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In the long run, what does it matter? Christianity’s biggest split seems to me to be was he or wasn’t he. Was Jesus God? Just doesn’t make sense. To me it seems like he was not.
Don’t mean to stir up a hornet’s nest here (or maybe I do), but I think a ton of people here got it wrong.
For my money, Jesus was the way-shower, the exemplar. He was sent here to be an example for us on the subject of how to live our lives. He was a human being just like us and that was the point. He showed us our potential – what we could be if we knew what he knew and practiced what he practiced.
He taught us how to think, how to treat our fellow man, how to heal, how to live.
Well, It happened again. It was bound to. It’s the way my life works. Last night I got into another discussion about God. This time my wife started it. It’s all her fault.
She’s fascinated with historical novels taking place on and around the time of Jesus’ life and was telling me how many divergent concepts about the meaning of the word “God” that she’s running into. We were laughing at some of the silliness of thought that some people bring to it, so many are stuck in this anthropomorphic concept of what I like to call God in man’s image as opposed to man in God’s image.
After a good laugh or two, we plunged right in. There I was, yet again, grasping at straws, trying to build a house to contain the unattainable. I went to bed with the unanswered on my mind and had to really concentrate on ‘things other than’ in order to get to sleep.
So I just woke up with the unanswered begging for attention.
On one hand I go much more these days towards the concept of God as ‘being’ – not “a being”, but rather just ‘being’. Perhaps intelligence… being. Or to get even more specific, perhaps God is the pure truth of the way it is. I like to think of God as Law, the law of spiritual life, not necessarily this mortal existence.
I try to un-humanize God as much as possible. I like the quantum physics approach where there is a connection running through all things (whatever ‘things’ are) – perhaps this connection, this allness is God. I try to un-see God as any kind of anthropomorphic being.
Michelangelo painted a beautiful picture on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel of God and man, but I like to think of that as a pretty old-fashioned and, in fact, ancient human misunderstanding – the result of some pretty limited thinking and perhaps the result of some pretty egotistical thinking – God in man’s image.
When I was in my early 30s I became fascinated with the subject of dreams. At the time I was totally caught up in just about anything that had to do with the paranormal. I was a product of my generation, the sixties, I was a seeker, I was studying the world’s religions; I was also partaking of the world’s fads and anything to do with the exploration of the inner mind.
For two years I read every book I could get my hands on about dreams. All in all it was one of the most beneficial subjects I dabbled in because I used many of the things I learned in my dream study for the rest of my life. I took a course in dream study, self organized, which has influenced me deeply for all these years.
I learned that, as I mentioned last night, we all have 4-5 dreams every night in the course of an eight hour sleep – one about every 90 minutes. I learned about rapid eye movements (REM) and how an observer could tell when the subject was dreaming by these sure signs. I learned that sleep moves like a roller coaster through the night, from sub-consciousness plunging down into unconsciousness (deep sleep) and then back up the hill again to sub-consciousness in that 90 minute span. Then the cycle is repeated.
I learned that soon after the roller coaster reaches the bottom of the hill and turns to start back up, we begin to dream and have these REM. Wake me up the minute I start these REM over and over again for a couple of weeks, in other words, refuse to let me dream and I’ll begin to go crazy in an all too short a time.
“Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another.” — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German philosopher and mathematician, 1670.
“The words ‘We are ALL One’ have reverberated through the hearts and minds of Humanity in one form or another since the beginning of time. They do not express a lofty platitude or a sweet cliché even though our lower human egos have often perceived them as such. They profess a profound Truth.” — Patricia Diane Cota-Robles
This concept of Oneness is one that I’ve always wanted to believe in, but never really understood. I’ve sometimes felt ‘at one’ with the world in lofty moments, sometimes I’ve found a kind of oneness with my mate, I’ve experienced a sense of being at one with great teams I’ve played on, and I’ve certainly felt a kind of oneness with God in true healing moments.
But I have to admit, most of the time I walk around in an individual state, lost in my ego, trying to find my way back to this concept of oneness, trying to scramble back up that mountain of daily doings to the heights of Mind.
For the first major portion of my life I considered only my oneness with God. This was often confusing because my concept of God often changes (hopefully evolves) and so becoming ‘at one’ with a changing thing that is not always easy to grasp can be confusing and elusive.
God stands at his conveyor belt. The unborn babies come down the belt one by one as God stands with his hypodermic needle injecting life into the babys’ butts. He knows he has to push the plunger each time only down to the red line, but even God gets tired of this routine, loses concentration and consequently sometimes his thumb slips and He mistakenly pushes the plunger all the way down past the red line. “Oops”, He says, “there’s another performer!” And he tosses that baby over into another bin.
Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson was one of these. In fact, you might say that with Michael you had the one where God’s thumb slipped the most. For about a decade he was arguably the most talented man on the planet and definitely the world’s greatest performer.
In my lifetime I would place Michael right up there in the top 5 with The Beatles, Judy Garland, Stevie Wonder and Frank Sinatra. We watched Thriller until many of us knew all the steps. We totally rocked out to Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough, I’m Bad, and Billie Jean, and my favorite will always be Man In The Mirror. That music stop into the big key change will ever be the epitome of great pop music. Michael was a great rocker, but the King Of Pop.
On top of it all he was a great innovative dancer, right up there with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. It wasn’t just Thriller that thrilled. Every time I ever saw Michael dance, my jaw would drop at this wondrous human being. The rhythm that poured from his body and his music was way beyond the rest of us mere mortals.
I was a fan. I was in awe of his talent. I loved him for being a super human performer and then I came crashing down just like the rest of you as he went over some mad crazy edge in his life and lost his balance. I laughed at him and dissed him and pitied him and finally shook my head and walked away from him as he became more and more confused with his own identity.
He never really had a boyhood — he was always out there entertaining us – and so in his adulthood he turned to playing with boys, hanging out with them and God knows what else.
He was a consummate performer, always trying to make the song, the step, the move new, better, best and he often succeeded. So it was only natural that he try to remake himself and his look new, better, best. For a minute there, when he had his long hair and his glove and his white socks, he succeeded again. But he couldn’t stop tinkering and for some reason thought he might try to make his make-up permanent. He was great, but he wasn’t God, and he found that out the hard way – losing his nose in the process.
We lay there on our backs in a line, I in the lead. The water in the stream wherein we lay was only an inch and a half deep and had slowed to a trickle beneath us, but it was cold, icy cold. It was so dark, there being no light whatsoever, that we had given up trying to see anything long ago. The walls of the passageway in which we lay had narrowed down to a claustrophobic six inches on either side of us. But it was the ceiling, the ceiling of that cave in which we lay, that was so overwhelmingly awesome in its presence.
That ceiling of dirt and rock had narrowed down to only six inches above my face. I had had to turn onto my back and push myself forward with my feet, inching myself forward through the ever-narrowing tunnel. I stopped and grunted, “Hold” to my other four companions, breathing in the dank, stale air of the underground passage. I thought of the rope tied amateurishly around my ankle running back to the next guy’s ankle and so on to the next. My buddies could always pull me out.
I did what no professional cave explorer would ever do. I thought about it. I thought about the walls, the floor, the ceiling. I imagined the earth above me slightly shifting and the great expanse of rock above me simply settling to fill this narrow worm-hole, crushing my body beneath its weight. The waves of claustrophobia began to wash over me. I suddenly could see, but it was only an imagined redness of fear.
The single word “Pull” burned into my mind, but what came out was a blurt of panic, “Just a sec.” One of my buddies, sensing my fear, called out, “Are you all right, Pete?” I couldn’t answer. The feeling of that ceiling pressing down on me had grown so that the words would no longer form in the tangle of my mind. My fear began to spread among the other four.
My mom was a healer. As an adventuresome boy, I gave her many opportunities to pull off some doozies when I was a kid. For her, healing was not a miracle – it was just the natural order. That understanding was one of the reasons why she was so good at it.
One fall afternoon this 11-year-old boy was out playing flag football. Now in flag football each player wears two foot long pieces of cloth or rag stuck in his belt on either side of his waist. A “tackle” occurs when you’re running with the ball and a player on the opposition simply pulls the “flag” out of your belt. A lot less injuries that way. Or so they hope.
So here I was running pell mell around right end heading for a touchdown. An older boy, faster than me, not only caught up to me but somehow decided at the last second to tackle me, rather than simply pull my flag. Off balance, I wasn’t expecting the tackle and fell forward awkwardly holding the football out in front of me rather than tucking it in to prevent a fumble.
When I fell, I fell chest first on to the top of the ball and the force of my unexpected fall and the weird positioning of my hands on the ball knocked both of my thumbs out of joint.
Ouch!
When I got up from the ground in extreme pain and looked down at my shaking and already swelling hands, the base of each thumb was about an inch closer to my wrist and both hands were extremely disfigured and terrifying to look at. The skin was not broken but there were two large lumps where there shouldn’t have been any, and each of my thumbs basically pointed in the wrong direction.
Peter Link, Creative Director of Watchfire Music, is the author of this blog. We'll be looking at all things inspirational, especially music. Read on and find out more about Inspiration on Planet Earth and beyond. And... you can also find out more about Peter at his personal Web site and also on the "About Peter Link" page below.
