The Conscious Cosmos: Why I believe in the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth

There are many scholars who doubt the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. However, I am quite certain that he was indeed a historical figure and that he was a mystic and master as well. Was his message misunderstood and coopted? Most definitely! I come to that conclusion based on all of the writings from the first three centuries CE. This includes some of the orthodox canon and the writings of the Nag Hammadi library. Was he sent from God? Well, that depends on your definition and understanding of God. If you see God anthropomorphically as a sky parent who had a literal son, then you have missed the mark. However, if you see God as the creative source of the universe, if you see God as creative consciousness, and you see the son of God as a metaphor for individual conscious agents that are an integral part of the divine, having a divine nature, then yes, indeed he was sent by God.

It is his message, that for me proves that he was a historical mystical figure, a miracle worker that was misunderstood because of the audience he came to, and the belief system they held about the creator and the nature of reality. If what I am writing scares you as heresy, my hope is that you get over it. If you think I am trying to evangelize the world to this idea, you are wrong. Could humanity benefit from what I believe Jesus real message was? Yes indeed! It actually adds mystical understanding to all of the messages and explanations that have gone on before it. This is why I believe that it should be a part of eclectic and syncretistic spirituality. Yes, I use the word spirituality and I use it without shame or hesitation. If consciousness is fundamental to reality, then it is ineffable, and spirituality is as good a descriptor as any.

Moving on to the reasons I believe that Jesus of Nazareth is a historical figure and a mystical master. It includes the Gospel of John, parts of Paul’s epistles, the Gospel of Truth, and other writings from the same time period. This theory does not include orthodox teaching, anything evangelical, or fundamentalist. Yet it does include parts of orthodox Christian scripture. It likewise includes Hermeticism, Platonic, and Neo-Platonic philosophy. One could add Taoism into the mix as well.  All of those traditions involve a “parent and an offspring” metaphor to the creation of reality. It is in that area that the message of Jesus advances the metaphor. Further, the advancement of that metaphor is dependent on a mystical message, most likely from an individual. That is how it has worked over the course of millennia and so there is no reason to doubt it in this instance.

The unique message in which Jesus advanced spiritual understanding was that the parent offspring metaphor includes all of humanity. This can be gleaned by looking at a universal coherent message that permeates all of western civilization across millennia, beginning with Egypt and Sumer, Hermeticism, Greek and Platonic Philosophy, the Stoics and culminating with two revelations that Jesus made that were not explicit before his ministry. He also taught that God was the parent, but additionally, a loving parent, and that all of humanity was God’s offspring and an active participant in the divine nature. All other claims prior to that had God at a distance, apart from the creation. There was no familial reference. Today, there are many who refer to the concept of being a child of God without realizing that it is known largely by the teaching of Jesus.

This revelation went on to be mystically revealed to Paul. Rom 8:38-39  “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,  (39)  nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God.” It was Jesus that introduced this concept in his teaching.

Many may ask, “didn’t Jesus also teach about hell?” That requires that one be able to clearly see the Jew-Gentile distinction that is in the pages of the New Testament. Jesus was a Jewish prophetic mystic and miracle worker. He did his work within the context and culture of first century Judaism. It was first century Jewish Pharisaic teaching that taught about hell (Gehinnom.) His references were a hyperbolic reaction to that teaching. Paul never mentions hell. Why? Because his mystical revelation was to bring the message to both Jew and Gentile and to present it as a spiritual reality. One can see the Jew-Gentile distinction everywhere in the New Testament and Paul taught that the wall of separation was torn down by the ministry of Jesus. So then, Jesus’ ministry was twofold. First, it was to call the Jewish nation to change their mind about their relationship with deity. Second, it was to inform both Jew and Gentile that God, the creative source was a loving parent.

In the Gospel of Truth, accredited to Valentinus by Irenaeus, the mission and message of Jesus was to overcome the forgetfulness that humanity has and remember its true nature which is divine. God the Father is a loving parent and upon incarnation humans no longer remember the fact. Jesus’ message was to restore that knowledge. Valentinus was a student of Pauline Christianity and founded a group of believers that were called Valentinians after him. They were considered heretics by the early church fathers, and their works were destroyed. It was the serendipitous find of Nag Hammadi in 1945 that gave us many of their writings. I am not saying that they had all and exclusive truth. I am saying that they had an important part of the Jesus message, and it would be beneficial today. Not that it is necessary for us to carry on as the offspring of the creator or to gain some kind of eternal nature. We are that already. But it would help us to realize that we are divine and that the divine is love and love is out natural state of being if we but remember who we really are.

Jesus realized that he was anointed with the divine Logos or the mind of God. This made him God’s son and he went on to teach that the same thing is true of each and everyone of us. I will close this with Paul’s words. This is from a letter that is credited to Paul by most all scholars.

Php 2:5-8  “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,  (6)  who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,  (7)  but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form,  (8)  he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”

We all do this when we incarnate. We become obedient even to the point of death. It does not have to be a cross. In our emptying process, we forget our divinity and Jesus restored that. That message is so unique that I believe there really was such a person that delivered it.

  

 

The Conscious Cosmos: Unified Field of Consciousness

This is an explanation of my theory of panpsychism. Assuming that consciousness is the foundational element of reality then it seems to follow that consciousness and energy are interchangeable. As the words of the poem, the primal dream flowed into my mind in 1974, I wrote “energy and thought, inseparable conceived the primal dream.” The above illustration is in the shape of the current graphic representation of the universe. Everything within the universe consists primarily of waves. The waves have particle potential and can result in matter. The original creative observer is consciousness itself which historically has been called the Logos, by Greek philosophy, Hermeticism, and Christianity.

Consciousness created individual conscious agents through sacred geometry. These conscious agents are integral to all of the dimensions and yet, the sum of conscious agents is greater than the individual parts. When I speak of conscious agents, I think of them similarly to Dr. Donald Hoffman in his book “A Case Against Reality.” This leads to the paradox of pantheism and panentheism. Both are true, as the Kybalion states in the principle of polarity. “All truths are half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.” The way it is resolved is in the truth that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts which is pantheism, and the individual conscious agents are a part of the whole, cocreators and that is panentheism.

To what purpose you may ask? I like a variation of how Dr. Hoffman answers the question what is consciousness up to? It is answered in a YouTube video. A Donald Hoffman Quote from his YouTube lecture on the Weekend University Channel entitled “Is Reality an Illusion?” It begins at roughly 1:13:38 into the video.

Quote:

“If we start with consciousness being fundamental then there is an interesting question; that is what is consciousness up to and why? What is consciousness doing right? And when we think about consciousness inside space and time we often think about it in terms of evolutionary theory and we say maybe consciousness helps you to survive somehow, maybe its an accident, but now we can think differently. Space and time are not fundamental. Evolutionary theory is not fundamental. Consciousness itself is fundamental.

So, what is consciousness up to? I don’t know, but I have only found one idea that is deep enough so far to take the idea seriously. I’m not saying it is right but it’s at least deep enough to be interesting and to take seriously. Kurt Godel, around 1930 proved what are called incompleteness theorems. What Godel discovered was that effectively, the exploration of mathematical truths is unending. There is no way to be omniscient about mathematical truths and what’s interesting about that idea then, is that if consciousness is fundamental and consciousness is all there is then mathematics, consciousness and that endless exploration of mathematics is endless, then that means that exploration of the possible varieties endless and is exploring, it’s a theorem that will never stop. And so maybe that is what consciousness is up to. It is constantly exploring itself!

So what’s happening right now, where we go, we talk, we have questions, we have lectures and so forth. This is just consciousness in space using space time as a virtual reality exploring one of many, many different possibilities, worlds in which there are attended spaces. Dimensions of space is irrelevant there is no dimension.”

I am not a mathematician, and if you want to accuse me of trying to turn science into “woo” go ahead. What I am writing here is intuitive. However, it resonates deeply with me, and I believe that it is correct. So let me explain the above quote in more spiritual and mystical terms. I do not think this explanation is incompatible with Hoffman’s far more scientific explanation.

Consciousness is knowledge. The ancient Greeks called it Gnosis. However, knowledge lacks something. What you may ask? It lacks experience. Knowledge is awareness of all the potential. It is aware of possibility. Experience completes knowledge. One cannot truly understand love without experience. Nor, can one know pain without experience. One can know it exists but only through experience does it become complete knowledge. We participate in the divine nature in order to complete knowledge with our experience. The possibilities are endless and infinite. One could say that we are God experiencing creation.

This is not limited to one life in one plane. Quite the contrary. However, we are also able to rest at will. I do not see reincarnation as a karmic hamster wheel that one is trapped on. It is not a punitive alternative to purgatory or hell. We all, in an egalitarian fashion, based upon our choosing experience joy and pain, good and evil. The unified field of consciousness, the All, God if you prefer, is the eternal present. As Eckhart Tolle states it is the Now. Energy cannot be destroyed it can only be changed. I think that the best illustration of what I am saying is that it is similar to a video game. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. You can get tired, even exasperated so that you put the game down only to become refreshed, perhaps bored, and you pick the game up and try again.

Experiential knowledge is ever increasing as we alternate between being whole consciousness to conscious agents and back and forth.