Monday, August 15, 2011

The Deception Pt 2

(Continued from Yesterday)

The deception occurred long ago. Jesus taught his disciples to share the words he gave them, the words that came from God and were holy above all others, and they did so. He warned that they and their works would be persecuted, just as he had, and they were. But in that persecution a great deception occurred:

The true meaning of Jesus's life and death, of the kingdom of God, of his words; it was buried, destroyed, burned, hidden, and locked away. Those who wanted to perpetuate their own agenda of control and power and greed twisted the message, deadened the good news and began to form a new religion from bits and pieces of the truth that they thought were harmless.

They took the truth and they flattened it into a two dimensional idea: If you believe in Jesus, you will be saved.

But this is only a half truth: salvation does come in belief in Jesus, but we no longer understand what belief truly means! Belief describes a multi dimensional action, not a two dimensional thought process.

Jesus attempted to describe for us what the completeness and wholeness of belief was through parables, stories and words of guidance. He explained that we had to release everything - from our possessions to our fears to our very lives in order to experience faith, belief, and ultimately the kingdom of God.

Imagine that you have never seen the color green before. You ask "Is it like blue" and someone who has seen it says "it is like blue, and like yellow, but it is neither blue nor yellow."

All you can imagine are the colors which you have seen, but because this color is not known to you, you cannot comprehend what that color looks like without seeing it. So, you call it blue because it is the closest thing your understanding can grasp. But the color is not blue. You'll share the words that shed merely a shadow upon the whole of the idea, and those words may sound amazing to other humans, and they'll say "yes, I understand, it is blue!" but because of their understanding they can only ever think of blue, and never of green.

In this case, green is the kingdom of God. In other cases those who have glimpsed it say "it is like a grand tree that reaches to the sky" and you picture a grand tree that reaches to the sky, not what they actually saw. So you draw trees and search for trees and familiarize yourself with trees, and you completely miss the point of the kingdom of God itself.

As long as you are searching for blue or searching for trees, you will overlook the kingdom of God. This is what Jesus told us, and yet most religions are still looking for blue and looking for trees.

The description became the weapon of the deception. That flat two dimensional idea about great things became the only thing people could see. The other knowledge and ideas were destroyed (or at least they attempted to destroy them) and just in case they'd resurface, rigors of fear and distrust were woven into the two dimensional idea that was shared. That way, if the original ideas resurfaced, those who believed in the two dimensional idea would do it so blindly that they would rather destroy themselves than consider any other possibility to be true.

In this way, it is the religions of the world which are largely the biggest deception of all - they are the wolf in sheep's clothing, those claiming to be good and to be the one true path but actually being nothing more than someone holding a feather and calling it a bird. Don't harbor hatred towards them, they honestly believe that feather is a bird, they can't see that it is only a feather. Through generations, they have been deceived and the deceivers who started it are long gone - though I am sure there are some out there who understand the deception and still perpetuate it.

Finding the kingdom of God is like this: realizing that the feather is not a bird, putting down the feather and then laying back and waiting for a real bird to fly past so you can see what it really looks like. It is giving up all the drawings of feathers, all the books about feathers, the place you kept your feather, and the people who only care about feathers : because all of those things scare away the actual birds - they won't come near because loose feathers say to them a potentially injurious place for birds to be- and it's true! If a bird came near people who honor feathers as if they are truly birds, they will pluck the bird for its feathers and remain blind to the fact it was a bird! After all, that isn't what a bird looks like, a bird looks like this feather!

And so, those who have a preconceived idea of what the kingdom is or looks like will look only for that idea and will overlook, even destroy, the kingdom. They may even fear the bird for it's feathers, saying "look at this greedy one who is keeping all of the bird (feathers) for himself! It is unfair that so much "truth" not be spread amongst us. We'll take it for ourselves, so that we can all be as enlightened as the other."

So they pluck away all of its feathers and leave the bird for dead, never realizing that it was the beautiful thing they had been seeking all along...

This happened to Jesus when he began to show his beauty to man. It took a mere three years before they destroyed him, and maybe twenty to fifty more years before they had buried and destroyed any of his message they could get their hands on, placing a headdress of feathers on the throne after having plucked and killed the bird to whom the throne belonged.

As Jesus said many times: He who has ears, let him hear.

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