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Posts Tagged ‘Divine Source’

The Door

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on April 24, 2013| 6 Comments »

The Door

The Door

I am the Door of the sheep.

All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep do not hear them.

I am the Door.

Through Me if anyone should be entering, he shall be saved

And shall be entering and coming out and will be finding pasture.

The thief is only coming so that he should be stealing and sacrificing and destroying.

I came that they may have aeonian life and have it superabundantly.

After tackling the dominance of Pauline teaching in the day to day life of traditional Christianity I’ve decided to return to the somewhat quizzical sayings of Yeshua as found in John’s narrative of the Nazarene’s final weeks on earth.

The above saying is lifted from Yeshua’s discourse with the Jewish leadership team that hung out in the Temple court area looking for heretics to put straight.

I am the Door of the sheep.

All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep do not hear them.

The Nazarene outsider is clearly using metaphorical language here in his engagement with his theological adversaries. He’s been talking about sheep, sheepfolds, authentic and false shepherds in his discussions with his learned opponents. So what do such symbols mean?

Sheep

This somewhat humbling term refers to those folk who belong to God; in the immediate context of his discussions, Yeshua is talking about the Jewish race but in light of subsequent sayings he is clearly referring to all mankind, those who have come from and will return to Divine Source.

Door

This is the entrance into the sheepfold, the sacred place of belonging where true community is to be found. Is this sheepfold, a racial group or religious belief system? I believe not. It’s the place of Divine Presence, the very Cosmos itself and indeed, beyond. The realm of  Divine awakening and awareness. Yeshua sees himself as One through whom his followers pass into such an altered state. He’s suggesting that following or tuning into him is the key to a spiritual awakening. From a mimetic or imitative desire perspective Yeshua is claiming that those who are drawn into his Desire field will find themselves emerging into a new state of consciousness, the same consciousness that he himself experienced during his space-time sojourn.

Thieves and robbers

Yeshua uses this term for the mosaic of spiritual teachers whose motives are purely for self gain; those who see folk as a means to an end. The religious and spiritual world is full of such peddlers of metaphysical wares, but the Nazarene sees through their shepherd masks to the lurking ego violence within. The perceptive seer was clearly referring to the established teachers of the Law centring around the Jerusalem Temple cult of his day but such religious teachers are found the world over no matter what their cultural or temporal context.

Yeshua clearly states that we sheep will not stick with such religious or spiritual experts for long. Eventually the realisation dawns on us that the Divine Voice is not being heard through them; something in the ground of their being just doesn’t resonate with our inner vibration of spiritual authenticity.

I am the Door.

Through Me if anyone should be entering, he shall be saved

Here the Nazarene connects the idea of entering through him into the place of Divine Awareness to the common but often misunderstood concept of salvation. May I suggest, contrary to much theological thought, that this salvation primarily refers to a continual state of psycho-spiritual freedom, one in which we’re delivered from the effects of skewed desire and its resulting Model Obstacle relationships. In other words, not a future escape from wrathful Divine Judgement but a here and now state of well-being and psychic wholeness, one that we will carry with us into death and beyond!

And shall be entering and coming out and will be finding pasture.

 Here Yeshua promises a free-flowing life, one that links both our inner and outer worlds. At times we’ll focus on the mysterious immanence of Divine Presence; at others we’ll be engaged with the manifestations of Spirit Breath in our outer day-to-day encounters. One thing is promised though. Pasture or spiritual nurture will be ours, a constant provision for those of us free from the inner and outer tensions of desire rivalry and competition. In the letting go of our squealing ego needs we’ll discover a surprising new level of Divine provision, one required to maintain our newly acquired mimetic state.

The thief is only coming so that he should be stealing and sacrificing and destroying.

The Galilean prophet goes straight to the heart of all inauthentic religious and spiritual experts.

Seeing beyond the pietistic surface Yeshua reveals three aspects of psycho-spiritual malpractice.

1) Stealing

The ego driven teacher helps themself to something that belongs to both the Divine and the individual spiritual seeker.

From the Divine the rogue guru steals the worship or worthship due to the limitless Source of All.

From the ardent seeker the master robber subtly steals the gift of Will, the individual’s God-given ability to choose which Path to follow. The somewhat subliminal, hypnotic powers of the spiritual expert can lead the unsuspecting sheep into a cage  of  psycho-spiritual codependency.

2)  Sacrificing

This interesting choice of word reveals the hidden nature of much psycho-spiritual thought and practice. The  false religious teacher  will always require sacrifice of some sort from those who follow them. The shedding of much blood, sweat and tears in order to keep the guru’s god happy usually  lurks within the spiritual teaching of the believable spiritual thief . A little tip from my personal observations and experience. Beware of spiritual or religious leaders who subliminally or openly push self-sacrifice in their missional manifestos.

3) Destroying

The fruit of all false spirituality is eventual death. Often behind the impressive mesmeric powers of the religious or spiritual salesman lies a fragmented heart of violence and control, cleverly camouflaged by a great big beatific smile. Many are the unsuspecting victims of such false teachers. Great piles of spiritual corpses lie on the smouldering fires of religious disillusionment. How many burnt out believers hide away in dark sacred corners, nursing their wounded psyches, those damaged by the skewed mimetic game of zealous master-disciple relationships?

I came that they may have aeonian life and have it superabundantly.

Here Yeshua states that his mission was to restore a vigorous sense of life to those confused and damaged by the religious status quo. His followers weren’t to be characterised by puritanical piety and spiritual hoop jumping but by the very essence of Divine Source, viz. Life. Not the mere existence of those caught up in the skewed desire battles of human culture but the very Life of the Queendom to come, the Life of the new Jerusalem, a one to One Union with Ultimate Reality.

Now that’s what I call superabundant spirituality; the crazy Cosmic Dance through the Divine Door that was incarnated in Yeshua.

Dylan’s Author page ~ https://www.amazon.com/author/dylanmorrison

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Paulianity?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on April 18, 2013| 11 Comments »

Paul ~ the chosen One or one among many?

Paul ~ the chosen One or one among many?

Some days I wonder what today’s Yeshua movement would be like if Saul, the persecutor Rabbi hadn’t fallen off his Damascus Road donkey. Suppose the Jewish scholar-policeman had just ‘pulled himself together’ and spurred his trusty ass on towards another religious roundup; how would the Way, later to morph into Christianity, appear in 2013? Call me strange but this somewhat unsettling quirky, what if thinking seems to be part of my Irish psycho-spiritual makeup, so please bear with me!

Many today believe the true Gospel or Good News to be the pure revelation of God as expounded in the writings of Saul. Their reasoning goes something like this:

Yeshua came to teach the Kingdom of God, it was largely rejected by his listeners, and so God and he switched to plan B, that had really been plan A all along viz. his death and resurrection. So far so good to a point. In the early days of the embryonic, Jerusalem, Yeshua community it would appear that his followers, including his ex-disciples didn’t get it quite right! Except for Stephen that is  for he, like Yeshua before him, drew the mob violence of the religious establishment upon himself, becoming the first so-called Christian martyr, for only Truth tends to draw the raging genie out of a highly polished sacred lamp.

Yet, the reasoning goes that God still hadn’t got His perfect message out! Even though the Jerusalem gang had lived with Yeshua during his space-time mission and had  been taught by him post resurrection over many days, a finer intellect was needed, one who would really get it.

And so we arrive at Saul, aka Paul and his stumbling attempts to understand the One who’d knocked him off  his perch as Temple sponsored Inquisitor in Chief. The big transformation in Paul however took place somewhere else, one where most of his old religious paradigm seems to have rapidly gone down the metaphysical drain. This Pauline womb of creativity appears to have been the Arabian, or more accurately, the Jordanian desert, where the new convert claimed to have been caught up into the Jewish Third Heaven and granted unspeakable glimpses of Ultimate Reality. This is where Paul professed to have gained his insights into the whole Yeshua phenomenon, later described by him as my Gospel or Good News‘.

Later writing to his fellow Yeshua followers in Galatia, the new apostle claimed not to have received his teachings from Peter and his Jerusalem friends  but directly from the risen Yeshua. Clearly then, the converted Rabbi was what is commonly called a mystic, one who receives direct revelation from Divine Source, rather than the status quo teaching of his contemporaries.

So what, if any, is the big problem?

Wasn’t Paul clearly sent along to lift the message of Yeshua and his former disciples to a whole new level, one that the Gentile would could accept without all those painful Jewish disciplines such as circumcision? Let’s face it; which of us men wouldn’t have signed up to be a Paulian?

Well, looking back at things from our 21st century perspective it’s hard to see the problems, but problems there certainly were once Paul added his mystical mix to the existing Yeshua mythology. Many of us have observed hints of the religious rivalry within the early Yeshua movement as described in the book of Acts, a Pauline stream account of the tensions between his followers and the fledgling movement’s elder statesmen back in Jerusalem with their particularly Jewish take on their risen leader. Let’s be honest: there must be a wee bit of Pauline propaganda in Luke’s Acts narrative; no-one writes to paint their charismatic leader as a ‘heretic’ but rather the bearer of a superior revelation, one that surpasses the previously accepted take on spiritual reality. Paul, In reality Paul was only one among many interpreters of the whole Yeshua event, those who jostled for the label of God sanctioned teacher. The early Yeshua movement was I’m afraid, not one big happy family but a collage of metaphysical takes on the revolutionary Nazarene, one with it’s all too obvious tensions and rivalries.

Three centuries on the Pauline interpretation of Yeshua’s execution and resurrection were later confirmed by the Constantine instigated Counsel of Nicaea as Christian with letters accredited to his authorship later included in the accepted Canon of Holy Writings, known as the New Testament.

So what’s the big deal you say?

Well, may I humbly suggest that Paul’s writings have gained a super status position within Reformed Theology and its modern love children viz. evangelicalism and its Pentecostal and Charismatic offshoots; one that is, all things considered, spiritually unhealthy. Having been raised to the level of Sacred Scripture, Paul’s metaphysical musings infer that the Gospel narrative accounts of Yeshua’s life and teaching don’t quite reveal the Mysteries of the Cosmos. The Tao/Logos in human form did not fully reveal all that needed to be revealed. Neither in fact do the other relatively recently discovered accounts of the early Yeshua movement, in the form of the so-called ‘Gnostic Gospels’.

Am I suggesting that we shouldn’t read Paul’s or his disciples’ take on Yeshua. No not at all. There is clearly something rich and unique within his narratives that reflect the awe and wonder of the mystical Yeshua, the Cosmic Christ to borrow a New Age term. Rather, what I am suggesting is that we have ignored the Gospel narratives, both canonical and excluded, at our peril. Our spirituality has been based on Pauline interpretation, giving us a one-sided limp on our pilgrimage home. Personally I believe that all that we require to come into mimetic salvation with the Divine Source is contained hidden within the overly familiarized Yeshua accounts within the accepted Gospels.

May I humbly suggest that God didn’t grab Rabbi Saul to be ‘the’ authentic interpreter or indeed founder of ‘Christianity’, as many modern Yeshua followers subliminally believe, but to paint a uniquely colored stroke on the multifarious canvas of Divine Truth.

So let’s dip into the rich variety of religious writings that abound around the person of Yeshua rather than remain Paul freaks. To do so will make us more sensitive to our own inner Journey and that of those around us. Life, especially the spiritual life, is full of surprises.

Dylan’s Author page ~ https://www.amazon.com/author/dylanmorrison

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