 88. Jesus (His Truth) |
VI
This text is intended to offer a straightforward evaluation, summation, and understanding of Jesus of Galilee, who is readily recognizable as a "type" of human individual that is otherwise found, throughout human history, in traditions all over the world. Thus, according to "type", Jesus of Galilee is clearly recognizable as an authentic Yogi-Saint (or Spiritual Master) of the ancient world. Jesus is a Realizer of a degree that is evident throughout the ancient world, and in the world even to this day. This is the "real" Jesus. The otherwise "officially" proposed Christian" Jesus is the literary product of institutionalization, based upon the "concretization" of a religious fiction (or myth)-the myth of the celestial Jesus, associated with an exoteric message of universal salvation that was intended not only for Jews but for the total world of non Jews as well.
Originally, the "New Testament" writings appealed to the tradition of the Jews, or the people of Israel, as the source of its "new authority" - in order to support the argument that Jesus was prophesied in the tradition of Israel, through its prophets and through various interpretations of the "Old Testament". That argument, however, need not be taken seriously, apart from generally confirming that Jesus of Galilee was, by birth, a Jew.
Jesus of Galilee did not communicate a Jewish teaching. Although Jesus was born within the culture of Judaism, he was not a teacher of Judaism as such. Jesus was an itinerant Spiritual teacher and he had unique associations with Jewish "outsiders", especially John the Baptist. Essentially, Jesus of Galilee was a man who was "outside" the temple and "outside" the culture of Judaism.
The "New Testament" is, at its core, an independent tradition. Christianity separated itself from Judaism, and became something else. Unfortunately, in making that separation, the Jewish converts to Christianity maintained a claim to the holy books of Judaism, and they even claimed to be the new "true Israel" - and, thus, established a principle of cultural superiority that, eventually, gave rise to all the horrors of anti-Semitism that Jewish people have been made to suffer for centuries. Such is (among other efforts made on the basis of the absurd presumption of cultural superiority) a negative result of the institutionalization of exoteric Christianity. Added to the absurd presumption of cultural superiority was (eventually) all of the inherently self-deluding and self corrupting association with political and social power, when Christianity became established as an "official" State-religion, with the power of Rome as its base. In contrast to all of that egoity of superiority and power stands the rather humble and simply human figure of Jesus of Galilee - the socially and politically powerless Jesus, and his compassion for those who have no power, and his "criticism" of worldly political and religious power, and his constant Blessing of all and everyone (completely without reference to any search for worldly power), and his teaching about Divine Communion (as a constant life-experience of heart, and mind, and body, and, ultimately, of Spiritual Breathing), and his teaching about authentic human freedom (without any tradition-bound or political requirements). Jesus was not a warrior, and his teaching was not about the search for worldly power at all-but only the search for Union with the Spiritual Divine (both in this life and Above this world).
Jesus of Galilee was talking (and teaching) about the process of Realizing freedom by means of Divine Communion. For Jesus, freedom was about liberation from bondage to the suffering and the humiliating mortality of this world. Jesus was not talking about making an institution that would become the "official" religion of the world-nor was he talking about a "God" that should become the "official" Deity of the world. Jesus had none of the characteristics of a merely exoteric religious (and, necessarily, also political) figure.
Because Jesus himself established a school of practitioners of his teaching, an authentic esoterically-based institution could very well have extended from Jesus (and continued beyond his physical lifetime) - but no such institution survived him. Nevertheless, that institution (had any, as such, survived) would have been an institution that was simply associated with moral (or personal "rightlife") practices, and devotional (or "God"-Communing) practices, and esoteric Spiritual practices-not political, not revolutionary, and neither Jewish nor anti Jewish.
The people whom Jesus of Galilee was addressing - who were, in their disposition, the same kind of person he was-presumed that suffering was the natural (and not merely political) state of human beings. Human beings, in that view, are all humble, mortal, suffering, often ill, and deprived-regardless of their worldly status (whether high or low in the human social and political hierarchy). Jesus was not a social revolutionary, or a social "activist". Jesus was, simply, by nature, sympathetic and compassionate.
