Boon Library in Hawi

I visited the Boon library in Hawi today, which is the oldest public library building in Hawaii. It was paid for by private funding. The Hilo public library was paid for by Carnegie funding. They have started building a new facility for the library...why, I don't know, this one is so gorgeous.

Concerning the third coming of Jesus

The story of Jesus is just that: a story. Being asked to believe in the story of Jesus is like being asked to believe in the story of Odysseus or Harry Potter or Star Wars--it's all very romantic and pleasant but in the end a story is not the type of reality that necessitates belief. The story is art. And art it is to be considered according to principles other then belief.

The story of Jesus is certainly high art. It is one of the most powerful pieces of art that we as a race have collectively experienced. Its power is to evoke an odd feeling of hope, something which is at once powerfully inspiring and awesomely challenging. The best works of divine art demonstrate these same qualities.

Where does art come from? I do not mean the creative force behind the art, but rather I mean the inspiration that triggers the imagination and stirs the artistic impulses. In the West we like to think that art originates in the soul of the creator, and that the origin is a completely individual well-spring. But what artist has ever created in a vacuum of cultural and communal isolation? Only the highest works of mystical reflection have been produced in such circumstances, and they all reference themselves to something beyond the individual, a source and inspiration that is supremely greater than the individual. That is, the very sources which come from the deepest isolation of individuality claim that their true origins are not the artist themselves, but rather a divine source existing beyond the sense of individuality.

Art is divine creation. "No matter how good or bad, art is a way of growing your soul." Kurt Vonnegut said something like that. This is because in the act of creation one taps into the source of all creation and struggles to attain a greater harmony with that source, a harmony of one's personal Dasein and the universal Dasein.

To say that the story of Jesus Christ is just a story is not to do the story an injustice--it is to treat it with the approach of truth, a truth which is said to have the power to "set you free". To treat the story not with an article of faith but with an article of reality is to do service to the story as a work of highest art, one whose well-spring is the universal divine that flows through us all and in all things. And more, it is to attain a higher understanding of the ways whereby art directs and guides human life in powerful and beautiful ways.

The first coming of Jesus Christ was in story--narrative art. This story produced a movement that took over the world powers of the West, reinventing such notions as love, justice, mercy, loyalty. The story obliterated the practice of animal sacrifice. The story unified disparate peoples and brought a common heritage to otherwise vastly diverse and divided societies. The story broke down the glass ceiling of transmigration of the soul. This was the work of the first coming, the first incarnation of Jesus Christ.

And the story was conscious of itself as a story, as a powerful story. It called itself the Son of Man and claimed “I and the father are one”. In the story of Jesus Christ we see an eternally self-referential source of divine power. The story as the son is the offspring of human and divine interaction. The story as the father births into humans a greater sense of being, evoking in us the inspiration to be more than we are—to become, indeed, ourselves sons of man. The story is also the father inseminating the listener with the seed of the son, which then becomes also the story revealed throughout history and in our own personal lives. In other words, this is not just any typical story we are dealing with—it is one of the most remarkable stories ever told but only if we approach it from the direction of truth-- that is, as a story. Such an approach loses none of the awesome potential of transformation inherit in the story but it does leave behind the shallow and hypocritical appeals to a false and theatrical emotion which attempts to believe despite itself in the reality of Jesus Christ. The reality is the story, because Jesus is the story. Outside of the story there is no Christ, but inside of the story is Christ and the entirety of creation. The story of Jesus Christ is just that—a story, but one in which the REAL is very discernable. The story is the first incarnation of Jesus Christ.

The prophecies spoke of a second coming, one in which the prophecies write: "this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven (Acts 1:11)." What is significant about this prophecy and others like it (even many of the prophecies Jesus made about himself) is that in almost all of them the sense of sight is the major vehicle of human realization of the second coming (see Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21). In some the ground will shake, in others the sea will roar, but in almost all of them there will be a "seeing" of the second coming.
Now, if the first coming of Jesus Christ was an artistic arrival, in the form of a narrative story (which is heard), then the second coming of Jesus is not going to be in any way different--it will also be artistic. And if that artistic incarnation is to favor the act of seeing in some way, then we should expect the second coming to be in the form of visual arts, rather than narrative arts.

The prophetic traditions also speak of the second coming as the time when Jesus would
secure his dominion over the powers of earth. Particularly Rome is used to represent these powers. Jesus would take over Rome in the second coming. So goes the tradition.

The second coming, I submit, has already occurred, in a very tangible and real manner: we call it the Italian Renaissance. In the Italian Renaissance we see Jesus coming from heaven in the same way that he went: first as a baby born, then as a man, then on the cross, then in the resurrection, and finally in the ascension. Jesus, as an artistic impulse with social transformative powers, took over Rome in the Italian Renaissance, and changed the way in which humans view themselves and their world. More than any other movement, the Renaissance ushered in the age of science with the use of the linear perspective style in which sight is progressive and moves in one direction toward a horizon. The progressive and observational techniques of science--which have taken over every power of the world--originated in the depictions of Jesus Christ in the Italian Renaissance, exactly as the prophecies predicted. The glorification of Jesus in Rome through art and architecture is the fulfillment of Jesus' empowerment over the dominions of the earth.

The second coming of Jesus already occurred as a revolutionary artistic movement which spawned the scientific revolution by teaching humanity how to see and how to observe--especially how to observe the heavens. The question is not when will be the second coming of Jesus, but rather when will the third coming manifest itself.

My first attempt at writing a spiritual history.

When souls transmigrate they have some power to choose which worlds they will inhabit. Souls who are very ambitious, or very brave, or very noble, might choose to try to break into the upper class worlds of ancient Rome, for example. This world was a politically confrontational one, and the Roman senate was more of a counsel of Godfathers than it was anything like a democratic republic. What the nobility did to one another was the sort of thing we see today in Mafia movies, and the lower classes did not have to treat with this kind of intrigue in their daily lives.

Instead, the ordinary inhabitants of the Roman world lived in domains of relative squalor, dirt, and disease. It is easy to understand why the nobility shunned the lower classes. There was a practical reason for this, even if nobody understood that reason. The lower classes were easily infested with illnesses of which nobody understood the nature. There were neither cures nor explanations, and humanity walked about in a great darkness. The nobility, by separating themselves from the lower classes, spared themselves from many of the threats which took so many of the lives of ordinary citizens.

Because the nature of disease was not understood the Romans believed that disease was a curse from the Gods. The nobility, sheltered and set apart from those disasters which struck the lower classes, naturally assumed therefore that they were protected and blessed by the Gods. Thus the ordinary citizens had their gods, and the upper classes their Gods, and the nobility treated the ordinary citizens with a great deal of contempt. The lower classes were, after all, cursed by the Gods—the nobility were morally justified in cursing them as well: it was their duty.

For a soul, therefore, to transmigrate from the world of the ordinary citizen to that of the nobility was a great feat indeed. It meant passing through the belief that one is inherently inferior and trying to prove that one is not. The separation must have been like a glass ceiling: even if one felt a certain amount of strength of character, the evidence was hard to put aside: the lower classes were morally and spiritually inferior. Even the very attempt by a soul to pass from the ordinary classes to the upper classes must be perceived as a noble effort. Surely the alure of riches must have been offset to some extent by a certain disgust at the underhanded way the nobility dealt with one another. According to today's standards, no morally pure soul would want to join the Roman nobility. I would imagine few souls ever even tried—and of those who did I feel that it is safe to assume that blessed few succeeded.

But Jesus changed this situation. Here was the story of a man who healed the sick. The message was powerful: the nobility were not the blessed of God. There was a Door way through the glass ceiling. And for the very pure souls, there was a way out of the disease ridden streets which didn't mean joining the ranks of the mafia-esque nobility.

Furthermore, the traditions of the Jews engrained themselves onto 1st Century Christianity and became part of the Christian way of life. The Jewish emphasis on physical cleanliness was a major distinction between ordinary Jews and ordinary Romans—the Jews lived in an environment of relative sanitation compared to their neighbors in the Mediterranean world. The Christian world, by making these traditions more normative, realized a greater level of sanitation and thus demonstrated the physical evidence that the nobles were not superior because of the blessings of the Gods. Of course, to accept Christian traditions meant to accept Christ, and thus the early Christians understood that the salvation from the noble-underclass caste system and all of the pain it entailed was Jesus Christ. It is easy for us to look back today and claim that it was the sanitary levels of Christians that made them healthier, but nobody knew that back then. Most importantly from a historical point of view, the souls of Christians breached a divide which only a few souls had really ever broached—and they did it with so much power that the Roman worldview—which by that time had become the Pagan worldview of the ancient western world—must collapse under the onslaught. Souls saw the rupture caused by Christian faith, and they understood that the Gods were not what it was claimed that they were.

a first attempt at an onto-ontological synthesis of the teachings of Jesus and the Bhagavad Gita

It has been argued that the teachings of Jesus are devoid of any reference to karma, and I for one agree to a degree. Karma is a philosophy of action, in which the actor is placed between the two poles of creation and destruction. Attempting to discover a balance between these two poles inside of the one’s self is the goal, so that the cyclical patterns of karmic interactions are nullified. The pole of creation is most often portrayed as being ruled by Brahma, and the pole of destruction by Shiva. Vishnu rules the space of maintenance.

What is conceived of is an energy loop between creation and destruction. This is the cycle of karma. In the sphere of maintenance, however, the loop becomes self-referential.

What we see in this triadic structure is a base of opposition between Shiva and Brahma. As in all oppositions there are elements of each one in the other. But in Vishnu, who is then the third point of the triangle, both of the other two are balanced. Thus Krishna, who is one of the manifestations of Vishnu in literature, describes himself as the creator and destroyer, the beginning and end (the same claim which Jesus makes). To enter into the realm of Vishnu is to have the forces of creation and destruction balanced within one’s self. This is the location of extra-karmic being.

What Jesus Christ teaches is also extra-karmic, or post-karmic. His teachings describe a different set of rules which must apply to the realm of Vishnu, because once the sense of karmic law is balanced within one’s self, there is no sense of higher authority to appeal to. This is why the Christian Church has degraded the teachings of Jesus. By creating a new law out of the teachings and myth of Jesus they have returned what is post-karmic back to the realm of karma. What Jesus argues is that in the post-karmic life, which has no authority toward which to appeal, the individual must rely upon a personal sense of truth and that personal sense of truth is made manifest through acts of faith in that truth—acts which are inspired by and justified by that truth. When Jesus said, “blessed is the man who does not fall away because of me” (Matt 11:6), he is giving the same advice as Krishna gave to Arjuna at the end of the Bhagavad Gita: "Thus I have explained to you knowledge still more confidential. Deliberate on this fully, and then do what you wish to do (BG 18.63)."

The onto-ontological interpretation of the teachings of Jesus indicates the extremely relativistic nature of the message of Christ. It also indicates how that these scriptures-far from being distinct from or superior to the teachings of other wisdom traditions-are actually in agreement with and shed a new light upon the sphere of Vishnu and the karmic relations between Brahma and Shiva.

an existentio-perennial interpretation of the resurrection

Even science agrees that the earth is doomed for destruction. The sun is going to explode a shock wave sometime in the next 5 billion years which will incinerate the earth--according to science our solar system is about half-way through its life cycle.

The perennial philosophy is a philosophy that takes as its dogma the idea that all religions inevitably lead to the same God. If this is so, I maintain that we should be able to derive a coherent understanding of the connections between religions that reveals the purpose and destiny of our lives. If we maintain that science is a religion then it is incumbent upon us to include science in such an understanding.

One of the challenges the perennial philosophy is currently facing is how to reconcile the Islamo-Christian teachings of the resurrection with the Asian philosophies of reincarnation. Using science, this thesis attempts such a reconciliation.

There have been any number of attempts to present the Christian teachings of the resurrection as teachings of reincarnation. It is well established among the traditional Christian community, however, that the teachings of the resurrection are not reincarnation teachings--they are teachings of the resurrection of the dead for final judgment.

I propose that both sides are correct. There is a way to understand many of the teachings of Jesus as reincarnation teachings. In another paper, I present the idea that the majority of the teachings of Jesus as pertains to "resurrection" can be understood in terms of a very general act of resurrection--terms which include in their logic both reincarnation (in the Asian sense) and resurrection (in the Islamo-Christian sense), as well as any sort of a transformation experience (baptism). It was primarily through the work of the Apostle Paul that the notion of the resurrection of the dead for final judgment became the dominant Christian discourse.

What is more important is to formalize a paradigm whereby we can conceive of the possibility that both the reincarnation scenario and the resurrection scenario can hold validity.

The Islamo-Christian tradition maintains that souls live one life and that at some point after that life is ended there is judgment. There are two problems with this approach. First of all, there is no logical reason to accept this conclusion unless we take the Bible or the Quran as the sole infallible sources of divine revelation and the final authorities for living the life of humans. The perennial philosophy necessarily takes this assumption to be false, and accepts no one source as infallible. Rather the perennialist maintains that all literature of the world's wisdom traditions hold some light inside of them which is shed on the divine, but not the sole light. The problem with accepting the Bible or the Quran as the final authority for life on earth is that it is impossible to come to one conclusion concerning how to interpret such complicated texts, and devotees of these traditions find themselves forced through emotional, cultural, and political developments to attempt the other's destruction. Accepting that war and the warrior are part of the human condition does not justify accepting an interpretive stance which cultivates aggression.

The second problem with the Islamo-Christian teaching of one life for one soul is that it leaves no opportunity either for the growth of the soul or the principles of the preservation of energy which rule physical matter. The Asian traditions understand the soul as an animating spark which transmigrates between various physical forms until it can escape the cycle of birth and death. This notion accepts an understanding of the principle of life, growth, and death (in short, the principle of transformation)--which is the most dominant principle on earth (and the universe). There is no reason to dismiss the notion of reincarnation unless we focus exclusively on the Islamo-Christian texts in which we arrive at the difficulty of how to conceive of the soul at all.

The problem is that the Islamic and Christian texts are very clear about a belief in the resurrection of the body toward final judgment. I accept this notion as valid since the energy mass of the physical body represents an imprint on the universe from the soul that does not just disappear with the erosion of the body. The body is remembered in the genetic and memetic codes of offspring, if nowhere else. Such a memory must necessarily form a connection between the soul and the body which persists after death. The soul is responsible for the body, and thus has a responsibility for the bodies in which it has transmigrated and the imprints which these bodies have made on physical and linguistic reality. If the soul attains Nirvana that is very well- the responsibility is cast aside and these connections are dissolved. But the majority of souls do not attain Nirvana.

Here is where the scientific understanding of the end of the earth proves to be most helpful. The Islamo-Christian traditions are concerned with the end of times, at which it is said the resurrection to judgment will occur. If we accept that such an end of time will come for earth at some point in the evolution of the sun from a main sequence star to a white dwarf sometime in the next 5 billion years then it is possible to make the Islamo-Christian texts commiserate with Asian religious philosophy. Because only those souls which attain Nirvana or some other form of escape from the reincarnation cycle are exempt from the rules of resurrection which govern life on earth and are described in religious texts of all flavors, the souls which do not attain such spiritual zeniths must necessarily be reincarnated in one form or another. Furthermore, due to the laws of the preservation of energy these souls will also at some time or another need to be faced with the realities of their connections to the physical bodies they have inhabited. The Earth is capable of storing the most significant imprints of such histories primarily through the transformation of mass from one energy form to another and the linguistic imprints which all life makes upon it's surroundings and fellow beings and leave as a heritage to its descendents. If the earth were to be incinerated, or damaged to the point that it could no longer sustain living mass or earthly language, it would be necessary for this mass to return to the jurisdiction of the individual soul and to inhabit some other physical space.

That the Islamo-Christian traditions always preface the final judgment with a fiery destruction of the Earth, it is not hard to accept that it is such a time as science prophecies which most readily describes such a future moment. But it is not just the one physical body which returns to the soul at this time, but rather some admixture of all of the physical bodies which that soul has inhabited. Thus Jesus says "At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven (Matt. 22:30)." I don't know what the angels in heaven are like, but if we think of heaven as space the angels could very well be stars, the people at the final judgment holding all of their bodies in themselves sounds like the type of huge mass formations that are the physical makeup of stars.

There are a number of positive consequences in approaching a commiseration of reincarnation and resurrection teachings. Foremost is a broadening of our understanding of life on earth and it's relationship to the universe. The notion is that the souls which are destined to go through final judgment at the end of time on Earth are not going to be either lost or rewarded in some ethereal and eternal heaven or hell. It makes more sense that the souls will be moved to other life-platforms, to continue their quest for enlightenment and reunification with the source. The idea of hell is therefore most sufficiently explained with the notion that those souls which have not maintained their responsibilities on earth in a coherent manner will be scattered and forced to live their lives once again--ie, "lost". But not eternally--only as a transmigrated life form moved to other platforms of existence. Heaven, or the "saved", is some new type of existence for the souls of those who are able to maintain their form in the resurrected space--perhaps these are now stars.

In order to conceptualize what I am saying it is important to move beyond the ethereal and ill-formed conceptions of heaven which stifle Christian doctrines. "The Kingdom of Heaven" is the universe--the huge collection of galaxies and stars and planets and life-platforms that exists outside of the atmosphere of Earth. Thus when Jesus says "The Kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21)," he means that feeling of the universe which we all have as part of the makeup of life in a system. The system is the universe, with it's gravities and lights and magnetisms. These stars and planets and galaxies are to be understood as living things--hugely powerful and of a different nature from ourselves, but restrained under the same principles of the resurrection (ie, both resurrection to judgment and reincarnation) as is life on earth. For these are the principles of life, and no life exists without these principles governing them.