Jesus and Representations

1.

I really love the idea

of Jesus.

(from spiritlessons )

If you do a Google search on "pictures of Jesus" it's amazing how many results you can get.  All for a guy who lived during a time when they didn't have cameras. 

This picture was in my grandmother's house, during the 1960s;

it's so soothing and passionate.  

One of the reasons I love the idea of Jesus.

2.

We don't have pictures of Jesus, but we have accounts of how he acted.  We have stories.

Stories give us the pictures

the remembrances

of events where we forgot our camera.

Kind of like the Book of Genesis:

and other Creation Stories -

they're attempts to capture 

the impressions of a really important event

when God forgot his camera.

Stories are really important,

because

each little word

is like a snapshot

of a gesture,

and expression,

an act.

3.

The word - Jesus - is a representation.

I love the idea of Jesus for what he represents: 

peaceful solutions

compassion

forgiveness

a rejection of the 

Old Testament philosophy of 

an eye for an eye:

turning the other cheek.

*

When 9/11 happened, I was in

Ankara, Turkey,

and as I watched the towers tumble,

I thought:

this is the equivalent

of the hole that was blasted

into the side of the 

U.S.S.Cole -

How would my nation

respond to this

provocation?

I was afraid.

*

In March of 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq,

I was in Ankara, Turkey.

On the night of the invasion,

I was sitting in a bar with a couple Turkish friends,

and I was in total despair.

This was the answer I feared the United States would give.

My friends and I were talking about

America;

we were talking about the 

Christian world and the Muslim world.

I said to my friend Onur:

what do you think would have been the best way for America to respond to the attack of 2001?

And he said:

Enact, purely, the teachings of Jesus.

Turn the other cheek.

No self-respecting Muslim could attack

a nation that opted to practice

an act of pure love.

Furthermore,

the radical Islamic sects

would not have the sympathy and/or support

of the Islamic world if they continued to attack after we simply

turned the other cheek.

*

Of course, that's not what we did.

And any arguments about the voracity of my friend's claim

would be purely academic.

*

At the time, 

I agreed with Onur;

today,

I still agree

with what Onur 

proposed.

This is not to say we would have avoided war;

(we were already in a war,

it's just that, 

on 9/11

Americans was made aware of the fact

that we were

at war)

we just would have avoided the kind of war

that we've been having.

4.

A stumbling point

between the world of Islam

and the world of Christianity

is, of course,

Jesus.

We both share him, by the way.

Jesus

is in the Koran,

and Mary his Mother 

is the only woman who is named

in the Koran,

for the very simple reason that

men in the Koran are identified by their father's name --

Ishmael and Iaac, sons of Abraham, for instance --

but Jesus has no father,

so he's identified by

his mother's name.

Which leads us to the rather troubling question

of who his father is.

Christianity teaches

Jesus is the son of God, 

and somehow that blurs into him being

God.

Islam says there's no way

he could be God;

God is God,

and Jesus

was a great prophet.

I've also read and heard the argument

from Muslims that, if God is everything,

why would he want or need a son?

Well, hey, if God is everything,

why the heck

would he have wanted to create

us?

He created us

and everything we occupy

in his own likeness,

and then, well,

we kind of made a mistake.

It's been our job ever since, to correct that mistake.
I tend to believe that
every now and then
some human takes form
who has a really big clue
about how to correct that mistake.

(Please see my earlier contemplations on the creation & the fall; and the second coming)

One thing that is remarkable

about reading the Koran

is that it actually presupposes that its readers

have also read the Old and New Testament.

It talks about the Creation,

and some major figures in the Old and New Testaments

as if the reader already knows about them,

therefore leading one to believe that

the best way to read the Koran

and the Bible

is together.

One of the great sins of each

of the Abrahamic religions

is that we don't read

each others books:

Muslims generally don't read the Bible,

and Jews and Christians

rarely read the Koran.

However, put those books together

and there's a very interesting story that emerges,

and its central idea is this:

Jesus belongs to all of us.

5.

Christ is the population of the world,

and every object as well.  There is no room

for hypocrisy.  Why use bitter soup for healing

when sweet water is everywhere?

(Jelaluddin Rumi)

5.

Late at night, when I've been writing on this blog,

I start looking at other people's blogs.

If I simply move through

blogger, I find

that my neighboring blogs

are often

lovely family blogs

with really lovely pictures

of lovely families,

or 

Christian blogs,

with really lovely pictures

of Christian families,

and I really like seeing them.

Occasionally, though,

I find a nut case like me.

I know that most people

in the United States

would say my ideas about Jesus

are blasphemous,

but they're not,

just like

my ideas about the United States

are not blasphemous:

I deeply love

what both the U.S.A. and Jesus

represent,

and I mourn

what the two, combined,

have become.

an aside: why I cannot seem to leave behind this question of origins

( sakkal.com )

Weeellll, there are a few answers as to why I keep talking about things like God and origins:

1.
I think about it.  Well, not every minute, but a good part of the time.  Some of my readers may find that rather pathetic, but, well, don't forget: I'm a 424 year old woman.  I've spent entire lifetimes being in love, producing babies, singing operas, selling my body, being sold by others without my knowing it.  Being used.  Using.  Only during this "lifetime" have I come to full possession of myself, refusing to use the people around me, and working to be utterly self-sufficient.  This is a difficult thing to hold onto, since so much of society is fashioned around diverting people's attention away from who they really are, and what they are supposed to be doing.

I've reached a point where this body of mine is just a husk, a shell, and the most active things in it are the ticker tape of my mind, the wind of my soul, and the scarred, scarred beating of my heart.

I can't have children anymore.

I don't want lovers anymore.

I simply long to know what it would be like to leave this realm, and yet,
I love the earth I live on so much and I love the sweet taste of life so much
that I can't stand the idea of leaving it.
And after all, I can't; I'm trapped in a spell conjured by a selfish lover, who
after damning me to eternal youth, just got old and died and left me.

2.
Lovers:  Men who steal a part of your soul.  And I so willingly give it to them, because love is so essential to who I am.  I still live inside the fantasy that I can find my equal. That may be true for many women.  I don't know.  I'm only one woman.  But I've met so many women, I begin to feel that I could be the archetypical woman.  My history contains almost all of the pain and happiness that many women have experienced. 

My last lover --- ah, I love him still.  Somewhere deep inside of me, I believe that in him I finally met the partner I've traveled all over the earth in search of.  Unfortunately, he was not always nice to me.  Sometimes downright abusive.

So maybe he's no one special, just a good con man: it may just be that he, in his ability to mirror back to me what I wanted to see, let me see inside of me.  And there, inside of me, I found my soulmate.  Perhaps that's the mystery of the divided self: that our soulmate actually exists inside us, and can only be seen through the play of mirrors between your own soul and a reflecting lover's eyes.

Loving him was not always easy.  So in order to love him, my love soared beyond the ordinary.  So high it flew that I have a hard time now living back in my planet-bound, solitary life.  I wanted to love him, not just his very handsome exterior that impressed oh, so many women, but the man behind that, so what I gave was unequivocal; it forgave much; it produced a state in me that seemed almost like a place in heaven.  It was one terrific high.

Almost, but not quite.  Neither he nor I are gods; we are only human, limping about this earthly plane.

But for a little while I felt I saw heaven; here on earth, in a blade of grass, in a purring cat, in a lover's smile, in a touch, in a silent sharing.

It still pains me terribly to think about the end of our time together.

Suffice it to say, my current ramblings are in part an attempt to unravel the mystery I encountered through what we shared.  Or, the mystery I encountered through what I gave him.

3.
But my entries are also in part grounded in two other fears/obsessions of mine.

Very early in this blog, I explain a message I received, about five years ago.  You see, I have this little tendency to hear voices and experience other such paranormal phenomenon.  This is something I don't admit too often, and it's best I do it in a fictional state.  This blog, in many ways, is my attempt to unfurl the meaning of that message.

The message was simple:

Jesus will come as the scholar in the four days of the grid.

When a message like that interrupts your dreams and rips you out of your sleep, and shocks you so much that you write it down, weeellll,  you don't forget it too quickly.

That, plus this whole 2012 thing.

No, I haven't seen the movie, and I don't really want to. But I've read some of the Mayan prophecies, and I've studied the Book of Revelation.  And I'm, well, for lack of a better word, kind of psychic.  I have two separate thoughts about this:

a.  I really fear that in the next two years, the media hype and paranoia is going to increase and increase and increase until people just starting killing each other and themselves.  We may have entire suburbs putting on their Nike Windrunners and drinking cyanide cocktails before going to bed at night.

Perhaps we'll create our own End of the World as We Know It.

b. There are signs, inarguable, natural signs, that the planet is going through a change, and that humanity is, too.  It's difficult, if you know anything about the Book of Revelation, to not see some parallels between the last twenty or thirty years and the events of the Endtimes, as predicted there.  The intensity of hatred and evil on the earth, the illness, the destruction of our natural environment, the deceit, and the feeling in my gut that we are facing something ominous.

4.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm alive right now for a reason.  I wonder if I'm supposed to witness something, or foretell it, or perhaps just help put together the puzzle pieces.   Or if I'm just losing my mind.  If any of those possibilities are true, it is most likely the last one or two.  You see, I tend to think the Grid is the internet, which I (like many others) view as an extension of the human brain.  And if Jesus is to come again as the scholar perhaps this means that His Second Coming will manifest itself through a constructive, collaborative use of the internet.


I don't know if we're going to face an ending; rather, I  like to think we may face a new beginning. I have visions and thoughts about what that new beginning will be, and those visions and thoughts are directly related to my readings of what I feel are divinely inspired texts.

I play no favorites among the Major Religions.  I see credibility in all, and tend to feel that the messages they share lie at the heart of what is true to all of humanity.

If you haven't figured it out already, several of my entries are the direct result of something like channeling.  My problem is: if I do that for a few days, I ultimately become very very tired.  Which is why I am silent for awhile between some entries.

That plus the end of the academic year.  I'm a teacher in this lifetime, you see. A college professor.  It's the only place in this world that will have, him, and in which I can "pass" as somewhat normal.

(from:  arianyoung.blogsome.com )

the days and the ages of the grid

Tonight I'd really like to talk about the Grid.

You see, when you receive a message like the one I received (see previous message), it's kind of difficult to ignore it. Yes, the part about Jesus coming again was sort of a mind blower - because it presupposes that he's been here once already. Definitely not good news for Jewish folk, if there's any validity to it. And the fact that he would come again "as the scholar" is also a titillating detail, as it might be able to help us identify him. But the part about the four days of the Grid intrigued me most, since that pins down when he's to arrive, so we can get ready. That is, if you put any credibility in my ability to prophecy.

But then again, I'm just a fictional character - I'm a slightly delirious character on the internet, sharing her musings with a vacuum. So this could all be flight of fancy, and most likely, it is.

Still, after hearing this message, I first researched the notion of The Grid, mostly because, that particular term was used very specifically in the message. I also know for certain that the voice spoke of the number four, and of the notion of "days." But I will confess, that when I wrote down the message as I woke out of my sleep the night I received it, I was baffled by the idea of Jesus coming in the four days of the Grid, or the fourth day of the Grid, which was the language that still rang in my head when I woke up. Because of that, I jotted down the word "age?" underneath the word "day", as I thought it might be possible that in the language of prophecy, a day could be translated very loosely. After all, we're told God created the world in seven days, aren't we? And that's pretty impossible, if you ask me.

Yes, when I do this kind of interpretation, I take everything as a sort of kaballist sign. Especially natural phenomena, and numbers, like the number four. In the tarot, the number four refers to building a foundation of some kind. So the fourth Age of the Grid would indicate that some sort of foundation has been produced by this time. Four is a very stable number, and it includes two doubles. Doubles mark harmony and balance of opposites. In the number 4, there is double harmony.

But what, I wondered, could be the Fourth Age of the Grid? And what the third, the second, and the first?

I researched grid computing for awhile, because I felt that the computer age, and the age of the internet, no doubt marked the First Age of the Grid. If that is true, than we have a while to go before Jesus shows up, since we're really just beginning to accept grid computing and the internet in a large scale way.

Or are we?

Even in Computer Science, we've moved rather rapidly out of the first age of grid computing, and may be into the second or even the third. So if the term is solidly grounded in computing, which seems to speed everything up, the fourth age may come more rapidly.

And if the term refers directly to computers and the internet, than perhaps the Fourth Age of the Grid will occur when everything has become digital. When we are all fully cyborgs, might I say.

I am not the first to make the observation that every advancement in technology has served to extend some limb or aspect of the human body. The wheel extends the leg; radio extends the ears and the voice; guns extends our arms (and our ability to throw something lethal effectively); the list goes on. And what of the computer?

It extends and imitates our mind. I was speaking to a good friend the other day who just happens to be a computer programmer, and he commented that the basic language of computers relies on pure logic, pure formula. That is a universal language, he kept insisting. So when we have all become automated, we all have access to a universal language. And that language, I would dare to say, would be the language of pure mind.

It would be pure logic. And it would be universally understood. So the language of the Fourth Age of the Grid would necessitate that the messiah be pure mind. The Scholar. Makes sense, eh? Jesus will come as the scholar then, because we will need a pure scholar to lead us into this age.

But then there's another thought I've had, and it's directly related to universal language. It may take a few entries to get this down.

What's troubling, yet exciting, about this Age we may be on the crest of, this Digital Age, is that it is one in which our physical bodies may be of very little value; we can be whatever we are on the web, and it would replace our physical handicaps and shortcomings. Sort of like me. Remember, I'm quite old. But I'm eternal on the internet. Always young; always feisty. I'm here for as long as digital data exists. Makropolis will even transcend my physical body. . . it will persist long after that physical body is gone. Therefore, Makropolis is a representation of what I would like to be - eternally young; however, she relies very heavily on previous representations to make her point.

However, Makropolis lives soley in the realm of digital representation. Which is a different realm from, say, an opera. Or a television show. Thus, the Fourth Age of the Grid constitutes a new age of representation, one in which actual authorship and identity is of minimal value. This Age was preceded by what Walter Benjamin called "Mechanical Representation," that being the ability to reproduced reality repetititively and multiply. This is an age where collaborative work is most effective; its media include photography, cinema, video, radio, television. Previous to that, the dominant representational mode was linear - ie: it could be understood in terms of a beginning, middle, and end. Furthermore, it had to be perceived that way. Mechanical Representation moved us into non-linear experience - ie, artists felt less and less inclined to present things in a chronological progression - time began to be recognized as having multiple dimensions. In the Age of Linear Representation, time was experienced as utterly chronological.

Linear Representation was ushered in with the onset of storytelling and writing. Both are media of narration, demanding that items be presented "in a line." Narrative is one type of linear organization. Other types include poetry and argument. The Age of Linear Representation began roughly whenever humans began placing more credibility on written and spoken words. The Age of Linear Representation, then, is roughly aligned to those periods that make sense of themselves through stories. Fundamentally, it is the Age of the Bible and other Holy Books.

This would mean the first age of the grid precedes that. What would it be called? Prehistoric, perhaps, but it might also be recognized as the first age during which humans felt a compulsion to look at the world and try to make sense of it, or preserve their impressions of it, by imitating it. This would be an age of mimicry and childish drawings - pre-Christian no doubt, not to mention pre-Judaic.

When humans were practicing simple mimicry, they were in early stages of evolution. Why, one wonders, did they decide to start drawing? They were like children, really. I think of Lacan and Freud here. According to Lacan, the first time we feel the compulsion to communicate is when we first recognize our own mirror image as both being us, yet being separate from us - ie: when we see ourselves reproduced. In that doubling of ourselves, we see ourselves as singular, alone, and incomplete. Feeling that loss, we try to reclaim it by reaching out, by creating society.

So we start communicating - thus, the first age of the artistic representation.

Each age of artistic representation has marked a new stage in the development of the mind. Yeah, I'm saying that while all the other technologies (wheels, trains, planes, guns, birth control pills) are an attempt to perfect some aspect of the body and the desires seated in the body, technologies linked with perfecting artistic representation are attempts to perfect how we extend the mind out beyond its limited physical dimension.

I am more expert in the Humanities than in other fields, so I will keep my examples largely in those fields; however, with my pedestrian knowledge of other fields, I would dare to say that in each of these Ages, the Sciences, Logic, and Mathematical knowledge also showed evolution. Indeed, those fields of intellectual study, which tend to be more closely associated with advancements in technology, also mark attempts to extend the mind beyond the physical dimension.

Therefore, each Age of the Grid marks stages in the development of our ability to represent the workings of the mind, and the reality of the mind. But don't forget - the Fourth Age of the Grid, the Digital Age, is seated in digital technology and is therefore global. It is also an intersection age - an age when Artistic Representation intersects with Scientific and Mathematical Representation - and all of these are attempts by humans to extend the mind beyond its physical borders.

Ironically, in some ways, the Fourth Age of the Grid brings us back to some of the features of the First Age of the Grid. Images become dominant in the digital age. Simple, clear messages about shared experiences have more saliency in a global medium than do complex messages about local phenomena. But in their simplicity, the messages that we extend across the globe about our shared experiences also become quite complex, because they acknowledge that we all experience simple life experiences colored by different life circumstances.

The Fourth Age of the Grid, then, demands that we all have a shared literacy. This shared literacy could be manipulated by a central power, if we let it. To keep us from being dominated by one world power, we all have a responsibility to develop our minds. We have a global responsibility to maintain the ethics of the media and develop a literacy grounded in empathy and compassion.

And if we could do that, as a world, well, it seems that we might lay the foundation for the potential of Jesus coming again. . . . . through ourselves.