The Idea Of Christ

   Every cell in our bodies is an individual living organism connected to neighboring cells via a matrix of fibroid tissue. If you remove a cell from the body and provide it everything it needs to live; oxygen, nutrients, moisture, etc., it will still die. In fact, if the only thing you take away is the cell's ability to communicate chemically with its neighboring cells, it will die. Brain cells (neurons and glia) are especially sensitive to their social environment. They are the hardest to keep alive long enough to study once they have been removed from the brain. That's why most brain cell studies must be done in situ (i.e. while the cell is still in the brain).

   It's fascinating to note that humans also cannot survive long without social contact. We have known for years (mostfly from post revolution Russian orphanages) that human children who receive no human contact will die for unclear reasons. Even in the United States there have been documented instances of children just dropping dead who we later learned had no social life to sustain them. Crazy hermits may seem an exception, but in nearly every such case these people end up developing fragmented psychological structures that provide enough of an illusion of social interaction that they can survive on their own, but usually only for a few years at most. Our mental hospitals are full of them; we call the schizophrenics (perhaps schizophrenia is not an illness at all, but a survival mechanism that can easily be reversed by simply addressing the social needs of the individual - needs that may well be disrupted by some other mental deficiency, but is usually the result of poor social experiences).
   The implications of these well known facts are clear. We need social interaction on every level of our being, from individual cells to complex human organisms (bodies and brains). No one can live for long without it, or at least without some substitute for it. In the brain, the cells that somehow manage to provide the experiences we call consciousness (mistakenly, but that's beside the point) clearly depend on this social contact with other brain cells in order to do so. So, what "consciousness" might arise on a global scale from the complex social interactions of human beings?
   This is a question that Jungian psychologists spend most of their time trying to unravel. Jung himself refered to it as the collective unconscious, and spent almost his entire professional life studying it and attempting to lay a foundation of scientific observations that could be used as a structure upon which further understanding might be built. We have "collectively" learned much ever since, though most of what has been learned is still mired in the intellectual vanities of the presumption that consciousness has no influence on behavior, only stimulus does). Even though the premise of behavioralism has been thoroughly discredited decades ago, it still muddies our collective thinking and keeps us from seeing things as clearly as we otherwise might.
   The thing that we are not yet clearly realizing but soon should, is that the collective unconscious is not unconscious at all. It is a living, thinking, feeling (and perhaps even sleeping and dreaming) consciousness that exhibits all the known characteristics of a functioning human brain, only on a vastly enlarged and all encompassing scale. We only experience it "unconsciously" (through our dreams and fantasies) because we can no more experience it directly than any one neuron could experience our human level consciousness directly.
   Jung explains that the evidence of this higher consciousness existing is in our dreams, our fantasies, and our mythology; especially our mythology. The "ideas" that pass through the collective mind appear to us as the shadowy ill-defined ideas we call myths and dreams. these collective ideas, or "thoughts", that Jung called archetypes, are all around us, and permeate our every experience. We cannot live without them. They not only define us, they breath life itself into us. Consciousness does not emerge from the bottom up, as most scientists still presumre despite the mounting evidence in nearly every field of study, from quantum physics to biology to psychology and sociology. Consciousness is breathed into us from a higher level. And when we are cut off from it, we die.
   Jesus Christ is a Jungian archetype that is commonly known as the "savior archetype", an idea that appears throughout history. Not only in our mythology, but in our literature, music, art, or any other medium typically associated with unconscious influences (e.g. the muses). The savior archetype is clearly expressed in all forms of contemporary media as well. Christ as savior is not a Christian idea and never was (Christians just latched onto it, as religious people do to anything they can "see" but not quite understand). Jung proved this long ago by demonstrating the existence of savior archetypes in cultures that exist in complete isolation from Christian influences (by actually travelig to and living in those cultures in order to study them). Not to mention documentation of the savior archetype in cultures that existed long before the religioin of Christianity was invented. In fact, there is convincing evidence --- or, should I say, a convincing lack of evidence --- that Jesus Christ the Nazarene never really existed as a man at all. Everything we know about Jesus has all the earmarks of a fabricated myth, and no independent evidence at all of his life, or his death, in this world.
   But, whether or not Jesus was real, fake, or some mix of both, is not important. What is important is that the Christ exists as a persistent idea in the collective mind of our world. And that idea not only informs writers and artists, but daydreamers like me as well.
   My life has paralleled the mythical life of Jesus in so many ways it is frightening! (for me at least). But, it's usually hard for me to express these parallels because they run beneath the surface of our conscious experience. So, no, I am not a carpenter, and I cannot miraculously cure blindness. Nor have I ever overturned tables in a temple, or been beaten and condemned for blaspheming the Jewish idea of God. But I was a professional craftsman (I earned a decent living building good quality computer programs), and I have helped lots of people to "open their eyes" and "see" things they did not before "see". I have also openly attacked people in the modern "tempe" of their home (which is as "holy" to a modern person as temples were in Jesus' day) and, most importantly of all, I have defiled the "sacred innocent" archetype of our modern society; the human child. My crime was in effect the worst form of "blasphemy" possible in our contemporary world. In Jesus' day, the tempe was the house of the most sacred innocent of all (i.e. God). And so when Jesus entered that house and overturned the tables, and attacked the money chargers with a whip, he was committing a crime that in the minds of the people of that day was by far the worst of the worst crime possible. Child rape in thos edays was not even on the crime radar (in fact, in some circumstances it was legally ordained!) Jesus himself could have had sex with children and no one would have cared; it would never have even been commented on by his disciples or anyone else. (But the fact that he recognized children as human beings at all was apparently noteworthy.)
   So, where is all this going? I'll tell you where: I am as much "the Christ" as Jesus was. I see this clearly, but I am called crazy (or at least "incompetent") if I speak of it because others cannot "see" the truth of it. Though I'm not exclusively the Christ; and neither was Jesus (which even the Bible admits).
   My life has been the expression of an idea in the mind of the world. And I believe that this idea will be continually expressed by "criminals" like me who are "possessed by demons" according to the pharisees (lawmakers and enforcers) of the day, until it ultimately accomplishes what it was originally intended to accomplish (i.e. the "salvation" of the world). So, the next time you hear of someone claiming to be Jesus Christ, it wouldn't hurt to stop and listen to what he's trying to say; I mean REALLY listen.
   I'm not saying I am Jesus. All I'm saying is that there are intelligent forces at play in my life that have shaped not just my experiences, but my behavior as well: all unconsciously to me. Unconsciously at least until I "woke up" on the mountain in the Montana wilderness with Shasta (an eight-year-old child) as my unknowing guide. I saw through her eyes what I could not see on my own due to my years and years of crusted over fear and hatred. I was able to let my guard down for her, and she deftly and completely naturally took advantage of the opportunity to love me directly --- to connect with a monster, that she knew in her heart was really just a frightened man in a mask: the archetypical minataur. I was thus "transformed" in the exact same sense that Jesus was transformed, also on a mountain. The whole process is fundamental to the ultimate intentions of life itself, and this "savior" archetypical pattern takes form not only in people's lives as it has in mine, but also, as I have said above, in the form of art (see Picasso's 1935 etching, "Minotauromachy"), movies, songs, and of course myths and legends, not to mention dreams and even ordinary fantasies. So, I am making no bizarre claims here. I am only observing and testifying to the Living Truth as I see it.

[J.D. the Christ 1-12-14]


P.S. Because I am confined in a prison cell I do not have access to resources that would allow me to confirm or expand upon the facts I rely on for the above. So I must rely upon my ability to recall things that I have read or seen in the past, which is not going to be 100% reliable. But the basic concepts above are sound, and I just hope that if there are any discrepancies in the "facts" that they don't detract from the essence of what I am trying to say here. And if the reader is aware of any facts that I have either missed or misrepresented that conflict with the basic premise of this post, then please leave a comment that lets me (and everyone else) know; thank you.

P.S.S. The above P.S. goes for all posts in the Fifth Nail blogs. While I never intentionally report a "fact" that I know not to be true, I do make mistakes on occassion, and always appreciate being corrected.