Jesus, The Easter Bunny, and the Real Renewal of Spring

At the time of the earliest stirrings of the philosophy that was to become Christianity there were numerous centers of nascent world religion, from the Gandhara region of India thru Asia Minor, Persia, and Greece, to Alexandria and Jerusalem – and other spots within and beyond the Roman Empire and the rest of the known, civilized world. To literate religious academics of the early Christian era, all of this knowledge was available. Christianity, like all religions, was not born in a vacuum.

You'll notice in the retellings of the Passion Play that Christians celebrate each spring, as well as throughout the New Testament, there are plenty of references to the Pharisee sect of Hebraism, the proletariat and middle-class Jews of the time. The Sadducees, the bourgeois, aristocratic sect get very little airtime comparatively – despite making up most of the temple priesthood. Edited out of the story completely are the Essenes, which were not actually a single sect but instead a collection of differing gnostic beliefs grouped together generically.

Beyond their numbers, which were significant throughout the middle east at the time, the Essenes were the original Christians, eschewing sacrifice and materiality, living simple lives based in practices of healing and service. They were dedicated to cleanliness, to communal, all-inclusive dining, to the practices of foot washing, vegetarianism, and holistic herbal healing. Their "inns" and white robes were the inspiration for our present-day hostels and hospitals, and doctors' white coats. It's likely that the Jesus of mainstream Christianity was drawn from this model. 

Most sects labeled "Essene" fully embraced a more personal, inward, mystical path to the realization of a divine simplicity, and so were the foundation of the esoteric forms of Gnosticism and Kabbalistic practice. In some groups, Buddhism was very influential, and in fact "Theraputae" Essenism was likely one in the same as the Buddhist community located near Lake Mareotis, outside of Alexandria (from Theraputta, sanskrit meaning "from the old ones"). Buddhism was alive throughout the region for hundreds of years prior to Christian mythology, and it's very important to note that the Buddha sat in the wilderness alone and was tempted by the devil, walked on water, fed the multitudes from a single basket, and drank at the well of an outsider (and more) 500 years before the Christ story came about.

It's very likely that the teacher Yeshua, whose philosophy – resurrected in the  discovery of very early pre-canonical scripture like The Gospel of Thomas – serves as the basis for the teachings of the Jesus of the canonical, Roman gospels.

The selectivity of Christian myth runs roughshod over much of what is actually known, as is the case with most inventions of organized religion. This is not limited only to religion, the same is true for organized historical dogma, organized cultural dogma, and organized social dogma. In a contemporary American context, for example, we have the assertion that Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union, or that John Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin; both nascent myths that aren't based in fact, but still canonized as historical truth by many. 

Likewise, American frontier identity was actually rooted in the genocide of the indigenous Americans, whose culture was, so to speak, crucified by "Rome." The positivity and popularity of much of contemporary American culture is based on the transcendent adaptations of African people held in slavery for hundreds of years. The implications of these truths are truly biblical, but not in the self-enhancing way traditional white male American historians would have us remember it.

So the suggestion that the Christian Passion Play is mythic, and was created in the centuries following the decline of Rome to serve political purposes by commandeering an authentically mystical path actually makes much more sense than the assumption of the canonical gospels as historical fact. The first big tip-off is the fact that the eventual authors of those gospels weren't actually named Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John – those were pseudonyms of journeymen writers of their day. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, chances are you might want to duck.

More recently there are the examples of Mormonism, whose co-creator Joseph Smith is not hard to prove as a plagiarist, philanderer, arsonist, and possibly worse, but not at all proven to be a prophetic witness to an early ancient American Judaic civilization; Scientology, whose inventor was unquestionably a hard-drinking, womanizing, egomaniacal science fiction writer – but highly questionable as an enlightened channel of godlike alien entities; and, going back a little further, Islam, the transcendent, mystical heart of which is regularly betrayed (like the other Abrahamic religions) by random acts of violence. 

Sadly for true believers, the historical references to the actual existence of the Jesus of the canons is still limited to the scant testimonies of Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Flavius Josephus, whose less-than-second-hand accounts came well after the fact, and were subject to powerful political and cultural influence, and countless subsequent rewritings. The most compelling testimony of Josephus has been known to be a forgery for a long time now, while Judeo-Roman historians contemporary to the times, like Philo, never mention the man or events, despite having every reason to. Josephus, in all his authenticated accounts in fact, mentions at least twenty different people named Jesus.

Then what should we really be resurrecting today? If the religious establishment now neatly sequesters the whole of the ancient Essene world into the austere walls of the community at Qumran, and the timeless teachings of philosophers like Gautama and Yeshua are respectively redefined as platitudes and tragic morality plays, rather than as the radically effective calls to action they truly are, then clearly what requires resurrecting is the spirit of divinely shared consciousness that Aldous Huxley called the "Perennial Philosophy." 

"The All came forth from me and the All came into me. Split the wood, and I am there. Turn over the stone, and there you will find me."

The Gospel of Thomas, Logion 77  

It's forgivable human nature to transmute certain realities into conveniently avoidable practices, or for people suffering from the fearful manifestations of low self worth, greed, and delusional self-centeredness to act out in our shrinking world, but what we really need is to rebirth the elemental compassionate unity, the eternal springtime of human spiritual evolution alive in each Easter every day, if possible. That is the message continuously carried by the spirit of Yeshua (not to mention the Buddha, Krishna, Gandhi, et al).

We can all "sit in the wilderness" – take the inward path to realization of our shared being; "walk on water" – rise above and make foundational our psychic afflictions;  "feed the multitudes" – know that we have plenty with what we always have;  and "share water from the well" – understand the eternal that unifies us, regardless of our outward labels. The Jesus of the Christian Easter is purely a symbol for the real power for transformation each of us carries within – all the time...not just every Spring.

"Whoever seeks will find; whoever knocks from inside, it will open to them."

"When you bring forth that within you, then that will save you."

"What you are waiting for has already come, but you do not see it."

"Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me and I will become them and what was hidden from them will be revealed."

The Gospel of Thomas, 94, 70, 51, 108

Since I believe that we all only die to this world, and so resurrection is a simple, personal realization that we will all get to experience, is it possible that the spirit of the Easter Bunny could actually be a better shepherd? The brand we want to revive each Spring? Could that be a better metaphor than the image of a good man suffering – the gentle lapine, the playful, prolific, vegan creature of the woods and meadows? Could a bunny be smart and wise enough to easily share that level of consciousness? For the answer to these, and possibly other questions, I invite you to watch this video:

 http://www.dogwork.com/buhr9

Happy Easter! 

[re-edited and reposted from an earlier time]

The latest book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered direct or online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!

What a Jumping Fish Can Teach You

        What is the best way to live? With a BMW, a big house, and a job with an important title? Of course those things may be great to have at times, but they only contribute to the real quality of your life in a certain way. Your true happiness—the way you really feel—has more to do with your understanding of Life and how you fit in it. When we completely identify ourselves with the material aspects of our being-in-the-world, we may come to feel insecure or ungrounded, because those things come and go. They're undependable, momentary, 
transient. 

        The other day while sitting on a rock by the river giving my mind a break, a fish suddenly surprised me by jumping clear out of the water right in front of me. Naturally, fish do that while pursuing bugs to eat, but there didn't seem to be any bugs around. This fish appeared to be jumping free of its watery medium for fun – or to make a kind of statement, like:

        "Here I am! I'm free of the water for this moment! I'm exposed to the air-world!" (of course, he may have been saying, "Hey buddy, you seen any bugs?" but for my purposes we'll stick with the first version).

        For a very brief moment (the image of which stays with me indefinitely) the fish was "a fish out of water," separated from the actual medium of his being – the water; but if you had blinked, you would have missed it.

        People say that about life too, don't they? You blink, and it's over.

        Water has always served as a great metaphor for the nature of Life as a medium – the depth of its mysteries; the ceaseless directional flow of it; the images and inevitabilities that it carries our way, that arise from it; the surprises that suddenly drop into it from out of nowhere. Those are the things that change, that come and go – but it's the medium it takes place in that I want you to think about. This is about the way you think about it. Let's think about it like we were fish (in a Buddhist way):

"As a fish taken from his watery home and thrown on dry ground, our thought trembles all over in order to escape the dominion of Mâra (the tempter)."

                          The Dhammapada, 3: 34

        Like that fish out of water, we're not entirely safe or secure exposed to this world of shifting material conditions, filled with destructive temptations. As an "Out-of-Body Near-Death Experiencer" myself, I can testify to you that we are clear, sweet spiritual (energy) beings, inhabiting the (sometimes unreliable) vehicles of this body we're in—and this tenuous world all around them. 

        No wonder we might feel insecure.

        Like that fish, humans are 90% water ourselves; and if we can remain aware of that medium that is our natural element (and our real ultimate home)—the true ocean of energy we swim in every moment—we can leap free of the demands and pressures of this difficult world, and "who we're supposed to be" in it. We can detach with compassion from all this messy stuff, and return to the true, secure medium of our being—which I like to simplify as Love.

        Have you ever heard of "The Gnostics?" They lived what we think of as Christian spiritual principles before Christianity was institutionalized, and they had a very interesting "fish-out-of-water" way of looking at life that I think fits the picture I'm drawing pretty perfectly. They saw themselves as brief visitors here, in a way:

        "The Gnostic ideal, simply put, is that you really are a displaced part of Heaven, but during this experience of human life, that knowledge eludes you. Momentarily, you’ve forgotten your true connection and the way to return, so you’ve actually come back into this life to rescue your authentic self, trapped in your limited perceptions of this world. Within a transformative moment of gnosis, you’ll remember who and what you really are, where you really come from, and how to take yourself back home.

        In Gnostic mythology, all of humanity is an expression of a divine light imprisoned on an imperfect plane of existence, enfolded in the beauty of earthly existence, yet victimized by the suffering that is such a big part of it all. Each of us contains a connecting spark of the Divine Light within called the pneuma (what the Hindus might call atman). Our fragment, imprisoned in this body, has fallen away from the radiant, infinite matrix of limitless potential, which is our Source called the pleroma. 

        Life's sadnesses inspire the longing to reunite our spark with the transcendent unifying power that we inherently know to be our loving origin—the effort to restore ourselves to our authentic nature. When gnosis takes place, we are restored as beings of light."

                    from How to Get to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying) 

        So whenever you're feeling uncomfortable, when you're experiencing that "fish-out-of-water" feeling, take a blink and give yourself a moment of "gnosis." Return to that medium of our solid, profound grounding – this ocean of Divine Energy we all come from, and all return to – and experience being enfolded in that Love that is the true nature and source of life on this beautiful Earth.

        ...and remember what every fish knows by heart:

"Everything that changes, isn't real."

                    Nisargadatta Maharaj

        "Reduce your needs to the simplest level of intelligence and

practicality. Live lightly and respectfully on the surface of Mother Earth!"

                    from 20 Tips for Getting to Heaven; How to Get to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Llewellyn Books, 2018.

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!

Feminine Divine – The Myth of Sophia, at GaiamTV

Here's early feminism, the birth of Gaia and Mother Nature, and the precursor to modern psychology. all in the Gnostic myth of Sophia, this month at Gaia.

"...for it's only in the feminine–the channel of creation into the world–that humanity finds the power and compassion necessary to overcome the darkness of ignorance."

The book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is now available everywhere, but ask for it it at your local bookstore!

On James Hillman: Au Revoir, and Hello to Uncle Jimmy.

Week before last, my uncle (by marriage) James Hillman – Jungian analyst, scholar and teacher, champion of the psyche, and "renegade" psychologist passed away into the world that comes after this, venturing into a dimension that I'm certain he's currently delighted to discover, given that he'd always dedicated himself to the most profound explorations of life [and death] with all the impetuousness and willingness to be amazed that was his nature. (I didn't know him all that well, but I knew that much for sure.)

I met him first six or seven years ago at a Hillman family reunion at his home in Connecticut with my then-fianceé-now-wife, his niece; again at his eightieth birthday; and then when he attended (...and boogied on down) at our wedding, with his wonderful wife, Margot McLean.

On our first meeting, I was in a formative part of a personal re-configuration, of sorts, doing lots of meditation and reading, but not knowing yet that I'd be called to set down my own personal explorations and discoveries, much less how to go about it. I'd cursorily examined some of his writing (The Soul's Code was in my then wife-to-be's bookshelf), and while he spoke so authoritatively of the same wilderness that I wanted to describe, I found myself more than a bit confounded.

Here was the voice of a true explorer into labyrinthine reaches I'd only just recently been opened to, but speaking in a language that I found nearly indecipherable. It was the language of an academician of the highest order, and as such seemed dense and elaborately logical to me, at the time. But I also saw that it was the welcome language of a Jungian mystic, a popular Gnostic, and a playful articulator. As it was very deep stuff, I began to recognize him as a sort of Jungian Jacques Cousteau of the psyche, diving into the imagery of mythic imaginings, bringing colorful, long lost archetypes to the surface and joyfully rubbing them clean for closer examination. That was his contagious joy of discovery.

He found me on the fringe of the family's reunion activities, perusing the books on his shelf and work table and asked,"Well, what do you think?" I answered that I thought it was a remarkable thing to undertake, "describing the indescribable." His eyes widened and looked straight into mine, "Describing the indescribable," he repeated, "...I suppose so." He smiled (he was always smiling), jumped up and ran off to his duties, to the happy ritual of organizing his family's past and present.

I never got the chance to have the conversation with him that I would have liked to have had—about ourselves, and our relation to all of it; about what I took to be his redefinitions of karma and reincarnation; his marvelous rejection of the intricacies of prescribed psychology, and his instead gleeful embrace of so many of the heroic and romantic idylls of mythology and lost civilization that I'd always wished I could define myself by, when I was a child...when I was that "acorn" growing toward what my life might ask me to become.

Here was a man (suddenly my uncle), who'd given to the entire world that rich and provocative opportunity for self-definition, who'd opened the trap door to that amazing underworld of fantastic self-configuration, embellished and defined by the shared timeless imagery of our psyches. He was a kind of wiry, jocular 80 year-old Heracles, pushing the glasses up on his nose, wrapping up his labors and splashing around like a kid in this gnostic reflecting pool we call Life on Earth. Wrestling with the demiurge was always that much fun for him.

All that had seemed so complex to me at first now winnows itself down to a very direct, playful formula for living... with me dressed in a toga, with a scuba mask, and maybe eagle feathers—and a sword, and a chariot (with Krishna driving, that would complete the picture). Anything to help describe me to my self—or vice-versa.

"It's important to ask yourself, "How am I useful to others? What do people want from me?" That may very well reveal what you are here for."

James Hillman

Enormous respect arose out of the realization that so many of the "amazing" discoveries I thought I was discovering for the very first time were merely simple, commonplace blips and bits of the contents of what his life's work contained. Just a couple out-of-the-way corners of his inexhaustible imagination. Ego jumped in, as usual, and told me "you'll never be that," but then that would be missing Uncle Jimmy's point, wouldn't it? You can be. You are now. We all are!

"Sooner or later something seems to call us on to a particular path...this is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am."

James Hillman

It was, after all, his life's work, and whenever I saw him, he most definitely was not working, but instead was taking part in a kind of ongoing celebration of all of Life's moments with the same logical attention to detail – the significance of that very moment, the nuances of storytelling...and always the setting-up of a good joke. There was that Zen fun, the updated Laughing Buddha (with a Jewish twist), invoking the joy of the eternal moment.

"Just stop for a minute and you'll realize you're happy just being. I think it's the pursuit that screws up happiness. If we drop the pursuit, it's right here."

James Hillman

Being a strong believer in the seamlessly continuous nature of life and death, and death and life, I'm looking forward in getting to know Uncle Jimmy better, and asking his help with my own awkward spelunking, in hopes I'll surface with some self-defining evidence from those "other worlds" that we've all inhabited, that focus themselves right here and now. Maybe I can joyfully rub the muck off of those bits and blips, and give them a good once over.

I've pulled together a few locations for you to explore James' life and ideas, and sincerely hope you do. The Wikipedia entry is pretty straight-up and does contain a bibliography. Of particular note are the two really wonderful interviews with Pythia Peay on HuffPo, and Scott London on his excellent site. The YouTube piece is great, but nothing I found really communicates just how funny he is...Enjoy! ...and thank you, Uncle Jimmy.

How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor is now available, from Llewellyn Worldwide and can be ordered online here. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available everywhere – but ask for them both at your local bookstore!