"DID JESUS DIE FOR OUR SINS?"

To begin today I’d like to share with you the Lord’s Prayer as spoken in Jesus’ tongue of ancient Aramaic.

Awoon dwashmaya
Nith kadashe schmakh
Teh they mulkootha
Neh way say wee a nakh
Aikana dwashmaya op bar ah
How-lan lahma
Dsoon kanan yow-mana
Wash woklan hau bain
Aikana dap h’nan shwakan l hiya wayne
Wla ta'lan l'neeseeyona ella pasan min beesha
Mitol delahe mulkootha
Oo hailah otesh boktha
La alim almein amen

I received an email from a friend the other day asking me whether or not Jesus died for our sins. I’m certain that this question was sparked because of Mel Gibson’s heavily hyped “passion.” But it’s a good question. However, it’s a question that’s not easily answered, because no matter what the answer, and no matter how much “proof” one tries to pull together to back up their answer, there are going to be a lot of people who aren’t going to like the answer.

So the easy way out is to merely say something like, “well, that’s what the Bible says.” But is that really what the Bible says? And if it does say it, then why does it say it, and what does it mean? And how does it affect me? And what does it mean for the rest of the world? These are all important questions that can help to lead us to a better, more thorough understanding of the possibilities raised by this question and its ramifications.

Important, pivotal issues in scripture are often based upon misunderstanding, secondhand information, limited or misleading translations, the creative veil of innuendo, imagined connections between scriptural writings that may be separated from one another by hundreds of years, or bold and outright falsification. To truly understand many of the teachings of the Christian Church, it is necessary to be cognizant of how those beliefs evolved. I say evolved because most of the doctrines and the rituals of the church did not originate with Jesus the Christ, but were, rather, creations of descendants of his teachings. Sometimes those “descendants” were removed by tens, hundreds, even thousands of years from the existence of the teacher himself.

During the early years of the formation of the Christian Church, the battles over teachings and doctrines were long and often convoluted. The various aspects of church doctrine were argued at great length, even unto centuries. And those arguments sometimes resulted in a violence that amounted to in-house wars. Even from the earliest days following Jesus’ crucifixion, there was a battle beginning over who was going to be the official purveyor of the message, of the gospel, of the teaching of their original teacher, Jesus of Nazareth.

We must remember, first, that the disciples of Jesus were Jews, who, because of their being brought up in the Jewish faith and culture, were conditioned by centuries of looking forward to the coming of a Messiah, a savior, who would take control, establish himself as king, and usher in a millennium in which the kingdom of God would manifest upon earth. This yearning of the Jews for someone who would save them from the wrath of their conquerors was an idea whose roots went back to earlier times of exile and bondage. It is important to remember that these “stories” of a coming savior sprang up during the times when the Jews were greatly oppressed. One doesn’t find these savior promises being made when things are going good, when the Jews’ enemies have been conquered, when peace and prosperity are reigning throughout the land.

The “savior stories” were a balm to help the people to bear up under their burdens by looking forward with hope to a brighter day. This kind of psychological support continues even to this day, not only for those who are suffering extreme hardship, but for those who “believe their lives to be oppressed” in spite of outside appearances. After all, we live in a world that is portrayed through the media, through politics, and through advertising as a life of multiple stresses from which we all must endeavor to escape.

For some, the messiah is in the promise of a lottery ticket. For others, it is represented by a particular education, a specific position, a special mate, a new job opportunity, or a miracle product. However, underlying all of this is a subtle thread of conditioning in which we are dissatisfied with the present, yet tolerant of its limitations because of the promise that we are taught that the future holds.

From an institutional standpoint, that is a wonderful place for people to be, for it distracts them from thinking about the presence and the power available to them in the current moment and results in a docility in which people will tolerate even enormous hardships. I’m constantly amazed at the resilience of people, the world over, to rise above circumstances and constantly reconnect with the divinity expressing through their humanity. The victims who find it in their hearts to forgive those whose actions have victimized them, far outweigh the half-cocked idiots of the world who desire to dethrone God by taking over the world and remaking it in their own limited image.

When Jesus appeared upon the scene, there was a thousands-year-old social and cultural structure in place with the Hebrew people of the Near East who had risen from the loins of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as descendents of the Aramean nomadic shepherd, Abraham. Abraham was a man who had discovered his personal relationship with God and had reportedly used that relationship as the foundation for his life. This was not a God of statues and icons, but rather a living God that was all encompassing as the underlying spirit of all that is.

Yet, over the centuries, following the brief time of Abraham’s wanderings in the lands of Aram, his descendants managed to lose that personal divine connection of awareness and experience of Abraham. They did this by codifying, doctrinizing, dogmatizing, and ritualizing the divine experience of spiritual awareness until it was all but lost to Abraham’s descendants.

Periodically, however, prophets would arise from within the midst of these people and the more profound of these prophets would teach and call for a return to the awareness of God that was Abraham’s experience. Unfortunately, the people usually reacted to these prophets by killing them, often in very brutal ways. The perpetrators of these prophetic murders were usually the leaders, the protectors, of the religious institutions and the political power structure of the time.

One of these prophets was Isaiah. Isaiah spoke out against the ritual, the dogma, the iconization of the God of Abraham. People often think of prophets as being those who speak of the future, but they also speak of the past, for they bring back to the people’s consciousness the truths that have been discovered by others but have been buried under the institutionalization of time.

It seems that all religions begin with the unique spiritual experience of an individual that gets shared with others until the stories about the original experience become more important than the experience itself and those stories become the framework for their own institutionalization, ultimately resulting in a worship of the story rather than an experience of the experience itself. The initial phase of this cover-up has its roots in the fact that it’s hard to know how to “share” an experience with someone else.

It was R.D. Laing who awakened us to a reminder of the uniqueness of our experience with his book, “Politics Of Experience.” Think about it. Remember a high point experience from your own life and consider how you would go about sharing that experience with another. Can you tell them about it? If you do, you are not really sharing the experience, but rather merely relating information “about” the experience. And that information is limited to being only from your own perspective.

Well, those who teach memory techniques will tell you that a good way of remembering and passing on information is to take the information and build a story around it. Why? Because we all remember a good story much better than we do mere facts. So we take the original experience and we create a story that contains that experience and presents it in ways with which people might relate.

And that, dear friends, is how the Bible came to be. These “books” all spring from original ideas and experiences that stretch back before history and have been passed from generation to generation through the telling and retelling of memorable stories. In our western culture, our memories are generally good enough to remember the gist of a story, but very few of us could repeat a story verbatim, word for word. Yet that is precisely what has been the reality of the ideas that have come down to us from every ancient culture. The people, though perhaps illiterate where reading and writing are concerned, were brilliant in being able to remember, and pass along, elaborate stories, word for word. There are people today who can do precisely that. There are people who know, and can recite, the entire Bible, or the entire Koran, or even both of those books.

Yet, even amongst those who have this memorable ability to repeat these stories, very few are 100% correct in their retelling of the ancient tales, and so, over time the stories have been modified. They have been amplified to make them more memorable. They have been altered to be more in tune with the understanding of a particular audience. They have been changed by the level of comprehension of the storyteller.

We’re talking here of ideas that preceded the written word. And remember, when the written word came into being it was only the few who initially had the opportunity to learn to read and to write. Centuries passed before the written word became available to the masses through the invention of printing. And the result of the passing on of the oral stories that enshrouded the unique experiences of peoples lost to the ages is that the stories have overwhelmed the experiences themselves.

But then, every once in awhile, a teacher comes along to, once again, strip aside the centuries of gradual encrustation that has encased the original idea that the story was designed to protect and to pass on. This is an interesting paradox in which the idea to be preserved has, instead, been obscured. And yet, the original idea still exists and has been preserved by that which obscures it. And then someone steps forward, cracks the outer protective shell and once again reveals that which has been both protected and obscured. And oftentimes, for that mere act alone, they are killed.

Isaiah was one of those teachers. Jesus was another. And Mohammed was another. But as profound as the understanding of each new teacher may be of the treasure contained within the ancient stories, these teachers, in their own turn, create their own stories, their own parables, their own metaphors designed to help the people “of their time” to connect with the ancient unique experience of their oneness with God. And, again, the cycle continues as the stories are passed on and are modified through new interpretations that again obscure the experience that is the goal of each story.

With all of that said, we now want to return to our consideration for the day: whether or not Jesus died for our sins. You won’t actually find any reference to this in the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. First, for Jesus to say, “I am going to die for your sins” is a dead giveaway that the statement won’t be in the first three gospels. Most people are not aware of the fact that Jesus doesn’t talk about “I am” anything except in the book of John. It is only in John that one will find Jesus’ “I am” statements, like “I am the way,” “I am the true vine,” and “I am the light.” The Book of John was written after the first three Gospels. It was written from a different perspective, for different reasons, and for a different audience.

It is not until the letters of Paul that we begin to see this idea of Jesus’ death being a tradeoff for the sins of the world. There are a couple of key things that must be kept in mind here when considering the words attributed to Paul. First, Paul did not know Jesus. In fact, Paul, before his conversion, when his name was still Saul, was a persecutor of Christians. In particular, he persecuted Jewish Christians, of which probably 80% of the early Christian movement consisted in the decades immediately following Jesus’ death. So, Paul, though a follower of the teachings of Jesus, never actually sat at Jesus feet. In other words, everything that Paul knew of Jesus was passed on by word of mouth from someone else who might, or might not, have actually heard Jesus’ teaching firsthand.

Secondly, although Paul was converted on the road to Damascus to becoming a believer in Jesus and the movement that was growing around Jesus’ memory and his teaching, Paul, nevertheless, still retained his prior conditioning that preceded his conversion. This means that he was still trained in the thinking of the Jewish Pharisees, a group of which he had been a member. This partially explains why he was so good at spreading the teachings of Jesus, particularly amongst the Jews, for he was a Jew himself, raised in the Jewish tradition, and trained in the Jewish Pharisaic knowledge of Jewish scripture.

Third, the writings of Paul that have been included in the Bible are actually letters to various churches throughout the world regarding particular, specific issues pertinent to each different church. Paul did not write these letters with the idea that they would become considered as all-encompassing global scriptural teaching. They were letters. Think what would happen if, in the future, your emails were to be gathered together by people who believed that you had something important to say, and those emails were treated as though they were the holy word of God. There’s a great book by Walter M. Miller, Jr. entitled, “Canticle for Leibowitz” in which a previous religious leader is so revered that even his grocery list is worshipped as sacred writing.

So we have a dedicated crusader, trained in Jewish law, writing letters to various groups of followers of a new religious movement, advising them how to deal with internal problems and to bring their activities and their members more in line with the standards and beliefs which are slowly being codified into the growth of what is to become the Christian religion. Paul is largely a part of his Jewish Pharisaic roots. He is extremely conservative in his views towards women and the human body in general. And this is obvious in his letters. At times, Paul revealed a depth of understanding of the gospel of Jesus that has contributed largely to the perpetuation of the faith. Yet, at other times, Paul’s previous conditioned “Saul” viewpoints raise their limited head and remind us again of the fallibility of blindly accepting every word of Paul as being synonymous with the word of God.

The men of those times, in many ways, were fearful of women, for women held the secrets of the birth of new life, an activity in which men participated more as an amazed, though inept, spectator than as an active participant. The proof of this unnatural fear and loathing can be found throughout the Biblical book of Leviticus and continues into our own lifetimes in the Semitic world, as evidenced by the truly head-in-the-sand writings of the late Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini, and the self-absorbed “men” of the Afghanistan Taliban.

I’ve personally always loved the confrontation between Jesus and Paul in the Martin Scorcese motion picture, “Last Temptation Of Christ,” based upon the Nikos Kazantzakis book of the same name. Dreaming, while on the cross that he has not been crucified, but instead is living out a normal life, Jesus comes across Paul who is preaching to the masses, telling of his conversion on the road to Damascus and how he now preaches “‘on land, on sea – I preach the Good News.’”

Jesus calls out, “‘What Good News,’” to which Paul replies, “‘Jesus of Nazareth – you must have heard of him – was not the son of Joseph and Mary; he was the son of God. He came down to earth and took on human flesh in order to save mankind. The wicked priests and Pharisees seized him, brought him to Pilate and crucified him. But on the third day he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. Death was conquered, brothers, sins were forgiven, the Gates of Heaven opened up!’

“‘Did you see this resurrected Jesus of Nazareth?’ Jesus bellowed. ‘Did you see him with your own eyes? What was he like?’

“‘A flash of lightning – a flash of lightning which spoke.’

“‘Liar!’”

Jesus and Paul argue back and forth as Jesus reveals who he is and claims that the crucifixion was a dream. Jesus then proclaims, “‘I tell you, not son of God . . . And don’t go around the whole world to publish lies. I shall stand up and proclaim the truth!’

“Now it was Paul’s turn to explode. ‘Shut your shameless mouth!’ he shouted, rushing at him. ‘Be quiet, or men will hear you and die of fright. In the rottenness, the injustice and poverty of this world, the Crucified and Resurrected Jesus has been the one precious consolation for the honest man, the wronged man. True or false – what do I care! It’s enough if the world is saved!’

“‘It’s better the world perish with the truth than be saved with lies. At the core of such a salvation sits the great worm Satan.’

“‘What is “truth?” What is “falsehood?” Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts us to man’s height above the earth – that is true. Whatever clips off man’s wings – that is false.’

“‘You won’t keep quiet, will you, son of Satan! The wings you talk about are just like the wings of Lucifer.’

“‘No, I won’t keep quiet. I don’t give a hoot about what’s true and what’s false, or whether I saw him or didn’t see him, or create it out of obstinacy and longing and faith. I don’t struggle to grow. If the world is to be saved, it is necessary – do you hear – absolutely necessary for you to be crucified, and I shall crucify you, like it or not; it is necessary for you to be resurrected, and I shall resurrect you, like it or not. For all I care you can sit here in your miserable village and manufacture cradles, troughs and children. If you want to know, I shall compel the air to take your shape. Body, crown of thorns, nails, blood . . . The whole works is now part of the machinery of salvation – everything is indispensable. And in every corner of the earth, innumerable eyes will look up and see you in the air – crucified. They will weep, and the tears will cleanse their souls of all their sins. But on the third day I shall raise you from the dead, because there is no salvation without a resurrection. The final, the most horrible, enemy is death. I shall abolish death. How? By resurrecting you as Jesus, son of God – the Messiah!’”

Jesus says, “‘I had only one word, brought only one message: Love, Love – nothing else.’”

There’s more, but you must read it for yourself. The point here is that Kazantzakis has recognized that the whole doctrine of Jesus’ unique divinity, and his saving of the world from sin through the blood of his death and subsequent resurrection, are not found in the teachings of Jesus himself, but are rather the creation of those who followed Jesus and who attempted to perpetuate Jesus’ memory by whatever means necessary. And by “those who followed Jesus,” I’m talking about countless people down through the millennia even to the present day.

This becomes more clear when we take a look at the origin of this claim that Jesus “died for our sins.” A thorough perusal of the Bible reveals very little reference to this “died for our sins” theology. This is not unusual to find that a major theological point has little to back it up in the Bible. By the time the Roman Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE (AD) there were probably 100 or more gospels used throughout the Christian “church,” and perhaps as many different perspectives upon what was actually true about the life and teachings of the man from Galilee. It was the purpose of the Council to determine a basic teaching, and to codify that teaching through a selection of those Gospels which supported the Council’s goal, to “sanitize” the works where necessary to further encourage a solidity of belief, and to remove from existence all of those writings which contradicted the Council’s view.

Just as the “theology” of Jesus’ death and resurrection had no foundation in Jesus’ teaching, neither did the concept of “original sin,” confession, or the church as the doorway to redemption. Even the concept of Jesus as the only “way” to salvation is the result of a mix of cultural misunderstanding and institutional self-interest. When Jesus spoke of “himself,” something we find mainly in the book of John, he is doing it metaphorically. In other words, when he says “in my name,” that is a metaphorical way of saying “by my teaching.”

Other than the book of John and its misunderstood “I am” metaphorical statements of Jesus, we do not find Jesus speaking of himself as uniquely divine. That concept is a later creation of the church that developed around the teachings of Jesus and the repeated stories about Jesus.

An important part of this “Uniquely Divine Jesus” theology is the belief that Jesus “died for our sins.” However, when we look at a translation from the Aramaic, we discover that Jesus died because of our sins or on account of our sins. What’s the difference and what does that mean? Well, rather than supporting this concept that a loving God would somehow “sacrifice” his “own son” to “pay” for the sins of the world, perhaps it makes more sense that Jesus died because mankind is a species that kills its own, particularly over theological and political disagreements. Jesus died because still, to this very day, far too many of us are murderers and far too many of us turn our backs upon the murders that are committed every single day.

Jesus came to free us from the ignorance of human sacrifice by turning us on to the realization of life eternal. Rather than listen to him, we killed him. However, although we killed the man, his message lives on. Hopefully, now, 2,000 years later, we will finally begin to take to heart Jesus’ true teachings and begin to live our lives as the children of God that we are. Only then will there be true redemption of sin, when we turn, once again, to God and begin to live our own divinity.

So, today, I say to you, “God bless you,” because God truly has blessed you, from the beginning of time. In spite of Mel Gibson’s over-hyped anguish, you do not need to feel guilty for the death of Jesus. Rather, recognize those aspects of human nature which led to his death and dedicate your life to living in ways that would create a reality in which that tragedy could not happen again.

- posted by Charles DeTurk @ 12:01 AM

 
"DISCERNING THE SECRETS OF THE LORD'S PRAYER"

To begin today I’d like to share with you the Lord’s Prayer as spoken in Jesus’ tongue of ancient Aramaic.

Awoon dwashmaya
Nith kadashe schmakh
Teh they mulkootha
Neh way say wee a nakh
Aikana dwashmaya op bar ah
How-lan lahma
Dsoon kanan yow-mana
Wash woklan hau bain
Aikana dap h’nan shwakan l hiya wayne
Wla ta'lan l'neeseeyona ella pasan min beesha
Mitol delahe mulkootha
Oo hailah otesh boktha
La alim almein amen

You may have noticed by now that I begin each of these talks with the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. This is the same way that I begin all of my talks, classes, and workshops. I must confess that I picked up the idea of doing this from Dr. Rocco Errico, who begins every one of his classes and talks with the Aramaic Lord’s Prayer. Although Dr. Errico has been doing this for decades, I only began the practice two years ago.

I probably first heard this famous prayer uttered in Jesus’ tongue in 1966 when Dr. George Lamsa and I were both living at Unity School of Christianity. I was privileged to hear Dr. Lamsa speak on several occasions at the Unity Village Chapel. It was he who first opened my eyes to the realization that there was much more to the Bible than the literal acceptance of what turns out to be very flawed translations.

It was Dr. Lamsa, of course, who translated the entire Bible from ancient Aramaic scrolls and text. Dr. Lamsa was born in what is now Syria in a tribe that, until this past century, had been cut off from the rest of the world. Their language, their customs, and their culture had not changed in thousands of years. The language that they spoke, of course, was Aramaic. Their religious foundation was the Christian Church of the East.

It was around this time, when Dr. Lamsa was in residence at Unity School (having come there from a stint with Oral Roberts) that Dr. Errico made Dr. Lamsa’s acquaintance, a relationship that evolved into Dr. Errico becoming Dr. Lamsa’s student. I need to point out here that being Dr. Lamsa’s student wasn’t in the western sense of merely reading books and attending classes. Dr. Errico and Dr. Lamsa lived together off and on. They traveled together. They worked together. Dr. Errico was “learning at the feet” of a great teacher. And today Dr. Errico carries on the work of Dr. Lamsa while enhancing it with his own special and unique perspective.

Dr. Lamsa left this plane of existence a couple of decades ago. Dr. Errico is presently the Dean of Bible Studies at the Barbara King School of Ministry in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Errico is also prolifically writing and publishing numerous books on the work that he did with Dr. Lamsa, the work that he has done subsequent to Dr. Lamsa’s passing, and the republishing of works like Dr. Abraham Rihbany’s book “The Syrian Christ.”

I first met Dr. Errico around 1970 when he spoke at my mother’s Unity of Dayton Church in Dayton, Ohio. This was the first of many speaking engagements in Dayton for Dr. Errico. In the mid-70’s I obtained a copy of an audiotape by Dr. Errico teaching the pronunciation of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. Like most people, I would listen to the tape from time to time and I would try to remember or write down the prayer when I would hear Dr. Errico say it again when he was in town, but I just never could seem to make the time to really try to learn the prayer.

Then, in the 1990’s while I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Dr. Errico moved from California to Santa Fe, just 60 miles to the north of me. After hearing him speak again on several occasions at a church in Albuquerque I began attending some of his classes in Santa Fe, finally moving to Santa Fe, thereby allowing me to attend even more of his classes, and giving me a chance to get to know him more personally.

One of the few regrets that I had when I left Santa Fe to return to my childhood home of Atlanta was leaving Rocco behind. However, in less than two years he also moved to Georgia where he now lives just miles from my home. Until I began working nights at UPS last year, I was attending classes with Dr. Errico three nights a week. It was during one of those series of classes that Dr. Errico taught the class the Aramaic Lord’s Prayer. To be honest, I can’t say that I have heard any of the other students say the entire prayer in Aramaic, but that’s okay for it was just what I needed to help me to make it a daily part of my life.

I say all of this to let you know of the long influence both Dr. Errico and Dr. Lamsa have had upon my life and my perspectives where Biblical scripture is concerned. They both helped to open my eyes to seeing the Bible from the perspective of those who wrote it and of those for whom it was written, rather than just from the perspective of a white, lower-middle class boy in the bowels of America trying to understand what are obviously bad translations of ancient documents. And with that introduction, I’d like to share with you today my comprehension of this “prayer” as it comes from Aramaic directly into an English translation/interpretation.

Now some folks might claim that the problem with people quoting the Bible is that they corrupt it with their own interpretation rather than accepting the direct translation. However, those who make such claims understand little about translation. One cannot translate without interpreting. It is a physical impossibility. And pleading absolute transliteration merely further exposes the ignorance of the claimant, for many words in one language have no direct correlation to any specific word in another language. So one must always be making choices, thereby crossing the line from translation to interpretation.

For instance, “love,” in English, could be translated as “agape” or “philia” or “eros” in Greek. Likewise, the English word, “create” that appears in the first chapter of Genesis is translated from the Aramaic word “bra.” Yet this is not the only Aramaic word that is translated into English as “create.” In fact, “bra” actually is a special form of creation. Dr. Errico, in his book “Mysteries of Creation,” identifies it as meaning “creation by God alone.”

In an effort to further identify the uniqueness of this divine creation without using the general term “create,” a German scholar finally translated Genesis 1:1 as “In the beginning, God Goded the heavens and the earth.” Personally, that is the translation that I prefer, as it seems to me that it more accurately identifies the act of uniquely divine creation.

So even transliteration requires the necessity of making choices amongst a number of literary possibilities. Instead of criticizing others for not agreeing to what we believe to be a strict and correct translation, transliteration, or other interpretation of the Bible, perhaps we should realize that discovering the mysteries of the Bible is an individual journey with individual answers and inspiration. It is not a guideline to demand others to toe.

One of the reasons that I enjoy being a minister is that in preparing a talk or a class, I must do research, and that always leads me to new and greater understanding of so many things. These are lessons that are far beyond the type learned by merely reading someone else’s book or listening to someone else’s talk or class. And that’s what we all need to be doing; learning the lessons that the universe has for us.

So, let’s take a look at this “prayer.” First, I think that it is important to look at the setting for this prayer. In Matthew, this “prayer” is a part of what has come to be known as the “Sermon On The Mount.” This so-called “sermon” comprises chapters 5-7 of the Gospel of Matthew. I once read those three chapters as a Sunday morning talk. Now stop and think about this for a minute. Jesus is renowned in the Christian Church to have been a great teacher. And the information that has come down to us regarding this rabbi from Nazareth includes the claim of a “sermon” presented from a high place to a large crowd. Yet, nowhere have I heard this sermon given in a church. If Jesus was such a great teacher, then one would think that his single “talk” that has been passed down to us would be retaught in its entirety. That’s actually the way most of the Bible has originally come down to us, through repeated verbal recitation.

I was talking with a Muslim friend recently and I commented on how impressed I was when I heard the Minister Louis Farrakhan speak a couple of years ago. He had a real well versed knowledge of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible in addition to the Koran. My friend told me that they had heard that the Minister was studying with a man in Chicago who can recite the entire Koran by heart. That’s the way things were before the advent of the written word; stories and lessons passed on from generation to generation through word of mouth.

Anyway, as a part of this alleged sermon and as an introduction to what we know of as the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus said:

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who like to pray, standing in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you that they have already received their reward.

“But as for you, when you pray, enter into your inner chamber and lock your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret shall himself reward you openly.

“And when you pray, do not repeat your words like the pagans, for they think that because of much talking they will be heard.

“Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need, before you ask him;

“Therefore pray in this manner:”

Now, there’s some very powerful ideas right there in those instructions. Do not pray to be seen by others, to impress others. Prayer is rather a private, personal communication with whom? With “your Father.” Those two words, right there, speak volumes. Jesus didn’t say “my father,” but instead he said “your Father.” Sort of shoots down the mistaken claim of Jesus’ being “God’s only begotten Son.” Here Jesus, himself, is stating that God is also “our Father.” As for the “begotten” part, that’s another mistranslation found in John 3:16, and I’ll explain the story behind that mistranslation in greater detail at a future date for it will require a talk all of its own.

So we are directed to enter our inner chamber and close the door and pray to our Father in secret. Again, Jesus is giving directions that upset the applecart of the church that developed following his death to profess his teachings over the next two millennia. He doesn’t say to go to the priest or the minister or the preacher or the rabbi or the teacher or anyone else, but to go to only one. He says to go directly to God, as one would go to a Father, and to go in secret, without the consultation or the permission of anyone else. In other words, he speaks of this as being a natural, easy, and common practice for everyone.

He says that we approach in secret and “the Father” sees in secret. This is a very personal experience that he is talking of here. And he assures us that the Father’s part in the communication is to reward openly. This is the basic secret underlying the entire creative process. It is the mystery identified by the Gospel of John in its opening lines. It is also the secret hidden in Hebrews 11:1, hidden because scholars insist upon translating from the Greek instead of from the Aramaic.

What secret is that, you may ask. Well, if one reads the foregoing scripture in most Bibles, one finds: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for and it is the evidence of things not seen.” That’s most probably a scripture that you have heard before. However, when it is translated from the original Aramaic, a surprising thing happens. A third phrase surfaces, giving a new, enhanced meaning to this marvelous truth. From the Lamsa Bible, we see that “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, as it was the substance of things which have come to pass; and it is the evidence of things not seen.” In other words, this is the source of everything that ever has been, everything that is, and everything that ever will be. Faith. The Word. The Goding. From the secret communion to the open reward. Later, in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 7:7-8 it says, “Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you. For whoever asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, the door is opened.” The secret of the manifestation of creation revealed. Pray believing.

Then Jesus says not to repeat your words “like the pagans.” In other words, it’s not important what we say in regards to any need we may feel in our communion with our Father. Instead, become one with the silence of the secret place. The Father already knows. I remember someone contacting me once as part of a prayer chain for a young boy who had been seriously injured in an auto accident. They went into extensive detail about all of the things that we needed to pray for. This was standard everyday Christian speaking. I could hardly believe it. Who are we to tell God what needs to be done. Pray believing.

And how does one believe? By giving thanks, of course, that the prayer has already been answered. Now, that’s believing. The prayer has already been answered. Your Father hears in secret and manifests openly. Give thanks. Now! It has already come to past, but if we are absorbed in trying to convince God to do it, then that’s all that it will do is to pass and we will never have even seen it. If healing can take place instantly, it can just as instantly undo itself if it is not recognized and accepted.

“Your Father knows what you need, before you ask him.” My God, how much clearer could he have said it. Our job is to believe, to give thanks, and to accept the reality of answered prayer. It’s never a question of whether or not “it” works. The process always works. The real question is whether or not we can work with it, believing.

And finally, Jesus says, “Therefore, pray in this manner.” Now, having examined the foregoing, perhaps we can look at this ancient prayer with new eyes.

Awoon – Our Father

Our Father; our creator; our beloved. In Aramaic, calling someone “father” is a term of endearment, like saying “beloved.” It is used not only for one’s physical father, but also for anyone, male or female, toward whom one feels a beloved relationship.

Dwashmaya – in heaven (throughout the universe)

Who is throughout the universe. I much prefer the term “universe” to the word “heaven.” Remember that “heaven” was a term referring to the stars above us. Not stars around, but stars above. And it was believed by most that the stars were embedded in some sort of shell that revolved around the earth. In 1642 when Harvard was first founded as a Divinity School, they were still teaching that the stars revolved around the earth. It wasn’t until the past century that we even discovered that other galaxies existed beyond our own Milky Way. Now we know that there are over a quadrillion galaxies, each containing, on average, over a billion stars. The universe refers to everything that is manifest. Everything! Let me repeat that: Everything!

Nith kadashe schmakh – Let be holy your name

Let holy be your name. Let your name be set aside. God’s identity is special. It is unique. It is set aside from all else in holiness.

Teh they mulkootha – Let come your kingdom

We open our awareness to the acceptance of your sovereign presence, here and now. Your sovereign presence is your kingdom.

Neh way say wee a nakh – Let be your will

We accept your will as the prime directive. We acknowledge our oneness with you and desire to be in harmony with your will for us as your children.

Aikana dwashmaya op bar ah – Even as it is in heaven, also on earth

As throughout the universe, so is it here on earth. We recognize that your sovereign presence is totally throughout the entire infinity of universe and that it expresses as a result of your will, and we therefore accept that same reality to be present here in our every earthly experience.

How-lan lahma – Provide to us bread

Give us bread, sustenance.

Dsoon kanan yow-mana – Of our necessities, from day to day

That which is necessary for a full life as your child, each and every day.

Wash woklan hau bain – And forgive us our offenses

Forgive, release, untie, cancel our offenses, our debts

Aikana dap h’nan shwakan l hiya wayne – As also we have forgiven those who have offended us

Wla ta'lan l'neeseeyona - And not let us enter temptation

Ella pasan min beesha – but free us from evil

But free us from error.

Mitol delahe mulkootha – For yours is the kingdom

For you are the sovereign presence.

Oo hailah otesh boktha – And the power and the glory

And the power, and the song and the glory.

La alim almein amen – Forever and forever Amen

From the ages to the ages, forever and forever; sealed in faithfulness; Amen.

R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller never went to bed without rethinking his way through the Lord’s Prayer. Rethinking his way through the Lord’s Prayer. One cannot do that if one only knows that prayer by rote. By rethinking the prayer, we see it from the different angles of our lives and allow it to take on new dimensions in our experience. In order to let you know what Bucky meant by his “rethinking,” here (from his book, “Intuition”) is the Lord’s Prayer as Bucky thought it, and recorded it on paper, on June 30, 1971, at the American Academy in Rome, Italy:

Oh god
Our father
Who art in he even
Omniexperience
Is your identity.
You have given us
O’erwhelmingly manifestation
Of your complete comprehension,
Your complete wisdom,
Your complete concern,
Your complete competence,
Your complete effectively,
Your complete love and compassion,
Your complete forgiveness, giveness, and postgiveness,
Your complete inspiration giving,
Your complete evolutionary sagacity,
Your complete power, will, initiative,
Your absolute timing of all realization.
Yours, dear god,
Is the only and the complete glory!
You are the universal integrity
The eternal integrity is you.
We thank you with all our hearts,
Souls and mind --- Amen.

In my own work at understanding not only the Aramaic pronunciation, but also the more accurate transliteration and translation, I have found myself often rethinking my own way through this ancient prayer. I say it daily in Aramaic and think of it, and its meaning in my life, often. Extremely powerful!

Our father, our furtherer, our God, our beloved

Who is in heaven, who is in he even, who is throughout the universe

Let your name, your identity, be holy, be glorified in our consciousness

Let your kingdom come, that is to say, let your sovereign presence be recognized and accepted, here and now

Let your will, your wish, your desire be recognized as now manifest in our lives and affairs

For even as it is throughout the universe, so it is also in our earthly experience.

Provide to us the bread of our necessities

To meet our needs from day to day

And forgive, release, untie, cancel, our offenses, our debts

As we also have forgiven, have released, those who have offended us or who are indebted to us

And let us not enter into temptation

But free us from evil, from error thinking and acting,

For yours is the kingdom, the sovereign presence,

And the power,

And the song and the glory

From the ages to the ages, forever and forever;

Sealed in faithfulness.

Amen


- posted by Charles DeTurk @ 12:01 AM

 
"QUANTUM PHYSICS OF SPIRITUALITY"

I'd like to begin today with the Lord's Prayer as spoken in Jesus' tongue of ancient Aramaic.

Awoon dwashmaya
Nith kadashe schmakh
Teh they mulkootha
Neh way say wee a nakh
Aikana dwashmaya op bar ah
How-lan lahma
Dsoon kanan yow-mana
Wash woklan hau bain
Aikana dap h'nan shwakan l hiya wayne
Wla ta'lan l'neeseeyona ella pasan min beesha
Mitol delahe mulkootha
Oo hailah otesh boktha
La alim almein amen

Our topic today is really more than one can address in a mere 30 minutes. And yet, that is precisely what we will do. For more depth on this topic, I conduct a workshop on "Quantum Physics, Spirituality, and You." We need to understand, however, that today is just the beginning. It is merely a very large, very general introductory overview.

Now, I want you to imagine, if you will, that a door suddenly appears before you. It is not attached to anything, other than the door frame. The door is just there. It's right in front of you. You can walk around it, but I want you to open it and see what's beyond it. However, when you try the handle, you find that it is locked.

Well, today, I intend to give you the key that unlocks that door. What you will find beyond that door is a whole new universe of knowledge and experience. It will look just like this universe in which we already live, but it will be different. It will be more colorful, more vibrant, and more meaningful. Today we will take but a few steps through that doorway. But you can always choose to return to the door at any time, to continue through it, and to discover whole new exciting universes of possibility.

I'd like to begin today with a few facts. Number one, the Bible has been a major influence upon the entire world for hundreds of years. Whether you believe in the Bible or not, it nevertheless affects every single day of your life. For instance, today's date is predicated upon the existence of Jesus of Nazareth over 2,000 years ago.

So, the calendar has its source in the history of Christianity. When we were growing up, the date was followed by A.D., standing for the Latin, "anno domini," and meaning "in the year of our Lord." That has been replaced in scholarly circles in the past few decades by C.E., meaning "in the common era." Nevertheless, the event which separates B.C.E., "before the common era" from C.E., "the common era," is the life and teachings of Jesus.

Another fact is that somewhere around 40% or more of the Bible is composed of dreams and visions. That's right. It's not verbatim reality, but rather the relaying of the visions and the dreams of people thousands of years ago who placed a premium upon the importance of things such as visions and dreams. These stories, like other dreams, are therefore open to interpretation.

The Bible, as most of us have come to know it, is composed of what we were taught to think of as the "Old Testament" and the "New Testament." Of course the "Old Testament" is actually the 39 books of the Jewish Torah, the Laws, and the Prophets, and other writings. It's interesting to note that recently the Roman Catholic Church, in a major position paper, referred to these books as the "Jewish Bible" rather than as the "Old Testament." This was a paper, incidentally, which stated that there is no conflict between the Christian belief that Jesus is the messiah who will one day return, and the Jewish belief that the messiah has yet to appear on the planet.

Next, what we refer to as the "New Testament" is 27 books or documents that comprise the gospels and letters about the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth and, of course, the book of the Revelation, a book which, incidentally, was not included as a part of the Bible until hundreds of years after the death of Jesus. It is these 27 books that comprise the foundation for Christianity, though "their" foundation is, in turn, in the 39 books of the Jewish Bible, or the Old Testament. The Koran, the book of Islam, has part of its foundation in all 66 of these combined books. And over half of the world's population claims to be followers of some, or all, of these 67 religious documents.

The reason that I have mentioned all of this today is that when we speak of "spirituality," we need to realize that our spiritual perceptions are highly influenced by the 67 books that comprise the foundation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, whether we think that we believe in those religious institutions or not. So we share a foundational commonality of religious and spiritual history with over half of our fellow human beings.

Because of the influence that these three religious movements, that are each descended from Abraham, has had upon our world, I use them as a frame of reference as we examine the impact of the latest in quantum thinking upon our notion of spirituality. But before opening the quantum box, we need to spend a few more moments with this thing called "spirituality." Although we may all use the terms, "spirit" and "spirituality," in mixed company, the fact of the matter is that those words have perhaps as many different meanings as there are people who use them.

I'm reminded here of R.D. Laing's book, "The Politics of Experience," in which Dr. Laing says, "You experience your experience and I experience my experience. You cannot experience my experience and I cannot experience your experience. You can only experience your experience of my experience and I can only experience my experience of your experience." This uniqueness extends to our belief in, and our experience of, spirit and the accompanying sense of spirituality. Our experience and understanding of matters of spirit is unique to our own individual consciousness.

With that in mind, it is still safe to say that we could probably agree that spirit is beyond that which is physical, though it permeates all that is physical and is, in fact, the underlying source of all that is physical. Spirit is everywhere, timeless, and infinite. It is beyond our ability to explain or to fully comprehend. Spirit is one, yet our experience of spirit is infinite.

I have begun with the institutional religious connections to spirituality because religion was the first organized connection to spirituality for most people. Now, however, in just the last century we have devised new ways of perceiving reality through the approaches of science, and these fresh modes of perception are shedding light upon ancient religious and spiritual teachings that were heretofore hidden from the awareness of most religious adherents.

Science, as defined by the astronomer, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, is "the process of placing the evidence of experience into a natural order." On the surface, that sounds simple enough. During this process of the orderly placement of the facts of experience, patterns are discovered that are represented by equations and descriptive statements that are known as theories, laws, and principles. However, until this past century the overwhelming bulk of scientific endeavor was based solely upon the physical world of appearance, upon the Newtonian view that the universe was static, upon that which was quantifiably measurable.

Then, one hundred years ago, that all began to dramatically change with Albert Einstein's "Theory of Relativity," E=mc2, which means that energy equals matter expanding omnidirectionally at the speed of light. Now, 100 years later, most people have yet to actually understand what that "theory" means, much less to comprehend the impact that it has had upon the thinking of science and the course that our lives have taken. Today, however, I am going to give you a few insights into these, as yet, still hidden mysteries.

With that said, let's take a look at this thing called quantum physics or quantum mechanics. The idea of the "quantum," as used here, springs from Einstein's theory. Simply put, it is an indivisible unit of energy. We could also think of the quantum as the basic, measurable, indivisible unit of spirit manifesting itself. It's important to note that rather than being a thing, the quantum is, instead, a concept for measurement.

Now, up until Einstein, time was thought of as a constant, but Albert laid that notion to rest. Time, he discovered, was relative. That means that it is subject to the perception or the perspective of the experiencer of time.

There was an implication in that bit of timelessness that led to a more profound discovery. Just as time was relative, so, it appeared, was reality itself also relative. Scientists came to realize that the observer unalterably alters the observed by the mere act of observation.

It turns out that scientists find what they're looking for precisely because it is what they are looking for. In other words, the result is created by the focus or intention of the observer within the realms of possibility. An excellent example of the implications of this is in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 to Sir Joseph John Thomson for "discovering" and "proving" that electrons are particles orbiting the nucleus of an atom, and the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics 25 years later in 1931 to Sir Joseph Thomson's son, Sir Richard Paget Thomson for "discovering" and "proving" that electrons are waves of energy surrounding the nucleus of an atom. Two apparently opposite results and yet both were correct. And that seeming paradox doesn't just apply to the work of scientists; it applies to everyone and to all of experience. We all find what we're looking for. And that's hard for most people to accept.

In the case of the electron, contrary to what you were probably taught in school, an electron is actually a cloud, or a wave, of probabilities surrounding the nucleus of an atom until someone attempts to observe the electron. At the moment of observation, the electron cloud coalesces at the precise place in space where it is expected to be observed by the observer. Listen, now. It assumes the appearance of a particle, out of the infinity of probable places that it could be observed as such, at the precise, single probability location where it is expected to be found. Science has known about this aspect of reality since before most of us were even born.

My dear friends, what works for the scientific observers in their quest to discover the electron and other building blocks of this world of appearance, works exactly the same way for we observers of the totality of our reality of this world of appearances. We are told that we were each created in the image and after the likeness of God, of whatever it is that created us, and through speaking the word of expectation, we create the reality in which we live. Genesis tells us, as you name it, so is it. And this is done on both an individual and upon a group level simultaneously, all of the time.

And that's just the beginning. In order to make such an incredible scenario of ongoing creation possible, the scientists posited that the mechanism that allows this to happen is the fact that all possibilities must already exist. All possibilities already exist. But they don't just exist in and of themselves. They exist in relation to whatever also exists in a possible relationship with them. Well, it doesn't take long for us to realize that the number of possible relationships that could exist between all that is is infinite. An infinite number of possibilities and they all exist. And a way of comprehending that infinite existence of possibilities is to think of the infinite possibilities existing in an infinite number of parallel universes.

Dr. Fred Alan Wolf first turned me on to thinking about parallel universes in his book of the same name. Then, one day as I was driving though the high desert of New Mexico, I found myself wondering if it would be possible for me to slip out of the universe in which I was currently living in awareness, and to slip into another parallel universe that might be more to my liking. You know, fewer problems, more money, better relationships. I suddenly almost drove off of the highway as it hit me, like a crystal bullet, right between the eyes. We already do that every single day, every single moment, with every thought that we think, every feeling that we emote, and every choice that we make. We are in a constant state of navigating through the infinity of parallel universes, and that's why it is possible for that electron to be exactly where it is expected to be. It is because we, through our thinking and through our feeling, bring into our awareness, or consciously enter into the consciousness of, one of the many universes in which that electron is precisely where probability leads us to expect to find it.

I had a friend, Vrle Minto, who used to conduct 24-hour seminars in what he called "Alpha Truth Awareness." One of the many techniques that he taught was how to program empty parking spaces. After attending his seminar several times I realized that the reason the parking space technique worked wasn't because one "caused" the parking space to be available but because one set oneself upon an unconscious course that caused one to arrive at the parking space precisely when it became available. And that brings to mind another aspect of the "all possibilities existing" scenario. By definition, because time is no longer to be considered as a constant, then the infinite number of possibilities and the accompanying infinity of universes therefore exist throughout space and time. What has been, what is now, and what will be are now already existent in all of their possible ramifications.

The alpha and the omega. Always was, is now, and always will be. Science is recognizing and validating what spiritual disciplines have professed for thousands of years.

In the early 1970's a comedy group called the Firesign Theater had a record album entitled, "Everything You Know Is Wrong." By now you may begin to agree with my belief that there is more truth to that title than we might like to admit.

Now, what's all this got to do with spirituality, one might ask. And I might respond, "Well, how do you think God answers prayer?" God answers prayer through you. God is the source, but you are the one who creates the expectations that result in the result. That's not as revolutionary as it might sound at first blush. When reading the Christian gospels, what is it that Jesus says, time and time again, when people experience healing? He says, "It is your faith that has made you whole." In other words, it is your belief that has chosen the outcome and the accompanying universe of possibility that will manifest in your life and in your consciousness.

Since we've mentioned healing, let's talk a little bit about that subject. Have you ever had an experience where you thought that you were very ill, possibly even dying, and you "pray to God to help you," and then you go to the doctor the next day, and the doctor says that it was no big thing. Heartburn rather than a heart attack. And what do we do? Don't we breathe a sigh of relief, feeling immediate improvement, and we go on our way, shaking our head over our foolish overreaction? But wait a minute. Didn't we forget something? What about the healing that we were so desperately praying for just the night before? The prayer is answered. The healed appearance proves that, but that very healing is used to discount the validity of the original healing challenge, thereby negating the reality of the healing itself. And so we lose our faith, and ultimately, we lose our lives.

My friends, the body is in a constant state of healing itself, of rebuilding itself, of replacing itself, of renewing itself. There's not a single physical, biological part of you, not a single cell, that is more than two years old. It's amazing! And then we slough it off when the doctor says, "it was nothing." I know that my life has been saved countless times through the prayer of the realization that the healed me existed somewhere out there and it was my job to align my consciousness with that healed reality and to accept it as my conscious reality. And I did that by giving thanks that the healing already existed.

This is what Gregg Braden is talking about in his book, "The Isaiah Effect," when he speaks of praying by giving thanks that the answer already exists. All of the answers already exist. It's our job to find them and to accept them by recognizing them with an open, accepting, attitude of gratitude.

A few years ago, USA Today ran an article entitled, "What Follows PC?" That's PC as in Personal Computer. The article said that the answer is QC. QC stands for Quantum Computer. In the present world of computers, a computer solves problems by answering an involved series of yes or no questions that ultimately lead it to the answer that it is asked to discover. That's the world of PC.

In the world of the near future, the world of Quantum Computers, it is understood that the answer already exists, so the computer ignores all of the interim steps and goes directly to the answer itself in one step. This has already been proven in the laboratories. Quantum computers. Quantum prayer. The difference between the two is that quantum prayer doesn't have to be manufactured in a factory. It is already at our immediate disposal. It is built in. And we don't have to learn how to use it, either. We're already using it all of the time. It's just that we're using it without awareness. And that results in answers without awareness; answers that we don't even see; answers that therefore appear not to exist for us.

Thirty years ago I predicted that the greatest discovery of the 20th century hadn't happened yet. It would be when science recognized and accepted the validity of consciousness. My dear friends, it has happened, just as I predicted, right before the end of the past century. Consciousness and, through it, the spirit that pervades all that is, are now acceptable elements in the search by scientists for discovering the inherent order in the universe.

Are any of you familiar with the Global Consciousness Project? Well, a group of Princeton scientists have discovered how to measure the consciousness of the planet. Discovering, through experiments, that consciousness can affect the outcome of a random number generator, that's a computer program that produces random numbers, they have installed 60 random number generators around the planet and they monitor the randomness, or the coherence, or the relationship with one another of the numbers that are being generated. They have already discovered direct correlations in the days leading up to the events of 9/11 and have claimed that the reason the winning numbers in the September 11, 2002, New York State Lottery were 9 1 1 may be because so many people expected the winning numbers to be 9 1 1.

We, as created expressions of the creator, we are the creators of our own reality of awareness. In Paul's letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 1, it says, and I'm certain that you have heard this before, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." That's from the King James translation. Two simple phrases with profound implications. And they have been used for centuries to give people hope, for the future. However, when this verse is translated from the ancient Aramaic text, something interesting happens. There is a third phrase that appears and gives eternal clarity to this verse.

In the Lamsa translation from Aramaic we read, "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, as it was the substance of things which have come to pass; and it is the evidence of things not seen." In other words, faith is, and always has been, the essential origin and nature of everything that is. What do you have faith in? To know that, just look around you. If you don't like what you see, then change your mind.

What? Some of you don't believe that that will work? Well, consider this example. Three decades ago I predicted that the Soviet Union would eventually collapse when the Soviet people became aware of what possibilities the world had to offer them. Many people believe that it was Ronald Reagan and Star Wars that led to the fall of the communist Soviet Union. I see those events, however, from a different perspective. I am reminded of the final line from the 1933 movie, "King Kong," when the narrator says, "It wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast." And I contend that it wasn't the threat of Star Wars that caused the communist state to collapse, but it was "beauty." And beauty was the Beatles, Levis, and CNN. It was when people recognized that opportunity could exist for them, that they began to believe in new possibilities, and those new possibilities began to manifest for them and for all of us. Incidentally, a year after I first published this realization, I heard Mikhail Gorbachov say the same thing, without, of course, the references to King Kong and the Beatles. It was when people recognized that opportunity could exist for them, that they changed their minds. And reality itself changed.

Well, our agreed upon concept of time says that it's time to wrap up these ideas. But before I close, I have a homework assignment for you. This is not easy, although it is simple. The assignment is: for the next week, drink at least 64 ounces of water every day for seven days. Most people can't do this. Not because it's too much water, although it may change your bathroom habits the first few days, but because they aren't self disciplined enough to remain focused on such a simple project for a mere seven days. And then they wonder why they can't get anything else to work in their lives. So, if you have the courage, test yourself this week. See how in control of your own life you are. 64 ounces, that's three 20 ounce bottles plus 4 ounces, or a half cup, each and every day for seven days. Oh, and if you miss a day, you start over.

In closing, for those who seek more help with connecting with their own spirituality, stop looking so hard for it. It is you. It is not to be magically manifested through anything out there. It is you. You are a spiritual being manifesting in a universe of your own creative choice. So, take the time each day to think about these closing words that are attributed to Jesus as he spoke with his followers. From Matthew 6, beginning with verse 5, and with my own and Dr. Rocco Errico's amplification upon the final verses:

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who like to pray, standing in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you that they have already received their reward.

"But as for you, when you pray, enter into your inner chamber and lock your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret shall himself reward you openly.

"And when you pray, do not repeat your words like the pagans, for they think that because of much talking they will be heard.

"Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need, before you ask him;

"Therefore pray in this manner:

Our father, our creator, our beloved
Who is in heaven, who is throughout the universe
Let your name, your identity, be holy, be set aside, be glorified in our consciousness
Let your kingdom come, that is to say, let your sovereign presence be recognized and accepted, here and now
Let your will, your wish, your desire be acknowledged and accepted as now manifest in our lives and affairs
For even as it is throughout the universe, so it is also on earth.
Provide to us the bread of our necessities
To meet our needs from day to day, every day
And forgive, release, untie, cancel, our offenses, our debts
As we also have forgiven, have released, those who have offended us
And do not let us enter into temptation
But free us from evil, from error thinking, feeling, and acting
For yours is the kingdom, the sovereign presence,
And the power,
And the song and the glory,
From the ages to the ages, forever and forever
Sealed in faithfulness
Amen."

- posted by Charles DeTurk @ 12:01 AM

 
"UNVEILING BIBLICAL MYSTERIES"

I’d like to begin today with the Lord’s Prayer as spoken in Jesus’ tongue of ancient Aramaic.

Awoon dwashmaya
Nith kadashe schmakh
Teh they mulkootha
Neh way say wee a nakh
Aikana dwashmaya op bar ah
How-lan lahma
Dsoon kanan yow-mana
Wash woklan hau bain
Aikana dap h’nan shwakan l hiya wayne
Wla ta'lan l'neeseeyona ella pasan min beesha
Mitol delahe mulkootha
Oo hailah otesh boktha
La alim almein amen

In 1973 Alan Watts passed away in his sleep at his home in California at the age of 58. He was widely recognized for his writings about Zen and specifically for “The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.” The very last piece of writing that he had published before his untimely death was an article that he had written for Playboy Magazine entitled, “The Most Dangerous Book In The World.” That was 30 years ago, but his contention is just as valid today as it was then. Oh, and the book in question? The Holy Bible, of course. We can add the Holy Koran to that for the very same reasons that make the Bible so dangerous to this day.

I’m here today to share with you some ideas and some perspectives about this most dangerous book, the “Holy Bible,” and to help bring it into a context wherein it is more understandable and more personally meaningful. The greatest danger with the Bible arises when we capitalize the article “The” by claiming divine infallibility for the entire contents of the document. “The” is not a part of the title of this book. It is correctly referred to by the titles, “Bible” or “Holy Bible.”

I have long taught that whenever you meet someone who claims to have “The truth, ” that you should turn and run the other way, for they are danger cloaked in a shroud of false beliefs. If, on the other hand, someone claims to have “a truth,” then take the time, if you’re so inclined, to see what they have to share, and then determine if it feels right for you. This is the approach I recommend for the Bible, and for all other religious and political teachings for that matter. Now there are those who will accuse me of blasphemy for these last remarks, but they are often the very same people who capitalize the article “The,” and falsely attach it to the Bible, as though they were the ones who wrote it, and therefore best know what it means.

The reason Watts called the Bible the “world’s most dangerous book” is that after proclaiming it as divinely inspired, it is then possible for people to selectively quote from the document to back up whatever belief they choose to espouse. This is possible because the Bible is composed of 66 different “books,” or documents, written by an unknown number of unknown authors, edited by uncounted, unknown editors, copied by who-knows-how-many copyists who-knows-how-many times, and reportedly presents thousands of years of history that has been passed on for centuries, if not for millennia, by word-of-mouth. Further, it presents the evolution of religious thought, coupled with interpretations of myths, legends, and beliefs which predate the documents. This is further compounded by the fact that over 40% of the content of this book of documents is based upon dreams and visions.

Because of the vastness of what is covered in these writings, concerning historical reporting and commentary, and the development of religious perspective, it is not unusual to discover that the Bible often appears, on face value, to contradict itself. There’s a simple reason for that observation: it’s true; the Bible does contradict itself. For that reason, its absolute divine origin is highly suspect. That creates havoc for the “divinity crowd” and forces them to develop elaborate intellectual explanations for why these contradictions are not really contradictions. In a manner of speaking, they are correct, inasmuch as apparent contradictions are really more a matter of different perspectives.

What we want to do today, however, is to examine these books from the perspective of who might have written them, why might they have written them, and who was the audience for whom they were written. Through these exercises we may then discover a better understanding of whatever divinity may be inherent in these documents, and thereby develop a new, more personal experience of the messages that they may impart to us.

The Bible, as we’ve come to know it, is actually two sets of documents. The first is what we were taught to call the Old Testament. That term, itself, is indicative of a point of view that sees the documents that comprise that “testament” as a series of reports testifying about alleged events of a past, that past being prior to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. In a recent major position paper, the Roman Catholic Church referred to these documents as the Jewish Bible, rather than as the Old Testament. That is, perhaps, a more correct rendering, for its contents are sacred documents of the Jewish faith. These books are the foundation of the religious belief structure that forms Judaism. It is not only the history of these people, but also the story of the development of their religious beliefs. And because it covers such a wide span of the evolution of a single unique people, from a metaphysical viewpoint it can be seen as analogous to the growth and development of a single individual human being in life and consciousness.

The second set of documents that make up the Bible is the “New Testament,” comprising the gospels, or teachings, as perceived by the followers of the Jewish Rabbi known as Jesus of Nazareth, and the epistles, or the letters, concerning his ministry, and some of the history of the early church which grew out of that ministry. Although Jesus’ ministry is built upon, and is therefore a continuation of, the principles outlined in the Jewish Bible, Jesus has taken these concepts to a whole new level of understanding. This tends to further contribute, of course, to the appearance of internal contradiction.

The beginning of the Bible, with the book of Genesis, is a series of allegories, or stories, designed to provide a framework for comprehending the answers to universal questions, such as “Is there a supreme being?” “Where did all of this come from?” “How did we get here?” “Why is there evil?” and “Why do we die?” These allegories of the Genesis, the beginning, of the Jewish Bible are actually usually modified retellings of stories from cultures more ancient than that of the Hebrews.

The first, possibly real, non-allegorical, character of major note in these stories is Abram, later to be known as Abraham, the Patriarch of the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims. Today, the ideological descendents of Abraham comprise over 3 billion human beings, over half of the population of the world, and they share a commonality with one another in the origin of their faith and religious beliefs that is traced back to Abraham. Who was Abraham, and why is he so important?

Well, first, Abraham was an Aramian, a man from the area of the world known as Aram. This is the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers. It is the land that was the setting for the stories of Adam and Eve and of the Garden of Eden. And, if you haven’t figured it out by now, it is the land that today is generally known as Iraq. And personally, I believe it to be a sad day when my country decided to bomb the homeland of the original Patriarch of the religious beliefs of over half of the world’s population. The fallout from those actions will not be easy to overcome.

The language that springs from the land of Aram is naturally called Aramaic. This is an ancient language that became the lingua franca, the language of commerce, for that part of the world for thousands of years. By contrast, the English that we speak today is merely several hundred years old. From Aramaic sprang Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, and a host of other dialects and languages. But Aramaic, itself, is a timeless language that is still spoken, read, and written today in communities in countries all over the world, including the United States. Aramaic is also the language that was spoken by Jesus.

It is for those reasons that I have found the most accurate translation of these ancient texts, known as the Bible, to be a direct Aramaic to English translation. Up until recently, the only such Bible out there, out of the thousands of translations that are available, was the George Lamsa translation. I have recently discovered another Aramaic to English translation that is in process, having begun with the New Testament first. In reading parts of the Lamsa translation, as compared to this new translation, it quickly became evident to me that Dr. Lamsa, who was born into an Aramaic speaking Aramaic tribal culture in the Northern part of Aram, had a different background in religious and cultural thinking, training, and experience than the other translator, who grew up learning Aramaic as part of an Aramaic community in Northern California, U.S.A. And those differences profoundly affected their translations.

Unless one has consciously worked in the field of translation, it is easy to mistakenly believe that translation is a direct one to one process in which “this” always equals “that.” Yet, when one thinks about it, merely communicating in a single language constantly requires translation between what is communicated and the communication that is received. And the difference between those two activity events is largely dependent upon the experiences and the perspectives of the individuals involved in the communication process.

Let me give you an example. I’m thinking of a word. It has four letters and it begins with an “F,” and it is used in many different ways, therefore implying different meanings. One meaning has to do with sexual activity. Then again, some use the word all by itself as an epithet. It is also used as a derogatory term regarding others. And it can be used as a way of saying “messing someone up.” Now, with the multiple meanings in mind, and realizing that we’re in a church, I’m nevertheless going to state that word aloud by using it in those aforementioned four different ways. As I do this, realize that not everyone here today will respond to this word the same way that you do. For some of you, who knows, this may be the first time you’ve heard this word used in a church. Okay, ready?

Fools! I bet I fooled you. If you feel foolish, like a fool should, perhaps it’s because you were thinking that I was going to talk about fooling around.

Now, if, by chance, you were thinking that I was talking about a different 4-letter word that begins with an “F,” you’ll probably find that it will plug in quite well as a substitution in what I just said.

Fools! I bet I fooled you. If you feel foolish, like a fool should, perhaps it’s because you were thinking that I was going to talk about fooling around.

When we start thinking about it, a lot of our words have multiple meanings. And it’s no different in other languages, even languages that are ancient. With that in mind, we quickly realize that all translation is subject to, and influenced by, the interpretations of the translator based upon their own, individual, unique perspective. That’s why the “divinity crowd” is so insistent that this is “The” revealed word of God and therefore must be taken literally. They are afraid to acknowledge, and deal with, our divinely inspired uniqueness.

Jesus claimed that he came not to destroy the law but to fulfill the law. He did this by helping to show us how to return to the God of Abraham. When one thinks about it, Abraham’s relationship with God was extraordinary. Abraham had no church, no synagogue, no mosque, no Bible, no Koran, no denomination, no theology, no books, no classes, no tapes, no minister, no priest, no rabbi, no organization, nor any institution to tell him what to believe, nor to intercede upon his behalf with God. Instead, Abraham merely had a personal relationship with God. Abraham walked with God. Abraham talked with God. It is even reported that Abraham ate with God. That’s right, “Guess who’s coming to dinner.”

What does all of that mean? It means that God’s sovereign presence was active in the awareness and the conscious experience of Abraham. And one might ask, “How could this happen, that a man should have that kind of a relationship with his creator?” And the answer is quite simple. Abraham experienced that relationship by choice: by his own choice. And we can, and do, make the same choices every day of our lives.

Thousand of years, and a lot of history later, a teacher arose out of Nazareth proclaiming that “the kingdom of God is at hand.” That means that the sovereign presence of God is here right now. “Awake, thou that sleepest,” he said. Jesus challenged mankind to make the choice made by Abraham: of recognizing and accepting our personal relationship with our creator. Through teachings and parables, and through his actions, he imparted to us a variety of ways of recognizing the immediacy of this divine sovereign presence that he spoke of as “Father.” The Aramaic word translated as Father is a term of endearment, like saying, “beloved.” And Jesus made very clear that this wasn’t just “his” father, as many in the divinity crowd would have us believe, but specifically, with his instruction on how we should pray, the Aramaic, “awoon,” means “our father,” or “our beloved.”

The work of Dr. George Lamsa, in more accurately bringing a translation of the Bible directly from an ancient Aramaic perspective into English, has been carried on by his student, Dr. Rocco Errico, who is, today, an outstanding Bible scholar, translator, and teacher in his own right. When Dr. Errico first began working with Dr. Lamsa, some 40 years ago, in an effort to define what he felt was necessary to gaining an understanding of the intention of the authors of these ancient texts, Dr. Errico outlined seven approaches, or seven perspectives, for unlocking the meaning of these documents. He called these “the seven keys to understanding the scriptures,” and he wrote about them in his book, “Let There Be Light,” and in its sequel, “And There Was Light.” Both of those books are available for purchase here today.

The seven keys revolve around becoming familiar with the nature of those people who originated what today we know of as the Bible. Briefly, the seven keys are:

1) The Aramaic Language,
2) Idioms,
3) Mysticism,
4) Culture,
5) Psychology,
6) Symbolism, and
7) Amplification

Having known Dr. Errico for over 3 decades, and having studied directly with him over the past half dozen years, I teach these seven keys, with Dr. Errico’s blessings. At this moment, we only have time to very briefly touch upon them. This is why I teach the workshop entitled, “Revealing Bible Mystery.” What I share here can only whet your appetite. To better understand these revelations takes time, study, and meditation. But, the reward more than justifies the effort, for such a study makes the Bible come alive. So, do you have your speed skates strapped on? Get ready, because here we go through the seven keys.

Every language has it’s own unique qualities and those qualities are attached to the religions, the politics, and the cultures of those who speak, read, and write the language. It is only through an intimate knowledge of a language that one can understand and appreciate its nuances of common usage. Some languages have words and ways for expressing certain ideas and concepts that other languages make no accommodation for. I’m reminded of Leon Russell, who, when he was on tour in Africa, asked a Zulu what the Zulu word was for “lost in the woods.” The Zulu replied that there is no such word, because Zulus don’t get lost in the woods.

It’s not enough to have a language-to-language dictionary for proper translation. One must be familiar with a language that one is translating from and also familiar with the language that one is translating to. A further example of this is a recent popular mistranslation from a computer space game developed in the Orient in the 90’s, and containing the now famous mistranslated line, “all your base are belong to us,” meaning, of course, “we have captured all of your bases.” On the Internet, a number of very creative people have taken that mistranslation and pushed it to hysterical limits. The same thing happens with the Bible. Mistranslations, particularly regarding apocalyptic books, are often promoted by extreme speakers to frighteningly hysterical limits.

Many of the 12,000 – 14,000 errors in translation uncovered by Dr. Lamsa are minor, though some are extremely major in their implications. Some of these minor mistranslations, because of the misdirected emphasis placed upon them, have had a major impact upon subverting the coarse of Christianity over the centuries. Probably the most influential mistranslation of our age is John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever shall believe in him shall have eternal life.” The key term that has been mistranslated in that verse is, “only begotten,” a concept which has fostered the argument that Jesus is half man/half God, and therefore different from the rest of humankind.

The translation should more accurately be, “like unto a first born,” so it would read, “For God so loved the world that he gave his son that was like unto a first born.” This is a child out of “many” children who is looked upon with great favor, rather than one who has a unique supernatural parentage. And that is in perfect harmony with Jesus’ own teaching: “Our Father.” It’s interesting to note that when Dr. Lamsa published his translation of the Bible that his publisher changed the phrase in that verse back to “only begotten,” without even consulting him. And if modern publishers do that, you can bet that ancient copyists also did it.

As we better understand the Aramaic language, we discover that God is zealous rather than jealous. A zealous God is in more harmony with the reality of universe than the human misconception of God being jealous in ways that mimic the jealousy expressed by human beings themselves. If God is all there is, then what is there for God to be jealous of?

Next, in our understanding of the original meaning of these documents is gaining a familiarity with the idioms of these ancient Aramaic-speaking people. An idiom, simply put, is a descriptive word picture, sometimes exaggerated, that represents a usually unrelated action or circumstance. Idioms are peculiar to languages and dialects, therefore, every language has its own idioms. We use idioms all of the time without even thinking about how ridiculous it would be if what we said was to be taken verbatim.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been steaming because at first I was in quite a pickle, and then I was in a jam, and all because I was too hot to trot when I should have had my eyes peeled, kept my nose to the grindstone, and my shoulder to the wheel, but I just couldn’t seem to get all of my ducks in a row. Even in our own English language, idioms can change from country to country, culture to culture. To “knock someone up” in America means “to get them pregnant,” whereas in England, it means “to wake them up.”

Understanding Aramaic idioms allows us to see that when Lot’s wife turned to look back upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and “became a pillar of salt,” that the writer is idiomatically telling us that Lot’s wife had a stroke, became paralyzed, and died.

Then when Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount says, “If thy right eye offends thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee,” “and if thy right offends thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee,” he is saying, idiomatically, to stop doing that which is offensive.

Next, we must consider the mysticism of the Aramaic cultures. Mysticism has to do with secrets and mystery. It’s origin is in intuition and sources other than those of mere physical appearance. Dreams, visions, contemplative thought, and meditation open us up to the mystic. And it is those same sources that provide the content of over 40% of the Bible, according to Dr. Errico. When one doesn’t have sources of information as we do today through the written word, audio, video, telephony, and cyber systems, one is more inclined to rely upon myths, dreams, and visions for guidance.

Many of the key books of the Bible are by, or about, prophets. The prophets were the mystics of their time. Much of what they are relaying to us, and what is being reported about them, has its source in the dreams and visions of mysticism.

Earlier you may recall that I pointed out that Abraham “ate with God.” Now, lest you get sidetracked into thinking that God took on a divine anthropomorphic form and supped with Abraham, realize, rather, that Abraham envisioned, or dreamt, of eating with the God with whom he felt so close. God was anthropomorphized by Abraham in Abraham’s consciousness. God has no need to take the form of humankind in order to commune with us. God is already present in all human form. It is we who feel such a physical transformation to be necessary, and so we create it with the mysticism of our imaginations and then imply to others that what we have “imagined” should be real for everyone.

On a more grounded note we also want to look at understanding the Aramaic culture itself. I remember a Peter Jennings Christmas Special several years ago from Jerusalem. In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, people were pushing and shoving one another and I found myself thinking how utterly stupid that they were fighting in such an allegedly holy place. What I didn’t realize, however, is that the people worshipping in that church believe that one proves one’s love for God by being the first in line, and that rather than fighting, those worshippers were, instead, jockeying for position to prove their faith, devotion, and dedication to God.

A large part of the culture of a people has to do with their customs and manners. Understanding the common, everyday events of people lives and the rituals and viewpoints which they develop around these events helps to bring new insight into the life and the writings of the people themselves. How people behave at meals, at special events, such as births, deaths, and weddings, and how they treat family, friends, strangers, and travelers, are just some of the aspects of the life of a people that gives insight into their culture.

The psychology of a people is also important to discern if one is to truly understand the people themselves. In the case of the Semitic peoples who are the origin of these religious documents called, “Bible,” their psychology is more Oriental than it is Occidental, and yet it is with a western mind that we have too often attempted to literally perceive the Oriental psychology of these near-eastern peoples. While the Western Occidental mind tends to analyze by fragmentizing and compartmentalizing the world of appearance, the Eastern Oriental mind is more open to the invisible realms from which the world of appearance originates. It is therefore understandable when Rhudyard Kipling wrote, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” that in order for true communication to occur between those two viewpoints, it is going to take a good deal of open understanding upon the parts of both perspectives if they are going to grant one another the right to be. And it is that very same openness that leads to the growth of new awareness. We must therefore see the “scriptures” from an Oriental as well as an Occidental perspective.

Consideration of the psychology of the Near East takes in their relationship to the concept of time. It results in the laws and customs that evolve from the Oriental perspective. This includes attitudes towards women and the relationships between the sexes. And those relationships then extend into our myriad of other relationships with one another and the legal procedures that we develop to monitor those relationships. Then a key aspect of relationships is the glue that binds them together: love. This becomes an important concept for consideration when we examine the teachings of Jesus: “love the lord, your god,” “love your neighbor as yourself,” “love one another.” And lest we get too serious, our examination of the psychology of the Near East includes an understanding of their sense of humor and the ways in which they infuse humor into their stories, stories that we all too often take too seriously. And with all of that said, perhaps you understand why we can only scratch the surface this morning in our consideration of the mysteries of the Bible.

Next symbolism is a very important aspect of communication and the Aramaic culture is steeped in symbolism. Jesus used symbology extensively through his presentations of parables, or symbolic stories. Many of the people about whom we read in the Bible are not people at all, but rather symbolic representations of entire tribes or groups of people. A good place to get an historical perspective upon this fact is to read “Asimov’s Guides To the Old and New Testaments,” by Isaac Asimov.

Western scholars, over the centuries, have perverted these ancient texts by interpreting symbolic Semitic metaphors as literal fact. Perhaps the most disturbingly destructive result of this literalization of ancient metaphors has been to foster the belief in the reality of an entity known as Satan, Lucifer, or the Devil, and giving this fictitious being a power that is in conflict with the omnipotence of God. From these false beliefs has sprung a doctrine of dualism that has distorted and hidden the truths in these texts for over two millennia.

Finally, we have amplification to consider in our understanding of scripture. Now the word, “amplification,” is a less critical way of saying
exaggeration. Although this is our final key, it is nevertheless extremely important for the Western mind to understand. Amplification is the element that animates Aramaic conversation.

The next time I speak with Dr. Errico, when he asks how this talk went today, speaking in an Aramaic context I might say, “oh, it was fantastic. Over a thousand people must have viewed it already on the Internet. I have received an overwhelming influx of emails wanting to know more about you and your work. I’m certain that everyone will be bying at least three of your books online.” We must remember this key whenever we come across large numbers, or repetitive numbers, such as 3, 7, 12, and 40, in the Bible. The numbers that are large are for the purpose of making them memorable, rather than because someone did an actual count. The repetitive numbers are used symbolically.

In moments of passion, each of us has probably used absolute statements that are nothing more than an amplification upon the reality of the situation at hand. The exaggeration will often start with the words, “you always …,” and then go on to state something that is patently outrageous. It’s no different in the Bible. Whether it’s Sampson slaying thousands with the jaw of an ass, Rebecca being told that she will be the mother of thousands and millions, or the walls of the cities of Canaan reportedly being fenced up to the heavens, the Bible is full of overly ambitious descriptive statements that are not to be taken literally but are rather to be relished for the way in which they bring life to scripture.

As I’m certain you can see, the Bible is a very vibrant and alive group of documents that contain a wealth of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding that can inspire each one of us to new heights in our lives and experience. So we see here today in our brief few minutes together that there is much more to the Bible than many of us perhaps realized. And the keys for revealing those hidden mysteries lie in getting to know the essence of the people who created, passed on, and recorded these insightful documents that make up what we have come to call the Bible.

My special blessings to you all for a marvelous week and an exciting life, and I look forward to sharing more with each of you.

- posted by Charles DeTurk @ 12:01 AM

 
"WHAT WE BELIEVE THAT MAKES US DIFFERENT"

I’d like to begin today with the Lord’s Prayer as spoken in Jesus’ tongue of ancient Aramaic.

Awoon dwashmaya
Nith kadashe schmakh
Teh they mulkootha
Neh way say wee a nakh
Aikana dwashmaya op bar ah
How-lan lahma
Dsoon kanan yow-mana
Wash woklan hau bain
Aikana dap h’nan shwakan l hiya wayne
Wla ta'lan l'neeseeyona ella pasan min beesha
Mitol delahe mulkootha
Oo hailah otesh boktha
La alim almein amen

I have spoken in Unity churches all over the country during the past 40 years. And I have attended classes and services in dozens of additional New Thought churches. One thing that I have noticed over the years is that people often have little idea what Unity is about; what it believes. This is quite evident when I see Unity people try to deal with some of the questions which more fundamentalist Christians like to ask of us.

All of my life it has disturbed me that there are self-proclaimed Christians out there who have such preconceived notions about what Jesus taught and what he stood for that they take it upon themselves to judge and, even on occasion, to attack myself and others of what you might call the Unity persuasion.

Once I was at an activity where people from a Unity Church were advertising themselves to the public, yet when the public questioned these “Unitics” as to what Unity was and what it believed, they admitted that their Church didn’t really teach what Unity believed, and therefore they weren’t sure how to accurately answer the questions.

Finally, some ten years ago, I was confronted with the realization that the reason these fundamentalist questions disturbed me was because I had not come to terms with my own beliefs. In other words, my beliefs hadn’t yet taken root in that experience which we call knowing.

So I began to make a list on a 3x5 card of words and phrases that would remind me of what I believe. I could then pull out this card whenever I found my thoughts and feelings floundering or being assaulted by others, and I could refer to it to refresh my memory and get me realigned to the perspective of reality that was most meaningful to me.

Of course, coming to terms with my beliefs as a Christian requires coming to terms with the Bible. Much of my understanding of the Bible has come from Dr. George Lamsa and Dr. Rocco Errico and their numerous books. Additionally, I have studied personally with Dr. Errico for the past half dozen years.

Dr. Rocco Errico’s book – “Let There Be Light” 7 Keys to Understanding the Scriptures states that the keys to understanding scripture are an understanding of: 1) the Aramaic Language, 2) Aramaic Idioms, 3) Aramaic Mysticism, 4) Semitic Culture, 5) Semitic Psychology, 6) Aramaic Symbolism, 7) Aramaic Amplification. These are all further expounded upon in Dr. Errico’s follow-up book, “And There Was Light.”

Forty-five years ago, I recall hearing a Baptist minister on the radio one Sunday morning in Atlanta say: “the Devil is walking the streets of Atlanta, and his name is Unity.” I was about ten at the time and I was shocked, wondering what it was that I believed and why people condemned my beliefs.

Throughout my life I have had occasional “religious discussions” with people who have a more orthodox view than my own; however, I have endeavored to avoid these situations as much as possible.

Then, as I began performing what I liked to call Yellow Pages Weddings I found myself dealing with a wide array of people with many questions regarding my beliefs and those of Unity.

What is Unity: - my pat answer: “Unity got it’s start in the late 1800's and has roots similar to those of New Thought, Religious Science, Christian Science, Divine Science, and the Scientific School of Right Thinking. In response to the orthodoxy of the church at that time, Unity attempted to cut through all of the form and ritual and to establish a direct relationship with God. Unity is, therefore, a return to first century Christianity, to seeking an understanding of the teachings of Jesus before they were confounded by the development of the church, and to discovering practical ways in which to apply those truths in contemporary life.”

Then I began to notice that the questions of others often turned into manipulative accusations. And with time, I got tired of playing the game, “Can we just agree to disagree?”

You’ve all heard it:

“Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

“Have you been born again?”

“Have you been washed in the blood of Christ?”

“Are you ready for the rapture?”

“What are these people talking about,” I would ask myself?

Then one fateful day I encountered what I have come to think of as my dialog with Brandon the banker. Brandon was a bank teller who, upon seeing “Practical Truth Ministry” on my deposit slip, asked me what I believed, and in no time at all he had steered the conversation into his personal attack upon my perspective.

The result of that experience is what we are examining this morning. I call it, “What We Believe That Makes Us Different,” These ten belief statements that I created in response to the question of what we believe are at the core of what causes others to grill us so mercilessly with their practiced questions. I normally teach this as a 10-week course. The content for that course comprises over 100 pages. This morning, we will be speed skating our way through the basic ideas and concepts contained in this volume. If you are interested in more detail, you can find it all on my websites and weblogs on the Internet. Today I am going to quickly share with you my own perspective and insights from my life experience in Unity upon the teachings of the Rabbi from Galilee.

Enough said. Let’s get started. What We Believe That Makes Us Different.

First: God is all there is: absolute, total, without exception

Unity was founded upon the teachings of Jesus Christ with correlation from other evolved masters of spiritual truths.

The book of John starts with the statement: “In the beginning was the word.” Therefore from that word springs all that is.

My mentor, Bucky Fuller, used to say when confronting a problem that he would always begin with total universe and throw out all of the non-essentials. What is that total universe?

Total universe is God. God is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. It is the origin from which absolutely everything springs forth. There is none else.

Deepak Chopra states that we are a field of all possibilities and he concurs with the thinking of Quantum Physics that all possibilities exist. God is all of those possibilities.

Quantum Physics further tells us that this is all possible through the existence of an infinite number of parallel universes. As an aside, I believe that we traverse these infinite parallel universes through the choices that we make.

Then we’re also told that all possibilities exist and that all time is now.

I think of God’s expression as being like breathing. Breathing in and breathing out. But at the core, God is the source; God is the breather. God is all that there is. There is none other. Think of all that has been, is now, and ever shall be and you will have grasped the totality of God, as we are capable of knowing God. Yet God is more than that. God is all there is.

The idea of one God is a Jewish revelation. Over half of world religious belief systems spring from Jewish roots. This awareness of God as one being that is all that there is is an ancient realization.

For evidence of this truth of God being all that there is, we need but look at the functioning of the total universe of appearance as a unity that implies oneness through its balance and its order. We then add to this the awareness that consciousness is everywhere and instantaneous. Everything originates in and from God.

Now, when accosted by the fundamentalist questions of others, I ask them if they believe that God is all there is. If they answer “no,” then I ask them what Jesus said to lead them to believe that.

Second: God is all good; therefore everything that is is good

Years ago, while browsing through the “Whole Earth Catalog,” I happened across a little box containing three laws of universe: They are: (1) Everything is connected to everything; (2) Everything is going somewhere; and (3) There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (the acronym for which is TANSTAAFL).

I find in those three laws the same thing that I observe throughout the entire universe: balance and order.

But if God is all good, then what about evil? Evil is an important belief for many people. Either God is evil or else God cannot be all that there is.

It has been said that nothing is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so.

Biff Rose, an entertainer from the 60’s said, “Being good implies being bad; being myself is beyond either good or bad.”

The poet Rumi says, “Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

The appearances of good and evil arise because we are judging by appearances. However, the latest in the thinking of Quantum Physics is that we are the ones who create the appearances. In other words we are the channels for the expression of God.

When we say that God is good, we are not speaking of the appearance of good. We are speaking of perfect balance and order and expression. Which brings us to our next point.

Third: There is no evil; evil is actually a denial of the truth that there is no evil; evil's only existence rests in one's belief in its existence; therefore evil is the great lie of a belief in separation from God

The physicist Fred Alan Wolf says, “Reality is nothing more than a whole lot of agreement.” And that truth is at the core of all of our problems. Reality is nothing more than a whole lot of agreement.

In John 8:44, when Jesus is being questioned by the scribes and the Pharisees, he responds to them: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do: he was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it.”

Dr. George Lamsa translates that verse as: “You are from the father of accusation, and you want to do the lusts of your father, he who is a murderer of men from the very beginning and who never stands by the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks he speaks his own lie, because he is a liar, and the father of lies.”

My friends, there is only one lie. That lie is the belief that we are separate and apart from God. If we believe that lie, then we open ourselves to all of the other lies. But without that lie, none of the other lies can exist. There is no evil except our thinking makes it so. Although it may appear evil, it is through the power of the belief of our own consciousness that evil actually comes into existence. But it can only exist so long as we believe in it. In other words, it is a figment of our own imaginations.

Fourth: We are created in the image and after the likeness of God; the word for that creation is the Christ; it is the core of every one of us, without exception; we therefore cannot be separate from God, for we are totally God in expression

Paul says, in Colossians 1:25-27: “…I became a minister, according to the dispensation of God which has been given to me for you, fully to preach the word of God everywhere,
“Even the mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now is revealed to his saints;
“To whom God wanted to make known the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

My dear friends, this is the message that Jesus came to proclaim, that each of us is the Christ. And he demonstrated with his life that it is possible for each of us to discover this truth about ourselves and to release that truth about our own Christ within, letting it express through us right now.

Christ in you; the hope of glory.

Fifth: What God does is to express itself; since God is all there is, then this expression is infinitely multitudinous

Let me share with you briefly about the Hubble Deep Field. I have provided a more in-depth explanation of this wonderful discovery on my website and one of my weblogs on the Internet. And I have pictures with me today of what I’m about to share with you.

In a nutshell, a handful of years ago they decided to point the Hubble Space Telescope at a part of space that appeared to be empty. It was the amount of space that would be obscured by a grain of sand held at arm’s length. They looked deep. They kept the camera’s aperture open for almost two weeks. And they discovered between 2 to 3 thousand galaxies, each containing over a billion stars apiece.

Because of this, we are now aware that the universe contains over 70 septillion stars. God’s expression is infinitely multitudinous. God expresses itself and you are a part, and an important part, of that infinite expression.

Sixth: As an expression of God, each of us is unique, a singularity; Jesus is a unique expression of God; you are a unique expression of God; everyone and everything is a unique expression of God; no one individual expression is better or worse than any other expression; each is a singularity; each is absolutely, totally, uniquely, singularly, exquisitely, fully God in expression

Take time to get to know and to accept yourself without judgment. Look in the mirror of life and discover that within you that is special and unique.

There has never been another expression in this entire universe such as you and there never will be another. You are a unique spiritual being expressing your uniqueness through the appearance of identity that you currently inhabit in this realm of appearances. And that is God’s design and God’s intention for each of us. It is our job to rediscover that truth about ourselves and to express it to the fullest of our capabilities.

Seventh: To question or doubt the divinity of our singularity is the ultimate sin of denial; it is denying the existence of, and the full and complete expression of, God

Questioning ourselves can lead to deluded self-judgment if not done in righteousness. Judge only righteous judgment. That means to keep your consciousness centered in the consciousness of the truth of your being, as well as the truth of every other being in spite of appearances. That may not seem easy, but that was what Jesus came here to not only teach us, but to demonstrate for us.

The one statement common to all religions is “do to others as you would have them do to you.” We call it the golden rule, and that’s because it is golden.

If we find ourselves questioning our divinity, then we need to go back to statement number one and begin all over again.

Eighth: Our belief in separation from God causes us to lose sight of the Garden of Eden in which we reside; the garden is the full and total infinite expression of God

I like to think of the Hubble Deep Field as a picture of the Garden of Eden. You know, in the book of Genesis, when God created Adam and Eve, he created them because he needed someone to attend to the garden. This is the same idea reiterated in Voltaire’s “Candide.” Think of yourself as a gardener and begin taking better care of the garden of experience that God has created around you through you.

Ninth: Our purpose, therefore, is to reveal the "mystery hidden for ages:" that each of us is the Christ, the singularity, the totality of God in expression; that revelation comes through every choice we make, conscious or unconscious; all that we think, say, do, and feel is of God and is God

Revelation is an ongoing personal experience. Every day, as we awake in this physical realm, we must begin again. There are no magic bullets. Each day is a new beginning: a new beginning of once again discovering and expressing the Christ that is at the core of each of our beings. This marvelous daily experience is accomplished through the choices that we make. Go forward and make positive choices and watch your life change dramatically.

And never forget that tomorrow you will start all over again upon this joyous journey of self-expression.

Tenth: Our purpose is expressed through apprehending and comprehending the beauty of the singularity and striving to consciously participate with it at every level of our being

Be the truth that God created you to be.

You are a spiritual being presently expressing in a physical body for a brief parenthesis in time. Don’t you think that it’s time for you to start acting like you really are instead of acting like who you appear to be?

It’s really a rather simple process, like that of the caterpillar and the butterfly. Enter your inner closet. Withdraw to a cocoon of spiritual consciousness wherein you cease to be consciously entangled in all of the outer appearances. You will then emerge into this new world of appearance as a new, unique, beautiful being. Then, as John Cage said, you can go forth, spreading joy and revolution.

Today you have all new opportunities stretching out before you; how do you choose to express the singularity that you are.

I want you to understand who you are, and what you believe, sufficiently enough that when the more orthodox fundamentalists of the world go on the attack, that you can very quietly and very confidently shake them off like the dust and move on with the beautiful, unique expression of your life on this level of existence.

God bless you all.


- posted by Charles DeTurk @ 12:01 AM