My vote in the poll would be, 'Doesn't matter.'
I have no particular beef with Jesus, or any of the major religious or spiritual brand names. No masters for me, though. It's all goddesses and cats, all the way down.
Love, sex and death are where I'm at religiously at the moment, I guess. And I put my faith in my imagination.
Recently I've been reading things in unorthodox ways. I think you can get more out of them if you don't read them in the 'standard' mind frame that you're 'supposed to read them. So for example I'll do Marxist analysis on spiritual texts, or read Marx, and other works on economics like alchemical tracts. Stuff like that.
I remember reading Jesus' parables, and stories about him, and trying to see him as speaking tongue-in-cheek. We don't usually think of Jesus as having a sense of humor. I think he might have, had he existed.
Here's a good book. Alan Watts' Myth and Ritual in Christianity. pdf online. Amazing what you can find nowadays:
http://www.bookyards.com/en/book/details/15833/Myth-And-Ritual-In-Christianity#I like his reading of Christianity. Here's an excerpt.
"The very insistence on the one historical incarnation as a unique step in a course of temporal events leading to the future Kingdom of God reveals the psychology of Western culture most clearly. It shows a mentality for which the present, real world is, in itself, joyless and barren, without value. The present can have value only in terms of meaning if, like a word, it points to something beyond itself. This "beyond" which past and present events "mean" is the future. Thus the Western intellectual, as well as the literate common man, finds his life meaningless except in terms of a promising future. But the future is a "tomorrow which never comes", and for this reason Western culture has a "frantic" character. It is a desperate rush in pursuit of an ever/receding "meaning", because the promising future is precisely the famous carrot which the clever rider dangles before his donkey's nose from the end of his whip.
Tragically enough, this frantic search for God, for the ideal life, in the future renders the course of history anything but a series of unique steps towards a goal. Its real result is to make history repeat itself faster and more furiously, confusing "progress" with increased agitation. But the Western disillusion with past and present events excluding the Incarnation is based on a sound intuition. We said that it seeks for the meaning of events, as if they were words: and, indeed, this is exactly what they are. In so far as we are aware of life as history only, as a series of facts, the life that we know is an abstraction without real value or joy. This will include our specious "present", which is not the true present but a memory of the immediate past the so/called nunc fluens as distinct from the nunc stant, the present which is always flying away as distinct from that which is eternal. Our plight is that in failing to be aware of the true present we look for the meaning of events in the future, and it disappoints us perpetually because it is as abstract as the past. This is the folly of "laying up treasure upon earth", that is to say, in time, and of "being anxious for the morrow", for the Kingdom of Heaven is not future, within time, but now, above time.
(St. Paul's "redeeming the time" is often understood to mean that, through Christ, the course of time is redeemed so that it leads to God, and not just on and on. This is not quite the sense of the passage in Ephesians 5: 14-16, "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. See, then, that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil." Arising from the dead is ceasing to identify the Self, with the past as a result of which time "leads to" or "ends in" Christ, not in the future, but now. C Lynn White, "Christian Myth and Christian History," in Journal af the History of Ideas, iii. z (New York, 1942), p. 145 an excellent discussion of this whole problem of "the course of time" in Christian thought.)
When, therefore, man awakens to the true present he finds his true Self, that wherein the reality of his life actually consists, as distinct from the "old man", the self that was and is not. He is then "no longer I, but Christ", and this "Christening" of mankind is the clear sense of the whole symbolism of the Incarnation, apart from which it is difficult to see how there can be any meaning in the important conception of Christ as the Second Adam. "For as in Adam all die, even as in Christ shall all be made alive."
Fun, right? Here's another brief excerpt:
"The importance of the "harrowing of Hell" is that the power of the Incarnation is retroactive or, to put it in another way, timeless. The coming of Christ is not a truly historical event, a step in a temporal process which is effective only for those who follow. It is equally effective for those who came before, and thus the Descent into Hades is a feature of the Christ story which particularly suggests the timeless and mythological character of the whole. From another point of view, the descent into the depths is almost invariably one of the great tasks of "the Hero with a Thousand Faces", of the Christ in his many forms. Hades or Hell may here be understood as the Valley of the Shadow, the experience of impotence and despair in which "I" die and Christ comes to life. The descent is likewise a figure of the descent of consciousness into the unconscious, of the necessity of knowing one's very depths. For so long as the unconscious remains unexplored it is possible to retain the naive feeling of the insularity and separateness of the conscious ego. Its actions are still taken to be free and spontaneous movements of the "will", and it can congratulate itself upon having motivations which are purely "good", unaware of the dark and hidden forces of conditioning which actually guide them.
Down in Hades the work of Christ is to bring Adam through the jaws of the dragon into Paradise. It will be remembered that when Adam was expelled from the Paradise Garden, the way back was guarded by a Cherub with a flaming sword which "turned every way". The gnashing jaws of the dragon and the whirling sword are forms of the important mythological motif which also appears as Symplegades, the Clashing Rocks, the task of the hero being to leap through before he is cut or crushed. But this "Active Door" opens and shuts with such incredible rapidity or suddenness that the hero has to get through in "no time at all". His only chance is to leap without hesitation, for the slightest wavering or indecision will be his undoing. Obviously, the Active Door is the same as the "needle's eye" and the "strait and narrow gate", through which one can enter into heaven only on the condition of having become nothing and nobody. Adam can pass through the Jaws of Hades into Paradise because now that he has been "crucified with Christ" who took upon himself the flesh of Adam, he is no more Adam but Christ. He goes forth into Paradise of Christ, as the New Adam. The reason is that Christ is the only one who can pass through the Active Door, being the Real Man who has no past and does not exist in time. Living entirely in the eternal Moment, it is no problem for him to move between the jaws of past and future where all others are trapped.
In many of the myths of the Active Door, the hero gets through at the cost of leaving something behind. A European folk/story tells of the Hare who wrests the Herb of Immortality from the Guardian Dog, leaving, however, his tail in the Dog's jaws. In the Christian version, the one left behind is Lucifer. Obviously, the Hare's tail is his past, that which is behind him, being the only thing which Time the Devourer can actually devour. Similarly, Lucifer is the "dead man" the ego abstracted from memory. So long as the mind is identified with it the gate of heaven is closed. Past and future clash together in a present which is exasperatingly brief, giving the sense that we have "no time*' for anything* But when it is seen that the true Self is not the self we remember, the tail is "docked" and the Hare is "through".
In the Old Testament the analogous situation is Moses passage of the Red Sea, where the waters roll back to let "Israel" go through but rush together to trap "Egypt" in the flood. Very properly, then, Christ's passage through Death and Hades is likened by the Church to the Crossing of the Red Sea, for in the "harrowing of Hell" the jaws of the dragon yawn wide to give passage to those that are **in Christ", but close again upon Lucifer and his hosts. Beyond the rolling waters, the perilous gates or jaws of Hell, past and future, good and evil, life and death, and the whole gamut of opposites wherein man as ego is inescapably trapped, there lies the Risen Life always open to him who leaps without hesitation, who moves with the Moment and does not linger in the past."
"the descent of consciousness into the unconscious." And now, back to lucid dreaming.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
