Resurrection?

I’m not a religious person, but I have a reverence and respect for the more pure forms of spiritual truth which I think the world’s religions are trying to grasp and make more tangible. When I hear phrases and anecdotes which are often repeated in order to anchor-in religious doctrine, like “Jesus died for your sins.”, or “Do unto others as you would have done unto you.”, or “He who is free of sin shall cast the first stone.” I try to register what these really mean and how they can realistically be taken up in our lives now. With some, this is fairly easy to do, but with others, it’s a bit more of a challenge. For instance, I’ve always had a hard time with the “Jesus died for your sins” statement, because this so often seemed to be presented forcibly… as if the speaker were trying to bend people to conform to the religious obligation that we should repay Jesus for his martyrdom by towing the line in the way that this religion dictates. Well, somehow I don’t think that’s what Jesus would have wanted… to have the truth of his martyrdom used to leverage others to conform, out of guilt, to another’s will. So the use of this statement had me stumped for years, until I came to understand better the actions of one person I had the great privilege to know fairly well.

It’s been my belief that we’re all here, in life, to work out our personal issues in some way… to right our karmic wrongs, and to evolve ourselves, and life on Earth, toward something more aware, free, healthy, and enlightened. And that once someone has taken this up effectively, to such a degree that they no longer need to focus just on their own personal work, then they can actually do quite well in lifting up the darkness in the world around them, transforming that into the needed and so desired healthy aliveness those of us invested in this process seek. Some extreme examples of people who have been able to accomplish this are, Jesus Christ (of course), Buddha, and the Dalai Lama. So once I learned, through this one man’s example, that a person having accomplished a high degree of spiritual awareness or enlightenment who knows they will be dying, can consciously, and very effectively, take up a lot of the darkness around them (our sins) and actually rid the world of this upon their death… that light bulb came on over the “He died for our sins” statement.

And so, once I saw that pretty-much anyone can take part in this process… whether you’re stumbling along in your own work of consciously addressing your own pain and darkness like I try to, or you’re actually at a place where you can truly, very substantially improve the world around you (whether others know you’re doing this or not)… something else started to occur to me about possibly the resurrection, but more the second coming of Christ. I began to think that the second coming of Christ could actually refer to the willingness within each of us to take up this process in ourselves to such a point of global saturation that the presence and intention of Christ’s work actually does live again, it’s just en mass.

Anyway… just a thought.

The Forbidden Fruit

Looking into the concept of Adam & Eve, and the forbidden fruit:
We were in a park last summer when a group of religious people, who had set themselves up with a powerful sound system at the other end of the park, started up a Holy Roller type sermon. As I was being bombarded by what seemed to me like abusive crap echoing out of loudspeakers, it occurred to me how the concept of "the knowledge of good and evil casting Adam & Eve out of the Garden of Eden" might be more purely viewed.

The apple (forbidden fruit) was symbolic of a form of knowledge which was not yet present. It was only this knowledge that made something which was idyllic into something that was, all of a sudden, not okay. In fact, it brought shame and torment. I'm willing to bet, that the type of knowledge this points to is the discerning, judging mind of entrenched Humanity without the wisdom and grace of spirit. Once people began to use their Human minds alone to apply value judgments to life's events and ways of being, we saw the beginning of a polarization which cemented itself into "good & evil". In this way, it's not really a person's actions that determine good or evil as much as the application of judgment. It's "the need to discern in order to polarize" itself, which cast humanity out of the blissful natural space of not applying judgment and condemnation, instead of just seeing things, truly, for what they are, with wisdom and compassion. That it's the mind's need to dominate, and use knowledge and reason (in a contrived way) to isolate wrongness, call that evil, and condemn, banish, or nail this to a tree, which has thrown us out of "God's Grace".

It seemed ironic that the preacher, who was busy jabbing his finger threateningly at the evil in people and the world, and ranting about the need for people to repent... if seen in the light I've just presented, would itself be the embodiment of evil.