Sunday Sermon [Who was Jesus]

Some (especially fundamentalists) will find the following offensive. For many, the traditional view of Jesus as a redeemer who died to save humankind from eternal damnation is what holds their whole world together.

I have no quarrel with religious beliefs, especially beliefs that help make people kinder human beings. My advice for people who think they may be offended is to leave this blog immediately. Others may find what I have to say interesting, even refreshing. In either case, the choice to read is yours. However, the choice to think critically is yours -- and mine.

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Who was Jesus and What Did He Say

Contrary to popular opinion, Jesus wasn’t a Red State Republican.

Jesus was born and raised a Jew. He lived and thought of himself as a Jewish teacher. All of his direct disciples were Jews. He felt that his job was to teach Jews about God and about the right way to live (though his teachings are truly for all people).

He did not intend to begin a new religion. He wouldn’t even have known what the word Christian means. In fact, Christian is a word that appeared after he died to describe people who believed some things that he himself never believed.

He wouldn’t have recognized the name Jesus Christ. His name was Yeshua or Yeshu (rhymes with day shoe), which is Joshua in English and Jesus in Greek. He didn’t have a last name. No one did in those days. Men were called “So-and-so son of So-and-so,” or “So-and-so from Such-and-such a place.” Whatever the case, Christ isn’t a name, it’s a title. It’s the Greek word for mashiakh, which is a Hebrew word that means “The Anointed One.”

Jesus once or twice referred to himself as a prophet. But he never thought of himself as the Messiah. The Messiah is a figure in Jewish legend that will supposedly appear one day to make the world perfect. Jesus never thought of himself as the son of God. True, he called God father, but that was (and still is) common in Jewish prayer. He didn’t mean that he was literally a son of God. He knew that he had a human father. He didn’t think that a male God had come down to earth and impregnated a human female, who had given birth to a hero, as in Greek and Roman mythology. What he meant by son of God was someone who takes after God, just as a son takes after his father. What he meant to teach was that if you truly love God, and treat your fellow human beings with respect and compassion, then you are a son of God.

Jesus knew he wasn’t the only son of God. On the contrary, he wanted everyone to become a son or daughter of God. His message was that no matter how poor, stupid, or confused we think we are, all of us are capable of becoming sons or daughters of God. He explicitly stated that anyone that acts with unselfish love is God’s beloved child. The second part of the message is that it is equally true that everyone is God’s beloved child and that God’s love is always present for us, no matter how selfishly we act.

The composition of the Gospels is an extremely complex subject, but what follows are some brief discoveries.

Jesus never wrote anything himself. The earliest account we have of him is the Gospel According to Mark, which dates about 70 years after Jesus’ death. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke probably date 20-30 years after, and the Gospel of John probably a little over a 100 years from Jesus’ death. None of these books were written by a direct disciple of Jesus. Jesus did have disciples named Matthew and Mark, but they weren’t’ the authors of the Gospels attributed to them. The Gospels were written in Greek, a language Jesus may, or may not, have known. His language was Aramaic, which is related to Hebrew. His original words, in original Aramaic, may never have been written down; if they were, they have been lost.

Seventy years is a long time; ninety or a hundred years is even longer. During those years, many stories were told about Jesus, and there were many reports of what he said. Some of these were handed down orally from Jesus’ own disciples, who lived with and knew him, even if they always didn’t understand his teachings. Disciples of disciples, who never knew the actual Jesus, made other stories and reports up much later.

Some people faithfully attempted to repeat the words he taught, and others added very different teachings, according to their own interpretation of what was true.

When the Gospels finally came to be written, their authors inherited a mix collection of teachings and stories, only part of which originated in the life and teachings of Jesus himself. Thomas Jefferson, a self-described spiritual man and author of the Declaration of Independence, once said, “There is internal evidence that parts of the Gospels have proceeded from an extraordinary man, and that other parts come from very inferior minds. It is easy to pick out the diamonds from the dunghills.” Imagine a president saying something like that today! Eventually he would spend a winter excising what he thought was contradictory and created what is now called the Jeffersonian Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

And there are passages in the Gospels that seem to contradict the authentic teaching about God’s love, as in the end of Mark’s Gospel, “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever doesn’t believe will be damned.” Sayings such as this make Jesus sound ignorant and small-hearted. I think Jesus would have been amused to hear such words attributed to him .

Another example, Jesus teaches us not judge (in the sense of not to condemn) but to keep our hearts open to all people. Later scriptures have Jesus as the final judge, who will float down on clouds for the world’s final rewards and condemnations. Jesus cautions against anger, teaches about the love of enemies, but in other passages Jesus calls his enemies “children of the devil,” and attacks them with savagery and contempt.

Which Jesus are we too follow? I think the task for any earnest spiritual seeker of faith, is to separate the diamonds from the shit. Like Jefferson, I don’t think it’s that hard to see through the political motivations of later interpretations.

I am not a Christian, but I believe the real Jesus was one of the most beautiful men who ever lived. He himself would probably have not considered himself beautiful or even special. He would have said that we are all beautiful, we are all special because – he definitely said this:

We are all children of God.

My name is Eddie and I'm in recovery from civilization...

Sunday Sermon [Fundamentalism]: Gimme Some of that Old Time Hand-Me-Down Religion!

Man is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his ideology isn’t straight. -- Mark Twain

What I find interesting when confronted by “holy rollers” is that it always comes down to this: I’m going to hell for daring to challenge their beliefs. It is common for someone to state unequivocably that (for my sake) I had better be right, because (presumably) God is gonna have his vengeance on my blaspheming ass! LOL! It has been my experience that “true believers” are more interested in defending dogma rather than actually living what they purport to believe. If you’re a Christian and you find satisfaction in your belief that your God will sentence me to a hereafter of eternal damnation, then what kind of Christian are you?

Beliefs can be a ma’fucca some times… SMDH

Personally, I do a “belief spring cleaning” at least once a year as a matter of habit. What that means is that I regularly taken an inventory of my beliefs and dump the ones that have no real foundation. Now, this is no easy feat. Over the years, I have had to throw away some really cherished beliefs. One such belief was my belief in me! I used to believe that “Eddie” existed, but when I sat down to look for “Eddie,” I couldn’t find him. What I found instead, when I looked closely while suspending my belief, was an on-going process -- a series of beliefs -- that I cobbled together to create this entity we’ve all agreed to call “Eddie” (as well as some other choice names). In fact, what I found was an amalgam of defense mechanisms, beliefs, fears, personality quirks, that if you ran it really fast, looked like what I consider my personality -- or “Eddie.” It’s a lot like a film. A film gives the viewer the illusion of movement and substance because the individual frames move at a very fast rate through the projector.

But when I sat down and slowed down, suspended my belief system, what I saw wasn’t “Eddie,” but a bunch of different components that added up to what I call my personality or “Eddie.”

At first that was a fucked up revelation. How could it be that I don’t exist?!! I must be seeing things wrong, I surmised to myself, so I began researching this. After all, I had worked very hard and was very much attached to the “Eddie” I had created.

But nowhere could I find the basis of Eddie. The brain/ mind has no specific function that creates a personality -- an “Eddie.” There’s no central processing area in the brain responsible for “Eddie.” It’s all made up! At first, this was a very scary revelation. I mean, how will “Eddie” go to heaven if there is no “Eddie”? But then, upon further reflection, I realized that this kinda/ sorta liberated me. I mean if “Eddie” was something I made up as a way to cope with life, then that meant I didn’t have to defend myself as much. “Eddie” was a story I made up in order to explain shit, but it wasn't really who I was. Sure, I use the construct “Eddie” for stuff like paying the rent and crossing the street, but “Eddie” is still just a story, a movie I made up.

And that’s how I lost “Eddie.” Or my belief in it.

Another belief I lost early on was the hand-me-down belief in a God that lived in the sky somewhere and who either punished or rewarded you according to your behavior. That one was a lot easier than losing “Eddie.” I realized that belief in Divine Hierarchy that needed to be petitioned in order to curry favor was pretty much juvenile to me. And that shit about the world being created in seven days? Yeah right! I lost that one when I was about seven or eight years old (and got in trouble for it!). And why he gotta be a man?!! What’s up with that? Why can't God look like Halle Berry?!! What I came to experience and realize was that we’re all part of the Divine Spark, that God isn’t somewhere out there, but here inside of me (and everyone else). And some day, even that belief will be discarded!

Any hand-me-down belief system is a subtle appeal to your deepest fears and longings. It’s like a parasite that wraps itself around your mind -- almost like a demonic possession.

The Friday Sex Blog [Religious Sex]

“… Her truth,
her altar,
forms at the
juncture of firm thighs
where a hallowed moistness --
a sticky-sweet dew --
exists solely to quench
my lustful thirst.
It’s where the stuttering
of my lips
offers prayers
from an unknown religion
to forgotten Gods.”

-- Edward-Yemíl Rosario
All rights reserved © 2008

According to The Big Three (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) the erotic impulse -- the world of Eros, the body, and human sexuality -- falls under the domain of Satan. From this perspective, the physical is cast as sinful, bestial. Human sexuality, according to this view, is an obstacle from the lofty hallowed pursuit of God and everything that is good and ethical. From the moment we are born, we are told that the more we open to the erotic impulse, the more we listen and open to the needs of the body, the more we embrace and enjoy our sexual natures, the further we stray from moral rectitude and emotional well-being.

I write this Friday sex blog mostly because I argue that the opposite is true. I submit that the erotic impulse, honored and liberated from the shackles of guilt and organized forces of suppression, is a powerful spiritual path leading to a profound psycho-spiritual awareness. The sex blog is a call for us to stop trivializing the erotic/ sexual world as we so often do, as if sex involved nothing more than sensory stimulation, ego gratification, and the pursuit of an orgasm.

Some of my assumptions are radical. That there is more to sex than the giddy pursuit of carnal pleasure may be hard to accept in the aftermath of the sexual explosion of the 60s and 70s. It was an era when reliable birth control, combined with an awakening feminism, consciousness-raising, and the movements for gay, lesbian, and bisexual liberation released us from some of our legacy of sexual oppression and fear. However, it is my submission that that it is precisely our failure to recognize the depth of the erotic impulse that is at the root of our current dissatisfaction with our sexual nature.

Once we began to shake loose the shackles of sexual repression, we were as the proverbial children in the candy store. In the time of so-called free love, we seemed to want nothing more than to consume as many erotic experiences as we could. We were, after all, sexually starved beings emerging from thousands of years wandering lost in a wasteland into a world of lush jungles bursting with exotic fruit. I was there, and it was an exciting time in the cultural history of Western sexuality, and an important first step in freeing ourselves from the repressive world on the 50s -- the huge, white-picket-fence, clean and tidy, sexual suburbia of post-war America.

The Friday Sex Blog [Sex and Spirituality]

In the first stage, people use sex for selfish reasons. In the second stage, people share sexuality as a means of loving one another. In the third stage, people use sexuality to open one another to the very recognition of oneness.-- David Deida

Some of the most sexually repressed individuals I have ever met have been Christianized people of color…

For some time now, I’ve been posting on Tantric and Taoist sexual/ spiritual practice. Using sex as a path for spiritual awakening is not for everyone. Many Westerners, socially conditioned by the sum of thousands of years of anti-sex propaganda, are at a loss when confronted with the notion that sex could be about anything other than physical pleasure, or that it should even have a place in a “spiritual” discussion. In order to elevate sex beyond the ego, beyond the conditioned habits, takes a conscious and sustained effort. At a basic level, we are hard-wired for pleasure. As humans, we are pleasure addicts, conditioned to contract it down into a small and egocentric agenda. In order to shift this circuitry takes time and commitment.

While there are many paths leading to awakening, sex is one of the most effective because it works through the body, as the bridge between spirit and matter, between our inner and outer life. If you learn how to use sex (instead of the other way around), you will have access to one of the most direct routes to spiritual realization and embodiment.

Margot Anand was one of the first Westerners to explore this sexual territory:

You begin to open up a channel to allow the orgasmic energy to move through your body, beyond the orgasmic explosion of release to an implosive orgasm of expansion of consciousness. You move from the genital orgasm to the belly, to the heart… You don’t fall in love anymore, you arise in love… When you have an orgasm of the heart, an orgasm of surrender, where you become the other and the other becomes you, it’s a tremendous heart-opening. When you have an orgasm of the third eye, you are in total spaciousness and total peace with each other. This is a wonderful art… you have to devote a lot of time to this.

Practices

While the following practices are very simple and easy to learn, they are also extremely powerful and need to be practiced precisely. I offer the following only as a very brief overview. If you feel attracted to redirecting sexual energy in this way, you will definitely need instructions that are more specific. In my personal opinion, I would go further and say that eventually you will need a teacher.

The Friday Sex Blog [The Big Bang]

... Warning: some might find the first portion of this post offensive.

I want to thank a dear friend and former lover for allowing me to use her photo and part of our story for today's post. She read it in advance and helped me edit some of it -- thought it was important to share. She doesn't live in the US, but we had an intense, loving affair one summer a few years back...

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... I feel like a storm, like the ocean, the waves... I want to fuck everything into my womb. A woman suffers not giving her love. To be fully satisfied, she must absolutely live in the depth of her love.
-- Jennifer Garcia

She’s beyond beautiful, she’s feminine sexuality itself, but throughout all our sexing, there’s always this holding back. Sure, she does everything to please me: she happily goes doggy-style and lets me penetrate her deeply and she revels in my deep thrusts, looking back over her shoulder and urging me on, thrusting back herself. She takes me into her mouth to the point of gagging and even swallowed my sperm -- all for my pleasure. But somewhere inside, this is all something dirty and she’s afraid to be a slut for me because some part of her is ashamed.

I want her to show me, to tell me what she wants. I want to know her -- the real her. I want her to grind her cunt against my face and take her pleasure. It’s a gradual process. Little by little we talk, communicating openly, talking about what we like and what we want and who we are and she begins to open. At first, it’s just a little bit -- like when she looks into my eyes while we’re fucking. Or when she squeezes the opening to my cock and smells it, or licks at my pre cum greedily -- all things she was ashamed of doing before.

She opens slowly and I wait patiently for the day when the floodgates open. She tells me she’s never met a man who was so curious and interested in her sex and at first it frightened her, but she enjoys the openness, the permission to be what we want.

One day, while I’m fucking her from behind, she pleads for me to stop. She throws me on my back and tells me, “It’s my turn,” and proceeds to ride my cock in the way that brings her most pleasure -- on top of me, facing me and all I ask is that she stays in the moment with me, looking into my eyes. I lay back, a passive tool to her aggressive grasp for pleasure, and she takes the reins of our sexing and rides me for all she’s worth, not caring, throwing caution to the wind. I feel her moistness. She scrapes her fingers against my chest. Eventually, she takes me on waves of bliss until she comes in violent bursts, her petite taut body trembling, pulsing, and I can feel the walls of her vagina vibrate, exquisitely wrapping my cock in a tender and tight moist cocoon...

All sex, in fact all life, is about the meeting of masculine and feminine energy -- the yin/ yang of life. I envision masculine energy as consciousness and feminine essence as light. This does not mean that men always embody the masculine, or that women only embody feminine energy. What it means is that sexual union is always about a conscious (masculine) presence penetrating a yielding, loving surrender. With some couples, one partner holds more masculine energy, and the other feminine. Some more sexually conscious couples will alternate who is the leading, masculine polarity and who is the yielding feminine polarity. This has very little to do with physical positions and more to do with attitude -- disposition.

As soon as a woman becomes more assertive, initiating, and penetrating with her presence, and as soon as a man relaxes, waits, becomes soft and vulnerable the sexual polarities have been reversed. This can be a great thing to practice intentionally, to experience more deeply the opposite sexual essence. For a couple that has learned to polarize and merge, sex changes from merely a personal act for intensifying pleasure into something quite different. Orgasm is a glorified sneeze when compared to the potential that arises once we step out of the box of rubbing genitals to release pressure or to connect.

When partners are willing to manipulate and cultivate sexual energy, they both arrive to a sexual meeting of fullness. In this scenario, the man has not only realized himself as empty consciousness, but he has also brought that realization down into his body. The woman has not only experienced love and connection, but she has also practiced opening so much that she radiates love itself, from her whole body. She actually becomes the body of the divine feminine: the supreme strength of absolute surrender.