araucaria
8th March 2022, 09:52
I am posting on this thread because I agree that a positive outlook is essential and I just want to stand back and report on a few things I’ve been reading lately. The word crisis means a combination of danger and opportunity, and we are facing a huge crisis in both senses. While by definition we are, to say the least, unsure about what the future holds, we do need to understand just how far back this goes. I find it sometimes helps to use our contemporary jargon when looking at the story so far.
Looking at the distant past is useful because that is how you observe time’s curvature. I don’t want to linger on Ukraine in the 21st or even the 20th century: it is too recent. I have previously explored how the region’s issues date back at least to WWII. Since Germany’s Lebensraum policy came about after being squeezed on both flanks after the Treaty of Versailles, you could go back to WWI (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?95553-JFK-the-CIA-the-KGB-and-Russia-today&p=1141768&viewfull=1#post1141768). But this is still not the big picture.
However, if you go back to classical Greece, and then fast forward, this might give some indication of our own future. By that time, the gods had long ceased to have any presence as physical entities toying with humans, and had begun to enter human consciousness as abstract qualities, virtues and vices governing autonomous human behaviour. In the 5th c. BC the Greek city states began to merge into a nation following the Persian wars when collectively they managed to see off Darius and Xerxes, mainly thanks to their naval forces, mostly Athenian (for such a tiny country, Greece has an incredible 2,600 miles of coastline). What started out as a confederacy eventually ended up in an Athenian empire, achieved by Athens producing the fleet, with the rest providing funds (paying tribute). If this sounds like NATO, notice that the alliance soon began to break up, with a succession of rebellions leading to the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). Sparta and her allies won the war and the golden age of Athens came to an end. Two things to note here: first, the cultural dominance remembered to this day was doubtless due to some extent at least to the extra income from the tribute being paid to the city. In other words, major intellectual, but also spiritual advances, notably through Aristotle, were partly financed by the ‘military-industrial complex’ of the day. On the other hand, the possession of an effective fleet both served as a deterrent against outside aggression and helped stir internal strife. The other major cause was the simple fact that the Greek city states were too different to cooperate much. What happened next reduced this whole political scene to a local quarrel, while on another level the big picture got much bigger when Alexander the Great spread this culture across his new empire. See this post (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?110311-Who-knew-about-Covid-19-in-advance&p=1343034&viewfull=1#post1343034).
The next major step after Alexander was the life of Christ, by which I mean the the entire experience for humanity, way beyond organized religion. Love and life, you can take that to the bank, but most of all, never forget you have that capital and where it came from! You would need quite a lexicon to translate the shenanigans from back then into modern English, but doing so brings the story a whole new contemporary relevance. The Bible as mainstream news, orthodoxy as the official narrative, heresy as alternative views, martyrs as eyewitnesses or whistle-blowers who were taken out, miracles as paranormal events; and so on, you get my drift.
I have just been rereading a book based on some of all the material that has been resurfacing in recent years from Biblical times: Hidden Politics of the Crucifixion, by Glen Kimball and David Stirland (Ancient Manuscripts Publishing, 1998). Let’s go along with this story for a while, and suppose all the evidence is truly there; a good place to check would be lostbooks.org (https://thelostbooks.org/the-list/) (a more detailed reference at the end of this post*). It merges seamlessly with what we know from official sources, which are therefore not wrong, just deceptively incomplete. First, a small detail: since Jesus died in 33 AD but was born probably in 7 BC (the year of multiple Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions: the ‘star in the east’), then he died not aged 33 but at 40, a truly symbolic number for the Jews, notably because of the 40-year exile in Egypt. In other words, not only did he live on after his death, but Jesus was born before Christ, maybe indicating twice over that this was much more than one lifetime. As the adopted son of Joseph of Arimathea, a leading ship-owner and trader (after the other Joseph had died), Jesus, we are told, sailed the world, and his passage to India and elsewhere is recorded in documents around the world; a high profile rather than a hermitic lifestyle is understandable from such a charismatic leader teaching the practicalities of his message of love. This would account for the gospel stories being limited to just three years: the rest of the time he was out of the country. One major event was the Roman connection. Emperor Tiberius was ill and, we are told, had sent for the renowned healer Jesus, only to learn that Pontius Pilate had allowed him to be executed: more on this later. This is a major discrepancy for us today: in his own day, Christ was a mainstream figure, and his only enemies were a few members (Anna, Caiaphas) of one branch of the Sanhedrin, the Sadducees; which goes to show the scale of the subsequent effort to stamp out this new philosophy, notably through religion. Try rewriting world history without Martin Luther.
Hence the life of Christ can be quantified to some extent. The official story of three years in the backwater of Galilee against a lifetime of extensive travel covers about a twentieth of the time, and probably much less than a twentieth in terms of geographical outreach. Overall, then, the New Testament story, although still huge, covers roughly five per cent of the actual event as experienced firsthand by many more people than we have been told. Also, given that Jesus’s killers themselves had no doubts about his being the Messiah, that means there was literally no one, all the way up to the Roman emperor himself, who failed to see that this person was extraordinarily special. There is no one, zero eyewitness, debunking a single one of the myriad amazing miracles that we have trouble grasping. This includes the rabble stirred to demand a crucifixion, the same people who just days before were demonstrating as devoted followers; ‘crisis actors’ is the modern term, I believe.
As we know, every time you act dishonestly, you increase your chances of being found out, and once found out the whole edifice comes crashing down: we see none of that here. In fact, it seems there was not one resurrection but a great many coming back from the dead in Palestine, but also in Rome following a major earthquake event. Meanwhile, Jesus was executed not for doing bad things, but for doing good on the sabbath, which was against the law. Clearly the law is an ass when one day a week good becomes bad and when service to God clashes with service to one’s fellow humans.
Jesus was also a member of the royal, wealthy elite, so he would be well known even before actually doing anything. But since what he did was mix bigtime with the wrong sort (ordinary people), and he was also a writer, we are talking about someone who must have been immensely popular. The power of the message, which came at a time when the gods’ influence was at a then all-time low, can be seen from its persistence, two millennia later, no longer as a spiritual lesson but by now assimilated almost as a definition of basic human decency that goes without saying. Given also that for 17 centuries this tradition has been built up solely on the remnants of a 95% information blackout, that gives some idea of the enormity of the cover-up. The accusation of deceit was turned against Jesus, notably on the subject of raising the dead being devilish magic. It may be magic: a magician pretending to cut a woman in half is demonstrating to what extent she is a ‘waste of space’, since she can fit into a space half the size. Resurrection merely takes this to the extreme of showing how a person can survive in no physical space at all. So, magical maybe, but hardly diabolical.
In spite of those unfavourable odds, as I’ve just indicated, I think it can be said that Jesus’s message of love successfuly penetrated human consciousness to a degree that I shan’t try to quantify. But there comes a point where it is no longer enough, when it becomes automatic, instinctive, and so in a sense… unconscious at a higher level. The next step up in consciousness would be to integrate into the message of love, notably an understanding of this blockage that has grown so huge, i.e. the knowledge of both good and evil. This would involve not just hearing the ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’ of whatever things have been kept secret, but more fundamentally understanding that open communication is an integral part of this force or energy we call love. My point here is simple. Anyone trying to understand the world today may do better avoiding wading through the truth and lies coming out of Ukraine and Russia. Nor need they try to get their head round the truth and lies to do with the CIA, Islamism, reptilian aliens or whatever other issue is getting in the way. Ultimately, for the vast majority all these issues just lead to the need to hold beliefs, like another religion. On the other hand, regarding Christianity, the recently discovered literature offers probably the clearest demonstration we are going to get that the familiar bible story was not wrong, but such a tiny portion of the truth as to become highly inaccurate. Get your head round this, and the other stuff should sort itself out.
There is something strange going on here. Almost everyone must have been feeling amazingly good, and yet this tiny spanner in the works (a couple of negative priests) leads to the crucifixion. But this was foreseen. Reviving the dead was one thing; it showed that there is life after death. But a newly executed man reviving showed something else: that killing is ultimately futile. (What we may envisage for tomorrow, with everyone today feeling incredibly awful, because that lesson was never learnt, might well be in the nature of a drop of oil that sets everything running smoothly.)
Tiberius in his rage not only had Pilate executed, but he reportedly unleashed a genocide against the Jews for murdering their Messiah, affecting many innocents who were his followers. Notice how his was about the most unchristian thing he could have done, actually repeating Pilate’s mistake on an altogether vaster scale. This major persecution was like a huge bomb exploding, but one unexpected positive outcome was that many promptly scattered all over the world, spreading the good news at incredible speed for the time. Note how this is a replay of Alexander’s belligerent campaign to educate the known world (see above): any evil murderous intent backfires into something positive, putting a whole new slant on Orwell’s ‘war is peace’! Despite this untimely death, Jesus continued to travel the world after the resurrection spreading the word, only now there were thousands of others doing the same thing, including across the Roman empire. That much remains historically true: not to believe in resurrection, however it is supposed to work, amounts to dismissing the contemporary eyewitness explanation with no alternative explanation for how we got to where we are today. Meanwhile the historical fact of persecution remains the spanner in the works that still needs eliminating.
What makes the above history of current relevance, apart from its apparent verifiability, is the reported message of a second coming after 100 (20-year) generations. If Jesus was travelling the globe, then the idea we read about that he was one and the same as Quetzalcoatl, who arrived in Mexico from the east, begins to make sense. He would have taught the Mayan calendar, which is somewhat mysterious because its start date doesn’t seem to mark anything in particular, and in any case predates the Maya civilization. If the calendar was invented halfway through the 5-thousand-year period, then everything would point to the infamous end date of 21/12/2012, which happens to be... 99 generations (katuns) after Christ’s crucifixion, i.e the start of the 100th, due to reach the age of 20 in 2032-33. Remember, these are round figures.
So, now that we are raising this long-awaited 20th generation, with hindsight, what might be the value of the current mindset within the above longterm planning? Well, for one thing, let’s have a look at those miracles, which mostly turn us off, but which back then would be simply be accepted as positive magic. Tiberius: ‘he can heal me, enough said, I want him here!’ Nowadays we might say ‘technologically too advanced’; but we are also at the point where we can say, ‘virgin births no problemo! The other stuff, not just yet, but we’re working on it.’ Science, which bought into 100% materialism, still needs to be reconciled with ‘religion’ (which by the way is not and never was purely up-in-the-air stuff, otherwise why was Jesus spending so much time curing, feeding, reviving physical human beings?). But at least we are reaching a stage where what once seemed impossible is no longer quite so far-fetched. So, ‘resurrection’, for example, is no longer just not natural, it becomes understandable as a change of plane; not necessarily a higher plane, a different plane. So, for example, a film-maker can break an egg and then restore it whole, either by reversing the film or by shooting the last sequence before the previous one. In other words, by moving through time instead of space.
Talking of science, I have been reading an SF story written for BBC TV by the astronomer Fred Hoyle, with John Elliot, called Andromeda Breakthrough (1964). It is the tale of a complex, meaningful message received from the Andromeda galaxy, and containing instructions for building a supercomputer capable of producing the blueprints for whatever is needed to get this planet operating effectively. This includes a lovely young woman, built in no time at all (virgin birth on steroids!) and also planning ahead for the various ways the message might be received. The hero is extremely worried by the whole thing, fearing an alien takeover. With the best of intentions, he destroys the computer, but not before a rogue gulf state has pirated the design and built another one. Eventually he falls in love with the Andromedan (after saving her life), and together they save this backup computer and the program at the very last minute.
So ‘Jesus’ here is a young lady built in a lab on instructions from a machine, and yet fully human. The premise seems to be that alien beings cannot just land on a foreign planet: they need to have a physical vehicle compatible with/made from that planet. Be that as it may, these aliens happen to be huge rocks that are part of the furniture on their rather dead planet, so there is no question of them travelling anywhere. So then, what is happening here? It would seem that this is a disinterested neighbour offering a helping hand, with no interference, to a planet in need of help – an intergalactic expression of love. But to do so, they have to become one of us, which can be interpreted in several different ways. It can mean total racial assimilation: no problem; if you are a spiritually advanced being, you will take this as read. Otherwise, they have to be somehow fake, spies, space invaders, magicians, whatever.
The Fred Hoyle story (again, the writer is a scientist) suggests that if you get to know and love this visitor, together you can change the world. But ultimately, these are visitors on the same level of planetary-based physicality as us. Sure, a distinction is drawn between hardware and software: software can travel, hardware is built on the spot; however, unlike Christlike humanity, software is hardware-dependent: if the computer is destroyed, the apps are lost. The Jesus story is explicitly on a higher plane, and more far-reaching; here again though, the whole project can be hi-jacked by one or two, not necessarily evil monsters, just earth humans with a grudge. Attacked, but not defeated: Jesus is killed, but he just gets up and carries on as before. The grudge in question, as described in the Kimball book, amounts to very little: Anna is unhappy that his own bloodline wasn’t chosen for the Messiah to incarnate, and so seeks revenge, which with foresight is in itself is enough to justify the choice of another family. Clearly, as I said, this was part of the plan to demonstrate the illusion of death; and it is the part of the story that the science misses out or doesn’t get to. All we see is the woman surviving various brushes with death, exactly how we don’t know. But let’s see where science might be catching up at last.
We are talking about chasing shadows. Gombrich (quoted in my 2nd link above) describes how Alexander the Great tamed his horse Bucephalus, afraid of its own shadow, by turning its head towards the sun. Then in the very next paragraph, he describes Alexander’s encounter with the stoic philosopher Diogenes, whose one wise wish is for him to remove his shadow from him and let him sit in the sun. More sun, less shadow, that is the horse’s philosophy too. But then you read that someone finding themselves in Jesus’s shadow is miraculously cured, the inference being that there is more solar energy coming from his shadow than from the sun itself. Or alternatively, that a time would come when protection from the sun’s rays behind a godlike shadow would prove necessary. Interestingly the afternoon of the crucifixion saw darkness and earthquakes in Jerusalem, and also Rome apparently (and the night of the resurrection saw daylight). This moment of physical death was accompanied, we are told, by the dead rising up from the grave. Earthquakes are the sort of manifestations one might expect at the time of a pole shift. Science is now saying that a pole shift, caused by solar activity, is due right now. That would be the reason not only for the timing of the second coming, but also for teaching the Maya, who never saw the start of their outsized calendar and never saw its end, to expect in this distant future what they called... the Fifth Sun.
There is a very practical lesson to all the above. It goes something like this: there is a fork in the road ahead and the signpost may be the wrong way round. The notion of a last judgment with no external judge would be based entirely upon that decision. The Orwellian-sounding paradox ‘death is life’ and its corollary, ‘survival is death’, might turn out to be crucial. Very possibly, elitist self-preservation in underground cities and bunkers after deliberately keeping foreknowledge away from the masses is the wrong way to go. Better stick to altruism, face the danger without fearFocussing on that simple choice should be enough to navigate the chaos resulting from some making a different choice and others maybe not choosing at all, or perhaps changing their minds.
Whatever else is going on, the above strikes me as an excellent design for a truly democratic poll where every vote counts and every elector gets what they voted for.
*Here is Pilate’s letter to Tiberius (https://thelostbooks.org/pontius-pilates-letter-to-tiberius-caesar/), ‘entered into the Congressional Record in the year 1887’.
Looking at the distant past is useful because that is how you observe time’s curvature. I don’t want to linger on Ukraine in the 21st or even the 20th century: it is too recent. I have previously explored how the region’s issues date back at least to WWII. Since Germany’s Lebensraum policy came about after being squeezed on both flanks after the Treaty of Versailles, you could go back to WWI (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?95553-JFK-the-CIA-the-KGB-and-Russia-today&p=1141768&viewfull=1#post1141768). But this is still not the big picture.
However, if you go back to classical Greece, and then fast forward, this might give some indication of our own future. By that time, the gods had long ceased to have any presence as physical entities toying with humans, and had begun to enter human consciousness as abstract qualities, virtues and vices governing autonomous human behaviour. In the 5th c. BC the Greek city states began to merge into a nation following the Persian wars when collectively they managed to see off Darius and Xerxes, mainly thanks to their naval forces, mostly Athenian (for such a tiny country, Greece has an incredible 2,600 miles of coastline). What started out as a confederacy eventually ended up in an Athenian empire, achieved by Athens producing the fleet, with the rest providing funds (paying tribute). If this sounds like NATO, notice that the alliance soon began to break up, with a succession of rebellions leading to the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). Sparta and her allies won the war and the golden age of Athens came to an end. Two things to note here: first, the cultural dominance remembered to this day was doubtless due to some extent at least to the extra income from the tribute being paid to the city. In other words, major intellectual, but also spiritual advances, notably through Aristotle, were partly financed by the ‘military-industrial complex’ of the day. On the other hand, the possession of an effective fleet both served as a deterrent against outside aggression and helped stir internal strife. The other major cause was the simple fact that the Greek city states were too different to cooperate much. What happened next reduced this whole political scene to a local quarrel, while on another level the big picture got much bigger when Alexander the Great spread this culture across his new empire. See this post (https://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?110311-Who-knew-about-Covid-19-in-advance&p=1343034&viewfull=1#post1343034).
The next major step after Alexander was the life of Christ, by which I mean the the entire experience for humanity, way beyond organized religion. Love and life, you can take that to the bank, but most of all, never forget you have that capital and where it came from! You would need quite a lexicon to translate the shenanigans from back then into modern English, but doing so brings the story a whole new contemporary relevance. The Bible as mainstream news, orthodoxy as the official narrative, heresy as alternative views, martyrs as eyewitnesses or whistle-blowers who were taken out, miracles as paranormal events; and so on, you get my drift.
I have just been rereading a book based on some of all the material that has been resurfacing in recent years from Biblical times: Hidden Politics of the Crucifixion, by Glen Kimball and David Stirland (Ancient Manuscripts Publishing, 1998). Let’s go along with this story for a while, and suppose all the evidence is truly there; a good place to check would be lostbooks.org (https://thelostbooks.org/the-list/) (a more detailed reference at the end of this post*). It merges seamlessly with what we know from official sources, which are therefore not wrong, just deceptively incomplete. First, a small detail: since Jesus died in 33 AD but was born probably in 7 BC (the year of multiple Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions: the ‘star in the east’), then he died not aged 33 but at 40, a truly symbolic number for the Jews, notably because of the 40-year exile in Egypt. In other words, not only did he live on after his death, but Jesus was born before Christ, maybe indicating twice over that this was much more than one lifetime. As the adopted son of Joseph of Arimathea, a leading ship-owner and trader (after the other Joseph had died), Jesus, we are told, sailed the world, and his passage to India and elsewhere is recorded in documents around the world; a high profile rather than a hermitic lifestyle is understandable from such a charismatic leader teaching the practicalities of his message of love. This would account for the gospel stories being limited to just three years: the rest of the time he was out of the country. One major event was the Roman connection. Emperor Tiberius was ill and, we are told, had sent for the renowned healer Jesus, only to learn that Pontius Pilate had allowed him to be executed: more on this later. This is a major discrepancy for us today: in his own day, Christ was a mainstream figure, and his only enemies were a few members (Anna, Caiaphas) of one branch of the Sanhedrin, the Sadducees; which goes to show the scale of the subsequent effort to stamp out this new philosophy, notably through religion. Try rewriting world history without Martin Luther.
Hence the life of Christ can be quantified to some extent. The official story of three years in the backwater of Galilee against a lifetime of extensive travel covers about a twentieth of the time, and probably much less than a twentieth in terms of geographical outreach. Overall, then, the New Testament story, although still huge, covers roughly five per cent of the actual event as experienced firsthand by many more people than we have been told. Also, given that Jesus’s killers themselves had no doubts about his being the Messiah, that means there was literally no one, all the way up to the Roman emperor himself, who failed to see that this person was extraordinarily special. There is no one, zero eyewitness, debunking a single one of the myriad amazing miracles that we have trouble grasping. This includes the rabble stirred to demand a crucifixion, the same people who just days before were demonstrating as devoted followers; ‘crisis actors’ is the modern term, I believe.
As we know, every time you act dishonestly, you increase your chances of being found out, and once found out the whole edifice comes crashing down: we see none of that here. In fact, it seems there was not one resurrection but a great many coming back from the dead in Palestine, but also in Rome following a major earthquake event. Meanwhile, Jesus was executed not for doing bad things, but for doing good on the sabbath, which was against the law. Clearly the law is an ass when one day a week good becomes bad and when service to God clashes with service to one’s fellow humans.
Jesus was also a member of the royal, wealthy elite, so he would be well known even before actually doing anything. But since what he did was mix bigtime with the wrong sort (ordinary people), and he was also a writer, we are talking about someone who must have been immensely popular. The power of the message, which came at a time when the gods’ influence was at a then all-time low, can be seen from its persistence, two millennia later, no longer as a spiritual lesson but by now assimilated almost as a definition of basic human decency that goes without saying. Given also that for 17 centuries this tradition has been built up solely on the remnants of a 95% information blackout, that gives some idea of the enormity of the cover-up. The accusation of deceit was turned against Jesus, notably on the subject of raising the dead being devilish magic. It may be magic: a magician pretending to cut a woman in half is demonstrating to what extent she is a ‘waste of space’, since she can fit into a space half the size. Resurrection merely takes this to the extreme of showing how a person can survive in no physical space at all. So, magical maybe, but hardly diabolical.
In spite of those unfavourable odds, as I’ve just indicated, I think it can be said that Jesus’s message of love successfuly penetrated human consciousness to a degree that I shan’t try to quantify. But there comes a point where it is no longer enough, when it becomes automatic, instinctive, and so in a sense… unconscious at a higher level. The next step up in consciousness would be to integrate into the message of love, notably an understanding of this blockage that has grown so huge, i.e. the knowledge of both good and evil. This would involve not just hearing the ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’ of whatever things have been kept secret, but more fundamentally understanding that open communication is an integral part of this force or energy we call love. My point here is simple. Anyone trying to understand the world today may do better avoiding wading through the truth and lies coming out of Ukraine and Russia. Nor need they try to get their head round the truth and lies to do with the CIA, Islamism, reptilian aliens or whatever other issue is getting in the way. Ultimately, for the vast majority all these issues just lead to the need to hold beliefs, like another religion. On the other hand, regarding Christianity, the recently discovered literature offers probably the clearest demonstration we are going to get that the familiar bible story was not wrong, but such a tiny portion of the truth as to become highly inaccurate. Get your head round this, and the other stuff should sort itself out.
There is something strange going on here. Almost everyone must have been feeling amazingly good, and yet this tiny spanner in the works (a couple of negative priests) leads to the crucifixion. But this was foreseen. Reviving the dead was one thing; it showed that there is life after death. But a newly executed man reviving showed something else: that killing is ultimately futile. (What we may envisage for tomorrow, with everyone today feeling incredibly awful, because that lesson was never learnt, might well be in the nature of a drop of oil that sets everything running smoothly.)
Tiberius in his rage not only had Pilate executed, but he reportedly unleashed a genocide against the Jews for murdering their Messiah, affecting many innocents who were his followers. Notice how his was about the most unchristian thing he could have done, actually repeating Pilate’s mistake on an altogether vaster scale. This major persecution was like a huge bomb exploding, but one unexpected positive outcome was that many promptly scattered all over the world, spreading the good news at incredible speed for the time. Note how this is a replay of Alexander’s belligerent campaign to educate the known world (see above): any evil murderous intent backfires into something positive, putting a whole new slant on Orwell’s ‘war is peace’! Despite this untimely death, Jesus continued to travel the world after the resurrection spreading the word, only now there were thousands of others doing the same thing, including across the Roman empire. That much remains historically true: not to believe in resurrection, however it is supposed to work, amounts to dismissing the contemporary eyewitness explanation with no alternative explanation for how we got to where we are today. Meanwhile the historical fact of persecution remains the spanner in the works that still needs eliminating.
What makes the above history of current relevance, apart from its apparent verifiability, is the reported message of a second coming after 100 (20-year) generations. If Jesus was travelling the globe, then the idea we read about that he was one and the same as Quetzalcoatl, who arrived in Mexico from the east, begins to make sense. He would have taught the Mayan calendar, which is somewhat mysterious because its start date doesn’t seem to mark anything in particular, and in any case predates the Maya civilization. If the calendar was invented halfway through the 5-thousand-year period, then everything would point to the infamous end date of 21/12/2012, which happens to be... 99 generations (katuns) after Christ’s crucifixion, i.e the start of the 100th, due to reach the age of 20 in 2032-33. Remember, these are round figures.
So, now that we are raising this long-awaited 20th generation, with hindsight, what might be the value of the current mindset within the above longterm planning? Well, for one thing, let’s have a look at those miracles, which mostly turn us off, but which back then would be simply be accepted as positive magic. Tiberius: ‘he can heal me, enough said, I want him here!’ Nowadays we might say ‘technologically too advanced’; but we are also at the point where we can say, ‘virgin births no problemo! The other stuff, not just yet, but we’re working on it.’ Science, which bought into 100% materialism, still needs to be reconciled with ‘religion’ (which by the way is not and never was purely up-in-the-air stuff, otherwise why was Jesus spending so much time curing, feeding, reviving physical human beings?). But at least we are reaching a stage where what once seemed impossible is no longer quite so far-fetched. So, ‘resurrection’, for example, is no longer just not natural, it becomes understandable as a change of plane; not necessarily a higher plane, a different plane. So, for example, a film-maker can break an egg and then restore it whole, either by reversing the film or by shooting the last sequence before the previous one. In other words, by moving through time instead of space.
Talking of science, I have been reading an SF story written for BBC TV by the astronomer Fred Hoyle, with John Elliot, called Andromeda Breakthrough (1964). It is the tale of a complex, meaningful message received from the Andromeda galaxy, and containing instructions for building a supercomputer capable of producing the blueprints for whatever is needed to get this planet operating effectively. This includes a lovely young woman, built in no time at all (virgin birth on steroids!) and also planning ahead for the various ways the message might be received. The hero is extremely worried by the whole thing, fearing an alien takeover. With the best of intentions, he destroys the computer, but not before a rogue gulf state has pirated the design and built another one. Eventually he falls in love with the Andromedan (after saving her life), and together they save this backup computer and the program at the very last minute.
So ‘Jesus’ here is a young lady built in a lab on instructions from a machine, and yet fully human. The premise seems to be that alien beings cannot just land on a foreign planet: they need to have a physical vehicle compatible with/made from that planet. Be that as it may, these aliens happen to be huge rocks that are part of the furniture on their rather dead planet, so there is no question of them travelling anywhere. So then, what is happening here? It would seem that this is a disinterested neighbour offering a helping hand, with no interference, to a planet in need of help – an intergalactic expression of love. But to do so, they have to become one of us, which can be interpreted in several different ways. It can mean total racial assimilation: no problem; if you are a spiritually advanced being, you will take this as read. Otherwise, they have to be somehow fake, spies, space invaders, magicians, whatever.
The Fred Hoyle story (again, the writer is a scientist) suggests that if you get to know and love this visitor, together you can change the world. But ultimately, these are visitors on the same level of planetary-based physicality as us. Sure, a distinction is drawn between hardware and software: software can travel, hardware is built on the spot; however, unlike Christlike humanity, software is hardware-dependent: if the computer is destroyed, the apps are lost. The Jesus story is explicitly on a higher plane, and more far-reaching; here again though, the whole project can be hi-jacked by one or two, not necessarily evil monsters, just earth humans with a grudge. Attacked, but not defeated: Jesus is killed, but he just gets up and carries on as before. The grudge in question, as described in the Kimball book, amounts to very little: Anna is unhappy that his own bloodline wasn’t chosen for the Messiah to incarnate, and so seeks revenge, which with foresight is in itself is enough to justify the choice of another family. Clearly, as I said, this was part of the plan to demonstrate the illusion of death; and it is the part of the story that the science misses out or doesn’t get to. All we see is the woman surviving various brushes with death, exactly how we don’t know. But let’s see where science might be catching up at last.
We are talking about chasing shadows. Gombrich (quoted in my 2nd link above) describes how Alexander the Great tamed his horse Bucephalus, afraid of its own shadow, by turning its head towards the sun. Then in the very next paragraph, he describes Alexander’s encounter with the stoic philosopher Diogenes, whose one wise wish is for him to remove his shadow from him and let him sit in the sun. More sun, less shadow, that is the horse’s philosophy too. But then you read that someone finding themselves in Jesus’s shadow is miraculously cured, the inference being that there is more solar energy coming from his shadow than from the sun itself. Or alternatively, that a time would come when protection from the sun’s rays behind a godlike shadow would prove necessary. Interestingly the afternoon of the crucifixion saw darkness and earthquakes in Jerusalem, and also Rome apparently (and the night of the resurrection saw daylight). This moment of physical death was accompanied, we are told, by the dead rising up from the grave. Earthquakes are the sort of manifestations one might expect at the time of a pole shift. Science is now saying that a pole shift, caused by solar activity, is due right now. That would be the reason not only for the timing of the second coming, but also for teaching the Maya, who never saw the start of their outsized calendar and never saw its end, to expect in this distant future what they called... the Fifth Sun.
There is a very practical lesson to all the above. It goes something like this: there is a fork in the road ahead and the signpost may be the wrong way round. The notion of a last judgment with no external judge would be based entirely upon that decision. The Orwellian-sounding paradox ‘death is life’ and its corollary, ‘survival is death’, might turn out to be crucial. Very possibly, elitist self-preservation in underground cities and bunkers after deliberately keeping foreknowledge away from the masses is the wrong way to go. Better stick to altruism, face the danger without fearFocussing on that simple choice should be enough to navigate the chaos resulting from some making a different choice and others maybe not choosing at all, or perhaps changing their minds.
Whatever else is going on, the above strikes me as an excellent design for a truly democratic poll where every vote counts and every elector gets what they voted for.
*Here is Pilate’s letter to Tiberius (https://thelostbooks.org/pontius-pilates-letter-to-tiberius-caesar/), ‘entered into the Congressional Record in the year 1887’.