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They All Reach the White Target
The True Purpose of Art™ is to create a shared space that we can all go to. That is, we live our lives separately, individually, cut off from one another into the various vessels of our bodies. And through that separation - one from another and God from all - we experience pain and loss and loneliness. Art is one of many in a series of corrective sequences granted to us by the Mercy of God™ to reunite us through the bonds of shared experience. We may not be able to feel what it is fully to exist within the body of another person, but through Art we have the ability to create a space simultaneously outside of and within all of our bodies where we can go all together and share the same bedrock experience.
Think of it like this: when you watch a movie in a crowded theatre, everyone sees the same movie. Everyone may see the movie in different ways based on their own perceptive powers and background experiences, but the point is everyone sees the same movie. Everyone has the shared experience which lays the foundation upon which they may reflect upon, confer, and disagree with their mates. You liked this movie because of all the fight scenes and jokes. Well, I thought they were stupid and contrived. But we now can both share the common experience of being humans and having sat through this movie and having had it trigger a response in us.
That’s Art.
Arguably, this is the purpose of what we commonly call “objective reality.” Out of all possible spiritual experiences open to us in the Many Dimensions and Rooms of God’s Mansion™, we have all agreed for some reason to affix ourselves to this one plane. Some of us are more securely moored than others, of course. And the variations in our perceptions are near infinite, but we’re all witnessing the same movie. It’s just that some of us are listening to different audio commentary tracks and watching alternate endings and deleted scenes.
I started reading Emanuel Swedenborg’s “Heaven and Hell” today, purchased for $3.00 at Epilogue Books in Ballard in a satisfying 1976 edition with a very sci-fi looking cover. The book opens with a quote from Helen Keller, who reveals that glimpsing Swedenborg’s vision gave her sight, “the light of which shall give me vision a thousand-fold when death sets me free.”
In chapter II, verse 7, Swedenborg explains very matter of factly:
The angels collectively are called heaven, since they make it up. But in the last analysis it is the Divine from the Lord, flowing into angels and accepted by them, that makes heaven overall and in every part. The Divine coming from the Lord is the good content of love and the true content of faith. There is a direct ratio between the amount people accept of what is good and what is true, and the extent to which they are angels, and are heaven.
Absolutely everyone in heaven knows and believes and actually perceives that he neither intends nor does anything good, nor thinks nor believes anything true on his own, but that his ability comes directly from the Divine, which means that it is from the Lord. He also sees that anything good or true from himself is not really good or true because it contains no life from the Lord. In fact, the angels of the inmost heaven see this clearly and feel the inflow. To the extent that they accept it, it seems to them that they are in heaven; for the measure of their acceptance is the measure of their intelligence and wisdom, and the measure of their resultant heavenly joy.
Johnny Appleseed, interestingly enough, was a Swedenborgian, bent on bringing this vision of Heaven to those living still upon this earth.
He procures what books he can of the New Church Swedenborg, travels into the remote settlements, and lends them wherever he can find readers, and sometimes divides a book into two or three parts for more extensive distribution and usefulness. This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches (two or three acres) of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries.
These become valuable as the settlements approximate, and the profits of the whole are intended for the purpose of enabling him to print all the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and distribute them through the western settlements of the United States.
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.
But at the same time as it is a “story” it is also descriptive of what is, of the ultimate source of reality, thereby making it a True Story. All stories are, of course, true. But some are more true than others. Some have better payoffs. Some have better rewards. Some transform you more than others. The Greeks knew this as the purpose of all drama (of which the Christ story is an exceptionally good example), and called it catharsis, “a sudden emotional breakdown or climax that constitutes overwhelming feelings of great sorrow, pity, laughter or any extreme change in emotion that results in the restoration, renewal and revitalization for living.”
This then too is the true purpose of the Crucifixion, of the Death Star being blown up, of Bill Pullman flying that plane straight into the UFO in Independence Day. The point is to pull you through infinity into a parallel dimension where Love and Grace are not withheld but are revealed vigorously as the true underlying substratum behind all things which appear in this falsely faceted World of Forms™.
So why not just worship Independence Day or Star Wars? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the point is simply the worship, the rejoicing, the ritual reenactment of the stories our hearts tell about the universe and about God and our return to him. But how do you return to him? How do you turn and accept the Source of Reality and become as one of Swedenborg’s angels in heaven, through whom all good things flow to us as intercessors?
It’s simple really; you just ask. Ask and it shall be given unto you. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and it shall be opened unto you. You make a decision. You make a commitment. And the difference between a simple decision and the complexity of a commitment is that in the latter you recognize that a decision isn’t good enough to get you through to the end. A decision is changeable based upon the favorability of outward circumstances, hence we have good decisions and bad decisions, wise decisions and ones that seem stupid in the Eyes of Time™. A commitment, though, is dedicating your inmost heart to the endless course corrections required of you by God to ensure that your decision to return to the Love of His Oneness, Truth and Reality™ is carried out even when it seems like it’s stupid. Even when it seems like it’s dangerous. Even when the pain of doing so threatens to strip away everything you clinged to for so long as being somehow representative of your “self.” The extent to which you are in Heaven depends directly upon your willingness to accept that you that you have jumped into this parallel dimension. Heaven is made up of nothing but angels who have individually committed themselves to this one story, this one story of God’s unending love for all things and for all beings, no matter how hard it is. Come along one and all and let’s go make that story our lives. It’s waiting there for us, all around us. The Kingdom of Heaven is all around you. Do you see it? I see you. I am waving to you. I am waiting here for you. I love you. I always have. My love is the source of all things. Come home.
June 10th, 2007 at 7:32 am
I’m not sure how much of this I should take literally. Are you implying that we cannot activate Jesus-mode without acting out his story?
Don’t you think the X story is always being acted out, by everyone everywhere, on all levels? I see Jesus essentially as the perfect mirror cum scapegoat, untouchable yet taking the violent brunt of all surrounding ignorance. And that is a universal human (egoic) theme, since we are all mirrors.
I agree with you about the cathartic value of art and the bonding experiences of shared ritual. But I do not yet see how acting out the Jesus myth is any different from our daily interactions with other egos. For me, the thing that allows you to enter that bizarro world of grace and purity, is ruthless honesty and self-awareness (i.e. ego transcendence, clear vision), which gives birth to Love.
I hope you can correct me if I misunderstandimate your position. I really enjoy your “treatment” of Jesus.
June 10th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
“Male”, “Solar”, “Vertical”, “Esoteric”, “|”
“Female”, “Lunar”, “Horizontal”, “Exoteric”, “-”
Cross +, the sign for addition(and askew, multiplication)
The eye inside us looks vertically, “esoterically” down, as into a well. Only at the indeterminate (and thus both “active” and “still”) point of intersection do we find the spring of the fountain that fills the well.
“The one thing needful” so often referred to in Christian mysticism could also be called the one thing crucial, meaning “cross”, derived from Latin crucis or French crux.
“I am crucified with Christ: neverthless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” Gal. 2:20
“Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations, but now is made manifest to his saints: To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” Col 1 26-27
Can we allow ourselves to be crucified on the metaphysical cross, which is no metaphor or poetic language, but the very real intersection of Heaven and Earth?
In the crucifixtion (”fixed to the cross”) story, when the sky went black, the lance pierces Christ’s side and blood and water come out, rose of Sharon and lily of the valley (Sol. 2:1), red and white elixirs, sun and moon, male and female.
Yes!
Jesus is the body for the Christ XPISTOS, which at all times bears the immense suffering of the world, the indestructible vajra.
“I say our crude Sperm flows from a Trinity of Substances in one Essence, of which two are extracted out of the earth of their Nativity by the third, and then become a milky Virgin-like Nature, drawn fro the Menstruum of our sordid Whore.” - Eirenaeus Philalethes
He calls the subject “our Whore” because in its passivity and compliance, it allows us to treat it however we wish, never resisting. The subject is only “whorish” in relation to external things, in reality, it is “virginal” and untouchable by physical things, indestructible, immortal, and triumphal.
“The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone” Ps. 118:22
June 10th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
“A humanitaria God cannot be demonstrated from the world that is knwn to us: so much are ye driven and forced to conclude to-day. But what consideration do ye draw from this? “He cannot be demonstrated to us“: the scepticism of knowledge. You all fear the conclusion: “From the world that is known to us quite a different God would be demonstrable,such a one as would certianly not be humanitarian”-and, in a word, you cling fast to your God, and invent a world for Him which is unknown to us
Nietzsche “The Will to Power”
June 10th, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Interesting, p. Although I didn’t mean “cum” in a seminal sense. Wait, yes I did. Wow. It goes both ways!
Timbo, I think I have my answer.
June 10th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
well said, tim. that’s it. though it doesn’t matter if it’s the jesus story. what matters is the devotion–going whole hog, plus the postage.
as for art…there’s an art that elevates and cleanses, reawakens the higher self and unifies the individual and the community through an ineffable and pure connection. then, there’s an art that debases and brings those experiencing it low, to dwell in their worst natures. but at a certain level of understanding (not intellectual “understanding,” but “whole being understanding”), there’s no difference between the two and that art that would debase others still results in divine elevation on account of the nature of the one experiencing it.
glad you mentioned johnny appleseed…his commitment to the Swedenbourgian vision of Christianity is one of those gems of history you never hear about in public school for various reasons.
Ted–devote yourself to your Isht-deva: whole hog, plus the postage! Nietzsche’s a good provisional one; perhaps not recommended for the long haul, though. Conan the Conqueror might be better. Or the Old Man of the Mountain.
June 11th, 2007 at 2:48 am
You probably don’t see it because you havent actually tried it on as a costume
Or have you? That is the Christ story in a nutshell.
June 11th, 2007 at 3:42 am
Nice. I will read this a few times, I think. Your definition of Art fits with something I’ve been pondering for a while that I had not been thinking about as Art. The people watching the movie do not necessarily have to communicate with each other to share the experience. This seems very different to the modern ‘internet’ definition of ’sharing’.
One thing about the story of the Gospels: I think they represent a bigger Story above and beyond, one which has been and is played out in different ways throughout history. Think of all the prophecy before the Gospels were written: there’s pre-echoes of the Story to be found there. Which means there’s post-echoes of the Story to be found everywhere right now. It’ll wax and wane, but presumably never go away.
p - awesome.
Ted - Demiurge-tastic, mate!
June 11th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Art you say? Here are some thoughts from my own private (you can have him, too) non-guru:
And this one is just for Tim:
June 11th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Oooo, how could i forget?
“In the staircase of life, Art is the only step that doesn’t creak.”
December 5th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
[…] Through the course of his many travels, the wandering {see also: ramblin’} Fool becomes wise in the ways of the world. Living amongst many tribes of men, he learns their language and customs in order to survive, and eventually becomes their friend. Through shared moments of ease and jest, he learns their songs, jokes, local traditions - what’s important to them. He empathizes with and understands his fellows, and trades tales of his own homeland and songs of his youth. In the sharing of this most simple of human fellowship, people bond and are “bound” together: they become headed for the same place, pointing all at the same target somewhere betwixt the heart and mind. […]