Essential Zen

In another study I have attempted a defense of Jesus as a genius with radically new ideas, an evolutionary Eurekal! development by which life tried to develop a new aspect of potential. I have tried to outline how completely the massive "failure of nerve" of that period, epitomized in Stoicism, and seen by Singer to have destroyed early science, was the victor in the struggle for man's mind. This same failure of nerve is the very psychological contradiction dominant today, the perennial cause of the split mind. This frozen logic of Stoicism not only triumphed but then incorporated the imagery of Jesus, inverting and negating his entire thrust. Thus was the "rushing torrent of the river of God" turned into a "broad but feeble stream" called Christendom, to use Edwin Hatch's metaphor.

One or two comments by Augustine, that final death-knell of Jesus' Way, indicate how the symbols of the Way had been absorbed into Greek logic until indistinguishable. Writing of the Stoic Seneca for instance, Augustine exclaimed: "What more could a Christian say than this Pagan has said?" Concerning the Platonists, Augustine stated that "the sole fundamental truth they lacked was the doctrine of the Incarnation." Since this "doctrine" was itself purely Greek, foreign to a Hebraic background and undetectable in the ideas, sayings, or actions of Jesus, we see how the new wine had long since been put in old skins.

Considering the world an immovable fated cycle, and man a tragic incidental on its surface, with God an abstract "pure essence" off in his ninth circle or wherever, the Greeks were unable to ask or hear a Job-like ultimate question. To the Greeks nothing could ever happen to the cosmic egg, only to incidental man. And to the Greeks, boxed in by their own logic, no answer came.

Stoicism rewrote Jesus' crack in the egg as a mythological once-for-all happening. Their projection placed the Way out of bounds for man. Thus man was really no longer responsible for his world, but only responsible to the priesthood organizing the dogma. The open-potential catalyst is completely unpredictable, and the forces of social control, feeding on predictability, quickly shut it out.

The "Will of God" shaped as the new metaphor for the old Greek Fate. The "Son of God" was no longer rational man; the "Father" no longer the logos-shaping mythos, the symbol of transference; the "Spirit" no longer the threshold of mind; "God" no longer that divine-demonic, non-judging, amoral, raining on just and unjust alike, the hard taskmaster reaping where he sows not, doubling the talents, any talents, mirroring any desire, and crying "More! More! Less than all will never satisfy." By the Greek perversion these became Olympian figures rather than psychological symbols of ontology. They were abstracted from all reality. Jesus' Way, the greatest of human Eureka! adventures, became a fairy tale, a maudlin, ridiculous, pious fraud.

Actually, none of the accounts of Jesus' "non-ordinary" reality maneuvers need be discounted. A miracle is a non-ordinary state in the don Juan, fire-walker sense, rather than in the Greek mythological fire-from-Olympus sense. Christendom has largely ignored Jesus' insistence that acts greater than his would be a product of his system. Based on Greek logic as it is, rather than on the non-structured and open Way, theology never understood or really believed in those happenings. Since miracles represented cracks in the egg beyond all probability, the self-styled guardians of the egg, determined to protect man from himself, projected those cracks into the nethermost regions of inaccessibility.

The "interventions in the ontological construct" attributed to Jesus and promised for his followers are as logical within his premise and system as are different reality states in don Juan's, fire-walking in the Hindu's, or atom bombs in the scientist's