![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Why the Bible is Magic
I know I have been beating around the bush a lot for the past few months. I admit that I get kind of a kick out of being opaque and puzzling. Part of it’s definitely sort of a self-protective thing or a privacy-layer I’ve grafted on top of my writing to protect myself psychically from random ass strangers making comments which wound me emotionally on a daily basis. And a part of it really is and truly intended to bump people’s consciousness out of its ordinary ruts into some other cooler special ruts. I also just kind of am a sadistic writer too, I guess. I like to “Lord it over people” - which is probably why the Jesus story appeals to me so much.
In place of the word “story” I was originally going to say “myth” to try and sound Joseph Campbell-ish. And then I was gonna say “musical” instead of that, but I realize a lot of people don’t still understand what the hell I probably mean when I say that stuff about Jesus being a musical. Well, think of it like this: think of a really good episode of Star Trek or Buffy or [Insert Popular But Totally Nerdy TV Show] and then imagine that it became so popular that people only told THAT story for like two thousand years. But imagine it’s such a good story that it really is worth telling for that long - and maybe longer.
That’s kind of the beginning of what I mean when I say the Jesus musical.
But actually that’s just me setting up artificial layers again between us. I have an even simpler explanation than that: Jesus Christ Superstar. I just watched the beginning of it again. Not only is it really awesome, getting really into it over these past few months has really enabled me to crystallize what I think is an understanding of the Bible that is mostly lost today but which is actually really awesome, and doesn’t even necessarily need to be “religious” - although just what that really means is it’s totally own thing.
In the beginning of Superstar they show the bus drive up full of cast members dressed in regular clothes. Strapped to the top are a bunch of props and on a quick close-up we see a cross. They all pour out and start trying on costumes and dancing around and getting ready until the movie seamlessly transitions into the actual musical performance. It’s sort of like they intentionally make the back-stage preparatory part a part of the show.
Why? Because the point of the Bible, or at least of the Gospels in particular (as I have not tried out the rest as thoroughly): is that they are supposed to be acted out. They are a piece of dramatic writing. It’s like Shakespeare. Yeah you can sit and read it quietly to yourself and that’s cool. But it’s SUPPOSED to be put up on stage and acted out with costumes and the whole nine yards. With the Bible though I think YOU are supposed to be the actors.
I don’t just think it, I actually know it. Because I have had extremely dramatic changes in my life occur from taking this exact course. I tried grasping all this stuff intellectually for years and that laid a strong foundation, sure. But it never blasted me off the planet into arms of a warm and deeply Loving God who was welcoming me home while we both wept in the presence of Grace and Eternity. I mean, that and all the drugs of course.
You’ll know you’ve done enough drugs when everything in the world to you can or does become beautiful. You’ll know you’ve done more than enough when that stops happening. That means you’re supposed to stop for a while and integrate it. Let your mind and your heart and your senses adjust to that much Love and that much Beauty poring in on you at all times. Then you can go back for more later if you feel like it.
But this isn’t really about drugs. Actually it’s about the drug of language. But not just language though. It’s actually what I mean when I use the fancy neologism “noographics.” I guess it’s at once existing fractally on all levels. Or some shit. Let me try again. It fully utilizes your senses, but you also know it’s not fully real. But it’s not just virtual reality because it also exists literally as a structure within your own mind as well. But “symbolic language” is a much simpler appelation for right now. So let’s stick with that. But do remind me at some point to come back and talk about how symbols aren’t supposed to be interpreted. Interpretation of symbols is - actually wait, let’s just talk about this now…
Interpretation of symbols is just the way that your linear rational editor.ai mind which I have talked about naturally interacts with symbols. But there are lots of other ways to interact with them as well. Your body can interact with them by trying to mimic their shapes, or by dancing out the energy frequencies which they signify. You can also hear them as music or see them as paintings, etc. And you can also act directly on them as symbolic code editing sequence thingies.
Actually I’m getting opaque again, aren’t I? Sorry. Didn’t mean to. It’s simply my attempts to forge some new linguistic tools for us to talk about these things with as we all experience them on new and higher levels - as we all seem to be rapidly doing. Everyone is getting in on this shit lately. Have you noticed? The world is changing fucking quick.
The point I’m still trying to make - in the midst of this neologizing and theologizing - is that you’re supposed to act these stories out. You’r supposed to play Jesus’ part. You’re supposed to play Judas, Mary, Peter, Pilate, etc. From the inside out is really the best way. Maybe that’s what I mean by “noographic” - multi-level immersive virtual reality in which you play every viewpoint within a hyper-linked holographic symbolic code sequence.
Fuck. Getting opaque again. Let’s start over. The way I got started down this path was that I decided to read the Four Gospels. Aloud. I don’t even remember why I wanted to do that, but I did. And I had a King James Version on hand because that’s the one with all the best language. Like Shakespeare. It begs to be read aloud and in a firm voice, dramatically. So that’s what I did for however long it took me. A week or so.
During that time period I noticed an extreme ramping up of synchronicities in my life which directly correlated to what I was reading aloud that day or that afternoon in the Bible. I have always had these types of odd moments crop up in my life, but these seemed to suddenly reach a fever pitch. And I gradually realized that it was because I was not just reading a story, but I was living it. I was making the story come to life and by doing that, the story in turn was making certain parts of me come to life.
And over time those parts of me turned out to be very receptive to what I can only describe as experiences of overwhelming Joy and of God’s Love and Presence, not just within my life but within my heart. A real physical Presence. A voice even. One that sounds like me, but utterly wise and good and kind and patient and understanding.
If you like you could call it a higher self, an oversoul, Holy Guardian Angel, future self, whatever. But like I said, beginning to act out the Gospel stories cracked open all these parts of myself which were basically symbol receptors laid into the bedrock of my subconscious mind through years of programming by the Catholic Church. I know most people groan and reach for a weapon when they hear about the Catholic Church, but I really get it now. Not the hierarchy necessarily, but the symbols. The symbols are fucking awesome. They did well to preserve and perpetuate that stuff, I think. It’s totally potent stuff. It’s a drug and it can be used to navigate your mind’s inner recesses as surely and reliably as any physical substance - maybe even moreso if you really get down to it. But let’s remember that drugs and religion both point to the same thing: God, the source of all reality.
But like I said, I have these certain symbol receptors that were just waiting to be activated. And they were patterned in with Catholic language songs, ritual and symbolic imagery. So no wonder my life exploded when I started pouring the proper kind of fuel into them. And the proper kind of fuel, folks, is very obvious and simple. You all already know all the ingredients. They are the things all people truly love, the creative things: singing, dancing, speaking, performing, acting out, painting, drawing, etc. The point is that you activate interest in it not just on an intellectual level (a problem I see tremendously plaguing spiritual discussion on the internet, which I know I have only added to over the years) but you get your body involved, your senses, and your heart. Your heart is the most important one. At least for the Jesus myth-story-musical thingamawhatzit. Cause it’s the one that turns it from being something you are just acting out into something that actually exists concretely.
I think this is the point the majority of New Agers (does that term still even apply anymore?) miss when they talk about shit like “creative visualization.” I mean you can sit there with your eyes closed for fucking hours HOURS visualizing all kinds of cool stuff you would like to have happen. But the universe doesn’t respond to idle passive visualization. It only replies to dancing and screaming and singing and stuff. It wants to know you’re really goddamned excited before it grants you any of your wishes. Because that’s what the universe essentially is: a wish-granting computer, the struggle of whose entire existence is to somehow parse all these conflicting sets of commands you are constantly giving it into something that sort of matches what it thinks you must really mean.
Don’t think for a second that the universe knows what the hell you’re talking about in your life. It’s just a computer whose algorithms try to match the trajectory of your perceived expectations. This is all magic is people: learning how to tell the universe much more clearly and consistently what it is you really want. If you can just do that you won’t need spells or sorcery or Magic the Gathering or whatever the hell people use to do this kind of shit these days.
I personally like the Bible because it’s a system of magic - of more clearly and consistently telling the universe what you really dig and having it respond - that is totally tried and true. Some teenager didn’t invent it while masturbating to comic books in his mom’s basement. It’s fucking tradition. It’s history. It’s beauty. It’s poetry. And that’s the thing to remember with all this stuff: religion is *only* poetry that people find to be so beautiful and moving that they decide to live their life according to it.
Most people don’t give two shits about poetry today though, I know. So instead if you’re a heathen like me you can say “movie” or “YouTube” clip or something instead of poetry. Same difference. It’s just an expression of a particular moment of beauty that someone didn’t want to let go of.
So they hung on.
For thousands of years and gave it to their children and their children’s children.
Simply because they thought it was so beautiful.
People make religion nowadays into this big awful nasty sinister thing created merely to oppress and destroy and squash the human spirit. But almost nobody talks about how it is first and foremost an expression of JOY of the BEAUTY and COMPLEXITY of the human condition.
Because goddamn! Are we ever complicated and screwy! I mean, I don’t know if you’ve been looking around much (or at yourself) but shit. This stuff’s pretty hard to figure it out. May as well find things that are beautiful and meaningful to you if you can’t find some kind of final absolute answer, right? I mean, it’s either that or unending existential dread. But even that is a reflection of a kind of beauty. The beauty of melancholy, of being forlorn and dejected and of late night panic attacks and drug binges.
But that shit gets old. The point I have reached in my life is that I want to be a part of the joyful exaltation of all creation. I mean, that sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Joyful exaltation over existential angst and being a whiny bitch forever? Don’t get me wrong: joy isn’t easy. It’s not always happy either. But it is a kind of fullness. A fullness of the experience of life, of the experience of how beautiful and strange and strong and moving everything is.
For people who don’t like feeling moved or challenged by raw beauty in its pure forms, then the Bible may not be for you. But I still recommend just dabbling with it creatively. Don’t try to understand it intellectually. Understand it dancing in it, by speaking it out loud, by literally performing the whole thing as a musical where each of your friends plays a different part. Do this earnestly and commit everything you have to performing that role, if only for a little while, and you might begin to understand what the miracle of Transubstantiation is really all about.
Oh, and PS. Don’t get hung up on if your character performs Jesus a little differently than somebody else. Why do you think they have four different Gospels written by four different (supposed) authors in the Bible along with those dozens of heretical “gnostic” versions? It’s because it’s all good. Open-source, bitches! You own the code. It’s your life. There’s room to play. It’s a party, fer chrissakes!
[Hey, look at me! I didn’t even post a single YouTube video or picture that doesn’t fit into the writing. Aren’t you proud of me?]
June 7th, 2007 at 2:11 am
I forgot to also include some other relevant connections if you want to really “intellectually” grasp this thing about the Bible being meant as a performance.
Find yourself some street performers, clowns, mimes, jugglers, people with a bit of a dramatic flair to their act somehow.
Then watch The Last Temptation of Christ, particularly the scene where they are in the market place and all the different preachers stand up on columns and yell. I guess they are prophets or something but they are essentially old school versions of modern street performers.
Also find yourself the Godspell movie, which also expertly connects the street performance aspect to the Jesus story.
Lastly, look into Mystery and Passion plays from the Medieval era. In them, you’d have entire villages and towns acting out every year the stories from the Bible.
And lastly, the Liturgical calendar in which holidays repeat at fixed intervals through the year is supposed to enable you to keep in mind long term scenes in the musical so you can use them to frame your individual reenactments of the story at home and in your own heart and mind.
June 7th, 2007 at 2:12 am
Oh and Fundamentalism is just the same thing as nerds arguing over who makes the best Star Trek captain and why. Same shit exactly. Except with like countries and bombs instead of glasses and pimples. It’s just nerdy fan-forum flame wars that get spilled over into the real world.
June 7th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
From the previous thread:
The connections made can also be seen as undistinctions: we decide a particular connection is valid the principle underlying it manifests in consciousness. In this model (illustrated in Plato’s Meno) learning is recollection, the remembrance of continually deeper principles, culminating in the Unity, the cause of realization’s realization of itself.
There has been sometime in our history a semantic collapse of the words “intellect”, “reason”, “rationality”, and so forth, they are now colloquially used as synonyms for “logical reasoning”, by which we mean the manipulation of sentential forms until we arrive at a social equilibrium of acceptability. We pretend that by manipulating logical forms, we are “doing logic”, but in doing so, we have have ceded our own role in the process to robotic automation. Just because the program is being run on a human substrate instead of silicon doesn’t make it any less a program.
Not so long ago, the Intellect (spirit, nous, ruach, forgive me for conflating these, it’s not quite proper but they are related) had a much more prominent role in our worldview. Without the spirit (which is one) inhabiting things, they could not be coherent, we could not realize the parallels between one thing and another thing, not even the parallel of ‘being a distinct thing’. In fact, there would be no ‘things’ at all, but this is harder to see.
The Intellect wanders up and down, exploring the ramifications of this or that, and we experience this as time passing. You could not distinguish one moment from the next without observing both the commonality and difference in two temporal reference points. The Intellect’s ceaseless action of comparison (ratio, root of rationality) this or that, up or down, black or white, produces our experienced world.
In self-induced schizophrenia (or whatever you wanna call it) the Intellect gets itself free and wanders further than it was comfortable with before, whatever pressures held it in a tighter orbit before are no longer present. We see correlations (or indistinctions) that seem quite meaningful, but do not correspond to any rule that is accepted by our culture. The problem is, we start to feel that these correlations are just as valid as any other conclusions we have ever drawn and we cannot find anything fundamental to distinguish between socially accepted rules and endogenous schizo rules! (Rock album review from the future: ‘Endogenous Schizo’ rules!)
The Intellect is beginning to turn its gaze onto itself. It begins to see that it is the source of all laws, proportions, measures, correlations, order. The world is bounded by it. This doesn’t necessarily mean it is acting in an unconditioned way, it cannot be other than what it is and what it is imposes a certain characteristic on its action. There are no discontinuities in Nature, even if the formal idea of Unity is held, the realization of it in itself is a long way from our (my, at least) apparent present circumstances. But it is still “closer than your jugular vein”, literally.
The distinctions are seen as nothing, the objects defined by distinction are nothing, the world of distinction is nothingness. the One Thing that is the principle, foundation, and radical of all things replaces the multiple distinctions. The world isn’t insane anymore, it’s Rational. It is exactly as it must be to avoid self-contradiction, we are in the “best of all possible worlds.”
(in the above, I have conflated man’s nous with the primary, singular Nous of name “God”. This is tricky, I don’t want to tell any more lies than I already have: our own nous is like a chink of light coming through the ceiling, or a wave on the ocean, it is not separate from its superior but cannot be justifiably conflated with it.)
So traditional symbols have survived so long because they present the most drama, the strongest images that cause our brains to recall what is. I like to think of deep symbols as being the real fundamental components, the assembly language of my mind, because their effectiveness in remembrance. They represent, in different ways, along different trajectories, that which makes poetry poetry instead of just words. If a word is captured and pinned down, we see it’s completely empty, words only live when your life is in them.
June 7th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
I think you being opaque just holds my attention more and has the unintended consequence of making me really morbidly curious about all your personal drama.
I feel like I am solving a puzzle but all I end up finding out are details of your relationship problems. Makes me feel nosy.
Then I feel like I am intruding on you, reading your diary or somthing. Then I feel like there is nothing I can say that seems appropriate, nothing I could do to help.
Its kind of weird. I wrote three comments to you, different days that I ended up erasing. I almost erased this one.
Strange thing isn’t it?
About acting out the Bible, do you think it would work with other storied and characters? I don’t really like Jesus.
June 7th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
See what I mean?
What a stupid comment.
But anyway, I’m not into the Bible but I like the idea of living on the basis of joy as opposed to cynicism and angst. I find joy in the natural world.
I really liked your post about Fairies, that would be cool if you would write more about them now that you aren’t as cynical. I was really tracking on what you were saying that time.
June 7th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
Yeah that’s so funny about the internet: how much time you spend waffling over “should i or shouldnt i really say any of this shit? i mean how well do i really even know this person?”
its funny how it all plays out. some days its like, oh cool these random weirdos actually care about and understand my life. and other days its just like what the fucking hell am i doing here?
It depends what you mean by “work.” If you act out the Rambo fantasy it will almost definitely “work” but where will that take you? Thats the thing to look at if you’re going to act out a story: where will it take you?
Mine takes me to some sort of self-sacrifice that noone really seems to get. Do you consider that working? The thing to decide is what are you working for. Two or three days ago I saw someone had scribbled into the dirt on a big white box truck:
“Who do you serve?”
I only just realized now the connection between that and the classical “Whom does the Grail serve?” question. Looks like I need to study that mystery more closely with my heart.
June 7th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Maybe I will act out Moses living in the wilderness for 40 years…
June 7th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Tim,
Let me reword what I said. I only know you through the internet, but I care about your life. I get concerned about you and want to help but don’t know what to say or do. It all comes out wrong.
So really “morbidly curious” is a really dick head thing to say. The fact is I can relate to a lot of your things you go through and I have trouble dealing with them myself. You probabaly are dealing better with them in a lot of ways, but I still feel compelled to help somehow.
But anyway, I don’t want to be Rambo. I would setle for being some type of shaman living out in the woods alone most of the time but occasionally being able to help people.
June 7th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Yeah no, I totally get what you’re saying. It’s actually really cool to have weird random people who care. I mean I’m putting it all out there, it’s so people can respond. It allows me to understand myself through the lens of the parts of me that other people share and can relate to. It’s a really weird experience to explain how it feels to me. It’s both rewarding and frustrating and weird and fantastic all at the same time. Which is to say that its exactly like life, I guess. So that makes it at least honest or authentic or something.
I guess the real challenge here, just like in “normal life,” is to edit properly: to figure out what I really want to allow in and what I don’t and how to steer myself and the people I care about safely around those hazards. It’s none too easy to figure out, but hey that’s the challenge of living itself I guess.
June 7th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
I only drop in here occasionally…Take that as a complement, since sometimes your oeuvre seems like the whole melting ball of wax. Anyway, I liked this one (and admittedly, partly because the lack of imagery appeals to my stoic heart)…If I were to toss an alternate title your way, it may be “the memetics of the messiah.” Been thinking about that a bit lately, but you’ve given it new vigor. I appeciate it…
June 7th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
Glad, I could be a weird random person in order to reflect you back to yourself. ;-p
It is a little narcissitic on your part don’t you think?
As well as voyeuristic on our part. But still, its not totally phony….
June 7th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Yeah its not phony to admit that we’re all narcissistic and voyeurs at the same time. It’s sort of important to reconcile all that shit in order to be honest with who we are.
June 7th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Shit, you people are too nice. Thank you JP for yet another wonderful contribution.
June 8th, 2007 at 12:35 am
This has been bugging me too. I feel the same way, and I hate feeling helpless when it comes to other people. It makes me just angry. But at the same time, this has also been bugging me:
My own self-centeredness resents yours, if that makes any sense.
Anyway it’s all good. It’s interesting that this comes up under this post actually, because what it is is that very excitement and passion and the living of the story that really, everyone else wants to be living, despite the painful parts, because it’s very apparent that you are LIVING it. You are giving yourself totally to something, to this story, or whatever, and that makes YOUR story compelling and impossible to take one’s mind off of. I mean what the hell, something’s up when all the symbols in my dream are not only speaking to me, or about me, but speaking to you, or about YOU, or trying to get me to pass messages on to you. And I know I’m not the only one. I find that very phenomenon as fascinating as anything, your ability to have all these people under the spell of your story, and contributing to it and wanting to be a part of it. It bothers me, personally, but it is quite a feat on your part.
June 8th, 2007 at 12:38 am
That, and for all your self-centeredness (no different than saying ‘humanness’, because we’re all hopelessly self-centered), you’re a cool dude and a real, earnest, decent person, and there’s that damn sisterly love thing I can’t shake.
June 8th, 2007 at 2:18 am
Well shucks. I am going to sleep. It’s been quite a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime.
June 8th, 2007 at 4:11 am
I sang in Handel’s Messiah once. One of the soloists took ill somewhere towards the middle. But by the Resurrection scenes towards the end she was back! In context it was totally trippy and fekkin’ scary to boot. And then there was Walton’s ‘Belshazzar’s Feast’, which to this day is still dripping out my ears. If peak oil scares you, try living through the fall of Babylon. Fuk.
(This is such good shit here, btw, if I haven’t mentioned that recently.)
These visions that one has… I think maybe they’re like vistas on a journey, glimpses of the whole valley, pointers to greater things. If one gets caught up with one of them it can eat your head. It took me years to get over that crazy-ass five-colours-dragon thing I spewed up yesterday. Though there’s truth in it.
My thinking goes like this right now.
There are magic words. Words that exist prior to the things that are them. When things be words they gain… something. So when the Bread bes the Body and the Wine bes the Blood, something magical is happening. It’s not the verb ‘be’ in its conventional sense. Which is unfortunate. The word ‘be’ has got messed up and forgotten somewhere along the line.
Indeed, ‘The symbols are fucking awesome.’ But it’s not as symple as symbols standing for things. Things can stand for, be, symbols too.
June 8th, 2007 at 4:17 am
Do you know this?
http://www.mikescottwaterboys.com/mike...twaterboys/Lyrics/song.asp?idsong=124
June 8th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Excellent point and very difficult to put into words. I will try to write about some of my experiences with this later, especially as they relate to “magic”
June 8th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
This was great.
Thank you!
And you know my mom, Liesl. And I feel like we should be properly introduced.
June 9th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Who indeed…
Chains are breaking
Minds are waking
Soon we’ll serve no more…
June 10th, 2007 at 3:16 am
[…] Where Jesus talked about his kingdom not being of this earth, I am beginning to understand what he is talking about. His kingdom, “Heaven,” exists noographically at right angles to our dimension. It is everywhere and nowhere. It is spread out before you, but men do not see it. Why is that? It’s because the only way to enter into the Truth of Heaven™ is through the story of Christ. Those who have never heard this story, the Good News, cannot be saved. It’s not an indictment of world religions. It’s more like saying that if you haven’t watched Star Wars, then you won’t be able to experience the Death Star blowing up. It’s actually exactly like that. Jesus throwing down the Gates of Hell is the same thing as the Death Star being destroyed. It’s an invisible act which can only occur for you in your life if you actively enter into that story. […]
June 11th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
I just returned from a trip to Israel; I visited the “holy sites” where Jesus walked on water, performed miracles, etc. After reading this post, I just had to tell you, my group of “spiritual peace activists” had an amazing experience in the Garden of Gethsemene: We kneeled around the rock where Jesus prayed the night before his crucifixion, while our group organizer sang the song from “Jesus Christ Superstar” at full volume. You should have seen the look on tourists faces, and the face of the Franciscan monk who resides there! It was pure art. The best performance I’ve seen in a long time. Wish you could have been there, you would have really appreciated it…
June 19th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
[…] And this: “During that time period I noticed an extreme ramping up of synchronicities in my life which directly correlated to what I was reading aloud that day or that afternoon in the Bible. I have always had these types of odd moments crop up in my life, but these seemed to suddenly reach a fever pitch. And I gradually realized that it was because I was not just reading a story, but I was living it. I was making the story come to life and by doing that, the story in turn was making certain parts of me come to life.” […]