Such a shock! I think of all the memories I have from 41 years of seminars at Four Springs. I think of how much symbolism there was in the lodge. I think of things that can't be replaced (art and the like) that Guild members donated over the years. I think of how much the loss of the lodge impacts the use of Four Springs for numerous groups, most of which will probably have to find alternate accomodations. And I look forward to a new lodge rising on the ashes of the old like a Phoenix.
I reflect on the fact that I have had decades of difficulty with my jaw, which has from time to time kept me from being able to open my mouth very far or being able to chew. Hmm. I have silenced myself a great deal. what is next? how to speak ...
The question has been posed, regarding the Basic Records seminar, “Is there still life in those old bones, and should we care? – A discussion on the study of the historical Jesus.”
Bones are the most mineralized part of the human being, and thereby the closest to death, which is why the skull and cross bones are used as a symbol of death. If our focus is “old bones,” does it reveal a lack of life in our thinking, which needs to be living if it is to have any relevance to Truth?
Science views the human being through anatomy and physiology basically as a solid, physical entity – and ultimately as a corpse. Despite vast advances in this realm, we still cannot claim to understand life, let alone something as intangible as soul, psyche, the unconscious, or spirit. Given that most of us would consider our being as having more reality and significance than a corpse, how can we extend this experience of reality to our field of inquiry?
In the Buddhist teaching story, where four blind monks each examines only a small part of an elephant, and each one thinks that his particular part is a description of the whole, we can see how misguided the results would be.
I have never taken the Basic Records seminar, so I am a relative outsider to this discussion. I realize that my questions and frame of reference may not be the same as the founders of the seminar, but my hope is that this perspective may allow new insights to emerge. Since first hearing about the seminar several years ago, I was intrigued about its nature. What is the mindset that decides a priori to limit our questioning about the being of Jesus to an historical context? Why do we assume that restricting our view to historical facts could possibly give us a complete picture of anything (although maybe that wasn’t the goal)?
I am reminded of Einstein’s famous sayings: “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.” "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."
Is the “historical Jesus” what humanity needs today? The fact that the question about old bones has been posed suggests not. If we truly want to understand Jesus, we have to expand our arc of inquiry and look beyond the merely historical. Historical contexts can add to our understanding but never be the totality of it, just as going back to original languages can correct misinterpreted translations, but original meanings still need to be understood on a deeper level. It is only when we are willing to expand our world-view to include higher realms that we can expect to glimpse the Big Picture. This does not mean taking on unexamined the dogmas of various religions, but it does mean opening to the realm of the spiritual through spiritual research. Such a spiritual perspective can give context and significance to the historical. Even Einstein recognized, "There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap."
In a story of Nasrudin, he drops his keys one night and is looking for them under the streetlight. When a passer-by stops to help him, he asks Nasrudin where he dropped his keys. Nasrudin replies that he dropped them “over there,” but decided to look under the streetlight, since there was more light!
By looking to the material realm of history, where there is “more light,” are we succumbing to the materialistic tendency of our time, even in our pursuit of soul/spiritual questions? Our distancing ourselves from the spiritual and diving into a materialistic view of the world has been a necessary step in the evolution of humanity, even as the child eventually has to leave his parents to find himself. But we are entering another phase now. It is interesting that Elizabeth Howes apparently felt compelled to add Jung’s insights about the reality and nature of the unconscious to Sharmon’s Records. Perhaps she sensed the dangers of narrowing the focus too much.
It has been said that God created man in His image - and then man returned the favor. When we limit our view of Jesus to our preconceived notions of what his reality could have been, do we find out more about Jesus - or about ourselves? Where does the Christ come into the picture? Would Jesus of Nazareth even have significance if it weren’t for the Christ event? And what is the significance of Christ for us – as opposed to the historical Jesus?
Rudolf Steiner made a poignant observation in the early part of the 20th century, which seems even truer today. “It is becoming increasingly clear that for the [Christian] religious faiths of the present, the Mystery of Golgotha [Christ’s Death and Resurrection] is greatly decreasing in significance. They see no value in understanding that event with the consciousness of this age; they see value only in continuing to spread and propagate their teachings. However, these teachings are losing the ability to grasp the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. Moreover, the result is that we now have a new and strange kind of theology in the world, one in which people no longer speak of the Christ, but only about Jesus, the man of Nazareth – the ‘simple man’ who wandered about in Palestine like a kind of Socrates. As a result, people cannot understand why the few who do still speak of the Christ see him as the pivotal point in the entire development of humanity.”
Alchemy speaks of the “second birth” of the spiritual embryo, the “I” being or True Self, which is brought to term by the conscious working of the student, through what in many traditions is referred to as mystery training. As we come to know ourselves and go through our own process of individuation, our challenge in this time is to rediscover the spiritual out of our full consciousness, no longer restricted to dream-life or the unconscious, and reconnect with it out of our free will. Ultimately, this can be seen as our work here on earth.
If the Basic Records seminar is losing interest and relevance, I would suggest that is because another level has now been reached. To address the needs of present day participants, we need to open to this next level, the spiritual aspect that seeks to make itself felt through all things in the world, and most especially through the cosmic significance of the deed of Christ, which must come to be understood anew in each age. Only though a spiritual understanding of the Cosmic Christ will we begin to grasp the historical significance of Jesus Christ.
Even as in our work together we strive to connect with soul or psyche, and in alchemy, to dialogue with the beings who stand behind nature as archetypes, I feel we are now being called to bring this same openness of consciousness to bear on how we approach the question of Jesus – and perhaps even to reframe the question from “an historical and literary critical approach.” Let’s let Jesus out of the box.
I'm looking forward to this event as well. It and "Is There Life in These Old Bones?" are complementary, dealing with the future of God concepts/images and the Records respectively.
The title contains an interesting distinction between any given "God" and "theism." The death of "God" was proclaimed by some many years ago, and the "rehabilitation" of God has been a going concern in some theological quarters ever since. That is, for some, theism (the concept of some sort of supreme or superior entity) has remained alive and has enabled the creation of new God-images--even though the "God" of liberation theology, process theology, or nature theology would probably not have been recognizable to traditional theists.
The step "beyond theism"--beyond personification, anthropomorphic images, privileged entities--can be a difficult one. Indeed I know "God" (in a psychologically sophisticated form) remains a living image for many of us. We are fortunate in having the psychological, mythological, and poetic/imaginative resources of Richard Naegle and Clare Morris available to us for this exploration.
The Records of the Life of Jesus study represents a heroically _modern_ project. First, around the beginning of the 20th century, the application of critical (scientific) principles to determine the most authentic text, to which Sharman added the remarkably effective Socratic dialog method. Around the middle of the last century came a vital extension--thanks to Elizabeth Howes, and the work of many other Guild leaders--the engagement of depth psychology and the individuation process. This was a Copernican step in the perspective of the ego in relation to the source of existence.
In essence the archetype of Christ (identified as Jesus) was replaced by Jesus as the model of the creative ego. This still required, however, the assumption that there is such a thing as the "historical Jesus" and specific text that can at least to a high degree of probability be regarded as the words of Jesus. In other words, an assumption that a "core" of psychologically and spiritually authentic teachings can be retrieved and engaged to create in the Records participant a process analogous to what Jesus himself experienced.
By the last third of the past century, however, the most academically respected New Testament scholarship (e.g. the Jesus Seminar) had largely eroded the "core," reducing it to a small number of high probability sayings. Meanwhile, the cultural developments we call "postmodernism" provide an even more significant and radical challenge to the assumptions underlying "traditional" Records study.
It is characteristic of the postmodern world that the whole _idea_ of authority or even "authorship" is deconstructed. There are no fixed texts that stand complete within themselves. Every text is part of a web of reflection and self-reflection (perhaps a bit like a piece of a hologram). In this view it becomes futile to attempt to isolate an "authentic" or "historical" Jesus from the web of two millennia of reflection.
Now consider the young person who might encounter an invitation to a Records seminar. She or he is someone likely to be intimately involved in a culture of "mashups" (new works created by dynamically combining aspects of existing ones), "sampling," (think hip-hop), YouTube, cooperative "authorship" (Wikipedia), and the breakdown of the distinction between genres, forms, and indeed even between "art" and the objects of everyday life.
Thus in the 21st century "Text" is no longer potentially "definitive" but has become more like streams that weave in and out of one another, creating new narratives that often consciously reflect on themselves. What does this mean not only for the Records but for the use of texts in general in Guild seminars?
I am looking forward to seeing how people who are more steeped in the Records than myself will address the impact of postmodern culture on this century-old project. But I see considerable promise in one approach, which John Petroni and Hal Childs have introduced to many of us. It involves moving beyond dialog with "the text" to a kind of direct, dialectical psychological encounter with emotion and image, reflected upon itself and transformed into "thought." It is the alchemy in which "text" is negated and its core or essence dissolved, only to be reborn as a mode of being.
The sayings attributed to Jesus still contain powerful images and can stir powerful emotions. But it is not clear to me whether they should remain privileged in such a way that a special seminar should be built mainly around them--a seminar with an implicit narrative and the assumption of a historical figure.
Perhaps the "Records" has already dissolved and is beginning to reappear not as the object of a seminar, but in the way we approach all images and emotions.
To borrow another term now used, I would suggest that Records has already been "sublated" (both negated and preserved) in our (post)modern consciousness. Perhaps our task now is to articulate and catch up with what it has already become.
Norman, I think we may have a question of semantics here. On the one hand, it seems America in particular always seems to need a single great Other/Enemy. In some sense the Cold War was replaced by the ill-defined "war on Terror(ism)." But of course "Terrorism" is not a country but an idea, so where does one target one's missiles? Somewhere in the shadows!
When the USSR fell some people declared that the U.S. was now the world's only superpower. (Lots of triumphalism on the Right.) Superpower? The U.S. is barely extricating itself from Iraq as it seems to be tied down increasingly in Afghanistan. I would suggest there are no longer any superpowers, but rather a mosaic of old, still potent powers (Europe, U.S.,Russia) and emerging ones (China, India, perhaps Brazil). I would call this a "multipolar" world.
The situation is similar with regard to economic power. There is, far as I know, no secret cabal of a few people who pull all the strings. Rather, there seems to be an autonomous emergent power that can be manipulated by an elite who can make big gains at least in the short term, but whose long term result is a kind of entropy that threatens to leave most of the world's people at the bottom of a flat world. I don't know how it's going in the UK, but over here this kind of concern isn't really admitted to such political debate as we have.
You can't have meant it Harry! You seem to be equating the collapse of the Sovet Union to the end of the 'bipolar' world.
Certainly the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tearing down of the Berlin wall were symbols of the ending of one form of bipolarism - the opposites then focussed on how society is organised and how money is controlled. The question was 'is the individual to be given more liberty or governed more from a centralised system?'
But the demise of that bipolar world has been very easily overtaken in the rise and growth of new (but ancient) bipolarism. The new question is not societal organisation but authority. The question becomes now - 'does authority reside fundamentally within the individual or within a 'god-source' who speaks through ancient texts ?' (whispers from the Records circle here) Human responsibility to live co-operatively is needed to live within either camp, but the trouble is that human nature is viewed from the heartland of each position, in very different ways, namely am I to attempt to live creatively out of my own authority or do I sumbit to an authority outside of me?
This is a deeper and far more problematic bipolarism than the societal one. If societal bipolarism was instrumental in birthing WW2, Korea and Vietnam what horrors could the 'new' bipolarism spawn after Afghanistan?
Jung could be more pertinent than ever for future generations who may feel increasing heat of this dilemma.
Such a shock! I think of all the memories I have from 41 years of seminars at Four Springs. I think of how much symbolism there was in the lodge. I think of things that can't be replaced (art and the like) that Guild members donated over the years. I think of how much the loss of the lodge impacts the use of Four Springs for numerous groups, most of which will probably have to find alternate accomodations. And I look forward to a new lodge rising on the ashes of the old like a Phoenix.
I reflect on the fact that I have had decades of difficulty with my jaw, which has from time to time kept me from being able to open my mouth very far or being able to chew. Hmm. I have silenced myself a great deal. what is next? how to speak ...
The question has been posed, regarding the Basic Records seminar, “Is there still life in those old bones, and should we care? – A discussion on the study of the historical Jesus.”
Bones are the most mineralized part of the human being, and thereby the closest to death, which is why the skull and cross bones are used as a symbol of death. If our focus is “old bones,” does it reveal a lack of life in our thinking, which needs to be living if it is to have any relevance to Truth?
Science views the human being through anatomy and physiology basically as a solid, physical entity – and ultimately as a corpse. Despite vast advances in this realm, we still cannot claim to understand life, let alone something as intangible as soul, psyche, the unconscious, or spirit. Given that most of us would consider our being as having more reality and significance than a corpse, how can we extend this experience of reality to our field of inquiry?
In the Buddhist teaching story, where four blind monks each examines only a small part of an elephant, and each one thinks that his particular part is a description of the whole, we can see how misguided the results would be.
I have never taken the Basic Records seminar, so I am a relative outsider to this discussion. I realize that my questions and frame of reference may not be the same as the founders of the seminar, but my hope is that this perspective may allow new insights to emerge. Since first hearing about the seminar several years ago, I was intrigued about its nature. What is the mindset that decides a priori to limit our questioning about the being of Jesus to an historical context? Why do we assume that restricting our view to historical facts could possibly give us a complete picture of anything (although maybe that wasn’t the goal)?
I am reminded of Einstein’s famous sayings: “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.” "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."
Is the “historical Jesus” what humanity needs today? The fact that the question about old bones has been posed suggests not. If we truly want to understand Jesus, we have to expand our arc of inquiry and look beyond the merely historical. Historical contexts can add to our understanding but never be the totality of it, just as going back to original languages can correct misinterpreted translations, but original meanings still need to be understood on a deeper level. It is only when we are willing to expand our world-view to include higher realms that we can expect to glimpse the Big Picture. This does not mean taking on unexamined the dogmas of various religions, but it does mean opening to the realm of the spiritual through spiritual research. Such a spiritual perspective can give context and significance to the historical. Even Einstein recognized, "There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap."
In a story of Nasrudin, he drops his keys one night and is looking for them under the streetlight. When a passer-by stops to help him, he asks Nasrudin where he dropped his keys. Nasrudin replies that he dropped them “over there,” but decided to look under the streetlight, since there was more light!
By looking to the material realm of history, where there is “more light,” are we succumbing to the materialistic tendency of our time, even in our pursuit of soul/spiritual questions? Our distancing ourselves from the spiritual and diving into a materialistic view of the world has been a necessary step in the evolution of humanity, even as the child eventually has to leave his parents to find himself. But we are entering another phase now. It is interesting that Elizabeth Howes apparently felt compelled to add Jung’s insights about the reality and nature of the unconscious to Sharmon’s Records. Perhaps she sensed the dangers of narrowing the focus too much.
It has been said that God created man in His image - and then man returned the favor. When we limit our view of Jesus to our preconceived notions of what his reality could have been, do we find out more about Jesus - or about ourselves? Where does the Christ come into the picture? Would Jesus of Nazareth even have significance if it weren’t for the Christ event? And what is the significance of Christ for us – as opposed to the historical Jesus?
Rudolf Steiner made a poignant observation in the early part of the 20th century, which seems even truer today. “It is becoming increasingly clear that for the [Christian] religious faiths of the present, the Mystery of Golgotha [Christ’s Death and Resurrection] is greatly decreasing in significance. They see no value in understanding that event with the consciousness of this age; they see value only in continuing to spread and propagate their teachings. However, these teachings are losing the ability to grasp the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha. Moreover, the result is that we now have a new and strange kind of theology in the world, one in which people no longer speak of the Christ, but only about Jesus, the man of Nazareth – the ‘simple man’ who wandered about in Palestine like a kind of Socrates. As a result, people cannot understand why the few who do still speak of the Christ see him as the pivotal point in the entire development of humanity.”
Alchemy speaks of the “second birth” of the spiritual embryo, the “I” being or True Self, which is brought to term by the conscious working of the student, through what in many traditions is referred to as mystery training. As we come to know ourselves and go through our own process of individuation, our challenge in this time is to rediscover the spiritual out of our full consciousness, no longer restricted to dream-life or the unconscious, and reconnect with it out of our free will. Ultimately, this can be seen as our work here on earth.
If the Basic Records seminar is losing interest and relevance, I would suggest that is because another level has now been reached. To address the needs of present day participants, we need to open to this next level, the spiritual aspect that seeks to make itself felt through all things in the world, and most especially through the cosmic significance of the deed of Christ, which must come to be understood anew in each age. Only though a spiritual understanding of the Cosmic Christ will we begin to grasp the historical significance of Jesus Christ.
Even as in our work together we strive to connect with soul or psyche, and in alchemy, to dialogue with the beings who stand behind nature as archetypes, I feel we are now being called to bring this same openness of consciousness to bear on how we approach the question of Jesus – and perhaps even to reframe the question from “an historical and literary critical approach.” Let’s let Jesus out of the box.
I'm looking forward to this event as well. It and "Is There Life in These Old Bones?" are complementary, dealing with the future of God concepts/images and the Records respectively.
The title contains an interesting distinction between any given "God" and "theism." The death of "God" was proclaimed by some many years ago, and the "rehabilitation" of God has been a going concern in some theological quarters ever since. That is, for some, theism (the concept of some sort of supreme or superior entity) has remained alive and has enabled the creation of new God-images--even though the "God" of liberation theology, process theology, or nature theology would probably not have been recognizable to traditional theists.
The step "beyond theism"--beyond personification, anthropomorphic images, privileged entities--can be a difficult one. Indeed I know "God" (in a psychologically sophisticated form) remains a living image for many of us. We are fortunate in having the psychological, mythological, and poetic/imaginative resources of Richard Naegle and Clare Morris available to us for this exploration.
The Records of the Life of Jesus study represents a heroically _modern_ project. First, around the beginning of the 20th century, the application of critical (scientific) principles to determine the most authentic text, to which Sharman added the remarkably effective Socratic dialog method. Around the middle of the last century came a vital extension--thanks to Elizabeth Howes, and the work of many other Guild leaders--the engagement of depth psychology and the individuation process. This was a Copernican step in the perspective of the ego in relation to the source of existence.
In essence the archetype of Christ (identified as Jesus) was replaced by Jesus as the model of the creative ego. This still required, however, the assumption that there is such a thing as the "historical Jesus" and specific text that can at least to a high degree of probability be regarded as the words of Jesus. In other words, an assumption that a "core" of psychologically and spiritually authentic teachings can be retrieved and engaged to create in the Records participant a process analogous to what Jesus himself experienced.
By the last third of the past century, however, the most academically respected New Testament scholarship (e.g. the Jesus Seminar) had largely eroded the "core," reducing it to a small number of high probability sayings. Meanwhile, the cultural developments we call "postmodernism" provide an even more significant and radical challenge to the assumptions underlying "traditional" Records study.
It is characteristic of the postmodern world that the whole _idea_ of authority or even "authorship" is deconstructed. There are no fixed texts that stand complete within themselves. Every text is part of a web of reflection and self-reflection (perhaps a bit like a piece of a hologram). In this view it becomes futile to attempt to isolate an "authentic" or "historical" Jesus from the web of two millennia of reflection.
Now consider the young person who might encounter an invitation to a Records seminar. She or he is someone likely to be intimately involved in a culture of "mashups" (new works created by dynamically combining aspects of existing ones), "sampling," (think hip-hop), YouTube, cooperative "authorship" (Wikipedia), and the breakdown of the distinction between genres, forms, and indeed even between "art" and the objects of everyday life.
Thus in the 21st century "Text" is no longer potentially "definitive" but has become more like streams that weave in and out of one another, creating new narratives that often consciously reflect on themselves. What does this mean not only for the Records but for the use of texts in general in Guild seminars?
I am looking forward to seeing how people who are more steeped in the Records than myself will address the impact of postmodern culture on this century-old project. But I see considerable promise in one approach, which John Petroni and Hal Childs have introduced to many of us. It involves moving beyond dialog with "the text" to a kind of direct, dialectical psychological encounter with emotion and image, reflected upon itself and transformed into "thought." It is the alchemy in which "text" is negated and its core or essence dissolved, only to be reborn as a mode of being.
The sayings attributed to Jesus still contain powerful images and can stir powerful emotions. But it is not clear to me whether they should remain privileged in such a way that a special seminar should be built mainly around them--a seminar with an implicit narrative and the assumption of a historical figure.
Perhaps the "Records" has already dissolved and is beginning to reappear not as the object of a seminar, but in the way we approach all images and emotions.
To borrow another term now used, I would suggest that Records has already been "sublated" (both negated and preserved) in our (post)modern consciousness. Perhaps our task now is to articulate and catch up with what it has already become.
Norman, I think we may have a question of semantics here. On the one hand, it seems America in particular always seems to need a single great Other/Enemy. In some sense the Cold War was replaced by the ill-defined "war on Terror(ism)." But of course "Terrorism" is not a country but an idea, so where does one target one's missiles? Somewhere in the shadows!
When the USSR fell some people declared that the U.S. was now the world's only superpower. (Lots of triumphalism on the Right.) Superpower? The U.S. is barely extricating itself from Iraq as it seems to be tied down increasingly in Afghanistan. I would suggest there are no longer any superpowers, but rather a mosaic of old, still potent powers (Europe, U.S.,Russia) and emerging ones (China, India, perhaps Brazil). I would call this a "multipolar" world.
The situation is similar with regard to economic power. There is, far as I know, no secret cabal of a few people who pull all the strings. Rather, there seems to be an autonomous emergent power that can be manipulated by an elite who can make big gains at least in the short term, but whose long term result is a kind of entropy that threatens to leave most of the world's people at the bottom of a flat world. I don't know how it's going in the UK, but over here this kind of concern isn't really admitted to such political debate as we have.
You can't have meant it Harry! You seem to be equating the collapse of the Sovet Union to the end of the 'bipolar' world.
Certainly the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tearing down of the Berlin wall were symbols of the ending of one form of bipolarism - the opposites then focussed on how society is organised and how money is controlled. The question was 'is the individual to be given more liberty or governed more from a centralised system?'
But the demise of that bipolar world has been very easily overtaken in the rise and growth of new (but ancient) bipolarism. The new question is not societal organisation but authority. The question becomes now - 'does authority reside fundamentally within the individual or within a 'god-source' who speaks through ancient texts ?' (whispers from the Records circle here) Human responsibility to live co-operatively is needed to live within either camp, but the trouble is that human nature is viewed from the heartland of each position, in very different ways, namely am I to attempt to live creatively out of my own authority or do I sumbit to an authority outside of me?
This is a deeper and far more problematic bipolarism than the societal one. If societal bipolarism was instrumental in birthing WW2, Korea and Vietnam what horrors could the 'new' bipolarism spawn after Afghanistan?
Jung could be more pertinent than ever for future generations who may feel increasing heat of this dilemma.