

Hermit Crab, O Hermit Crab, where art thou Hermit

Crab?

--HC Romeo, Mich.

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