In all education, 'metanoia,' or change of concept, there is some form
of duplication of this world view structuring. Those whose initial
experiences, of entry into fantasy and return to reality with their
parents, were rewarding may have an edge here. Perhaps we can see why
education fails so sadly; why there are at best mostly technicians and
too few physicists; why "hardness of heart" may be built in from infancy.
It is not fortuitous that Jesus used the father-figure as his symbol for
transference, neither is it just an echo of Old Testament archaisms --
which it very soundly is, in spite of Harvey Cox, and for good reason. Nor
is it at all just coincidence that Jesus used the child-metaphor for
the subject making the transference.
The symbol of transference determines the nature of the resulting
hierarchy of mind. Sadly, I will never know don Juan and so can never
experience his Path of breathless wonder. When Jesus said "no man comes
to the Father but through me" he was simply stating this very case. His
Father
is a very specialized and carefully-delineated symbol of
transference, designed to give that "loosing on earth" that we want
"loosed in heaven."
Both the systems of don Juan and Jesus were end products of ancient
cultural drifts. Don Juan's was so completely developed that no
innovations were possible within it. Don Juan was the remnant of
an ancient, though disappearing culture. Jesus was the culmination
of a long-building synthesis, incorporating his own culture and even
beyond. "Before Abraham was, I am," indicates an "inflation of the psyche"
seized by an archetypal imagery long in building. He was the
Eureka!
illumination of a long process of synthesis brought to fruition through
extremes of cultural crisis. He was the focal point of a passionate
quest centuries in building, and the translator of the answer into the
common domain.
In our day we tend to dismiss suggestions of "unconscious," cultural
forces, since we deny properties of mind other than those of an
electrochemical, biological nature. This notion makes it difficult for
us to understand culture in general. Only recently have anthropologists
broken from this narrow and pedantic error. An unconscious exchange is
apparent between Carlos and don Juan, and the suggestive force of that
exchange went far
beyond
the person of don Juan. This contributed
to Carlos' perplexity about the reality of Mescalito. Recall Cohen's
observation that under LSD the Freudian patient immediately reflected and
thus verified the analyst's assumptions. An indeterminably ancient set of
archetypal assumptions and "sets of expectancy" underlay don Juan's Way of
Knowledge. As with Jesus, Carlos sowed a wind -- and reaped a whirlwind.
A cultural hierarchy, represented as the Two Brothers, directed the
contents of the aboriginal Dream-Time. No syntheses outside the cultural
set of expectancies ever resulted; there was no antisocial behaviour. A
cultural hierarchy directed the Balinese in their seizures. The material
for the restructurings had been automatically absorbed as part of the
overall cultural conditioning. A strict protocol controlled the content
of the seizures. The trance state never led to antisocial behaviour.
A cultural synthesis was the "hierarchy" in Jesus' metanoia. His
"father-symbol" was the sum total of the human venture. As Bruner said,
life creates myth and finally imitates it. Jesus, seized by the catalytic
synthesis of the long quest, translated the answer in flesh and blood,
giving a concrete symbol of the new cultural synthesis. He set up the
expectancies for new possibility and gave the pattern for the best
representation we could make of life for the best mirroring response. He
used dramatic restructurings of ordinary reality as examples of the
possibilities -- whenever he could find a person willing to suspend
an ordinary world view and enter into a subset with him. He used these
restructurings as don Juan did with Carlos, to try to show the arbitrary
character of ordinary reality, and the equality of other possibilities.
He emphasized a decorum and respect for the world, while yet giving a
criterion for deciding when you should "hate" this world and break with
its statistics and employ the nonstatistical openness.
Don Juan was contemptuous of those who would try hallucinogens without
the proper disciplines. In the same way, the logical processes of mind,
the disciplines, "law or judgment" in the terms of his day, were never
evaded by Jesus. Unless your "righteousness exceeded that of the
Pharisees and lawyers," you would never get through to the crack in the
egg. Dissolution of ordinary consciousness, or isolation in non-ordinary
states, plays no part in Jesus' system since the entire concentration of
"obligatory acts" is on one's fellow man. This kept the follower in the
world, while hopefully not
of
the world.
A new hierarchy of concept, such as don Juan's or Jesus', organizes the
new kind of reality event, but only on the spot, so to speak, out of
the materials given from the ordinary context of reality. There is small
probability of finding out what the new reality is like
first
and then
deciding to try a switch of allegiance. The forest shapes according
to the light of the clearing. In scheming out the possibility of an
"after life," Jesus realized there could be no such thing a priori to
his actions. He would have to go and "prepare a place" in that "house
of many mansions," the open possibility of synthesis.
The systems of don Juan, Jesus, and other cracks in the egg produce
unique events not available to the noncommitted person. Fire-walking can
be observed by others, but the walking itself is another matter. With
don Juan, becoming the process was the only way to discover what it
was about. The same holds for Jesus. The rewards of the system could
not be displayed to a non-believer to convince him that the plunge was
worth the risk. A person had to
enter into
the creation of the state
in order to share in it. That is why healing stood a good chance of
being a bridge over the gap in Jesus' time. There were simply not many
rivals. And that is why healing stands far less chance of bridging the gap
today.
Agreement
between two or three on what is being done is the key.
Agreement is freedom from ambiguity. Double-mindedness fragments.
Ignored to this day by Christian orthodoxy is that Jesus was helpless to
create non-ordinary events unless his hearers surrendered their hierarchy
of mind to him, at least for the moment and at least in regard to the
problem at hand. Jesus could trigger a "special consensus" about reality,
and so change events, among those who had nothing to lose, those country
dwellers and city poor, those crippled and diseased without hope, those
whose world was terrible enough to make the risk of suspension of ordinary
criteria, with its overtones of a "collapse into chaos," the lesser of evils.
Things were different indeed with the clever intellectuals, the people in
power, the "doctors of law." "Hardness of heart" is as much indicative
of success within an established system as it is some sort of moral
failure. No one abandons a game which he is winning. Jesus pities the
rich young ruler unable to grasp the new reality because he could not
let go of the old.
The empty category can be filled, but it must first be created. Long
centuries of sacrifice by hook-swinging took place in India before broken
by that believer seized by the notion that he really was the temporary
incarnation of the god, as the priests had represented for centuries.
Once that notion had been realized, dramatically concretized and made
real, no bodily harm ever came again to the "victim." The mythos leads
the logos.
Don Juan had entered a firmly-established path through a long and
hard apprenticeship to his own benefactor. No such system was handed
Jesus. His illumination was probably symbolic, of necessity, as was
Kekule's hypnagogic imagery giving rise to the benzene ring hypothesis,
for instance. The genius of the man was called into play to translate the
experience into reality. A high degree of improvisation and innovation
is found in Jesus' sayings and actions. Hugh Schonfield brilliantly
portrayed this venture in his
Passover Plot
, though in another work
I have contended with him on several points.
The common materials of common reality had to be Jesus' materials for
translation since the common world was his focus of concern and since
there was no other material. The Greek-Stoic perversion of Jesus'
imagery has projected his magnificent display of courage and genius
onto an "out there" Olympus. To translate the imagery of his
Eureka!
into a communicable form, however, Jesus had to be that imagery, act
it out, give it flesh-and-blood reality, fill the empty category with
the only material available, himself, knowing that the average man can
grasp concepts only as a concrete, workable image is given him.
Recognizing that "what we loose on earth is loosed in heaven," Jesus tried
to give the kind of loosing we should do, the kind of representation we
should make of God, or life, if we want the non-judging mirroring process
of reality to work to our best advantage. It was a purely practical,
pragmatic venture. He set up a pattern of representation, an image of
transference, a pivot for restructuring, by which we can, "becoming as
little children," achieve a new hierarchy of mind, a way down and out
to freedom from fate.
On the other hand, he recognized and warned that
any
representation
of God or life was
true
insofar as believed in. Any leavening fills
the flour. Kataragama is as true and real as his Hindu followers. He
works. Science works. Carlos found Mescalito a functional fact.
The unknown continuum of potential, the dark forest with its circles ad
infinitum, the large category of the unknown, rains on just and unjust
alike. This function "judges not." Any question asked with ultimate
seriousness merges into this unjudging ultimacy and tends to express
itself. Any sowing enters this contingency and tends to set up its own
reaping. Any world view organizes a world-to-view. Any representation
of God produces accordingly. Understanding and accepting responsibility
for this function can make us free.
The whole character of don Juan's or Jesus' system was interlocking. The
only way by which the ally could be brought about in the mind was by
surrender and commitment to the initial transference figure, who was
also the content of imagery by which the synthesis could organize. Recall
how P. W. Martin's
Experiment in Depth
, carried its own materials for
synthesis. The same self-verifying procedure takes place in physics.
Fasting entered into Jesus' Way as it does in all non-ordinary
systems. His forty-day fast in the wilderness, duplicated in our day
from necessity by marooned travelers, was the way of breaking with
the world of necessities and statistics. Fasting bypasses the logical
blocks. Jesus refused food, saying he had nourishment his followers knew
nothing about. Don Juan commented casually that food would not be needed
for their several days' trip to the mountains where they would be guests
of the god Mescalito. The ways of the world would not be essentials when
one had opened to the ways of the god. Don Juan never made an issue of
the two- and three-day fasts that preceded new steps along his path,
such was simply a natural part of the tradition.
To move against the certainties and energies of "the world" calls for
an equally sure conviction and a concentration on balance of mind. To
center all the forces on the restructuring of an ordinary event in a
non-ordinary way called for exceptional organization of self.
Jesus
sighs heavily
as he goes to raise Lazarus. In his growing and
reckless confidence, he delayed two days, not only to make sure Lazarus
would be dead but to gather the forces of mind necessary to illustrate
this extreme example of the "glory of God," the open-ended-potential
of being. Jesus
sighs heavily
as he moves to heal the deaf man. The
fire-walker
sighs heavily
as he walks to the pit of fire. There is
a childlike quality in bringing the dream state through the crack to
fruition. Such an inner state is balanced by a tough and resilient
clarity of mind in the outer self. One is like a lamb to the inner spirit
but like a fox to the outer world. This is the balance of mind.
As with don Juan's "ally," Jesus' "Holy Spirit" would instruct in the
"right way to live." This "instruction" was only a synthgsis of the
instant moment itself, however, not any sort of foreknowing. The "ally"
is only a catalyst acting on all parts of the immediate context. In
Jesus' move-for-the-world this means all those other persons who are also
the autistic, also the "father son"; they also contain the kingdom of
heaven within them. To prestructure, or "take thought of the morrow,"
would set up logical blocks of expectancy preventing free synthesis.
The synthesis would of necessity have to include the instant moment of,
and move for, all parts of the context equally, since all parts are
equally the context to the non-judging autistic.
Eternity is still in love with time. The desires arising out of time
are the organizing nucleus for whatever "eternity" might be. In every
case of Carlos' meeting with Mescalito, the god could only ask: "What
do you want?" Jesus promised his followers: "Whatever you ask in my
name will be given you."
"What do you want?" is the only question eternity can ask of time,
and it is our divine gift to answer by asking our own question. Desire,
passion, curiosity, longing, novelty, daring, creativity, productivity,
lust for life, ecstasy, joy, adventure, all these are the highest thrusts
of life, the most divine of attributes, the most sacred of possessions.
And all these have been the attributes
mistrusted
and
condemned
by that dark priesthood probing for control, domination,
and battening
on the brother's blood. Without these seeds from time, however, without
these vital. gametes from the larger body of man, the womb of eternity
is barren.