Abwoon-dbashmaya--First-Line-of-the-Aramaic-Prayer-of-Jesus_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
Abwoon-dbashmaya--First-Line-of-the-Aramaic-Prayer-of-Jesus_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
and this is a word a couple of words from Jesus's prayer which is sometimes called although not by me the Lord's Prayer and this again the first line of his prayer points us to this greater connection with a larger Cosmos in a shared community of awe with each other the line that we're going to chant is or if you just get a boon you're doing well I think this is often translated as our father without in heaven but actually a boon is a process it's not a being sitting somewhere a bonus creation it is creating fathering mothering at the very moment at this very moment and shamaya is not a heaven in some Penthouse above us somewhere it is actually here and now Shem means that which connects us through sound through light which connects us through vibration through name that heaven in a middle eastern way of looking is as much here and now as it is somewhere else so the words are again and we'll do a few of woundings at the end ah b-w-o-o-n like blowing a kiss very gently and then that connection with each other the breathing life of all connecting us all together in one name or light or sound that is in all names all diversity foreign foreign foreign breathing again feeling that breath connection that possibility of Infinite Creation always you could say always something new coming from the darkness and also connecting with those who have gone ahead of us as well as those who are coming along behind following in the footsteps of the best of those who have gone ahead of us leaving a better world for those coming along behind us
Aramaic-Jesus-The-Hidden-Teachings-with-Neil--Douglas-Klotz_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
Aramaic-Jesus-The-Hidden-Teachings-with-Neil--Douglas-Klotz_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
foreign [Music] to humanity in every episode I tell you powerful true stories filled with great wisdom that you can use in your own life as you strive for a higher road to travel my future guests will have their own unique story to tell that Enlighten your mind and your soul so kick back relax and learn the secret to success when you take the high road [Music] [Music] hi this is Nancy Earl and welcome to high road to humanity and I have a wonderful gentleman visiting me from Scotland Neil Douglas klotz is here and welcome to high road to humanity Neil thank you Nancy thanks for inviting me greetings from Scotland I'm so excited you're here cool and you say it's chilly there it's very chilly the chilliest stuff well it's almost the chilliest I've known since I've been here 20 years or more oh my goodness well you guys today we're going to be talking about the revelations of the Aramaic Jesus and this is the book that he has written and we're going to be talking about the language Let me just sit back and relax a minute and let me give you first of all Neil's bio and then I'm going to read you a little bit about what we're going to be talking about so Neil Douglas klotz is an international known scholar in the field of connecting religious studies and psychology psychology as well as a poet and a musician he is the past chair of the mysticism group of the American Academy of religion and active in various International and uh conferences dedicated to peace and spirituality now his best-selling Works include prayers of the cosmos and the hidden gospel which I think I own the hidden gospel actually I was like oh wow I think I have this so you guys what we're going to be talking about today is the challenges we Face are not in essence different from those of our ancestors he says our relationships our love our knowledge our work and our purpose still claim our main attention and that's true yet he says the implications of these challenges for the survival of humanity and the planet seem more acute we seem to know more yet our Consciousness has evolved in such a way that makes it difficult to see what the purpose of life really is and how do we live more fully in the moment solving the problems before us and you know he's going to talk about Jesus's teachings and how he spoke and I guess I want to know how did you get into this that's always the question yeah I mean how does one get into something so obscure well yeah your parents well from what I read your parents were both Christians and they were involved in holistic health and organic gardening and receiving wisdom within themselves what drove you to this this really interesting work by the way yeah I mean I have this sort of unusual family background although my parents were nominally Christian that was as I sometimes call it a cover story that we that we had uh because my father was one of the early chiropractors in Illinois Nancy and so you know we he had to work there and it was a small town and you can imagine Chiropractic was still considered well like taboo well taboo and you know is like Way Beyond the pale and uh now it's somewhat more mainstream although depends on who you go to so so we were raised with you know Chiropractic holistic health listen to your body you know we're gonna we're gonna plant all our own vegetables because we had we took over a large vacant plot next door and you know had like a small farm actually feeding ourselves and whoever else was around and then my parents were very much into Edgar Casey and your listeners may know about so um because Casey Trav uh channeled a lot of holistic health remedies that are still you know what one can still buy them today and one can still read Casey's Casey's channelings on this so so that was our that was our Holy Trinity that was you know Rachel Carson Edgar Casey and Chiropractic I know the three C's you said I love that the three C's yeah I know it's a bit of a become a bit of a cliche after all these podcasts I've done but you know I I was because we we were Center quite Conservative Christian Schools again this was part of how we presented in our community I had to learn a large part of the Bible uh By Heart by memory which is what Christian schools did in those days and then on Sunday you have to stand up and re you know how would we say recite first yes yes yeah recite and recite from Luther's small catechism verbatim exactly what Luther's said this whole thing meant and all of that and it was like I don't know you know I always felt that there was more there right and again from from my family background my family background was all about you know feeling what you feel what does your body feel what does your body want you know my parents were really more about what we would call spirituality rather than religion right so they they read us Bible stories and I got some feeling from that and you know from the way we were raised and you know doing a lot of digging around in the dirt in in planting things but you know it didn't it didn't mesh with what I was learning from standard Christian theology so even as a child I had this feeling there's something there but I I really don't I don't I'm not getting it you know I'm not getting what it is right well right in the beginning of the book in the introduction you say and I love well John says in John 8 3 2
he said You shall know the truth and the truth will make you free and that's what I really you know when I read that it really hits home for today because we're starting a lot of people are waking up and they're starting to see the truth and they're starting to realize that this has all been a ruse and that really hit home with me when you said that in the very beginning of the book because well you didn't say it John said it but he was telling you but it was it's interesting it's like it brings forth these times we're in right now yeah so there's very much of that because you know whom do you trust and what news do you believe and you know on and on and on and right and then even this passage from John you shall know the truth and the truth will make you free right this gets this gets sort of hijacked and and the truth is whatever theology you know the your local religious official is telling you uh whereas Jesus uses the word uh for truth the Aramaic word that he must have used because he didn't have a choice of other words to use ishrada which really means the the truth that's found deep deep within the human heart it's that which the human heart is already inbuilt with we already have this sense of being able to turn toward the right direction right and know where we are and know who's telling us the truth and know who isn't but it's all been overlayered with centuries of culture and enculturation and that wasn't what Jesus was talking about right I like how you bring this up well it's not a good thing but I read in your book where you talk about our individuality has been developed over the five or six hundred years and we've been separated from nature and that is so true you know that's something I always talk about on the show that we have to get back into nature and get outside we've gotten to where we've disconnected from nature and disconnected from God yeah very very much so both of those you see that that's sort of the epidemic of human times yeah um you know where we were ten thousand twenty thousand years ago again you know as it was a bit of this in the book too because that's really the background is that humans were much more human consciousness was much more embedded in our surroundings and at the same time we had very little sense of individuality that is being separated from one another or from a plant or a tree or I mean why else do we have all these World stories about Davis you know and nature spirits and you know all of this in the world culture is all there that the nature had these living beings they were living beings or they were connected to living beings and so we had this relationship with the Unseen World with angels with demons with all of this so this was this was a not exactly a normal thing but this was all very much accepted thing uh in earlier human consciousness now the development now I'll go I don't want to go too much into this but you know but it's a major feature of the book human consciousness develops such that we have this individual sense of self now and many of us would not do without cannot do without it because to it we can attribute our individual human Freedom uh human rights Justice all these things treating each other because if there's no each other there's no like treating each other fairly if you see what I'm saying it's sort of so all this develops over thousands and thousands of years very gradually and it has its good sides and then it has this very very negative size which we see around us today right people are cut off from The Unseen they're cut off from God from the Divine and they're cut off from from nature so it's it's like there's a both and here well can I say I'm going to just interrupt you here a second and this is what I feel about yes I'm an intuitive and I'm connected with God and I really feel like this is what I feel intuitively I think we had to go to this far on the Spectrum to come back to God agreed totally agree because now here we are and here I am today connected with God so connected with nature balanced happy joyful watching the craziness go on around me being aware knowing the truth but only because I'm connected with God and nature absolutely absolutely and this is you know really if you don't want to cut the Pod shark podcast short but I mean this is really the essence of Jesus's whole message was that you know we need to to be able to turn turn our individual Hearts which we have now developed as individual Hearts towards that source and we as I said everybody has the potential you don't have to do it my way or anybody's way you know we all have that potential to do it and you know we can have people help us I mean people like you are helping people others are helping people I'm helping people in my way you know it's like well that's what it's all about now it's not about institutions or religions or organizations right it's every everybody's got to do it for themselves well let's get back to talk about Jesus spoken word now he did obviously he knew Greek and Latin well maybe maybe but so let's just use the Lord's Prayer as an example absolutely and talk about this tell us what he really I mean because I say the Lord's Prayer every day when I get up in the morning and so I want to hear your take on what maybe the meaning was for Jesus and maybe we're missing some of the meaning here so if you could help us with that yeah thanks Nancy well this is really where I started out with my work you know I had gone as far away from Christianity as I could when I got to University I became an investigative reporter uh trying to find out you know the secrets that government was hiding from us this was in my 20s you understand wow now I'm 70 something so uh you know and and that was always my tendency I wanted to find out what's underneath what's underneath what's underneath what's underneath and I was pretty good investigative reporter and then I discovered that people didn't make decisions based on facts this was even in the 70s uh I can tell you uh much less now even when you give them the facts they don't they don't want to hear it states when you were doing this yeah yeah I was in the states I was working for an alternative new service and there were still alternative new Services you print new services in those days now they've all on the internet so but uh and you know so I had a burnout I you know so I'm telling you this the rest of the story how I got to what I'm doing but you know I had my own spiritual I had my own burnout my spiritual burnout and uh and I started to hunt around you know well how do I make decisions you know how do I decide what's true for me you know back to that theme and and that's where I got involved with with spiritual things and I actually ended up with sufis some of the western sufis and one of one of their teachers who had died just before I came said he wanted to learn to pray the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic and this was Samuel Lewis who started the dances of universal peace if you've ever heard of those they're they're around these Circle dances where people are chanting okay and but he had never done this he'd never learned to chant The Lord's Prayer in Aramaic so I decided I want to find out what that's about and I I did my research but originally my research was really experiential I started to chant the words um I didn't actually know much about what they meant except I knew they were supposed to mean you know Our Father which art in heaven and on and on like that but I felt okay there has to be the sufis think sound is a real thing sacred sound connects us to the Unseen you know you can connect to the ancestors that way there's got to be something here if Sam thought it was something so I began to chant it I was on a retreat this was late 1981 I think so that's a little over 40 years ago and uh I was I did my retreat initial Retreat practice setting up the boundaries as you do with a retreat you do like psychic protection basically that sort of stuff and then I you know after about day two or three I took this sheet I had with approximate words you know the approximate Aramaic from that a you know a Jewish rabbi had given me and I began to just chant them on One Note and all of a sudden my body began making movements that I had never felt or experienced before will you do it for us will you say it for us absolutely you know and then I began to hear Melodies and I can sing you some of those Melodies too yes yes so that was that was the beginning of all this work over really 40 years ago and uh and then only later did I do all the scholarly work which you've mentioned in some of this bio stuff right right I want to hear the Lord I want you to say the Lord's Prayer and I want to learn it because I feel like I'm I agree with you wholeheartedly and you guys our audio isn't as good as it should be I'm in kind of not my regular place and he's in Scotland so you're gonna have to bear with us our our visual is not good but our audio is very good so I just say okay hopefully the recording will be good yeah the recording's good it's the visual that's not as good so um if you're joining us on binge TV today that's the situation he is far away and I'm not in my usual place where I can be plugged in directly to the Internet so there's a little weather the weather could be better here yes I can tell you yeah so yes the Aramaic prayer um I'm ready to say the words first okay and if if anyone is interested in learning this it is a wonderful prayer it's the protection prayer it's a healing prayer there are so many layers to it and I'll go into it just a little bit after I've Chan after I've said the words for you and then we can chat some later okay you know the thing is with the Aramaic it's a lot of open sounds it's a lot of dense sounds um it's a mantric language if you know what that is your listeners I think they will in other in other terms the Semitic languages of which Aramaic is one they have these these sounds that connect us to the Unseen and this is this is a bunch of them are in these languages this Hebrew ancient Hebrew ancient Aramaic like this so uh listen for just a bit and just breathe and feel it and and that's what I did originally [Music] foreign wow people okay so if you or your listeners want to learn that Nancy that you can just go to my website you know you click on buttons it's all there free you can hear me saying it line for line repeat repeat after me and then in a month I guarantee in a month you'll have learned it tens of thousands of people have have learned the Aramaic prayer that way through through recordings and uh it's a it's a tool it's a doorway we can just say it's your way right um whatever however you would translate it the Aramaic words are a doorway to the Unseen I mean all the books that I've done are just an excuse for people to have their own experience right just an excuse for people to have their own experience because there's so many layers hundreds of years of Christian theology layered on top of this stuff and it's not so much that most of the normal translations are absolutely wrong they're just you know it's like this this is the real meaning and this is this is what you get strained out through Christian theology except in some cases there are outright mistranslations and misinterpretations and the Aramaic prayer has at least one of those so now what is your website uh it is um ABW that's a b w o o n dot org avoon.org that's the first word of the prayer a b w o o n it's an https site you know if your browser bulks at that it shouldn't that's the most secure and there's a whole bunch of sound files there you can listen to all this stuff you know as I say in a month five minutes a day you can learn the Aramaic prayer five-year-olds have done it um I've had Parents bringing me their children and say you know listen he wanted to learn the year she wanted to learn the Aramaic prayer you know you know they just yeah I learned it's like easy no problem I love it you know I want to get I want to talk about light and sound as this whole thing with the prayer and I I I'm so into energy I'm So Into we are energetic beings yeah talk about the sound and we've really gotten away from that you know um I just had a harpist on a couple days ago and you know I started to cry because of the sound and because it's the sound of the prayer it's the sound of the words that you say them and the way you say them that changes our vibration talk about that well I mean yeah and there's two things as I mentioned uh in the book you know we don't know exactly no one knows exactly exactly exactly how Jesus said his Aramaic I have made my best you know how would we say Research into it using all scholarly resources and bringing you know basically what ended up getting me a PhD to the whole project and so I think I'm you know the way I pronounce it is 99 probably close to the way he said it there are Aramaic Christians today some of them say it slightly differently some of them say it more like I'm saying it but the main thing is that sound is vibration we have to realize this breath you could say breathing comes into sound and becomes audible so our breathing what Jesus calls our that which connects us to everything into all the time into the Divine that comes into our sound that comes in and then that comes into our words so we want to make sure that our our breath and our heart and Our intention are aligned with our words this is not new stuff but it's all over Jesus in Aramaic so it's the sound of the words because they connect us to his being his living being and this is the reason why people chant things because you connect to the being who originally said them or you connect through them is better because Jesus didn't say stop with me he said go through me you know I'm a door you know and I not me individually but he says connect your small self to the only self and that's a door for you that will be the door to thee to God to the Divine so it's it's the words that connect us we we piggyback on on yeshua's experience yeshua's being Jesus's name in Aramaic and we bring our own heart intention into it and that means our need that means our love that means you know all all that stuff that opens the doorway our gratitude gratitude love and of course you know deep need will open the door as I'm sure many of your viewers and listeners will have attested when I'm in a real deep trouble and I say a prayer however I just say a prayer in my own words that's going to open some doorway because my heart is fully into it I have to tell you something that really shocked me so I had a young lady on my show about a week ago and she had a near-death experience and she was uh flatlined for 20 minutes and why she was flatlined she went up to the light she went through the tunnel and she said I watched prayers coming up they look like text messages I knew what they said I could see them I want people to know that their prayers are heard by God fabulous I thought that so what you say and so it goes back to the same thing the prayers are heard your words are heard whether they're good or bad yeah because they they resonate in the what we could call the Unseen World uh and to the extent that our hearts are involved because the heart is what's between our individual self and what Jesus calls uh or Soul you know we've got a self and a soul and this is Jesus terminology I'm just translating it into into English we've got an individual self you know here we are here and now you know looking around and the world looks like you know whatever it looks like and then we've got our soul which is rucha which is connected from before into the UNS in its connect after it's always done it's always available it's open 24 7
so you know it's awake while we're asleep and all that stuff you know it can come into our dream life if we allow and so Jesus is saying okay let's part turn towards your soul and now it's you know if you look around you a lot it's a lot of it is what we've written a thing in our culture it's just people who you know they're looking to their individual self to try to fulfill that that which is never going to be able to fulfill actually right it's like looking for love in all the wrong places you're looking for everything you know you know yeah I mean it's not that we're not supposed to meet our own individual human needs we're here we've got bodies you know we've got a gift we've got to use it properly we've got to learn what we need to learn but you know we the main difficulty with work like yours with work like mine is convincing people that you know consciousness and all is not all animated from the it's not like the brain producing chemicals you know and all of a sudden there's Consciousness that's you know no this is a nonsense people you know this is you know you're going down to you know you're going down the wrong pathway there so you know everybody's got to connect connect this is what Jesus was talking about connect your individual self you know to your soul which is always on which is your connection to the Divine it's it's pretty simple right how has this changed you since you started to speak in the language that you well you know I start to I started to think Nancy at a certain point in Aramaic and I still do I'll wake up in the middle of the night or in the morning and and something will come to me in Aramaic and I think why is that coming it should be now and think ah okay I was I had a question I had a problem so now you know the answer is coming but it's coming sort of Yeshua so so there and I've known other people that that started to happen too I mean because I've got I've translated many things over the 30 years I've been doing this I've got chance to many things uh people use the chance they use the body prayers that I have in my books or on my website and and and great I mean that's that's wonderful it's another resource for people right especially if they were raised Christian and have they're sort of they they've got sort of Jesus phobic you see so and I was Jesus phobic and and so I got rid of that Jesus phobia and now I can study from all anybody all sorts of traditions because I'm not weighted down with a whole bunch of unnecessary guilt what's the most surprising thing that you were able to translate that may be completely different than what we thought it was where shall I start anyway we have to choose a few well it's you know let's take let's take with a stick with Jesus's prayer which is normally called The Lord's Prayer it just said I don't usually call it the Lord's Prayer I have no I think against you doing it if you want to do it but there's no real good word that's translated strictly speaking is Lord and Aramaic and Jesus didn't call that and so wherever you see the Lord in the in the Bible it's sort of like an interpretation really based on later theology either Jewish or Christian and it's sort of medieval it's it's due to the medieval eras in which the scriptures were translated into other languages because he had Lords and Ladies and class system and we still do in some places right uh like here in Britain now I'll tell you uh but so the if we take toward the end of the prayer this is very very problematic line where there is an outright mistranslation uh it's usually translated lead us not into temptation but Deliver Us from Evil lead us not into temptation and Deliver Us from Evil so as a child I'm thinking why would God lead us into temptation why would that happen and the answer is it's a mistranslation the prayer never said that and even the pope has admitted this now that is the current pope if you've if you want to dig into the Italian news but the prayer says so this is the so-called lead us not into temptation but actually it says let us not enter Temptation so lead us not let's say let us not enter that's a big difference yes and then the word for temptation is nissayuna which is really means forgetfulness that means we get lost in the in the superficial appearances of things of life this is a word that's all over the Semitic languages we forget where we came from and where we're going we forget that we came from the Divine and we're returning to the Divine don't forget Jesus he says don't let us enter that forgetfulness and then it says and how's that is the Deliver Us from Evil well there's a question of evil Aramaic Praises evil as bisha bisha means that which is not ripe it's not in its right time not in its right place it's an unripe piece of fruit either let it ripen leave it longer or maybe it's overly ripe and it needs to go to the compost so Jesus uses these sorts of metaphors throughout you could say the Gospels and says so don't let don't let me be unripe that is not in the moment don't let me be lost in The Superficial but also let me be also fully present in the moment so I can do what needs to be done in my life right now it's sort of a balance that's it that's it look ahead don't look behind that's where the fruit that's it be the others what he says elsewhere in the gospels uh you know a ripe tree Bears ripe fruit be like the ripe tree and then this was translated as a good tree Bears good fruit and an evil tree Bears evil fruit well how is the tree morally evil well it's not it's just you know it's a bad translation and it got strained out through a whole bunch of strange people's ideas particularly original sin which Jesus never had in mind and could never have had in mind because it wasn't a ancient Semitic Outlook of life right I want to jump to Beatitudes in Matthew go for it I love the Beatitudes yes these are my notes Here I picked out a few things but way to return to health through awareness breathing and heart feeling gosh that really hit home with me because truth I mean I talk about that this you know past and and present we need to be in the present we need to not think about the past we need to yeah and just be and that's what I'm learning right now I'll just tell you that and the audience I tell the audience and it's not easy to live in the present moment but what I'm learning is and I want you to talk about this is that when I just stay present and I go with the flow the universe has got my back and takes me where I need to go because God only wants the best for us that's what I see yeah yeah it's just a matter of you know you connect and then breathe in the moment that's it and this is what the Beatitudes say I mean the first beatitude this is in Matthew we're talking about since that's the ones you chose uh this one this usually translated blessed are the poor in spirit really a much you know a more accurate translation or blessed or ripe are those because again the word for blessed is really again the same word for ripe in the moment blessedly in the moment are those who rest in their breath who realize their breath that my breath is my first possession in life that is this breath comes into my form and I breathe my first breath having emerged from my mother and then it's the last thing to leave but that breath continues from before until after there is a there is a non-physical breath also so as Jesus says blessedly ripe are those who rest in their breath and then he says to them the whole the whole Shem the whole you could say vibrating Cosmos the the cosmos that's full of vibration and sound and light opens around them and and within them and that's you know that's the Blessed of the poor in spirit they should uh to them belongs the Kingdom of Heaven as is usually translated right but but the truth is if you just go with it and breathe and be centered and be connected to God then you will always be connected whether you're here sure it's just a matter of remembering right now it's right and there's so many things I wrote down to ask you about I'm so excited to have you on you know talk a little bit about the Holy Ghost you address the holy ghost in the in this book and let me hold the book up again you guys this is what the book looks like I want everybody to see it I didn't make it through it all but I will go back and read this because that's how good this is I want you it's a slow read friends it's not a quick read it's worth it let me tell you it's Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus the hidden teachings on life and death and it is by Neil Douglas Kloss um talk about the Holy Ghost a lot of people yes the Holy Ghost is the word in Aramaic say it again and yeah it features all over Jesus's sayings but again you know Jesus this is pre ideas about the trinity in in that's in that Christian sense um now the Trinity can be interpreted in a very mystical sense which different Western esotericists have done but I want to take it back to what Jesus is talking about he's talking about that I have a breath that is always connected I mentioned it before it was before my birth it continues after my physical death this he calls rucha it's actually another word for sort of the breath Soul the always-on part of us not the individual Limited in this body part so this this ruha is connected we're we're connecting right now Nancy in the moment and then we're connecting with whoever is listening here live I don't know if anyone's listening live or we're just recording but anyway but even if you're on the recording it's live because it's now and it's now is always now any moment it's now so sorry I've get I start to go off on no you're fine you're fine go ahead anyway so this ruha is we're connected to our community our family our friends it's a bigger it's a bigger breath and that breath is connecting than all over the planet to all the planetary beings first in the scene world of course nature true all of that and then in the Unseen World there's a connection to to beings to different beings in the Unseen and people say oh well you know beings in the Unseen that's old that's but you know this is actual this is this is real stuff friends right um you know it depends on who you with whom you connect but this is this is for Real it was real for Jesus yeah and uh you know it's as real as anything you just gotta choose who you're connecting to and then that breath is is extending throughout the whole universe this rucha and then where does that where does that ruha or that breath goes well that goes back to the one breath and this is what he calls de Kucha I call it sacred breath or holy breath because you know ghosts sort of gives you sort of I don't know Ghostbusters or Casper I don't know what but um that's okay too I mean I enjoy that stuff but you know this is the breath that is to which all breath is returning the one this is the way the ancient Semitic nomadic peoples felt it they felt that all our breath is connected and returning to the one breath which is being breathed in and out from reality itself and uh and that's the sacred breath now when we come to a very problematic Passage people will bring up what about the so-called sin against the Holy Ghost as it's mentioned in Christian theology well sin in this case both in Aramaic and in Greek by the way just means to cut yourself off from something so if you cut yourself off okay from your breath from your connected breath and from the source of your connected breath you know who's going to heal that who's going to who's who's going to knit that back together you have to you have to breathe differently breathe differently don't just breathe here within your small self breathe differently breathe deeper bigger however you want to put it it can you know whichever way you go it go it'll go there if you have the need and you have the love and you have the Gratitude it'll do it interesting interesting now you say I like this part well Thomas says light exists in the inner part of the person of light and that person illuminates all of the world around them if that person does not become light they are Darkness clothed in upon themselves that really hit home with me because I feel like right now and I want to know your feeling on this because you've done so much research so right now I feel like Humanity part of us are going to the light and part of us are just within themselves and that's what I got from that what do you think yeah I think you know Yeshua was looking forward to looking ahead to those that potential of the human self the individual human self to enclose in on itself and he comes to show a different way so in this well about half of the book I'm I'm going through Jesus's inner Transmission in the Gospel of John and comparing it to passages in the Gospel of Thomas if your listeners viewers know that it's it's written about the same time it's remembrances of Jesus's sayings written roughly about the same time as the Gospel of John is the best current research and Jesus is it says things like what you've quoted Nancy that we have within us this potential to turn towards the light or to turn away from the light and it's interesting that in the Semitic languages and when I say Semitic languages I mean ancient Hebrew Aramaic and also ancient Arabic quranic Arabic the Arabic that's in Quran they construe the human self as a shadow this is what you have in Genesis it says the first human self was created as a shadow of the Divine we're supposed to mirror the Divine and follow the light but if we turn if we turn ourself towards our own shadow then we're enclosed in ourself and we can't know anything for real because again the darkness isn't necessarily bad it just means we don't know what the heck's going on we're in the darkness we can't see we can't know we can't hear we can't feel smell touch taste that's what Darkness was for the ancient people and then what you want to know you want to turn toward the light so what we have to feel now is that we all have the potential to do that turning no matter what people around us say no matter what the culture's saying all that stuff so that's my take on it no it's I agree with you wholeheartedly and I teach everybody on the show to bring in the light every day to bring up the light on the earth I bring it down and then I bring it up from Gaia and you know that is how I connect and and I just want to say and I tell everybody this but you know it's always good to talk about it it heals you it balances you and it changes your life yeah I mean find a few things that work for you I mean that's my advice to people you don't need a whole bag of tricks necessarily although as life gets more complicated sometimes one does need other things and one needs help like help from people like you Nancy or or so I mean and that's that's good too um that's excellent but we all have it and it's a matter of intention as I mentioned and and then having a few things that you can really rely on bring that light down you know bring it into the heart from the heart feel it go to the Center of the Earth feel it connect let it spread I'm going to read something out of your book if that's okay sure please this is on page 173 of his book and this just you know I can't re I'm not well versed in the aromatic yet but here we go yahshua is saying in effect find your own trust in in connection to this breathing life as I am doing and showing you now by speaking in the way I am doing and then he underlines this message okay verily verily I say unto you he that believeth on me the work that I do shall be also in Greater Works than these shall he do because I go into my father now here's what that's King James version yeah here's what I underlined whoever carries the same trust I do who connects with me with these deep roots in reality itself they will do the same works of service that I have done I tell you that's my version yep that's how I feel about us that we're connecting and he says indeed they will serve love and offer themselves even more abundantly in ways ever more fitting and beautiful because my small eye the temporary part of me is departing leaving only Soul returning to its home the breathing of Light of Life of all and that's what you were talking about that's what that's what he's talking about that's what I'm talking about and you know yeah I mean Jesus never asked people to believe in him that's a that's a Mis translation of a preposition in Aramaic he's I said believe like I believe have the trust like I have and then you'll do it then you'll do this stuff you know you know he's because he's telling people look I'm going you know I'm not going to be here forever so you know you've got to step up you find you find your way all right well I'm gonna it's not that's not literal translation from Aramaic Nancy but I really okay translation you guys but I want to know um we got to get out of here in a little bit we've been talking for quite a long time but I want to know well I could talk to you for a couple hours because you have so much information that you're providing and thank you for writing this and thank you for providing this information to us because it's really needed at this time I've always felt intuitively that a lot of this translation wasn't proper and so it's really enlightening and really refreshing um to see this what do you see for 2023 for Humanity ah well I see again that you know that there will be this slow turning you know towards the light you know different people in many different places using many different means are going to do this sort of turning toward the light that you're talking about or I've been talking about many people are talking about actually and so although there will seemingly be this polarization as we're talking about the light from the dark there will be gradations and there will be people looking people searching and we want to keep providing resources for people to find we don't want just people to seek we want them to find and so in whatever way they do find that's going to be really good but remember that wherever you have a polarity there's always a field in between the two polarities it's not like there's a wall between them there's always this middle space like we have between the North and the South Pole I write about this in the book a bit you have like a magnetic field and although it seems to be like okay like that or like that but there's this middle bit and that's you know that's where we have to place our hope and place our trust and also ask for help ask for help from The Unseen and find a way to do that and then connect every day that's my take on it I agree with you wholeheartedly connect every day you can say Divine you can say Source you can say energy whatever God whatever makes you comfortable but it is that connection because we are energetic souls and we have to connect it's just like connecting to the internet if we don't connect every day we don't get the information we need to live our lives well that's that's very true and then filters are good too love it what do you want to leave us with today before we get out of here let's do a little bit of chanting I did promise it um I want to chant a little bit of the first line in of Jesus's prayer in Aramaic so we're back to the so-called Lord's Prayer and these are some of the Melodies that came through well a little over 40 years ago that people now chant around the planet and you can find these also at my website is the book Flash the book that's very nice his website is a b w o o n dot org that'll take you there there's a lot there rummage around mostly it's free there's a few things I asked for a donation for but very little so we're going to chantashimaya this is the first word first words first two words of the prayer oh thou the breathing life the parenting of all this is again the way Jesus addresses the Divine in his language and this wound is moving to and from us it's always available it's always there it's around us in shamaya shamaya usually translated as heaven but not above us it's it's above us and around us and underneath us it's the realm of vibration and light so connect first to the big we so I had a teacher said connected connected the big burner first turn on the big burner and then you can cook so connect first to the big burner here we go and let me turn on this so you get some decent sound okay and there's here's a simple body prayer so like this [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] okay that's good we like that so um yeah anyway it's all at the you know it's all there for people and God bless it's a resource thank you I'm so excited you came on the show today and I'm so excited thanks for taking an interest Nancy and thanks for all the work that you do and you know connecting with the angels and all that good stuff so yeah yeah it's all good I appreciate it Revelations other arithmetic Jesus you guys is the book it's by Neil Douglas clots and it's k-l-o-t-z and it's he's the author of the prayers of the cosmos as well Neil thanks for coming on I wish you thank you Merry Christmas in Scotland this year you too you too okay have a weed RAM for me Nancy haven't we what have a wee dram oh okay all right you guys um thank you for coming on the show again I really appreciate it everybody we wish you a very merry Christmas and a very happy New Year this is Nancy here out this is high Roti humanity and we will see you next time everybody take care and God bless [Music] please join me next time on the high road with Stories full of love and hope for our future you can find High Road TV Manatee on tokenet radio Spotify Apple podcast and now watch the high road on binge TV networks my channel is high road to humanity have a blessed week and know by staying on the high road you will make it to your destination for a psychic empath reading visit my website Nancy you're out.com to book your date and time with me I will deliver your messages from the angels and God bless [Music]
Meditation--Unity-is-Breath_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
Meditation--Unity-is-Breath_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
as some of you know uh i don't like to just talk to people i like to actually do some experiential work with them and so will i would invite you to if you wish to chant a little bit with me these two words and we'll just follow them for a minute or two into the silence and feel the breath here and then let the breath go out and feel the whole of columbus and and beyond connected with the sense of breath i'll be chanting just a few notes but feel free to harmonize around it don't even worry if you're singing the right note the main thing is to feel the sound according to the middle eastern tradition traditions feel the sound in the middle of the heart and just let the resonance be felt there that resonance of the breath then takes us into the meditation so sound taking us into you could say a deeper sense of our breathing and a deeper sense of connection the words again we're using allaha and then unity allah is breath breathes a lot we're simply entering the silence feeling our own breathing connected with each other we might feel the words inside to help us focus our feeling on the sense of connection connection through breath and the breath made audible through sound back to the first beginning back to allah
Neil-Douglas-Klotz---Aramaic-Jesus-Native-Middle-Eastern-Spirituality-Christian-Mysticism---BatGap_2024-02-08_en.txt
Neil-Douglas-Klotz---Aramaic-Jesus-Native-Middle-Eastern-Spirituality-Christian-Mysticism---BatGap_2024-02-08_en.txt
Pump
My name is Rick Archer, Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually Awakening people
We've done over 670 of them now
If this is new to you, and you'd like to check out some of the previous ones, please go to batgap.com Bat gap, and look under the past interviews menu, where you'll see them organized in several different ways
This program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers
So if you appreciate it, and I'd like to help support it, there's PayPal button on the website and there's a page explaining alternatives to PayPal. I guess today is Neil Douglas-Klotz
He is an internationally known scholar in the fields connecting religious studies, comparative Semitic hermeneutics
And you know, what does that mean? the name of Hermes, the Greek god
And Hermes, the tradition of Hermes is that language can heal you or language can kill you
So he was the trickster
And so hermeneutics is the big language, the scholars word, it's a language for the whole interpretation theory around languages
you studied comparison between various interpretations of the Semitic languages. that they shared a common worldview and they shared a common way of looking at life, which I can speak about later. is one of those languages, I presume? you are so you're an internationally known scholar in the fields connecting that, and psychology as well as a poet and musician
You are the author of Prayers of the Cosmos, Desert Wisdom, the Hidden Gospel, the Genesis Meditations, as well as co-author of The Tent of Abraham with Sister Joan Chittister, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow. You're also the author of a new book, Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus, which we'll be talking about today
You were the past chair of the Mysticism group of the American Academy of Religion and are active in various international colloquia, and conferences dedicated to peace and spirituality. One of your mentors is Sheikh Fadhlall a Haeri, whom I interviewed on BatGap, about a year and a half ago, delightful man. And I want to read a quote from your website before we get rolling, because I liked it a lot. "It is a real blessing if one can find companions on the path with whom one can share honestly, and who are dedicated to the awakening of self to soul through the constant albeit often painful, massaging of the heart by life's circumstances. When well massaged, any pain of rigidity, the 'ow' of life, is superseded by the awe of the souls eyes looking through one's own." There we go. So, I'd like to ask you just, if we could spend a few minutes
Some people are pretty self-effacing. They don't to talk about themselves a lot
But I always like to give people a glimpse of who the person is that they're going to be hearing for the next hour or two
Because many of them want to know, on what authority or based on what study or knowledge or experience, the person is saying the things they're saying. And so give us a bit of your background. anyway, thanks for inviting me, Rick. an enjoyable week, you know, reading your book and just thinking about the things that you've been discussing
I'm going to have a lot of fun today
I hope everybody enjoys this
know and didn't want to know about Jesus
exactly right
And most people are afraid. I was born in a sort of alternative family in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, and my father was one of the early chiropractors in Illinois. So my two brothers and I were raised with, we were raised with what I call the holy trinity of Edgar Cayce, you know, the American psychic. And Rachel Carson, of course, the great American ecologist
And then chiropractic
So I mean, I could spell chiropractic before anyone else in my school even knew what it was, I'll tell you that
So we had this inner family sort of culture. And as most children do, I thought everyone lived that way until I started to go to school, and then discovered that it's not the case
So we had to have, as I now call it, we had our inner family story, which didn't involve any theology, really, my parents were raised Christians, but they mainly read us Bible stories at night
They didn't, you know, they weren't fussed about that
But we needed an outer cover story, as I now call it, in our community
My father did
We did, I suppose, because he had to work there
And it was quite conservative
So my brothers and I were sent to quite conservative Christian elementary school. This was Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, if any of your listeners know what that was about, or is about, they softened up a bit after that, but we had to learn large parts of the King James Bible by heart and all of Luther's catechism by heart and all of Luther s theology by heart and... Garrison Keillor was always going on about, right? In his Prairie Home Companion? is good on Lutherans, actually
But these were... yeah
So anyway, you know that that did serve me, because I still remember large parts of the Bible, obviously
But when I finally sort of exited all of that and made it to university, I went as far away from Christianity as I could
And I basically became involved as an investigative reporter in the anti-war movement, and because I had a background in it, then in the Food and Drug Administration, investigations of the Food and Drug Administration, and, you know, the adulteration of drugs and all of this stuff
So that's what I originally started working as was a consumer investigative reporter in New York City. And I wanted to I mean, I'm, you know, he wanted to know, the background, this is where I came to how I'm doing it
But, you know, I had an editor in New York City, one of the bigger consumer publications, and he liked my work, but he said, Neil, you know, this is all too positive
You know, you have to make people more afraid
If they're afraid they'll buy more of more of the magazine
This is all pre-internet, you understand, Rick, this is this is all pre-Reagan, actually, too, as far as that goes. So in those days, the US still had, excuse me for saying so, somewhat of a free press
And it took the form of alternative newspapers and magazines, and university and college newspapers all across the country
And I ended up working for an alternative news service that syndicated stories to all this huge network that was active in the well, it was in the late 70s, and the early 80s. And I was one of the investigative reporters
So however, I was working 60-70 hours a week as you do in your 20s
This was happening
I read a poll, a Gallup poll, and it asked people, you know, as Gallup polls used to do, these opinion polls do? They would say, for instance, the poll I was reading, given that there's no solution to the, to the problem of nuclear waste, is nuclear energy a viable solution for our energy? And 70% of the sample said no
And then about 50 questions later, they asked people, if you had to give up something, because we no longer had nuclear energy, would you be willing to do it? And the same percentage said no
So this I should have known, but I was somewhat idealistic and naive
And I had an early burnout in my mid to late 20s
And then I had to decide for myself, you know, Neil, how do you make decisions in life? Do you may always make them on the basis of facts? Or do you make them on the basis of something else? Major life decisions? And if it's something else, what is that something else? How do you make decisions? And that led to this sort of inner search that I went on, which would now be called, I suppose a sort of spiritual search, really
And I went to various groups I wasn't really satisfied with anything was happening there
And then I did end up with the Sufis
And the Sufis were broad enough, at least at that point, they weren't so institutionalized, that you could go your own way, really, you could try to integrate whatever wisdom you could find from wherever you could find it. And that was important to me
Now, because I had--I'll finish this story because it takes you to where we can jump off from--because I had editing skills
And I had worked professionally, which few people in the hippie generation had actually in some cases, I was put to work, archiving and editing the diaries of the person who started the Dances of Universal Peace, Samuel L
Lewis
And in his diaries in his letters, he says, I want to do two things before I die. I want to start the Dances of Universal Peace, so people can eat, pray and dance together. And that's my peace plan
And then I also want to learn to pray the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic. And he had done the first, but he had not done the second
And that was a moment that struck me
I still can recall the moment you know, right now
It's just like, it stopped me in my tracks. And I knew that if this if this was something, it would have something to do with sound, with feeling, with the connection of music and sound through the words, which is what the Sufis do
And what most Middle Eastern chanting, all the Middle Eastern traditions have chanting
So they all do this
And so I began to hunt around
I began to investigate
Okay, who knew Aramaic who could help me do that? You know, I didn't think it was that difficult, because I had been raised hearing different languages anyway, in my household, you know, a little bit of German, a little bit of Polish, a little bit of Russian, mostly English, of course, but, you know, I had to sort of had a sort of ear for language
And I thought, okay, well, you know, how hard could it be? So this is where I began to chase down Aramaic really. do they..
with Sanskrit, it's considered that the sound value of words is as important as their meaning
And in fact, it's considered that there's a correlation between the vibratory quality of the name for something and that thing
So in other words, whatever the word for apple may be in Sanskrit, that somehow that word has a vibratory, the sound of that word has a vibratory quality, which in some way corresponds to the vibratory quality of an apple. Do they have something like that in Aramaic? actually, Rick, I would say that most ancient languages have this and if they've survived into today, that is sort of been sieved out of them, winnowed out of them, this way of looking at life. The ancient Semitic languages, and here I'm talking about, ancient Hebrew, Egyptian, old Canaanite, Babylonian, Aramaic, and even up until the classical Arabic of Muhammed-- the Arabic that Muhammed was speaking before they made up grammar around it
All of these have this idea
We could say they arise from a nomadic experience, a nomadic experience of peoples in this area of the world, Southwest Asia as I think we now call it or the Middle East as we used to call it, traveling, traveling, traveling, always moving
And so all of the languages arise out of this where the sound the letters are sounds, and the letters and sounds are not just naming things that are outside of oneself, but they are making a relationship to those. They are acknowledging a link that already exists between myself say and the apple, or myself and the tree
So it wasn't like I'm here and the trees there and you know, isn't that a nice tree and oh, the poor tree or, or you know, it's gonna be piece of lumber someday or whatever
It's like, I feel that the tree is part of myself
And the tree is a being that is not just the physical what we call the material object, but it is you could say--you could call it the spirit, the faerie, the genius
I mean, all these words are used in different world traditions
It is the living deva of the tree in some of the Sanskrit traditions. This was not just people making up mythology in those days
This is the way they perceived outer reality
Their outer reality was like a dream life that was on the outside, as one author once put it
And I think that's a good way to look at it
The inner sense of the subconscious that we have today, my dream life is my dream life, my emotional life is my emotional life
Okay, that evolved over 1000s of years
Before we didn't have this sort of inner-outer separation, as much as now
The individual self was not so developed
what you just said, that a language in which there's a correlation between name and form, or between sound of words and the objects they represent, would enliven the relationship with those objects
I think you were just kind of saying that but, you know, through chanting, or even just speaking the word, you're kind of creating a fundamental mutuality between yourself and the object
either the object or the person, for instance, who said the words
Like let's say it's a shaman, or a mystic or a prophet, or someone like that --a holy person, you know
If you are chanting--chanting is usually what was used around world cultures-- chanting or speaking those words, you could through the language and through a feeling of, for lack of better words we would call devotion or love, you can make a connection with or through that person
And this is, I think, one of the keys of chanting really
there's some verse about through yagya, which is a form of, you know, ritualistic chanting, one enlivens the gods, or the devas, and they in turn benefit you
There's this mutual sort of..
Reinforcement thing going on
Yeah, there's a mutuality
So it's not just, "oh, praise Jesus." You know, Jesus is up there, and how wonderful
It's meant to open a channel, if you will
So it's a two way street, if you will
There's a communication both ways. said, if you believe in angels, you're saved, but if you actually see them, you're probably cursed. acceptable theologically
I see
You might get in trouble
who see them, a few friends anyway. you know
In fact, one friend, when I found out that he saw these things, I was in an elevator in the San Francisco airport
And he had told me that he sees them
And I said, you know, are there any I n this elevator? And he didn't really say much. But when we got off, he said, they just said to me, don't point us out to people
If they're meant to see us, they'll see us
This week, by the way, there were three he said
absolutely
Yeah
I mean, now so called modern science, poo poos all this stuff, Rick, but, I mean, how much do we really understand about most of the way the universe works? understand about the way the so-called algorithms that control the stock market and the economy work? I mean, this is, these are robots, basically
And, you know, they're determining people's futures in some way
So, I mean, we put our trust in the economy or this or the markets
But what does it actually mean? I mean, honestly, you know.... not stocking up on all the things of the world because, you know, they're gonna turn to dust or whatever, and you can't take them with you? Well, I mean, slaughtering the verse..
do say this
Honestly, it's but you know, we're living..
well, I don't want to.... want to ramble, I rant a bit
You know, we're a couple of old hippies, we can blow off some steam
in such a way that we have a much more individual human self
That's where I was going before
We're much more separated from each other and from nature
And also, we're much more deluded by the idea that only outer reality, so-called material reality, exists
Those are the two big delusions of modern life
They did not exist 2, 5, 100,000 years ago. They had other delusions, most likely other challenges
So we've evolved in that way you could say
It's a devolution in some ways
We've evolved in the sense of individual human rights. This is an evolution of human consciousness
But along with that goes more individuality, more we going to do with this separateness? One of the things Jesus--who came at a sort of cusp when this consciousness is really starting to change.... Yeshua, in his Aramaic name, Yeshua came to show us, okay, how to make this shift in a healthy way, so that we don't end up well, basically, sort of where we are
Not that everyone is there, but mostly what the news reports is the results of, you know, more selfie, selfish, isolated, materially hypnotized culture
lot of people who are trying to overturn the materialist paradigm, you know, which is that everything is fundamentally material, and the brain creates consciousness and so on
And I'm sure you're aware, they, they are up against a lot of blowback from academic institutions, and so on, you know, whether they're a student in them or a faculty
Then it threatens their career course, and their tenure and so on, if they start talking that way
So there's, there's a lot of resistance to seeing life from a more spiritual perspective. because there's so much invested in all of this, whether in academia, in technology, the scientific community
Even in the spiritual community, you have a lot of an equivalent sort of thing going on, actually, where people mistake the symbols of spirituality for, you know, actually, anything real. You know, instead of the emperor with no clothes, you have the clothes with no emperor, basically, in in many cases
were just saying, kind of reminded me of the issue of polarization that's rending society these days. And isn't there some verse in the Bible where Jesus says something about I came to pit, you know, son against father or some such thing? And it sounds like he was advocating polarization or separating the sheep from the goats or something. You know what I'm talking about that verse? talking about, in modern terms, of the need to get over one's conditioning from one's family, and from one's culture
And in the time of Yeshua, Jesus, the family culture for most people, was pretty bleak
These were all underclass people, as we would now call them who had been oppressed. Taxed into penury and slavery basically, by empires for generations
And so, in these types of families, a lot of dysfunction appears. What we would now call, people living under this trauma
And so they would have all these what we would now call in psychology, liminal disorders, dissociative states, abuse, all of this was going on
And a lot of what okay, there is another realm, there is another dimension or other dimensions in the unseen, but here are ways to access them in a healthy way. You've had this, this conditioning, so to speak, abuse, whatever
I mean, you have to understand that at the time of Yeshua, there was virtually no middle class
It was all you know, even maybe even a smaller upper class than what there is today, as unimaginable as that may be
And so the local ruler, he could just come and say, "Well, now you owe this and if you can't pay it, I'll take your son or I'll take your daughter
It's like that and..
what is the effect of that on, on a family or on a son or on a daughter
So, he's pointing out, that you have to, at this point, separate from that
Maybe you can go back and heal it later
But you'd have to separate from that
discussion of the book
We're already sort of doing it but let's shift a little bit more. Firstly, let's establish that Jesus actually existed Have you ever read the books by Tim Freke and Peter Gandy about whether or not you know, Jesus even existed and they kind of reference all these traditions which tell similar stories as we're told around the life of Jesus? stuff, actually
Because people are always asking me about it
I don't put much, much... here's a couple of things
If Jesus did not exist, he wouldn't appear all over the Qur'an. Unless you believe the conspiracy theory that the Qur'an is just a Christian aberration, which is another conspiracy theory
I mean, you can sell books with these things
But there's, there's no reliability to it
I mean, these sayings, this type of wisdom, whether it's Jesus or Bhagavad Gita, or Gautama Buddha--people don't make this stuff up by committee
I mean, it just doesn't happen
This happens when individual people open themselves in a deep way to whatever that is-- the "great Mystery"--and something begins to come through them
Later, it gets made into a religion. Later, it gets made into a religion
That's the whole story, you know, of all these, of all these so-called "great religions." when it gets made into a religion, that soon begins to fail to resemble what the guy who established it was actually saying, unfortunately
And we'll get into that, you know
And eventually becomes, in many cases, the polar opposite of what he was advocating
I mean, I've seen you know, memes on the internet of Jesus holding AR-15
You know, with love... what's happening with Buddhists in Myanmar
Or, you know, with Hindu nationalism in India, you can go on and on with this
And of course, we don't even have to mention Islam
So...
Mahesh Yogi
On this topic, he used to say knowledge crumbles on the hard rocks of ignorance. the existence of Jesus, we won't debate that
splash back there
I mean, wow.... made a splash
Yeah, exactly. written down? I mean, he obviously wasn't followed around by a stenographer
And, and there are accounts of private meetings he had with like, the woman at the well and various other instances where nobody else was there. one else was there
I know. you know, come to us and when was anything first written? Did it go through decades of you know, oral transmission before went into print? hat on here, Rick, even though I'm not changing my hat
This is the stuff that dreams are made of? No, this is the stuff that PhDs are made of, in the religious studies and biblical studies fields, the so-called "transmission history" of the Gospels
How does it go from Jesus's mouth to whatever was written down on the page? Did it for instance, go through various people make scribbling little notes here in different places? And then did people compile these different notes? Or was there some source document? Or did it simply result from people's memory? Because we know in non-literate cultures, memory is much, much better than it is in in literate cultures
studies
So the different so-called gospels, perhaps they simply arise from different different groups' remembrances? "Well, we remember him saying this." And then Thomas group says, well, no, we remember him saying this
And the Mary Magdalene group says, Well, we remember this
So and it goes on like that. You know, my point with most of this is that, if you look at all of them together, if you look at them through an Aramaic lens, that is through a native language lens, a native Semitic lens, it's still the same Jesus
Really, it's still the same Yeshua, just different people remember different things, because we're human
And we need different things
I mean, look, if you go to your spiritual teachers, and you go to any spiritual teacher, and you ask 10 people, what did you remember from that? They'll give you 10 things. And this is even given you know, that we have much poor memory then in people's did 2000 years ago
that we have much poorer memory
And I don't think that point has ever come up on BatGap before but that's recognized and other cultures too
You know, for instance, for 1000s of years, the Vedas were just handed down orally, and they weren't, they weren't distorted
I mean, and they had these very elaborate methods of memorization. They had to do them forwards and backwards and you know, this way and that, and people devoted their lives to that
And then finally, when we entered what the Hindus called Kali Yuga, Veda Vyasa came along and said, "Everybody's really gonna get foggy now, so we better write it down." So he kind of got the whole thing written down. same with these texts
I mean, whether it is the Hebrew scriptures or the Gospels or things like this
So the earliest? It's in pieces
But if we boil it down to what we have today, the earliest Greek version is only about 100 years older than the earliest Aramaic version. And if you consult the Aramaic Christian scholars on this, they say, that's because we never kept old manuscripts
You know, we didn't want them to get too old, too frayed. So we ritually recopied them, checked them, and then burned the old one
So we didn't keep... we were not a relic culture...
They're basically nomads
You know, they don't keep old things, they keep fresh things
And they don't carry around old stuff with them just because it becomes a relic or John the Baptist thumbnail or God knows what. the way that it was done
So the Aramaic Christian scholars, they say, if or when he spoke anything, he spoke it in Aramaic, and our version, is going to be a lot closer than any Greek version
And that's the sort of the point of view I go from
So did Aramaic. In terms of it being written down, did Aramaic precede Greek or Greek precede Aramaic? Or was it kind of simultaneous, different people writing it down in their respective languages? simultaneous, really
Okay, because most of all of Jesus's listeners were Aramaic speakers--- remember poor, underclass
Only a few of them would have understood Greek or Latin if they were collaborators with the Romans
And that would be a very, very small minority of people
So... Greeks hanging around in Jesus's vicinity? Or was it mostly Romans? Speaking..
have also spoken Greek, because it's a trade language
a language of commerce all the time. But, but Aramaic is very, very old language in the Middle East, it's most likely that when, if you remember your Bible at all--I don't know much you remember---when the ancient Hebrew people were carried into captivity by the Assyrians and by the Babylonians....When those who came back came back, they were speaking Aramaic, rather than ancient Hebrew, the Hebrew that they were spoke before
The people who still speak a form of so-called Ancient Hebrew, not modern Hebrew, are the Samaritans, who live in Israel and other parts of the Middle East
They were the ones who were left behind when these other people were carried off by the empires in the fourth, fifth or sixth centuries BCE
So they say they maintain that older pronunciation. book that there were literally hundreds of different gospels, all kinds of different source documents, and that under the Emperor Constantine, it was winnowed down to the four gospels that are widely recognized today
And then obviously, there have been some other finds in recent decades, you know, Gospel of Thomas and the Dead Sea Scrolls and all that stuff
Magdalene, Gospel of Judas, all these good things
But they all had to be hidden
They had to be hidden otherwise they would have been destroyed at that time
Now the answer Emperor Constantine is left with a quandary, a conundrum, which is still the that of modern politicians
How do you simplify things for a bureaucracy? If the Roman Empire is going to become Christian, what does "Christian" mean? So we have to boil all this down
And up until that time, as one scholar describes it, what you had was all these little individual groups all over the Middle East, who were Jesus people in some ways
They start out, let's say, in the Egyptian desert
A mystic who goes into the desert, he has experiences, he has visions--or it could be she, too because there were "Desert Mothers" and "Desert Fathers." They gather people around them
These ascetics, these mystics, if you want to call them that
And so the community that gathers around them-- they're not really up for going into the desert and starving themselves and seeing visions
They just want a community
So then the question is, how do we determine what holds this community together? So the community begins to write little mission statements --as we would call them today for a corporation
And the mission statements would be like, Okay, we're going to gather and say a prayer
And then here's the statement of who we are
And these early mission statements become the early creeds of Christianity. And then Constantine boils them all down, simplifies it all to four gospels, one creed, this is it
Everything else out, that's it. way some modern fundamentalist Christians say, well the Bible is inerrant word, the literal word of God
And not a word can be modified or reinterpreted or anything
It's just like set in stone, this is what God said or wants to have said, it just seems kind of rigid? again, people, you know look around...
I mean, you've got your midterms coming up in a few days. And this religious right is a very powerful force
It has been for a long time in the US, even when I lived there, it was very powerful
So people are afraid
People are want to maintain control over life, they want it to be the way it used to be
But you know, it ain't gonna happen
Life is change, face it, friends
You know, get out of the outer selfie, grasping bit
And find where it's really coming from, find where your self really comes from. That's what Yeshua was pointing his people to
the US Constitution
I mean, you know, we're fussing over what these guys thought in 1781, or whatever it was
Who had no idea what we're going to be dealing with today
And in fact, I read the other day that Jefferson figured that the Constitution might last about 19 years and then would have to be completely revamped
Anyway...
idea maybe? >>Rick I understand your book to be
It's an attempt to find fresh interpretations of the words that Jesus may have spoken
By looking at the original Aramaic that he probably used, or the words he probably used in Aramaic
And then considering what the different meanings of those words would have been in the context of his society
And how did you do this? Did you find enough original Aramaic text to work from? Or did you like have to take the English Bible and like figure, alright, what would this have been in Aramaic before it went through whatever it went through to become English? And then, you know, going back to the Aramaic, this is what this verse might mean, as opposed to what it's usually thought to mean. first rather than the second. It's it makes no sense to go back from English
there original Aramaic renditions of the Gospels? Peshitta, which is what the Assyrian Christian churches use, or actually all Aramaic speaking Christians today use this Peshitta text of the Gospels
And although that particular Aramaic, if you will, is a little bit newer, that is, not quite as old as the one Jesus spoke, all of the major words are the same
All the words he must have used, if he said anything, remain the same
And this is my main point with scholars, because I often have to lean on them about this
If or when he said anything, he said it in Aramaic
And basically the language--the major, major words, like the word about spirit, or breath, or blessing, and good and bad, and all this stuff, all these words are the same. And they remain the same
From ancient Hebrew, even into classical Arabic
A lot of it remains the same really
It's a shared cosmology. It's a shared worldview
So anyway, this this book...yeah, thanks...we're backing into the book! we end up with the King James Bible or whatever the various modern versions of the Bible are? Did somebody go back to the original Aramaic and go from there jump to English, or did it go through Greek and Latin before it got to English. in most cases, in some cases through Latin, but it went through Greek
It has to do with the Reformation and the invention of the printing press
Again, the Aramaic Christians point out that, "We always have these scriptures, these scrolls, if you will, in our homes for maybe 1500 years, whereas for you Europeans, it was illegal and punishable by death, even to own a Bible if you were not a priest
This is pre-Reformation
So you could be executed for having a Bible in your home
Most people don't realize this
So they think "well fundamentalism." So the King James Version was a translation of the King James scholars at the time
It's actually, in many cases very poetic, although very wrong, in most cases
But in other cases, it's just theology that has interpreted the heck out of it, and twisted the meaning incredibly
out one thing, which I think you'll agree with, which is that is this is not just a matter of translating things accurately from one language to the other
But, I mean, you hear people say, "What would Jesus do?" And when I hear them say that, I always think, well, you kind of have to be Jesus, in order to do that
You have to be in Jesus's state of consciousness to act as Jesus would act
And if you're in some low level of consciousness, you simply cannot do what Jesus would do
And the same would be true
Same point applies to translating scriptures from one language to another, if you are incapable of grasping the profundity of some statement, because you're just not at a level of consciousness, which could grok the meaning of it, then how mutilated is the translation going to be? as you say, it's not just a matter of the language then
The word for spirit actually means breath. So cross out spirit wherever you see it in the New Testament, write in breath, and see if that changes the meaning for you
It's not just about that, although that's a good thing
But it's about the consciousness, it's about the cosmology, it's about the way of looking at life that Jesus had. And again, this is, as you say, you have to have this sort of spiritual gestalt, if you will, where you get into the feeling of Jesus
If you read the Gospel of John, which I have in the new book, this is actually what he's advocating
"Feel it like I'm feeling it, look at it through my eyes, feel it as though you're embedded in me
And then it'll all make sense to you
You've had me here in the flesh for these years, and now I'm, I'm scarpering off, I'm leaving
So you're on your own, but you know, you can feel me if you make a connection from your self to your soul
And I think that's one of the main points of the book, really
I was trying to bring together 40 years of work in one book, really, I started out with his little book, Prayers to the Cosmos in 1990
And then I did various things over the next 30 plus years. And this book is really meant to bring it all together, and place it in one view for people along with--as well as I could do it-- some guided meditations, some contemplations, whatever you want to call them, which I think are really some of the keys to the book
Because as `I say, you have to feel it
You have to you have to experience it, rather than just, you know, hold it up here (in the head)
something to be said, for trying to imagine the inner state of a great soul like Jesus, trying to feel into it
But that still doesn't mean one totally gets it
But Jesus assured people that they could totally get it and, you know, as evidenced by works that they could potentially perform as he did, and even greater works, as he said
But we don't see too much--well, we see some evidence of that kind of thing
You know, various saints levitating and things like that. But anyway, I think one should always approach this stuff with humility, and not make snap interpretations of things, but realize that one's interpretation is probably going to continue to evolve as, as one's self evolves
yeah, there's no question of that
Any anything that's wise, you know, wisdom words, if you want to call them that, they will continue to deepen like seeds, they'll continue to grow new plants in oneself
Otherwise, I don't want to be stuck with what I said 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, about something
Why would you do that? I mean, Jesus doesn't actually point people to him
He says, look through me, go through me is what your small self to the source of that self, which Jung would call the capital S self
Or in Aramaic is really called the ruha, the soul, ruha
You know, connect, make that inner connection and then you'll know what to do
You don't need me to tell you, you don't need some scripture or some holy person to tell you, you'll know what to do
taking various verses from the Bible and then looking at the original Aramaic, and, you know, reinterpreting the verse based upon what it might have meant if you understand the Aramaic
And since you just mentioned this thing of Jesus didn't say to people "look to me." Why don't we start with that verse there's so often quoted of "I am the way the truth and the life, no man cometh unto the Father, but by me," which fundamentalists use as an exclusionary kind of, you know, thing
God so loved the world...." that stuff in there
But all these sayings from the Gospel of John, that are translated, "I am," do not actually say I am
Because, and for this I'll have to take a pause before I say it for all of you listening
The ancient Hebrew languages do not have a verb that is translated as "am," or "are" or "is," a "being verb." They do not have this
Why? Because as you recall, I said they're nomadic, they come out of a nomadic experience
So you can't say, here I am, and this is never going to change." Everything is changing
So what he's saying in the gospels, in the Gospel of John is literally an Aramaic, "ina"--I, plus another "ina." Ina-ina. Two "ina's" together
That means I and I-- like the Rastafarians talk who about the "I and I." You know, the connection of the individual "I", to the source of my, my self my "I." Not my eye, but my individuality
Smallest self to the biggest Self
Smallest self to biggest, that's what he's talking about
Yeah
So if you connect this way, this is the way he says
This is really literally the path is what he says
Then he says, ina-na urha--urha is a path
Then shrara is the sense of right direction, which way to go when you come to a crossroads
He uses this word very often. For instance, "you shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free." He says in Aramaic, "if you know, if you find the heart's direction, of the ripe direction, then you're free
You know, that is the truth
So he says here and John "Inana urha shrara..
I am the way, the truth-- the sense of right direction, or the heart's GPS. And hayye, which is universal in the ancient Semitic languages, means life energy. He doesn't mean life somewhere else, or life on a cloud somewhere
This is life energy that is throughout the universes, seen and unseen. So he says, if you make this connection, you will have your path, you'll know which way to go
And you'll have plenty of energy to travel the path
Now, on the other bit, the exclusive bit, he says...well, this is-- as he understands it-- and I'll give you a gloss on this, it's more exact in the book
Yeshua says, "as I understand it, this is the way everyone has gone
This is the way everyone gets to where I've gone is that they follow this interconnection of small self to big Self, of you could say, of self to soul. So this is his experience
This is the way it goes, you know
You can go directly, or you can have somebody help you, I'm helping you
But you know, you have to start with dealing with your individual self
you have to if you want to get water, you have to hook the pipe up to the reservoir. to help you to go through them
Middle Eastern traditions are strong on this, or you can go direct, you don't have to have you could say help
Some people just-- and you have you've had many of them on your program
They just wake up one morning and boom, you know, life has changed
And that happens too...
that verse, you're basically it basically says, you know, if you want to be free, or you know, you can't even say to reach your full potential you have to connect jiva with Atman
You have to connect the individual consciousness with universal consciousness, and then you'll be good to go
you're good to go
And the rest of it is all him giving you different stories, metaphors, you know, to help-- how would we say it"--corral his students into that experience, if you excuse the sheep metaphor
He does use that at some point
So it's you know, he uses story language, he uses metaphor, parables, things like this
you know, if we, if we believe that Jesus did all the things, he was reputed to do, all the miracles
It's remarkable how abundant they were, I mean, he must have been making such a stir healing all these people and multiplying loaves and fishes and walking on the water. And I mean, if they were anybody, like doing carrying on like that, in today's world, they'd be like, all over YouTube
And on the evening news and stuff like that, it's, I mean, it must have been quite a shock
remember that we're 2000 years earlier or so in human consciousness
So the understanding of the, I'll switch to psychology language here--the understanding of a "liminal realm", a realm between the realms, between this every day and the unseen, is that more people are open to that. who are able to see demons, or devils, or things like this
And these can be shared experiences even
So, I mean, one of the things that struck me about his healings is that it says in the usual you know, and he "preaches," and everybody flocks to him
Well, the word for "preach" in Aramaic just means he announced himself. And so he comes to the village and he says, "okay, here I am, have you heard about me?" It's not like he's giving him a Sunday sermon
And because they people were living under this traumatic reality, and they were living in these dissociated states, all these people pour out to be healed. I mean, and some of these dissociated states would lead to, as we would now call them, physical ailments
And so because he can make this connection and healthy connection to the unseen, he's able to, he's able to heal them
It's as simple as that, because how is it that we're all these ailing people running around in Palestine at the time? I mean, you know, was every other person sick? Well, it's because, again, because they were all living under a traumatic reality and had been for generations
where the people of Somalia
People have been so traumatized by, you know, decades of brutality. That's an interesting point you made about how that the consciousness of the people was much less what we were talking earlier about the materialist paradigm that dominates today
It was much more subtle than that, in a way or in tune with the, you know, deeper levels at which, you know, things like angels or, you know, all that were considered normal, and, you know, just part of people's understanding
it was, I would call it it's, it was much more embedded, Rick. was more embedded in each other, in nature, and all of this
Now that has a downside if you're in a so-called dysfunctional family, as we would use in today's terms, or if you're living in a terrible reality
But this is why people were, you know, having these unhealthy states, if you will. take some other verses
So you've, you know, interpreted the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes and all kinds of verses that are, I've always... you hit some, you know, a lot of the greatest hits, like if a house divided itself against itself cannot stand and all that
So, let's, we couldn't possibly cover them all
But--and when those of you who are listening live, if there are particular verses you'd like Douglas to comment on, Neil to comment on, send them in through a question and maybe he can comment on that one
But what one would you like to do next? do is it's about the words for Good and Evil, which are very key in in the Gospels because, for instance, Jesus is quoted as saying, "A good tree bears good fruit and an evil tree bears evil fruit." So how does this tree become morally evil? He's not talking about...
is
This is the King James Version translation. "Good tree bears good fruit or evil tree bears the word for good in Aramaic, the word that's usually translated as good from the Greek actually means ripe, R I P
E
That is, at its right time, its right place
Again, think nomadic reality
You know, think timing, you know, being in the moment, all of this
So a ripe tree bears ripe fruit and an unripe tree bears unripe fruit
And you might say, "Well, Jesus, that's a no brainer." But he's saying to his students, "look around you look at nature, live the way live the way nature is
Live as a ripe tree, don't live as a as an unripe tree, time at the right place with the right action
And then this then becomes the word-- the form of the word takes the main word for "blessing" in the New Testament
So for instance, all of these so-called word for "blessed are"-- we use no "are" because you've heard me say that before
But the word for blessing means ripe, ripeness
For instance, in the first Beatitude, usually translated "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." He says, ripe are those-- ripening are those-- who "lemeskenae b'ruh"-- who are able to find their home in the breath. Poor in spirit is the King James translation
But "lemeskenae" means that the person is holding on to the breath, to their breathing, as though it were their first and last possession
Which actually it is
I mean, it's the first thing that comes into our bodies, when we come into life, it's the last thing that leaves
He says when you when you hit rock bottom in this way, then things begin to open up for you, then you have, then comes to you "dilhounie"-- is coming to you-- "dilhounoie malkuta." Malkuta--not kingdom actually queendom in Aramaic, because it's feminine gender
Then comes to the sense of empowerment, of vision, vision with empowerment, that is throughout the whole cosmos
You have a much bigger home then
You have a sense of vision with the energy to accomplish a vision in life
So but you have to sort of go to the what, you know, the 12-Steppers call, you know, rock bottom, and start from there really. a 12-Stepper would where you've just you know, really bottomed out and you're desperate? Or do you mean rock bottom in terms of some, you know, deeper fundamental level of reality that you connect with? For that can be thought of as a foundation or a rock bottom too? one
I mean, the people to whom Jesus spoke the Beatitudes in Matthew seem to have been, really at rock bottom
They were homeless, they had nowhere to go
They had been driven off their land, they, you know, maybe driven out of their family
And so literally, they didn't know where to go or what to do
And so he begins to give this, you could say.... with them proceeds through the Beatitudes
From starting with finding your home in the breath, to acknowledging the places that are mourning or grieving or confused in you
And then it goes on and on through the different Beatitudes, the so called Beatitudes
Yeah. is, Yeah, I know things are really rough for you people, but I have something to teach you here, which will actually bring you fulfillment and inner happiness, regardless of your outer circumstances and might in fact, improve your outer circumstances
it's not just the words again, imagine that there is an atmosphere of this person, as one has in authentic spiritual teachers today, where one sort of can feel that. you can feel their way of being with of being and perceiving and living with that. where shall we go? out here, but I want you to choose if possible
I started with the prayer of Jesus, the so-called Lord's Prayer, although I argue there's no word in Aramaic that is actually well translated as "lord." That's a medieval feudalistic concept that gets layered over onto the Gospels. So I just call it the prayer of Jesus, the one that he gives in words
So we can look a little bit at that
I'll dip into a bit of that. But I'd like to remind people that Jesus didn't always pray in words
When it says he went into the hills and stayed overnight praying, it doesn't mean he's mumbling words to himself all night
You know, he's talking about in another place in the gospels, "pray just with my atmosphere, that means in silence, you know, pray with my "shem," the word for atmosphere or light, or the light that you feel through my atmosphere
Just pray that way
Pray in the silence, pray with that feeling. around a spiritual teacher like that, you've probably experienced it
And I know I have
You can, entrain with the teacher's consciousness... in that atmosphere
And, you know, shift into something very profound, just by mere proximity. thing
You don't need any special apparatus. You can, you know, if you feel your breath and feel your heart, you're there
You don't need anything special. actually
I mean, the only reason I'm doing all this with Jesus, is because many people will have been burdened with Jesus in their childhood, as I was to some degree, although not as bad as some people
And so when they go into other traditions, Vipassana or anything, Advaita this or that, they may reach a certain point where their childhood comes up to them
And part of that childhood is sort of fear and loathing around Jesus, basically
Jesus phobia, I call it, and that prevents them from actually, you know, going a little further
So, for a lot of people that have come to my work, that's how they, they found their way to it. They went elsewhere
And then they figured, well, I guess I better heal this too
So..
series on television called "Anne with an E," which is based on Anne of Green Gables
And there was a there's a part of the story where the missionaries or this Christian people are taking young Indian kids away from their parents and locking them in these residential schools. Which we've heard a lot about recently, because the Pope went and apologized for that
But, and one of their phrases was kill the Indian to save the child
And they were literally killing many of them, but they're also just, you know, brutalizing their whole traditional understanding in order to supposedly save them
I mean, it makes my blood boil
Sometimes when I think of the number of people who've been..
the genocides that have been committed in the name of religion. And I'm afraid that Christianity might, if you look at the whole history of all religions, it might be in the lead in that unfortunate regard
we can segue into that briefly
I mean, I would agree in that a misinterpretation, not only of the Gospels but also of the whole Bible, empowers colonialism, racism and ecocide. And one of the key verses I point to, which when I did my book on Genesis, I re-translated was one of the most egregious mistranslations, deliberate mistranslations in the history of translation
Which is the verse in Genesis that's usually translated, "Be fruitful, multiply, dominate and subdue the earth and rule over..." and then dot, dot, dot, it's all the other ones that created in Genesis before the human
Well, the Hebrew doesn't say that
The Hebrew says, Yes, you will be fruitful
And you will multiply. Learn how to manage, learn how to manage your own "earth," that is, your own earthiness, your own material existence
Learn how to manage that. And then it doesn't say rule "over" the fish and the animals and the trees
It says, "rule together with," "rule along with," or "rule from within" these other beings
This is a total mistranslation of a Hebrew preposition
This preposition has never meant "over" over its whole history, either ancient Hebrew or modern
So this just gets right into it because ruler said
well, it has to say that because we have to dominate
You know, we were, we are now in charge and we're gonna go... in, you know, among the Incas and we want to we want it so let's go there
you native peoples are not using this land, so you're not there
You don't exist
It's like that. getting back into rant mode. there's so many injustices, you know. It's so ironic, tragically ironic, that so many injustices have been perpetrated in the name of what should be the greatest blessing, you know, that a person could possibly have in life
You know, the blessing of knowing God and experiencing God, It's just so twisted
say, human consciousness developed in such a way that now we're stuck with everything that this has resulted in
It's is in front of us
I mean, it's all in front of us
So how are we going... like the condition of the world, the condition of the environment, all that How are we going to use this human self, which is now separated? How can we turn? How can we return as the Hebrew mystics talk about
And again, this is where Jesus is constantly giving this, you could say, his mode, his map--although the map is not the traveling-- to turn from your small self to the big self, your self to your soul
From the breath, which is only living in this body, this material form for x number of years, and towards the breath, which is everywhere and all the time, and before my birth, and after my death
Before my, you know, my original face, and after my last face, if I can paraphrase the Buddhists on that one
So, we have to, we're either going to make the shift or we're not
of a verse
Because I think of, you know, deep spirituality as being the ultimate solution to the world's problems
So, you know, the verse says, "Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else should be added unto thee." Yeah, let's work on that one. although it's not in this new book, it says, "If you're going to, if you're going to aggravate yourself and run around and pursue anything, do that first about finding...
And this word "kingdom," again, it's "malkuta" in Aramaic--it's actually queendom, feminine gendered--- and it means a combination of a vision with an empowerment
A lot of your interviewees have had this in these awakening moments they've had, because it's not just that they had a vision of something somewhere else
But this was downloaded into them in the sense that was empowering to them, whether they're a psychic, or you know, an online mystic or whoever they are
So they have this sense of the malkuta. And this malkuta is throughout "shemaya," he says, the kingdom of heaven
Heaven, not up there, but heaven being the realm of light and vibration that is everywhere around us, underneath us, above us, and within us
As I called it another book, sort of the wave reality that the new physics people talk about, rather than the particle reality
So he says, don't fuss yourself too much about all the particle reality, find first this connection, this connection to that which is always on, and which you can always rely upon
And then you will have a real non duality, because everything will be included
You'll have the individual self included, but it will be included in that which is empowering it, every breath
good word
And I see that inner world as being the potentiality from which the whole universe is arises
And if a person is cut off from it, and I bet you there's some Bible verse about this, then they are like a plant that has cut off from, you know, contact with the ground or the nourishment from the earth
Whereas if they're deeply connected to it, then it just pours into their individual life and through their individual life, to all whom they contact. right, Rick
The verse I think you're alluding to, is the one where he says..
this is like another one of the ones that people make a lot out of in Christian fundamentalism, the so-called sin against the Holy Ghost. Well, Jesus talks about..
sin in Aramaic means to cut yourself off from something. the mark? I've heard it translated... depends on which word for sin
The Greek is actually the same but the Aramaic is more sort of like cutting yourself off
I know I've heard this thing about missing the mark..
yourself off from the source of your nourishment
It's the same word in Aramaic, within and among are the same word
And this again, points to what I was mentioning earlier on in our talk, that, okay, my within-ness, what I now call my subconscious, my psychology, this is also connected to what is around me. It's not like my inner life is just my inner life and it doesn't affect anything
No, my community life affects my inner life, my inner life affects my community life
So this "within" and "among," they had this whole sort of intertwined in the ancient times
I mean, the gospel of Thomas, he talks about-- similar verse-- he talks about the so-called "malkuta d'Alaha," the kingdom-queendom. What I have called "the I can the cosmos," as though it's arising within you and then spreading around you
So that includes both of the meanings
you were about to start talking about the Lord's Prayer and then I sidetracked you onto something
So you want to come back...I mea culpa is necessary
Well, the prayer again, you know, the place of prayer, for many people is fraught, that it is difficult, because, you know, devotional practice, while it can be heart opening, it can also lead to its abuses
And one sees that in many aspects of fundamentalist religion, not only Christianity, but other types of religion, because you're placing God out there somewhere
You know, it's like up on some throne, or this or that or other thing
And again, I hope I've said enough, in the time we've talked together to indicate that Jesus was not coming from this sort of place
He's coming from a place where a prayer is like a chant, if you will, that helps attune you to different realities within your soul
So that you can make that connection that we've been talking about, between self and soul
And so he begins with this beautiful word in "dbashmaya...dbashmaya." "Oh thou, oh breathing, oh creating source, oh parenting source throughout the cosmos
And again, why idealize at all? Well, because to idealize, I have to invoke, you could say, my imaginal sense, as Henry Corbin calls it. I have to envision the best of what I can imagine and place that as something for me to grow into. So this is the function of prayers in general, that you know..
okay, you're gonna pray to Krishna, that's fine, but be Krishna
You want to be a Buddhist, be a Buddha! So praising is about finding a doorway, opening a doorway in one's heart, so that the heart can turn easily between self and soul
This is the key place of the heart in ancient Semitic prayers or in ancient Semitic culture in general
Again, ancient Semitic languages, they don't have words for mind, really, or brain or you know any of this other stuff
They only have a word for heart. So he says "abwoon d'bashmaya," Oh thou breathing life of all, creating one, throughout the whole cosmos
Create a space, empty me a bit, to create that presence here
"Nitkadash shmakh." What they usually translated as, "hallowed be thy name." Well, hollow oneself so that that sound, that vibration of the cosmos, can resonate within you there of Reality
And then it goes on from there, basically
And, again, he talks about "malkuta," then this leads you to this, "I can," this vision with the empowerment
And then you're ready--and this is the payoff-- then you're ready to bring heaven and earth together
Then you're ready to, with your own heart's desire, hearts will..
"Let your heart's desire come through me." This is the one translated as "let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Well, it's not willpower, and it's not someone else's will
It says let your heart's desire--"nehwe sebyanach, nehwe sebyanach," let your heart's desire be done through me
And so that will bring heaven and earth together in my life
God's heart's desire, you're saying..
heart of Reality, you don't have to use the G-word, let the heart of --whatever the great mystery--come through my heart, and then bring my life together
So that I connect, connect, my individual experience in life with my communal experience, my communal experience in life in my world. In other words, what am I going to do now? You know, that's wonderful that I have this moment of illumination
But what now? And do I have to go out and convert everybody else to my moment of illumination? Well, no, but you have to find out what is yours to do? And then do that very well
And this is what Jesus points to
The rest of it is all about
Okay, now what do we do in our communal life? Well, we can share bread and not hoard more bread than we need to hoard
"Bread," meaning not wheat, or even gluten free bread, but any food
So the word for bread, "lachma," can just mean any food. Could be emotional food, mental food, like that. Sometimes I fear I've hoarded too much Aramaic biblical food, but I tried to give it away as fast as I can
So I hope people spread it! And then it's about releasing, untying, forgiving
And the main thing about the line about forgiveness, which is usually translated, "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us"...
"Trespassing" is about going over somebody's boundaries. The Luke version has again, a sense of untangling knots, a slightly different word in Luke's remembrance of the prayer
Or maybe Jesus said different ways different times-- people do that, go figure! So untangle these knots...
So if you can "unstep" an overstepped boundary, do it
And then everything will be released at the same time
So it's not as though if you do this, then you get the reward later. No, it all happens simultaneously. It's not like an if-then thing
And then the words that give people a lot of problem. Mistranslations here
Usually translated, "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." And why the heck would God lead us into temptation? Well, mistranslation. The Aramaic says clearly "let us not enter" "nesyuna," which really means forgetfulness. And forgetfulness is a big theme in the Middle Eastern, spiritual traditions
This is why the Sufis have a practice called "dhikr," which is remembrance
So the "nesyuna" is the opposite of this
We also find it in Arabic, classical Arabic, and it means forgetfulness of where we've come from, of our original face, of where we're going, you know, of the bigger picture of life. Don't forget, don't forget! But then he says also "ela patsan men bisha," "set us free from "bisha"--unripeness
Again back to that word I mentioned half hour ago
Set us free from not acting at the right time, at the right place in the right moment with what is mine to do. And then, you know, it ends with a beautiful sort of praise statement or a dedication
And Semitic languages also had this sort of dedication that one has in Buddhism, too, where you would say I dedicate this now for the benefit of all beings. Well in Aramaic, you offer it up in different ways
And then Jesus offers one way at the end of the Aramaic prayer
He says, "for all of this can" and the vision and the energy and then what is usually translated as glory is really song or music
You could say and this music of my life is returning to you
And we move on
Amen
as you mentioned and..
You know, what do you make of converting people, speaking in tongues, handling snakes, being saved
You know, I guess handling snakes is kind of a rare one
But, you know, some of the... certainly speaking in tongues is more common than that
And then, you know, converting others to save them, because they're all going to hell forever if we don't save them
And, you know, we are saved, because we believe such and such. I mean, they derive these beliefs, or they use various Bible verses as excuses for these beliefs. How would you reinterpret some of the common verses which are basic to those behaviors? Well, if we stay with conversion for a bit, there's a basic misunderstanding of what the soul is for Yeshua, or the real Self. It's all over the Gospels
It's called "ruha." It's similar and related to the word for breath. It's that always-on part of us, if you will. And there are terrible Mistranslations or confused mistranslations throughout the King James and other versions of the Gospels, where the word "self" and "soul" and you know, "life" are mistranslated as one another. This confuses things
Because for Yeshua, we don't need to save our soul
No one needs to save our soul
We need to simply let our soul save us. That is, redeem us, show us what to do
We don't need to save our soul
Let your soul save you! That's his basic message
So what does that do to conversion? Well, I mean, if you look actually in the Gospel in the book of Acts, and I ventured a little bit into Acts in the new book--just not too far! But all of the early people who come to the Jesus movement, we could call it that, or one of the Jesus movements, they don't have theology
There's no theology being preached to them
The people like Peter, they're just saying, receive that receive "ruha d'qoosha," receive the breath, receive the sacred breath
"We received it from Yeshua, this transmission, if you will, this atmosphere
Here we'll give it to you if you want it
And, you know, end of story, you know
And communities form around this
Only later, as I mentioned, you do have theology, mission statements, on and on and on like this
So it's all about transmission and people being attracted naturally, not about going out and converting the poor heathen. weren't pushy
They were sort of like, you know, come if you want, here I am
And, you know, if you don't want, then fine. There's that kind of attitude, apparently
say Jesus was not spectacularly successful in looking at the long history of things
But on the other hand, his immediate disciples seem to have had something
They seem to have had whatever you want to call it, some real--for want of a better word-- spiritual magnetism. No doubt, some went off the rails, but they had something that people would be attracted to them, basically
Jesus wasn't sort of spectacularly successful? at the long history of Christianity
yeah
I wouldn't blame him for that
Jesus for you know, what has been done
And... You could look at that in any religion
It's true. But you know, we don't know..
the story is not completely written
So we won't, I won't pre-judge anything
And that's, you know, I run into that quite a bit. The thing about snake handling and all that. Well, people like to prove their faith. phenomenon
There are, although mostly unknown to Westerners, there are some Sufi groups who do things similar, in terms of piercing themselves with skewers, in the same sort of fashion, to prove their faith in the unseen shaykh, basically. So I'm not a member of one of those groups
I'm still you know, unpierced but, I'm not a member of any
But this has been known throughout history, this sort of ascetic practice to show you know I'm going to rely only on "that," whatever that is. And we're going to trust that and go for that. So I'm not so down on down on all that
I mean, no one's gonna force you to go into snake handling, are they? So? Not likely? I mean, the other thing...
I think that's in Peter somewhere or something like that
And, you know, I think Peter-- excuse me, if I am misremembering to those who are better on their Bible than I am-- I think it's Peter who is bitten by a snake and yeah, he's fine
He's...no problem a poisonous snake, by the way
So you know, this all gets extrapolated from little bits in the Epistles, that is, the letters that come later from Paul and...
off of snakes! Snakes are good, but I won't go into snakes
Okay, never mind...
woods, they're really cute
They lie on the sun on the trail
And I'm careful... in a lot of Middle Eastern cultures. to Kundalini there, maybe
So, this is a popular one
"I and my Father are one." here, this is again in the gospel of John, chapter a punctuation mark in a particular story
But I'll tell you the short version
He's called in front of the scribes, that is, the temple officials, several times, particularly in the Gospel of John
And they ask him by what right are you doing these things
And he says, at one point, "before Abraham was, I am." Again remember, there's no "am." So he's pointing to, I'll get to your passage in a moment...
by 1000 years, or two or whatever..
And because the Middle Eastern way of looking at it's as though the past is in front of us
The ancient Middle Eastern way of looking at time, and the future is behind us
And we're all traveling-- again, remember, nomadism. So we're following our ancestors, we're following the best of our ancestors
And we want to make sure that we leave something for our children who are coming along behind us, and our children's children
So there was a sense of continuity and constant travel. So when Jesus says, "before Abraham," he means you could say, the idea, or you could say, the archetype, to use a Jungian term, the archetype of the human, of the complete human being, the completing human being, was there before Abraham
It was there in the heart of the great Mystery, when all this happened, and when self separated from soul to some degree, and Adam and Eve and all that great stuff
And you know, then we get challenged
And so the idea of a person that could turn easily, turn his or her heart easily, from self to soul, and back again, this was already seeded in the cosmos before Abraham
And then they say, then the scribes say to him, you know, "you're hardly 30 years old, how are you saying you're before Abraham? You know, what's that about?" So he says, Well, you know, then he says, I, "ina" --not I and the Father are one but he says, "ina wa aby had hnan." Had to pull it out of the memory banks! I and that breathing life of all, the creating source of the cosmos, live together. We are one living together
Now that is a paradox in the sense that how can you have one and be together? This is about non-duality, actually
So you have a oneness, a unity, that is also a togetherness
Possible? Well, for Yeshua, it was possible
So he's not saying he is God
But he's saying or he's not saying he is the great Mystery
Well, how could that be because he's in a body and you know, his soul is part of that great Mystery, is living within that great Mystery within Alaha (which is the word he uses for Reality or, so to speak, God. He's embedded within that Reality, that is, living together
And the word "hnan" in Aramaic, comes later into Arabic actually and is a word for love. So there is a love relationship, in this living togetherness with the creating source with the cosmos, you know, with this birthing, fathering, mothering of the cosmos
And that doesn't get him in, that doesn't cut any dice with them either
So he "gets out of Dodge" and leaves Jerusalem again
there verses--are there verses in the Bible, which describe God as omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, those words? All of that is Greek construct from the Creed's Rick
And we have it and other religions too
I mean, yeah, you know, but your basic Christian would agree with? That God is omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent, and all that? the question then what is this? should beg that question
But usually it's construed in such a way that this omnipresent, omniscient, it's up in the cloud somewhere, and it's in some transcendental reality, that is, in what I would call a Platonic heaven. if it's up there, and we're down here and... in some corner someplace
what shall we do here? I've got all these six pages worth of..
I took of...
I got I took all the verses, the actual verses from your book, because I put them on six pages and 13 point type, and I'm just sort of whatever would catch my eye. Well, there's the Only Begotten Son thing so god His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life." Actually, I've had instances where Christian evangelists or something have called me on the phone out of the blue, and I start talking astronomy with him in terms of how many planets there must be in the universe and by odds, how many of those must be inhabited? And then I say, well, is Jesus on tour? And does he spend 33 years on each of them? And, and if the universe is only 6000 years old, and how does he get around that? Is it like Santa Claus somehow? Does all the households in the world on Christmas Eve? They hang up? with sometimes Jehovah's Witnesses come around here
Yeah
And I used to say, "Do you want to know, like, the word is actually pronounced
And they run the other way? the conversation with the Jehovah's Witness
literature and I give them literature back
door they knocked on? they don't know
But anyway, where are we with...
son," yeah
Well, ask the next time, what "only begotten" actually means
Yeah, what it says, the "only born," beget, to be got? Anyway, the Aramaic has nothing...the Aramaic says, "fully integrated." "Alaha loved the worlds of diversity, that is, so-called material reality so much, that Alaha...sends a fully integrated human being. So that whoever has-- not "believes in" him, but whoever believes and has trust, "like" he does. This is again another preposition thing
So Jesus never says to people believe in him, he says, "have the same trust, trust with me, trust within me, or believe with me
It's really not about beliefs or concepts
It's about having trust that there is this only Reality, Alaha he calls it. And that this is the ground of being, again to use another Buddhist term
This is the ground, this is where we come from and where we're going. "So whoever has the same trust I do, will not, you could say, will not disappear with their individual form
But they will continue. Like the breath will continue, like your breath will continue from world to world." And whether that implies reincarnation or not--I don't know if we want to go there or not
But, you know, you can read it whatever way you want
we define the word trust, that maybe trust is the first step
You know, like, if you have as much faith as a grain of mustard seed, that whole idea, then you can move mountains
And it's more like you get your foot in the door with a certain amount of trust, but then there's a lot more than just trusting or believing, there's actually undergoing the transformation necessary to be able to function or experience as Jesus did
you know, that's what he keeps pointing people to, you know
While he's there, they trust Him, they trust his atmosphere, they trust his being
And then towards the end of the Gospel of John, he's trying to tell them, "Okay, how are you going to do this after I'm gone?" You know, what, what's, what's gonna be there for you? So develop that
Good point
All right
I'm going to fire some questions at you, which means we're going to jump around a bit from one topic back to the next
But of a lot of people send in questions and I want to ask them, are a lot of them
So let's not go too long on every one but just say whatever you feel needs to be said
So this this one was sent in the other day
Sarah Page from Ascot, England
Did Yeshua die on the cross? I have had what sounds like "ashea," come to me in meditations, but I'm still unsure of its true meaning
So can you shed light on this, so two questions basically there
Again, as I was just mentioning, you know, I've read a lot of books about this, too. That he didn't die on the cross
He was revived with aloe and went to India
And all of this is possible
I'm not saying it's not possible
It is possible
On the other hand, already, at the same time, the different gospels report that after his so-called crucifixion, different people had experiences of him, partially in the body or not in the body, or in what we would take as spirit body, or all of this. All of this was there for them
And that should, should not be a surprise because he actually promises this, again at the end of the Gospel of John that he says, you know, "I'm going and then but there will be a place where you can connect with me." This is the so-called "my house with many mansions." "I go to prepare a place for you." And the place is not a physical condominium somewhere in heaven. It's a state of consciousness is the word that's used there
In Hebrew, it's called a "makom," in Aramaic it's called an "`atra," that is, a state of consciousness
Like the prophets go into in the Hebrew Bible, like Ezekiel or Isaiah do, when they have these visions
"There'll be a place where you can go and contact me
It's just there." And then he goes on to say, how they contact him, you know, what methods they're going to use to do that
So that's clear, of course
Did he die on the cross? Some part of him, no doubt, died. But not the rest
Not the real bit
he supposedly came out of the tomb, three days after he was crucified, in reasonably good shape, makes it seem like his physical body must have died, it must be some spiritual body, because he wouldn't have been up for coming..
unless he had some miraculous self-healing abilities. theories about this
You can read the books, Rick, and you know, he's up in India, his tomb is in Kashmir in Srinagar, and it's possible. I'm not saying it ain't possible
attitude
Who knows? Okay, some more questions
So, next one, from Hasim Sadka
Do people from different faiths see angels or divine beings of other faiths? Hmm
And if you don't know, you're can just say
I don't know
it would be possible
if you're tuned to multiple faiths. you're a Christian, you die
Do you see Jesus? If you're a Hindu? Do you see Krishna? If you're a Buddhist? Do you see Buddha, you know, when you go to heaven? In other words is the initial, at least the antechamber of Heaven fashioned to make you feel comfortable when you get there? passage in John I mentioned, he says, "in that place, there are many mansions, many places you can go." You could you could go a lot of places, and don't forget about the non-aligned people
They're not necessarily Christian, Buddhist, this or that
And so, you know, what about for them? They may, you know, anything could happen
And it's a big mystery out there. in the Gita where Krishna says that, anybody anywhere, if they have any sort of faith or expression of, you know, religious whatever, I accept that
I honor that
I appreciate that
It doesn't have to be in any particular form or even to him or anything else
Alright, so, question from Travis Rybarski in Richland, Washington. On your website, there's a quote from Jung, which states that Christians must create their own yoga, rather than borrow from China or India
Could you explain why you liked this quote? To me, it seems like a very good thing when Christians borrow from their elder sibling traditions. context of what it is
I mean, Jung says, which I basically agree with, if you're raised in a particular way, at some point you're going to have to confront that and deal with it, and heal with it
In order to go further
Of course, it's good to borrow
I mean, it's good to learn many things
Qur'an says, you know, "seek wisdom even unto China." So I don't see any problem with that
But Jung did feel that..
well, Jung actually felt if you read Peter Kingsley's work, that his form of therapy would become this Christian yoga, but then it gets perverted into a you could say, a more materialistic psychological technique
For many people, not all
And the visionary spiritual capacity that he had, that Jung had envisioned for it was sort of pushed aside
And that's from Peter Kingsley
And I would encourage people who disagree with me to read his book Catafalque, which is about Jung and Jung's legacy and all of that
He'd be another good one for your program, if you can get him. But..
We actually reached out to him years ago, and he was sort of potentially interested and we haven't followed up on it
So maybe, yeah, maybe one of these days
This is from Daniel Ramirez from San Antonio, Texas
Several prominent Western spiritual teachers talk about the deep undercurrent of unworthiness that plagues us in the Western world, connecting this to our founding mythology of the Garden of Eden, and our supposed core of original sin
Is it possible to be raised in the West and escape that fundamental feeling of unworthiness? Further, is there a path for us to create a new life affirming mythology? speak from experience
I was raised with all this original sin stuff, at least in in school. I mean, so it was like that
Again, this is a misinterpretation of the Adam and Eve and the serpent story
And again, I have that in my book, Original Meditation, how that should actually how that one is reading that
But basically, it's about, you know, if you look at that, it's again like a Sufi story or a Zen story, you know
You've got the original human beings
And they are given a choice. You know, "here, you can eat all of this, but don't, don't eat that." And what is this tree that they can't eat? Well, the so-called "tree of the knowledge of good and evil," which is basically about having preference
In other words, I like this, and I don't like that. So when does that happen in human consciousness? When is the human self become able to choose between what it likes and what it doesn't like? When does that part of the human self evolve, such that we're no longer so embedded in this natural reality that I've spoken about earlier, that we've individuated? And now I have a choice? And who is it that said, I think it was the Buddha said, "the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences," something like that
And so this is all about the human self-evolving
It's not good or bad
It's not "original sin." It's just what happened
And it's what happens to children as we grow up
I mean, we grow up and we're sort of embedded in this beautiful childhood, or for many of us, it's fairly beautiful. Some, obviously, not so much
But at some point, the self of the child, myself as a child, begins to awaken and I, you know, there you go. So it's the same that humanity goes through. conversations with friends recently about judgment versus discernment
And kind of relates to the question we were just discussing. Jesus said, "judge not lest you be judged," right? And maybe you can give us a spin on that verse
What it what do you make of that phrase, "judge not lest you be judged" in the whole consideration of having preferences, which are healthy in life if they're not out of proportion? having preferences, because the Aramaic word Jesus uses for "judge" here, I mean, in this passage you mentioned and also in John, it's really about, it's based on the word "din," DN, which means to find what is one's, you could say, what one owes to life
Okay, now I'm in this form, I've come into this human form, from wherever, and what is mine to do in life? What do I owe, you know, what is this? What is the preciousness of this human existence? And what do I owe back to life for, you know, for having this life
And this is the word he uses for "judge," but it's really more, as you say, it is more really like discriminate
Discriminate what is yours to do what is not yours to do? You know, you have something that you owe to life. Okay, pay it
You know, but don't try to pay everyone's debt and don't try to, you know, convert somebody else to pay your so-called debt to life
And by life I mean, you know, this preciousness of this existence that we have in these names and forms for as long as the breath is in this flesh, as Jesus would call it
So it's, it's all about that. have thought you'd interpret it that way or go into that from that comment
But there's definitely a feeling of giving back
You know, there's some verses in the Indian tradition of "thy gifts, My Lord, I surrender to thee," you know, it's like, these are not mine, these gifts I have
They're there for me to pass on or to serve as an instrument of the Divine
is determining what is mine to do
I mean, Jesus could have stayed at home in Galilee and never gotten in trouble
Basically, he was pretty safe there
But he goes in Jerusalem, he throws over the moneylenders' tables, and all this stuff, upsets people
And he didn't have to, but he felt okay, that's mine to do
So he did it
You know, and there you go. Sometimes you have to upset people, and..
whole topic, too
I mean, one's dharma, you know, what is mine to do? And to what extent are one's behaviors or actions motivated by a sort of individual consciousness? And to what extent are they just an impulse of the Divine for being channeled through one's individuality? journey of challenge of our lives. Now
I mean, the "din" in the Qur'an-- we'll just segue a little bit into Qur'an
The Quran uses the same word as "din," which is you could almost is very similar to dharma really, if you look at the way dharma is used, mystically. So the "din" is this, you know, what is mine, what is really my path to do? And unfortunately, in most translations of the Qur'an, this is translated as religion
So people think well, this is all about Islam or about some institutionalized form of Islam
But it's not
You know, it's about finding your own, your own "din," your own way of proceeding, your own way in life
What is mine to do, and what is my path? Doesn't mean you can't join with others
And it helps to join with others at some point, but at a certain point, probably not going to be
Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, you know, that if possible, let this cup pass from me
And then, after all, let thy will be done
Yeah
I mean, can you imagine yourself, knowing that you're going to be beaten half to death and then crucified
And on the eve of that, and what you would have been feeling or going through? Some people have gone so far as to say that they distinguish between pain and suffering. And they, you know, have said that, you know, Jesus was at such a deep level, that while his body was experiencing pain, he was just residing in heavenly bliss
Deep within and wasn't actually suffering
Have any opinion about that? it's very possible
I'm not there. it's certainly possible
Yeah
a fuss made in Christianity about Jesus suffering, and there was that horrible Mel Gibson movie which I spared myself the experience of seeing
suffered for you." So you're gonna suffer and...
that as he took on a lot of karma
And if you if you connect yourself with him, then you become the beneficiary of some of the you know, some of that absolving of karma. think you know, that's I have.... I'm not so sure about that
I think Jesus was more about, as I was mentioning, you have to find your own way, basically
He can help you at a certain point
But you go through him, like a door, "go through me like a door," and then keep going
help themselves" actually a passage in the Bible
Is that just a common saying? that's a fairly common thing, don't believe it's in the Bible, but I'm sure I'll be corrected by someone on the chat. a question from June Waterman in Midland, Michigan
What would be a good resource or book geared toward lay people about the most true or realistic representation of the ministry of Jesus? have to be self-serving and say, I think one we're talking about here? Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus
good place to start, actually
And see if it makes sense to you
That's all I can say
I liked it
It was funny because I use this voice translation software to turn written text into voice so I can listen to it
And you should have heard what it did with the Aramaic. But fortunately, the passages are short, so it's just like brief little pieces of gibberish
Okay, here's a question from Rizwati Freeman in Los Angeles
I'm wondering about the scripture in which Jesus tells a woman to go and sin no more, after castigating the men who were chastising her
In other words, "let him who was without sin cast the first stone." too
So this is John 8
And as the Gospel says, they're trying to get Jesus in trouble
And so they bring him this woman, who is supposedly, as it's usually translated, caught in adultery. And what is usually overlooked is that Jesus starts writing something on the earth
This is in the gospels
He starts writing something on the earth... It's not clear what he is writing. And then he says, "let the one who is without their own tangles, which is about sin, sin is in this case, the word for tangles, let the one who doesn't have their own tangled relationships, or doesn't have tangled relationships in their path, let them cast the first stone
And so he's writing and writing and writing
And then the Gospel says that the people begin to sort of filter away, the ones who are the accusers, and the oldest go out first
Now, why does it say this? Well, this is speculation on my part, but I would speculate that the oldest have more tangled relationships and things in their past than the younger ones! And so they put down their stones first, and they all leave
And then Yeshua says to the woman, he says, "well, okay, no one has anything against you
No one owes anything against you
I don't owe anything against you." Again, he uses this word for usually translated as "judge." "So try not to get tangled in the future." is a bit of a curveball question-- but what do you make the Christian political base in the US, who will support people who are, you know, obviously dishonest, and, you know, are, you know, adulterers, and so on, because they want to get Supreme Court justices appointed, or just get their political party in power? And they really don't care how corrupt the politician is, as long as they get their way in Washington. I wonder what Jesus would have said about that
Jesus would not be pleased! I mean, I was ranting to my wife about this last night, as we were watching the US election news, and "you don't know how bad it is," I told her, you know, you think Russia is bad. Because of the way the Russian Orthodox churches in bed with Putin
You know, you've this has been going on for generations in the US from my experience, and it's just built to a head now where they can completely overlook, you know, all the things that you say, because they believe somehow that God is going to rule the country. Their limited image of God, so to speak, is going to rule the country in some way
It's delusion
a house divided against itself cannot stand because I mean. into that verse just a little bit. Well, again, there's a similar thing in Thomas, too, where he says...
Remember this thing that we talked about this "only begotten," this fully integrated human being where self and soul are turning easily from one to another, the heart is turning
So this is the fully integrated human being, this is where we want to be
And so it's all one but the heart is turning easily. But the "house divided" you know, you've got part of you over here and part of you over there and part of you doing this
And this can happen on the inner could say the so called inner as we now call it or it can happen on the outer
We know one can be very divided in one's outer occupation, too much so, but one can also be very divided inside if one does not become more integrated whole, on the inside
And again, just as a parenthetical, the word that's used for "perfect" in Aramaic in the Gospels is this word to become "whole" or "complete." Not to be according to some exterior standard perfect
"be ye therefore perfect," he was saying "be whole and complete." because you're never really complete
It's just that you're completed in the moment
And then as life unfolds, this life unfolds, more completing will be required
this house divided against itself cannot stand is within the context of Jesus being accused of Satan giving him the powers that he had
And he said, Satan doesn't good, do good stuff
If Satan is doing good stuff, he can't stand because the flip side of that is these politicians who are doing, you know, lying and cheating and stealing and, you know, corrupt in various ways. How can they be representatives of anything worthwhile? It's like, no, that won't stand
is again, we see this happening with Christian, some aspects of the Christian tradition, not all by any means
Some aspects of Buddhism
Again, I mentioned Myanmar
Some aspects of Hinduism. Of course, Jewish religion
You can go on about this
Just as with the human self, there's a tendency now for spirituality to be all sort of "out here-ness." You know, it's all about the symbols
It's all about the trappings
It's all about how much control I feel I have over my external life, my so called material life
Well, of course, you want this, because the soul already has control of everything, but you're looking in the wrong place
The soul already has freedom, and everything, you're looking for, the "ruha." But you know, you're looking to try to control this outer reality
And it ain't for that
It's for learning how to turn back and how to return. the verse, "you shall know them by their fruits." unripe, he says
You know them by their ripe fruit or their unripe fruit
So
But there's a lack of awareness of what unripe fruit is, it seems, in the instances you're speaking of
sense
But then sense isn't very common
So here's a question from Jason Harms in Manhattan, Kansas. "Thank you for sharing your insights, Neil
It's fascinating
It's fascinating
In your research, have you found that the original meanings of any of these translated texts support or do not support a non-dual understanding of existence? earlier in the talk, I'm not sure if it ran by people
But what you have is what you have is more of a view of--not a split-ness, not a two-ness but a continuum, a polarity of all these qualities
Self and soul, everything
And this continuum means that, okay, here I am individual, in this time, space, and here, I'm everywhere and all time
And then there's a place where they both come together. So it's like the North and the South Pole
The magnetic field of the two poles, it meets somewhere
And then in this middle, you have attraction from both. Similar also to what the Chinese tradition has as the yin and the yang-- there's a little bit of this, and a little bit of that. we'll add a dot in this and a dot in that. So it's more like this in the ancient Semitic languages
And so that makes the Unity you see. You could say that the Yin and Yang is dual, but it's not actually because it s nondual. It's just this is a way of viewing life, so that you're not in denial and just in an abstract, so to speak, mental non-dualism that, you know, refuses to recognize what the needs of this moment are
And Jesus was all about the moment
a lot of modern nondualists or neo-Advaitins, as they're called, have this sort of mental concept of it which they mistake for realization, and do not give proper importance to the relative world
And you know, dismiss it as illusion and you know, continually emphasize that there's really no person
And so I thought that it becomes very harmful for people
I did an interview with a woman named Jessica Eve, a couple of months ago. And that was our main focus was the downside of conceptual non-duality versus the genuine article
certain sort of passivity with that
what's the use of doing anything? Aaron Fish in London
Jesus said, pluck out your eye or cut off your hand if they offend you, as this is better than what you will experience in hell after you die
I'm not quite sure that's the way he said it
But the times Jesus talks about hell make it hard for me to reconcile what he was saying with the universal and compassionate God
Do you have any thoughts on this? Again, this is a reading of a later Christian notion of hell back into the ancient Semitic afterlife, which has nothing to do with this hell of punishment actually. And again, even into the Qur'an, this notion the initial as a time of purification, anything that the individual self is holding on to, this is gradually for one of a better word, purified, sweated out of you can I say? And then the soul, the eternal part of one's being, travels further, travels on and on and on
So Jesus sometimes uses quite extreme language. And again, it depends on who he's speaking to when he tries to shock people
He does use shock therapy
He's like a Zen master, he uses some sort of shock phrases
But he's trying to point out that, you know, whatever you do here, in so-called this life, this will have an effect on your experience of the afterlife. And they very definitely have a feeling about the afterlife that there is mercy and compassion and there is time to purify and then for the soul, you can say that individual self, to be gradually dropped
And then the soul to travel onwards, if you will
And that's just a very loose cosmology of ancient Semitic mysticism. There is a bit more in the book on that. mentioned, you mentioned, reincarnation earlier, some feel that reincarnation was part of early Christianity, but was edited out
Like Yogananda says it was edited out at the Council of Nicaea
As you've been poking around in all these ancient things, have you come across it? are, you know, little bits of allusion to it throughout the Gospels
Because if you recall, there's one instance where Yeshua asked his students, well, who do people say I am? And then the students, the disciples say, "well, some people say you're Moses reborn, and some people say, you're this person reborn and that notion was in the culture, that a particular being, a particular prophet could--or some quality of that prophet or some aspect of that prophet-- could be reborn in a new body, so to speak
reincarnation? Is it part of that? again, there's no one Sufi point of view on that
And some well, you know, it's again, similar
I mean, one of the great Sufi teachers of the 20th century, Hazrat Inayat Khan, once said, "the afterlife is like a recording, and it plays the music we created in life." And so we're going to at least at some point--and this is early in the process, as he imagines it--we're going to hear this music that we created in our life. Is it great music, is it harmonious music, not so much? Or you know, it's going to be there and then we keep traveling further on
And Inayat Khan...
I don't think this is this is necessarily a generally Sufi point of view, but Hazrat Inayat Khan talks about that, in his cosmology/cosmogony, there are souls leaving and souls coming
And they exchange things, sort of like a Middle Eastern marketplace on the way, and so Mozart's heading out and somebody else is heading in, and he says, "Hey, here, you can play the piano like me." So, and he goes on like that
So I get I hope I'm not making this too...
But I think that's a rough paraphrase of what he talks about
we've been going on for a pretty long time. And it's been a lot of fun
Are there any concluding thoughts that you want to leave us with? Or anything? Or even a song if you want to sing something? I still have a voice, Rick
I'll turn on "original sound," and I'll play you out with a little bit of the original, one of these chants that came to me
it came? You kind of cognize it or something? go with this work, and people can find them on my website, they all happen on spiritual retreat. So this is an aspect we haven't talked about, but music as inspiration
You know, this is the way chants, authentic chants that have a deep effect, they come when they're being given, so to speak, in inspiration
And so this came to me on a retreat 40 years ago, actually
And it's the first line of Jesus's prayer in Aramaic
And I heard a voice and the voice said, "you know, this isn't just for you, share this with other people
So I went home and I said to my wife, "well, you know, am I crazy, what's going on here?" So she said, Well, it's just try it, you know, see what happens
You know, that's all, just try and see what happens
So that since then, a lot of this has spread
And a lot of groups do this sort of chanting now along with Taize' music or other chanting or interfaith chanting, things like that
But anyway, this is the first line of Jesus's prayer and the words are "abwoon d'bashmaya." And I'm going to have to for your engineer here..
Om, yeah, and "shemaya" is a bit like Shivaya. But he's got these "oo" and "ah" sounds
So this is the sound of the first line which is usually translated "our Father which art in heaven," which is as I already mentioned, not that at all
There's no "in" only but this reality is moving to and from the reality that is in space and light and all around us so
Let's just do a wee bit of that. [Chants Abwoon d'bashmaya] "breathing the words" >>Rick Very nice
Thank you
Nice guitarwork, you weren't even looking, had your eyes closed the whole time. so much
Really? Dog is coughing down here. I've really enjoyed this whole conversation and getting to know you and reading your book and I'll and I'll be..
I've already created a webpage on BatGap for your interview, which I'll post when you're when I get your interview ready to post, and it contains links to several of your books and also to your author page on Amazon, which lists all of your books so people can get, and also to your website
So your work and your continued helping people find their way through all these wonderful interviews
beneficiary, you know, I mean, you just, it helps
sure
It changes you too
It's kind of a powerful technique
I'm usually high as a kite all day after an interview. thanks to those who are listening or watching and my next guests is going to be a very dear friend of mine named Robin Chaurasiya, who lives in? Well, at the moment, she's in London, but she spent a lot of time in Himalayas but long story with Robin, but she, her primary thing that she has been doing in recent years, is helping children who are born in the red light district of Mumbai, get out of there and get a good education and live a good life
And she's knocking herself out helping people all over the world in the midst of, or in the face of, daunting obstacles and challenges such as getting beat up by corrupt policemen and all kinds of horrible things that she's had to face
But I just love her so much for what she's doing
And anyway, that that will be my next interview
So stay tuned.
Personal-Perspectives-on-the-Historical-Jesus_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
Personal-Perspectives-on-the-Historical-Jesus_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
yeah i i have friends in the historical jesus world let's say at other academics other scholars i would consider myself on the fringe of that because in the historic what in what is called historical jesus work over the last 20 years and i've been i was around for all of that the historical jesus work starts with a certain view each scholar has to start with a certain view of how they render who jesus is so the first thing you would do in historical jesus work is determine what did he say what didn't he say and different theories evolve around that like um you know one theory is the more he said it the more likely it is to be accurate the more times it's attested the more likely it is to be act well that's not necessarily have any basics in logic that's just a presumption okay it might be true might not be true others go in different directions like they'll start with jesus was influenced by cynic philosophers and so anything that doesn't fit with that model gets thrown out or jesus is the jesus in what's called q which i won't explain right now and if it doesn't fit there does it well i take sort of the opposite point of view which is i like a lot of the archaeological work i work with that with the ethnology of the ancient middle east i work with that but i tend to go the other direction because i'm interested in what the spiritual practices and the spirituality of jesus so i tend to say if or when jesus said anything he said in aramaic that's my first presumption and so let's look at the aramaic version and see if if i identify if he fits with middle eastern wisdom and if it fits with everything else he's saying looked at from an aramaic point of view and you know 95 percent of of everything in the gospel looked at in that in the gospels looked at from that point of view does fit together but not if you translate it from the greek not if you translate it with plato in your back pocket which is what most people in the sbl satisfy biblical literature which i'm also a member of are doing they're translating it from a point of view an epistemology if you want to use a big word a way of knowing that jesus and his followers never had could never have had that's even historical people not not you know so i i part company with them but i also am you know arm-in-arm with them in certain areas
Revelations-of-the-Aramaic-Jesus---Jesus-Before-Christianity_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
Revelations-of-the-Aramaic-Jesus---Jesus-Before-Christianity_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
hi friends neil douglas klotz here i'm very happy to tell you a little bit about my new book revelations of the aramaic jesus coming out october 1st first i'd like you to go on a little journey with me imagine yourself sitting on a hillside pasture facing a teardrop shaped lake a warm afternoon breeze blowing at your back you're facing a person before you who's speaking inspired words and radiating the most powerful atmosphere you've ever experienced as he continues to speak the sounds of nature become more alive around you within you colors images appear and then become more vivid you feel love and the courage to become more hopeful suddenly you begin to feel what the purpose of being a human being could actually be now what if this person told you not to have faith in him but to have the same faith that he did in the source inspiring him what if he told you not that you needed to save your soul by believing ideas about him that you needed to allow your soul to save you by trusting it what if he told you that to be blessed meant to be ripe that is to fulfill your unique purpose in life in this time in this place or the truth is not out there somewhere but found within your own heart what allows the light of your soul which he calls ruha to shine through it what if this teacher were not some preacher therapist self-help guru but jesus as he was before christianity i know hard to believe but these are some of the things i found in 40 years of work looking at jesus's words the aramaic words he must have used that is through his own native middle eastern language and the way that that language viewed the world two thousand years ago this view clearly shows what jesus actually meant and just as importantly it reveals the actual spiritual practices prayers and meditations that he offered to his listeners i mean really prayer and meditation is the same word in aramaic i've gathered all this work together expanded it integrated it in my new book which i've mentioned revelations of the aramaic jesus coming out october 1st you can go to the book's website for more information maybe you're already there you'll find a short sample you'll see what other people have said about it and of course you could order it too you'll also find there are three more short videos where i talk about who the book is for why we should bother with all this how i stumbled into this work and what the book contains watch out also i'll be doing some more online events and interviews in the next two months before the book comes out so watch for those too thanks for listening i'm very grateful for this work it's changed my life and tied many inner knots i didn't even know i had just from growing up in western culture i've seen it do the same for many other people around the world find out how simply by hearing from jesus before christianity bye for now take care [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
The-Aramaic-Jesus-and-The-Cosmic-Christ_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
The-Aramaic-Jesus-and-The-Cosmic-Christ_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
uh again welcome to you all uh this is from Scotland and from uh from Dr Matthew Fox in California uh we're here today to speak for a brief bit together about some of the work that's I think dearest to our hearts uh which has to do with uh the human you could say What's called human potential the greater human potential and how that's revealed uh by some of the books we've written particularly Matt's uh Cosmic Christ books and my Aramaic Jesus books let me just say a word about Matthew Fox first for those of you that may not know him very well uh I've known him for many many years and had the blessing I think it's I can easily say the blessing to work in his Institute in creation spirituality in Oakland in the author of well I think nearly 40 books now uh but also an educator his whole model of education is really the way that many of us feel that education needs to go that is education of the whole person not only the secular materialist uh person uh in addition uh Matt has had many dialogues with various scientists he's written books on work uh also uh on spiritual activism and recently within the last I think five or six years formed the order of sacred Earth which is a you could say a guild of of sacred activism So today we're going to speaking more about you could say Jesus and Cosmic Christ and in particular as I mentioned in the announcement we had books come out 30 years ago uh almost within a few months of one another and then we've updated that work over the years uh Matt's work with ritual was updated with through the the cosmic Christ with a book called Stations of the cosmic Christ Stations of the cosmic Christ uh which takes the whole image of Stations of the Cross where one would follow you could say symbolically or in imagination uh the Via doosa of Jesus on his last last journey and changes that over to the Stations of the cosmic Christ which is really about you could say okay let's meditate and view through imagine ourselves in the position of you could say Jesus in these various transmissional moments I think we could call them from the standpoint of spirituality where he's trans transmitting uh something greater than just you could say a belief or a concept people and he's trying to communicate to them something that we'll talk about Cosmic Christ and um my own book my own recent book which is coming out in a couple of weeks Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus uh updates my work since that time also and I think you know one of the impetuses for this is that Matt was gracious enough to introduce my new book uh and then I thought well really this new book really brings these two together Cosmic Christ and historical so to speak historical Jesus uh many people particularly liberal Christians have had an aversion to the historical Jesus uh because there's so much confusion about this and I think as my new book shows uh there doesn't need to be confusion about historical Jesus we don't have to have woring theories about was he a Mediterranean Jewish peasant or a cynic philosopher and on and on and on uh if we simply view him as a prophetic figure speaking prophetic words uh and view him through his n not only his native language Aramaic but also through the world view view of that time uh the cosmogony the origins of the world and also the cosmology which is very important uh that modern culture has really lost its both its cosmology its bigger picture of life as well as where it cames from and so if you lose where you're where you've ultimately come from you're going to lose where you're going too I mean let's face it so um Matt let me welcome you officially formally after I've had these few words and uh really blessed to have you here and thanks for sharing this time with us well thank you Neil that's wonderful to be with you all and um understanding is over 1200 people have uh registered for this class of course many are in different time zones so they'll Tune In by by video or film later but it's good to be with you all and I'm excited about the obvious interest in this topic and I'm very excited about Neo new book and um I was honored to write a forward to his very first book the Aramaic uh Jesus and where he translated the Our father and the Beatitudes into Aramaic and now this is his most recent book and um I was asked again to do it forward and I'm very honored by that and um uh in my forward I really stressed what a revolutionary contribution has made his whole life long because as he says really um talking about the historical Jesus is not enough we have to talk about the Aramaic historical Jesus and the language that Jesus spoke and uh and dreamed in and thought in and that includes of course the cosmology our views of the world are are sifted to us through our our um cosmologies and our languages so um what Neil has been doing is very very important and I said in the very my very first forward many years ago that his translation our father was a revolutionary book and now I can say the same about his most recent book which is a wonderful summary uh and uh of his life's work so I really honor what Neil has been doing and um and it's not just about words either he he dances he creates rituals he does he's put the Aramaic Jesus into body prayer and into Circle dancing and all the rest and this is is part of overcoming the dualisms of Western languages and Western education and Western thinking that the you're more tribal languages and I've had the blessing to work a lot with Native American peoples but they are so much more together and so much more playful and uh as he points out Neil and his work like in the translation the Our Father there are actually seven different ways to translate each sentence in the Our Father well that's because uh unlike Latin and Greek and English and German and all this these more ancient and bound to Earth languages are they play with languages and you hear this from African uh speakers and other indigenous people as well so I really honor um Neil's work and I think the focus we've chosen for today is not only very interesting and exciting it's very important uh uh I would say that as Neil was referring to but my language would be that our species is on a cusp today either we wake up and grow up or we're we're our our Extinction is um is most probable and so um we have to go back to our great teachers as well as call forth the great thinking of our own communities today including our science to um to stir up uh our passion and so much of that's what I like about Neil's writing that he takes these prayers that have become prayers by rot like the Our father and and he puts life back into them not by making things up but by going back to the original language so one of the points I did in my introduction to his book um or forward to it I really kind I was really amused by but struck by I went to Webster's Dictionary because I was I was thinking you know we're so used to prayers by rote so I looked up learning by rote in the webter and this is what it said it said learning by wrote means the use of memory usually with little intelligence or it means routine or repetition carried out mechanically and unthinking or it means a joyless sense of order and it means a commercial hustle if that isn't a summary of what some people experience as Religion Today I don't know what is but I was just blown over by by Webster's Dictionary Ser it's not that exciting but this TI the top of my head off uh memory with little intelligence mechanical unthinking routine joyless sense of order and a commercial hustle I don't think that's where we want to be on the cusp of a new a new version of humanity humanity is supposed to grow up not fall asleep and bore one another and call it religion okay so now we're getting into the cosmic Christ and yeah let's do that you know because you know we're um you know the world is is filled with confusion um old the old some of the old order seems to be breaking down or what was the old order for the last hundred years um here as as we' mentioned when we were off camera you know the the queen just died and some feel people feel whatever you feel about monarchy that she was sort of a lynchpin figure uh and uh we don't have to look very far to see around us you know uh War uh the rise of white right-wing dictatorship uh fascist Tendencies even in countries like the US uh so I mean Matt in terms of ritual I mean many people consider ritual irrelevant why why bother with ritual can we talk about that a little bit and then we'll go into Cosmic Christ uh why do you think ritual is so important for us well ritual as melad um wrote he died recently the great African um teacher of ritual who was instructed by his Elders to come to America and teach Americans about ritual as he says there is no Community without ritual period there's no Community without ritual and exactly the the issues that Neo just named including obviously climate change is an issue of community isn't it um and Community is falling apart all around us and of course the community around humans and networking with the rest of creation but hild theard of being called the web of creation uh this is about survival not just our survival but the survival of the Beauty and the diversity of nature as we know it at this time in history and so um we need all the tools we can get to uh build a broader sense of community in a deeper sense that is more than just human Community more than just the little tiny boxes we find ourselves in whether as Europeans or Americans or Asians or North Koreans or South Koreans or what have you uh we always tend to that tribalism and um we have to be thinking in terms of our common survival and this is what you do in ritual you celebrate common Joy you know whatever our difference is we're here and isn't that something to be joyful about and you undergo you celebrate our common grief and that is so important today that everyone is grieving but no one knows what to do with it and being able to grieve in in ritual and with others is extremely important to do the emptying but also the empowerment that comes after that emptying yes and then to build up our creativity and our our common work all that can be energized uh by by ritual yeah and you know as you've worked with uh you developed this uh Cosmic mass and you know I've as you mentioned been working with chanting and uh many people over the last 30 years you know chant some of the Aramaic words of Jesus in small meditation groups like ta music things like that and then you know try to go more deeply into the ex the sort of the shared experience that uh you know Jesus Yeshua in his Aramaic name is pointing us towards so uh let's let's talk a little bit about Cosmic Christ can tell us a little bit about Cosmic Christ Matt and and U what that means to you yes and just to build on what you just said the very first time that you led us in a prayer of the circle Dance of the abun deash Maya the year Our Father something happened for me Christ showed up in the middle of the circle I mean that's not not happened often when I pray nor was I do I seek for it but it happened it was really an amazing thing so I knew from then that moment on that your work was was uh more than useful it was profound okay so what's the question you asked oh Cosmic Christ okay let's Okay well the cosmic Christ is the most profound um and foundational archetype of um of the U of the Christ and of mysticism itself in in Christianity remember the Christianity flies on two wings the wings the wing of the historical and Aramaic Jesus and the wing of uh the cosmic Christ now one thing that's so important about cic Christ today is that the nyine Creed which is a fourth Century Creed which Anglican churches and Roman Catholic churches and several others still recite by wrote on Sunday mornings very often um that was a fourth Century thing and and it was filled with Greek Phil philosophical terms and fine it was done in Greece why wouldn't it be but um uh it's it's it's limited and it was inaugurated not by a uh Christian Church assess but by the emperor Constantine so that makes it just a little bit fraught as well but that's reality and that's hung around for 16 centuries but the cosmic Christ christology began with the earliest writer in the Christian Bible with Paul in in Colossians for example but other examples as well I'll just remind you of the one writing in Colossians the Colossians 1 15-1 17 Christ is the image of the Unseen God and the firstborn of all creation for in him were created all things in heaven and in Earth everything visible and everything invisible before anything was created he existed and he holds all things in unity holds all things in unity that Unity that is as we say falling apart everywhere today but it's a an archetype of uh the pattern that connects and um so it's now another thing is people today if they hear about it at all because the church has not been preaching it for centuries they say oh well that's something shardan came up with in the 20th century and his new age or something no it's straight from Paul the first writer in the Christian Bible and the gospel of Thomas which is also very old right it's in there too but then again as we're going to show later it's in all the great events depicted in all the the gospels from the Nativity to the crucifixion and resurrection and everything in between so it's everywhere and yet we haven't talked about it for a centuy we've been so busy going after that historical Jesus that we've forgotten the sense of c and that's part of our anthropocentrism that we interested in someone who looks like us and uh and who talk to us but we we leave out the cosmos which is leaving out the Earth as Thomas Barry says ecology is functional cosmology so if we can recover a cosmology with that comes a living ecology and so the Christ the cosm Christ stands for the sacredness of all beings so John one has a cosmic price and talks about the light in all beings and now today's physics talks about how there are photons in every atom in the universe so all two trillion galaxies contain this light what art calls the spark of divinity that's in all beings so this is opening our minds and heads and bodies up to the sacredness of the universe and the sacredness of the earth and the sacredness of all beings on the earth including ourselves and this of course course is a a revolution in Consciousness so um and Thomas Barry says we not will not recover the lost sacred uh without recovering a sense of the universe and so the CM Christ brings us there now one other point when I was in South Korea lecturing a few years ago I brought up the CM Christ of course and afterwards a Buddhist monk came up to me and he said I've never heard that term Cosmic Christ before but I love it I'm going to start preaching about the cosmic Buddha and of course he should because the cosmic Christ is utterly ecumenical we're all part of the cosmos we're all part of the the Earth and um and of course the Buddha nature that tnad Han writes about is absolutely parallel to the cosmic Christ and Christianity and in Judaism today Scholars are coming up with with re understanding the term shalam that means we translate as image of God and they're realizing in the entire Jewish tradition image of God is not just about humans it's about every being is an image of God that my folks is the cosmic Christ in Judaism yeah as as you've pointed out and I have also in my books um this does reach back to the the story The cosmology story in Genesis where it's uh in Genesis being is being created in the Salem which is what you mentioned the uh really it's it is the the image but it's not a picture image in ancient Hebrew it's not a picture of someone or something it's a moving image it's like a shadow that moves in response to you know a source of light so another way of translating it is is sometimes the you could say the the depth of this embodiment uh and it's important to note it that it is it is moving we are each moving individually different beings move individually with this Divine as you would say as Buddhist call the Buddha nature so it says Mutu uh this is in the likeness so people want to make this okay it's only about Jesus it's just the picture of Jesus it's only about Jesus but it's not about Jesus in Hebrew or in John 1 because uh John 1 is also stated again I don't want to get too much into the tech technical tties of the language but John 1 is really stated as in the in the beginning is in the in the first point of the beginning is living it's not it was but it it is at the point that it of of the creation it is living as word that is as sound and if we look to the book of sirak which is one of the the books sort of intertestamental books as is pointed out word is related with wisdom that is Holy wisdom HMA Sophia is is her AKA Sophia her better known name which people know her by today so people were awaiting at that time at the time that uh Jesus comes Yeshua comes they were awaiting a figure that would bring them all together that would redeem them from you could say inner and outer from the desperate situation uh they had been at that time and here one can mention you know also a political situation is that the people of that particular area had been under the thumb of of Empires for centuries centuries and so there was this expectation as we witness in these intertestamental books that some figure would come and so you might ask well how can Jesus a man embody sopia a woman well ancient peoples at that time did not have this fixed idea of maleness and femaleness because again if we reach back to Genesis it says that the first human being one human being is created male and female so we're already envisioned in this story in Genesis 1 to have a s of a melded dual nature of maleness and femaleness and a flow between them and it's it's it's not an either or thing uh and and this this goes on throughout the whole biblical tradition and I will say from my more recent research also into the Quran uh which we're not talk about much here today but they have the same basically the same story they inherit the same stories from the abrahamic tradition of this we could say the divine nature of the human being that Salam the depth of you could say reality knowing itself in the human human being so uh let's uh let's go a bit more into the the I am's met and uh and proceed from there because I think these give a you could say a more you could say a concrete a practical uh view to how different this view is your view my view uh Cosmic Christ Aramaic Jesus of these statements which are often viewed as simply e exclusivity statements well it just means Jesus you know so we have to Jesus is going to save us um how you know and so it's just Jesus Jesus Jesus you know I have to believe not I don't I have to believe thoughts about Jesus I have to have certain beliefs about Jesus then that will so to speak save me so what what's what's your view of that right well to build on what you were just teaching what's at stake here is the realization that we are all other christs that we all other christs and um that flips things so for example if um is in the in the gospels whether the I am saying and of course I am is a is a name for the Divine in Book of Exodus Moses asked God who shall I say I'm speaking to I am who I am or I am who I will be and and Neo can no long can surely embellish that through the Aramaic but the point is that the I am is the sacred name for Divinity and yet we're all called to that I am so if we find a phrase like I am um the door uh what that means is you are the door in what ways are you a door and this gets really practical in what way are is Christ a door fine is Jesus a door but in what ways are you a door and am I a door and are we are we living up to being doors and and uh of course a door can be a very positive thing it could be a welcoming thing it opens and it shuts it create intimacy when it shuts but also it can be barred and locked and and so even with these images there are choices to make are you going to be you know a healthy door that and are you going to W welcome strangers or are you going to just keep people at Bay and so forth so this can apply to every one of these archetypes and they are archetypes that are attributed to to um Jesus or the Christ uh in what ways are we adore to one another and you can turn every one of these I am sayings around that way including of course Matthew 25 I do it to the least you do it to me yeah and and right there the historical Jesus is is talking about the cosmic Christ and he really does that and but he's saying that I am this person I'm not just me so we are one another especially when we're in trouble when we need help and so there's a whole ethics that is built on Matthew 25 where we're here to help one another and find the Christ in one another yeah yeah I mean it's as you say this Matthew 25 part um you know this we find throughout the tradition really because it's the interconnectivity that happens when we when we view this when we not only view but we experience this in ourselves then we feel okay as the Jewish tradition says and as repeated later in the Islamic tradition if you save one human being you save all of humanity if you kill one human being you're killing all Humanity this is about the ancient notion that that we are that we are interconnected this is this interbeing the tikn Han talks about too again to quote a Buddhist now you know one thing I'll say about about the the I am and we we can use that as a as a short form of what we're talking about but wait for it um Aramaic doesn't actually have a being verb that is it doesn't havei am you are he she it is they are it doesn't have the are the is uh this is true throughout the ancient Semitic languages uh the the first verb that is the first activity is to live so all this has to do when you see this sometimes for instance in in Exodus where Moses is confronted by the burning Bush what he hears the burning bush really saying in Hebrew and this is there's all sorts of different interpretations about this so I don't want to get into an argument with anyone on the chat about this either um he's really this is based on the verb for livingness that which lives which is living past present future is what is speaking to you it is it is life it is livingness and so when Jesus however in Gospel of John it's translated as I am what he actually says in Aramaic is two of the Aramaic words Ena i n i n so he says Ina Ina Ina or Ana means I that is the individual so he says Ina Ina connecting my ego my individuality to the source of that connecting my self my individual self to the source of that well H how does that make any sense well you have to know again words that are mistranslated throughout the gospels Soul self and breath and all of these are mistranslated often the basic cosmology that Jesus has and which was true in the Biblical times is that we have two different types of breath one is an individual breath that I hold within this body for however many years I've got in time and space here and the other is a breath that is always connected always connected and based on these two words for breath we have the word for the individual self NAFA in Aramaic and AHS ha if you want to spell it out and r r Hebrew is R uh Hebrew of the individual self is neish so once we understand this basic map that there we have two ways of looking at life and one is our always on open 247 connection to to that which was before and which comes after and one is our individual Life as we try to manage as best as possible right here in time and space and muck our way through and and mess things up and then get things some things right so it depends on being able to turn from you could say the the ENA my individual eye to the source of that that you could say you could call it soul but again throughout most translations of the gospels the word self and soul are translated all higgledy piggledy as they say here it's all messed up and then the breath is often translated as spirit so people think it's somewhere God knows where or goddess knows where whereas wherever you see the word spirit in the New Testament you can read the word breath just read the word breath because it has to do with my breath connect conting to our breath again interconnectivity and then that breath our planetary breath which is very important connecting to the source of that and that's what he calls wait for it holy breath Ora or you could say sacred breath uh so this is this is this connection you see that becomes very very clear once we start to just shift a few things correct a few Mis translations and then correct some of them that are very very limited such that we don't see what the what the heck is going on if you excuse me for saying um at least that was I was raised Christian you I was raised in a Christian household we were I memorized large parts of the King James Bible as not as part of my household but as part of my elementary school education I had to memorize all of Luther's small catechism uh it was good for the memory but it was like rote as you're talking about man wrote wrote wrote but you know some of it stuck with me and then I was able to reframe it um what about this first one you know the it's usually considered the first it's not really the first but the one in John 6 mat where Jesus says I am the bread I am the bread of life he says what's your what's your take on that one sure that um again I think it's so interesting that Jesus picks so ordinary a image an experience as bread and of course bread is foundational for um survival in the Middle East as it is in many but not all cultures it would be like rice in the in Asia and and we have to translate that too you know so what what is rice to Asians what is bread to Western cultures well it's survival and of course it comes up often in Jesus teaching um the Our Father give give us this day our day bread and um so the the it's about work isn't it it's about uh people have to grow the Grain and they have to you know the sun has to come and the rain has to come and not too much of either one which we're experiencing in our climate change today we're getting either floods on the one hand or droughts on the other so there has to be this balance and then human Ingenuity has to pound the bread and and uh pound the wheat and turn it into flour Etc and of course add some leaven and all the rest so it's a process it's creativity on human's part doesn't just just drop out of the sky although um we're told of course that in the Hebrew Bible there was a special bread that did drop out of the sky and kept the Jews alive during their in the wilderness so so it's just it's just filled with with archetypal power but to say I am that I am the bread and then to turn it around and say you are the bread how are we bread for one another and how are we sustenance for one another and I think that brings up all is kinds of issues around Justice and Injustice around um and of course climate change they just talking about that about our interdependence with nature and um so I think all that is is in the mix when uh the Christ says I I am the bread and meaning also we are bread to one another but I'll let you Neil now get further well yeah I agree I mean you know it's again we have a you know a parallel way of viewing this if you look at the Aramaic that um again if we take Ena Ena as the connection of my small self you could call it to the source of myself connecting self to Soul you could say which is done by turning the heart the heart has to turn is the way they would look at it then um this connection he says this this is the food because actually in Aramaic uh even though it is it does mean bread it isn't limited to uh bread per se wheat free glutenfree or whatever it's really is a it's it's food so this is the food the freshness that is of livingness or is this livingness um well what is it that we eat in food well we we call a food fresh when it has a lot of life in it and so we are as you point out Matt we are this food I mean our our bodies become food for those who come after us so and then what about our souls you know are these fresh are we always renewing our soul uh are we change are we changing are we are we stuck in our ways are we always looking for more uh looking for more you could say from our soul rather than trying to grasp more possessions or this or that on the outside which is what's done so much damage to the climate now there's an interesting story around this and I'll just share it very briefly in John 6 and that this phrase I am the bread of life happens in the aftermath of the story where Jesus is has one of done one of his big feedings you remember the story bunch of people come there's no food you know there's a few loafs and fishes and like that and you know they feed everybody well it's a big it's a big happening as we would say today so Jesus and his students his disciples as they're called Yeshua they go out on the boat they fish some then they come back uh it's a bit of a I'm shortening the story and the crowd is still there and the crowd is basically saying hey what about more Loaves and Fishes you know we're still hungry and it's at this point that Jesus says you know okay don't look for the just the outer don't look for the material look for that that freshness within yourself I mean he's not saying starve yourselves but he's saying what you're really looking for is the food that will give you this livingness that will connect you to the life that is interconnecting us with the planet and with our source and you know this is where he also has this very controversial saying where he says you know um you know unless you eat my body and drink my blood you won't understand what the heck I'm talking about I'm translating lucies from the Aramaic but um and then the disciples say you know Master that's that's a very difficult saying they're not getting this the crowd is dispersing which is probably what Jesus wanted anyway because they were looking for the outer and isn't that just what's happening today you know all the these soulle impulses that we have PE we look for them in you know for this unlimitedness in the outer whereas you know again when I looked into this more deeply all the words for happiness or joy in uh in Aramaic they have to do with noticing that our small self our individual self has limitations we can't consume as much resources you know as as we each want we can't acquire as much wealth as everybody wants you know there limitation of the of our individual humanity is necessary to find the unlimited why because then we turn from acquiring things outwardly to the connection you could say with soul with the cosmic Christ with what is always on and open of where he starts to go with all of this another angle on the um I am the bread of life and the crowd being hungry as people say and the inner work that you talk about the the inner self as opposed to the outer is that generosity is found inside too and so part of what he may have been doing was urging people to share the bread not hoard their bread you know they just brought a little picnic for them they're family but others were there with no picnic so yeah so that may well have been part of the um story too that he got people to dig in and think of others absolutely break your bread and you eat a little less like you were just talking about and your your neighbor gets to eat too and that and that's a miracle too that's a bigger Mir you could say that again anyway let's yeah can we do a little bit of chanting here before we go uh go further and we just have a brief sort of pause for contemplation I think that's um that could be helpful and I'll grab my guitar here just so you have a sense of old time sake here Matt so we're going to chant this one that Natalya just put into the chat which is if you look there you will see it a couple of times and this is again connecting our individual self to that which is you could say more permanent to the to the cosmic Christ to the livingness within us uh and feel the and we then we'll pause for a brief moment of silence and and feel that that connection to life not only within us but around us because it is the same life as Matt was pointing out in in nature in all in all beings as the Buddhists would say all right here we go so chat a little bit with me if you want to move you can you know I'm just going to lean back and forth here because we can't do much more than that on Zoom but but we can still enjoy [Music] [Music] life [Music] Allah [Music] Allah [Music] now just feeling our own breathing connecting to life within us around [Music] us what is always [Music] [Applause] living [Music] and then even if you don't remember the Aramaic words just breathing feeling okay my life comes from before before the before and here for this period of time what is mine to do and then it continues on if we connect with that Source Ina Ina small self to that which has empowered created that which is doing everything I have a question for you with that small self you could also say it's it's other expression is the big self the big self and psychology uses that a lot today Yan certainly use it a lot but I think what they mean is the our interconnectivity with all being and with the source of all being when when you know the big self self of the capital S so that might be another way of talking about um that translation you say self yeah I mean different people translate these terms soul and self different ways particularly in modern psychology um Yung talks about individuation which is really if you read young very Yung very very closely say as Peter Kingsley has done in his books Yung is really talking about the same thing particularly in his book answer to job it's this connection you could say individuation is really this Con contion of my my limitedness to my unlimitedness we won't even have to use the word soul and self but um anyway one has to use something for a sake of for the sake of translation as I point out in the new book um well Matt let's go into this thing about the light this is a this is another theme the uh I am the light of the world these these different sayings that are in John 8 most of which has to do with themes of light really uh what's what's your take on that one well in my study on world religions um I have 18 themes that are common to all of them the word light really stands out uh what I found is that the word light is the closest synonym for Divinity around the world uh you know Buddha says that become a light unto yourself and of course Jesus talks about not hiding your light under a lamp and and and the Christ talks about I am the light of the world and um but you find this this um this language this's metaphor for light for Divinity everywhere and of course it's understandable we all know all people know everywhere and have known that you know the sun coming up is kind of helpful and useful and and uh bottom line and uh uh especially people living in the north Ireland or or Northern Canada and of Worth or or Iceland where my brother lives now uh and his wife she's from Iceland you know that you you really honor light when you have situation where you have 20 hours a day of Darkness so um uh and of course then there's so many meanings to light and of course Genesis 1 says light was the first thing created but so does the new creation St of science that the fireball was the first 750 ,000 years of our universe and so Einstein himself said I want to spend my whole life doing nothing but studying light so light is a name for the Divine there's a one one of the wonderful Psalms says in uh says um God comes robed in a cloth in a robe of light so light is everywhere when you're talking about Divinity and not just in the biblical tradition but around the world so um for Christ to say then I am the light and saying that we are to be light to one another which he literally says um and of course in the Celtic tradition light is identified with our intelligence with you know our mind lighting up and your heart lighting up and uh so what can you say except that that light is is a primal effort Humanity to name what Divinity is yeah I mean it as you say it goes way way back in our in our human Heritage not just in our our material Heritage but in the evolution of our Consciousness uh one thing I just you know Semitic languages the ancient Semitic languages really stem from a time before agriculture so when the you could say the ancient semites were were wandering and so light then becomes for these people Clarity during the day you you can see things at night I don't see very well you know and so it's really about Clarity seeing clearly and you know at a time okay then this is in the dark it's in the unknown it doesn't mean darkness is evil um so you don't have this light is good darkness is evil dichotomy or split in these ancient cultures particularly uh in the ancient Semitic languages and this is true for Jesus too so this light is really about as you were pointing out that the Celtic Christianity has it you know this Clarity that we have okay we're in a world full of confusion you know can I get clear on what is really mine to do in all of this or am I going to be so paralyzed that I'm going to you could say be in in a sort of a muddle of of paral of paralysis that that I don't really see very clearly so this is what Yeshua keeps pointing to uh in in the gospels and particularly in this John 8 passage which happens really just after this whole sort of pregnant moment if you excuse the expression where they bring you know they do this test of Jesus of Yeshua and they bring in this woman supposedly uh caught in adultery as it's called and they say well you know we're supposed to Stone her so what do you say master and yada yada yada and then what usually is overlooked is that Jesus starts to write something in the sand in front of them we don't find out what it is and he says this famous saying which everyone remembers those without sin cast a first stone sin really means that those without their own tangles in their past life because really sin is about Tangles we've we've done things in our life that got us into Tangles you can like knots so Jesus says those who have don't have their own Tangled life you know cast the first Stone and then he starts to write in the sand or in the earth and gradually they troop they they fade away and the gospel makes a point of saying that it's the the oldest ones first because we don't know maybe he's writing well so and so did this and you did that and what about these things that you did and you know so they the oldest ones have more to hide than the younger ones so they start to troop out and then he and then he goes into this you know enana uh Orma I am I am the light of all the levels because Alma is really there are different words for Earth or World in Semitic languages and Alma or Alum really means the the light in time that allows us to see and know things in time and space we distinguish things we learn things we know things so the light that allows us to know practic in our lives what's going on who's telling the truth and who's making stuff up th this these levels or these this condensation of levels this light if you connect then you'll know who's telling the truth and who isn't telling the truth you know they used to say that you can't lie you know you can't lie to children and dogs I don't know if anymore it's true but I mean if you put a dog or a child in front of a TV set and Troop a politician in there you know the dog's probably going to start to bark I but anyway so the the understanding the light of how distinguish re you could say even on this level of time and space that which is true from that which is not true what is true for me in my life you know where is the compass that is going to direct me towards my next steps you know and and what is you know maybe we I you know what is not for me this is the most one of the most important questions in life is the question of of our human purpose and Jesus keeps trying to point people to this um it's a it's a remarkable chapter if you read John 8 in the Aramaic uh because you know then as I say it's all about seeing and not seeing then you know along the way he heals this blind man but you know oops it's the Sabbath so he shouldn't be healing anyone cuz some people think healing someone is work and he shouldn't be working and you know eventually he ends up uh before the for one of the many times he ends up before the the scribal counsil in the Jerusalem Temple and they're asking him you know so what gives you the right to do this and you know our fathers didn't do this and a You Know da d d you know we've never done things this way I mean isn't this the way you know we always hear now where people go on about well we've always done it this way you know and so it's always got to be this way but actually it's not true it's just you know it's a fiction that human beings have always done things the way we now do them isn't it I mean I mean really it's it's amazing yeah if I could just add a little footnote to this too um as you were talking about light and um the the Aramaic language that preceded Agriculture and so far how important light was and about Clarity it reminded me of a interaction I had with Eddie Nebo in an Aboriginal in Australia and it was nighttime and he said um you know daytime uh Clarity is about the things we're interacting with we see one another we see the Earth everything around us but night time it's it's dark on Earth but the sky lights up then we see the stars but of course they're always there but you don't see them in the in the light you only see them at dark time at night time yeah and and then he goes g on and said you know in our culture we teach our children that the stars are campfires of our ancestors and that our ancestors are looking down at us to see what's cooking here on Earth what kind of campfires what kind of communities are we creating but so the the wisdom that comes from the night and from the dark as you saidage is not a negative thing is different nighttime is different from daytime now of course with electricity and neon lights and cities and all this we've convoluted this entirely and very confusing but notice how the the cosmology is there that the cosmos speaks at night if you will and and uh and the the Earth and our everyday life you know is happening in the light but of course now with web telescope you know we are bringing Cosmos in in a whole new way right into our living rooms and computers day and night and and uh and it's astounding of course what we're what we're um connecting to it's a it's a marvelous way to connect again to the cosmos and here again is where the archetype of the cosmic Christ or the cosmic Buddha or others um shines yeah I mean there's every there's every indication also that you know the ancient Semitic the ancient Semitic Nomads they also saw the stars and the planets really as living beings because these are all created uh you know before us you could say and then the human being comes along and in one of the most I would say egregious mistranslations in all of history uh the Genesis passage is translated uh be fruitful and multiply and dominate and subdue the Earth and rule over and the and the Hebrew never says anything about you know dominating and subduing uh and it doesn't say rule over it says says learn how to manage your individuality your human self along with all the other beings created before you not over the Hebrew the Hebrew preposition b or bait uh never means over that is on top of uh in in the whole history of the ancient uh Hebrew language but it says rule you learn how to manage your manage all this along with all these other beings of nature uh stars and planets that were created before you so this is again this interbeing as tick Nan talks about and and it's it's really all over but the problem is you know all this has been strained out and as I wrote in one of my early articles it becomes like um psychic oil that is minded uh you know that is plumbed out of the Earth all this this whole cosmology of of the ancient Semitic tradition of Jesus so many people are are Jesus phobic because the you could say the the juice of it the livingness of it has been strained out and used to create some very toxic theology frankly I mean there's good theology but there's a lot of very toxic theology in the last 500 years and you know your your whole work has been about all this really so you know more than I do it's um it's a thing yeah can can we do a little bit I think let's do a little bit more on you wanted to get into uh the shepherd and and you want to do anything more on Shepherd or the door mat or not the door mat but the door I am the door or sometimes it's translated I am the gate really and I am the Good Shepherd and like that well um I think the archetype of the Good Shepherd is really significant for a time of ecological crisis because the shepher I lived as Shepherds for six months in the P Bosque um the southern part of France whereas uh rent a room in a farm and to write my doctoral thesis and um you know shepherding is uh uh a project of those at the lower end of the totem pole because you you have to be the Shepherds out 24 hours a day and you begin to smell like them and you know you're not developing your social skills so much when you're hanging out with sheep um but sheep are very vulnerable animals they they can't run fast they can't climb a tree they don't have good claws or strong teeth so they really need uh help they need parenting and they need protecting and that's what what Shepherds do you know they're not having to feed the sheep so much to take them to the grasses where they can eat but they do have to protect them and especially in a time when wolves were uh were plentiful and um there are some stories about in Jesus time how at nighttime the Shepherds would put the sheep in a shed and the shepherd would lie down in the in the entrance to this shed so that if a wolf came he'd have to deal with the sheep first or have he'd have to deal with the man first or yeah the shepherd the shepherd first so um so the shepherd is attached to another being to another species and realizes the importance of protecting of parenting you might say that's a big part of parenting too and so I think amazing archetype for our times and it's not about little B peep you know it's not about something sentimental it's about loving a nonhuman and isn't that what the ecological crisis is all about that we were not even caring for the other than human whether you're talking fishes or rainforce or or polar bears or tigers and elephants you know there it's again it's we're back to the theme of interdependence yeah but I think the she is a marvelous archetype for that and um just because we live in cities doesn't mean that um Shepherd architect doesn't speak to us um because it is about protecting the vulnerable yeah I mean if you look in the John 9 story again from the Aramaic view um you know Jesus is in Jerusalem he's caused trouble there and so they you could say the intelligent Services of the of the temple are following him there's people following him and and then he's speaking to people and he's sort of speaking to both his listeners who are receptive to him and he's speaking to these people who are trying to do him no good and he's talking about really when he talks about um the gate or the door he talks about okay there are some people who are sneaking in Over The Back Fence like we call them sheep rustlers in American English and they're they're trying to Ste you know they're stealing the Sheep um and what does that mean well well metaphorically it means that the religious energy the spiritual energy of people was being hijacked by by the temple officials and this is what gets Jesus in a lot of trouble and then he you could say he says my sheep know my voice they hear me you know so they they hear the voice of authenticity in me Yeshua is saying and so they know that I'm telling them you know how they can go this is where it's the so-called Good Shepherd it says so the connection to your own true self we could go use a true self or your small self to the larger self this directs you to that which is ripe this is a key word in Aramaic throughout the gospels rip PE not right as in right and wrong but ripe as in a fruit or a plant ripening he says I am the Shepherd that leads you to what the right place at the right time and the right action this is what ripeness is again if you want to know one thing to read into your gospels no matter which translation you're using you know wherever you see the words uh good and bad or like that you know you should read ripe that which is ripe in the right time at the right place like a fruit ripening or tree ripening and that which is unripe and this is what was translated in as good and bad this is why you end up with a good tree and a bad tree I mean how is this tree morally bad is that even possible so it's really he's talking about he's pointing again to Nature and throughout the you could say the gospels viewed in Aramaic Jesus is always pointing to Nature as a source of teaching this is this is a feature uh really really of his teaching uh in in a very very unique way so yeah and sometimes that word um is also translated as perfect be you perfect for example and I just hate that because says perfectionism is a Neurosis us to be neurotic and perfect but to be ripe and uh that's uh you know as you say the the real meaning of the of the word it's it's ripe and it's also ripening so all of these these states of being in Semitic languages and in Aramaic it's also true it's not like okay now I'm ripe and then I'm done that's it okay it's all done no we're always ripening into life yeah um and this word that was translated as be you perfect it's really like a sense of okay I'm completing My My humanness by connecting to the Divine image completing completing it's an active verb it's not like okay now it's done it's a static State static states are not something that Semitic languages excel in they're always being they're sort of active you know they're active processes rather than fixed States and that's that's actually very important to know even if you don't know any Aramaic um and that wonderful teaching of Jesus that follows this of things by their fruits you will know them you know exactly they saying you know that the you know the the evidence is in what's what we're doing what we're standing for how we're we're um carrying out our values and our living our integrity Etc so yeah yeah if if we Circle back again also to John one you know and Cosmic Christ and the light and and all of that towards the middle of this John 1 first beautiful passage it says you know the word that is the wisdom you could say the light is becoming it says is becoming flesh so it's it's becoming living it's living and and and then it's usually translated and dwells Among Us so again this is interpreted as only Jesus well Jesus was here and now he's gone and on and on but actually the Aramaic say the word could say this light that is in all beings took form took a form in in a human being and then it this is also dwelling within us so within and among are always the same preposition in Aramaic so the withness and the among us this is why Jesus has quoted as saying the kingdom is within you or the kingdom is among you actually didn't say Kingdom but that's subject for another time but it's always W with within and among so again this inter beingness there's only one preposition Aramaic has and it stands for both within and among he doesn't have a choice no matter what he said I mean I'm using the scripture that aramea Christians use today but Jesus doesn't have a choice of how many of what words to use and we know he spoke Aramaic there's only so many words he could have used so the withness this word this potential of the cosmic Christ is dwelling within it's come and Jesus basically shows us how to do it that's that's what he so that's what he defines as His function and he shows that really the human potential when not the human potential movement but but the real human potential to realize our our light our Cosmic Christ is still coming we're still working on it um it wasn't done a long time ago uh we're working hard we hope we we get there as a general Humanity uh before we lose the opportunity to get it in these forms uh and then um you know then it'll be up to what Jesus calls allaha that is the the Divine to uh take things next step but um it's it's important you know again that we've realized that these things are these are our potentials this word wisdom this uh HMA this holy wisdom uh this Sophia that Jesus embodies is really it's part of each of us we don't have to reach somewhere out in space for this uh HMA you could say hakima in Aramaic really means that sense that unites all of our senses so we know we smell We Touch we taste we feel we have body awareness but but what is it that unites all of these within me so that I can say I smell touch taste feel rather than just I'm overwhelmed by random chaotic Impressions so this this was considered to be the sacred sense the sacred you could call it six sense which is another name for for Holy sense sacred sense holy wisdom um it's it's a potential we're still really really working on uh so you think intuition would be something of a synonym for that I I think so because intuition is is a capability that we all have that arises when we do that sort of connection uh when we connect you could say soul to self we use those terms small self to Big self and then what allows this to happen well our heart has to turn it has to be you know it's like it has to we have to take the rust off our heart as galin roomi says so that the heart can can turn from the individual and the material to that which is you could say always on and doesn't mean the material an individual isn't important because these are our challenges but we have to be able to turn so that we're not just one just focused out on on what's you could say out there but also what's in here and U that's my take what do you what's your take on that Matt well the reason intuition came in my mind is you know Einstein says that we've been given these two gifts the gift of the rational brain and the gift of the intuitional brain and that values come only from the intuitional brain but he said he says I abore American Education he criticizes education because it values only the rational brain which has no values to it says the rational brains should serve the intuitive brain and of course the intuitive brain includes heart what you're talking about about changing the heart it includes conscious it includes connection to the whole the cosmos therefore the capacity for wholeness which is intrinsic to all of wisdom and it includes play which is part of wisdom and creativity so all these good things are tend to be ignored in everyday education uh in the West in favor of you know the the rational and so finding that balance again I hear you really talking about that when you're talking about changing the heart and wisdom changing the heart and of course wisdom is also feminine HMA sopia sapen around the worldw over my shoulder here she's feminine so that's been banished for the last 400 years of modernity uh and so um we have knowledge factories but we don't have wisdom schools and so I think all this kind of comes together in what you're talking about uh when it comes to wisdom and and um and and Jesus teaching of wisdom and how the kingdom queen of God is among us and within us and and wisdom is among us and within us and um and that that Christ is wisdom um and and as you said early that mels the masculine and The Feminine yeah uh and uh so anyway I just think there's a lot that follows from what you were just talking about yeah well we're about at the end here I mean we could go on and on quite a bit actually but um maybe we uh we end very briefly before we say thanks to everybody uh with just a little bit more chanting of the first line of of Jesus's prayer which you mentioned earlier Matt when you were we were dancing together in the 80s in iccs in Oakland so we're going to chant just a little bit of a deash a debash Maya which Natalia has just put in her chat so refrain from chatting for a moment so people can see that and and um again aoon is not a being sitting somewhere in Judgment of us it is again a a living process I originally wrote Oh breathing life of all that's probably the closest but if we want to talk about it it's the it's the process of giving birth of parenting that is throughout the universe that is throughout the Realms of light and connectivity in vibration which is what shmaya actually is in the ancient Semitic languages so you is you know pointing Beyond himself Beyond any particular image of god or goddess uh to that which is potential within all of us that which is you know really authentic within us because authentic means that which is which is creating that which allows any individual to create something and and that comes from this same Source anyway here we go we're on the track and so a lot more could be said there but let's chant a little bit and then breathe together have some silence and we'll say [Music] [Music] [Music] goodbye [Music] [Music] just breathing connecting to our individual Source whatever we call that and then connecting to the bigger Community around us community of nature of the [Music] planet again breathing in breathing out feeling our hearts more flexible more capable of turning from our individual challenges life connecting to the source from which we come that Divine image the cosmic Christ is always present in every being no matter what you call it amen amen amen okay uh I think we just about made it so thanks to everybody thank you Matt for being so generous with your time thanks Natalia Natalia for doing our engineering here and um thanks to all of you also who are listening on the recording because I know many of you will be doing that and remember that when even if you're listening on the recording you can just feel that you're here now because ancient Semitic languages they don't have a strict separation between past present and future the now is always now anyway um thanks to thanks to thank you many thanks to Matt and thanks to all of you for joining us and we'll see you somewhere for your inspiration in having this event and good luck with your new book and uh blessings on everybody may you all um be inspired by the uh the implications of of our our 15 minutes together today so be well wherever you are thanks everybody thanks Matt take care everybody bye for now
The-Aramaic-Lords-Prayer-of-Jesus_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
The-Aramaic-Lords-Prayer-of-Jesus_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
the practice of chanting the Lord's Prayer in the Aramaic language originally spoken by Jesus can be transformative but this practice was mostly unknown in the Western world until thirty years ago when Neil Douglas Klotz was inspired to put each line of the aramaic prayer to music and movement what follows is an example of this practice and the voices of those who have experienced Jesus in his own words okay so we're gonna be chanting a wound do ba shamaya wound do ba and left sham I so what we're doing is we're bowing gently from the heart very gently feeling our own connection with source whatever by whatever name we call that God Holy Spirit you know any name in Aramaic it's called Aloha or unity the ground of reality in this case we're using the word of wound Oh birther or breathing life or parenting one of the cosmos the whole process of creation is contained in the word of wound when you say the prayer of great being of the content of the messenger you are connecting through sound through vibration to their real atmosphere and we pray that prayer it's not just saying words or saying words that mean something but we're directly connecting to Jesus or Yeshua breath the sound is atmosphere his real being first time I heard the prayer something in me I think it was my heart just burst open and I was lifted to a place I'd never been before and I thought is this really what Jesus meant is are these his words and if these are the words he spoke then I understand why people dropped everything and followed him and it changed the way that I started to think about prayer and it definitely changed the way I thought about Jesus and listening to it the first time it was a incredibly as weeping at the end of it and I had no idea why but it was something that touched me so deeply for me being able to learn the fuller meanings the additional possible meanings that are available over the ones that we were given about what Jesus might have said what Jesus I might have man told us life might have been all out I feel it's really given me faith belief relationship with Jesus back in a very personal way when I danced the Lord's Prayer for the first time I knew my soul was home I couldn't pronounce the word yet but I was experiencing them in every cell of my body in the words in Aramaic dancing them embodied the spirit of Jesus in a way that nothing had done for me in a long time total embodiment in prayer in action prayer in song prayer and movement and that just really brought a flood of emotional as well as intellectual impact just breathing the sound in the heart I think my work as a minister didn't really begin until I encountered at a heart level the message of yeshua through through this aramaic translation and spiritual practice world so again the most profound gift of this has been that it gave me a spiritual practice to center life and and a direct experience I discovered mysticism and discovered that there is a way to integrate one's head one's heart one's passion for justice issues and inclusivity and one's desire to really get at the source of all to understand and experience God as the source of all we're going to continue to the right now the same way to the right again yeah I can see that this prayer has changed me and changed my life because it's given me the tools that describe exactly what's happened with me internally and kind of turned it around just from the very beginning the first line when it says father and mother it's and finally I started to understand that the words actually go into yourself and that it actually does physical healing for you because everything is rhythm everything is song and it was that part of this prayer that these are the songs that everything I don't I'm I'm a literal embodiment of that prayer so that's why I'm grateful for it the aramaic prayer just immediately open my heart in the way nothing else in Christianity had ever done just because the first line finally mentioned not just the father but the mother and that this is this is what he's so important to me is that it's not just masculine it's getting out of the patriarchal and also meeting the prayer was a fulfillment of my childhood dreamed of bringing the prayer into language that I could understand and that would inspire me to pray and use it because the Orthodox English language didn't it was just like oh this is what I've been working for the feeling for that of keeping a prayer in the heart going is something that the Aramaic language allows us to enter in a much deeper way because again these are the sounds equals these are the words that either Jesus said them or they're so close to what he said that it still gives us the same breath the same feeling the same answer and that has to be a big thing I mean that has to be a deepening aspect for a person's spiritual life because you feel inside that the prayer is as though saying you you have a companion of the heart accompany me through jesus's atmosphere through Yeshua Sabbath for those of us that know it let's say together the words whole words of that prayer Jesus and Aramaic the Lord's Prayer and if not simply breathed with the word of one Mundi bachmeier Nicodemus Taytay mallacoota neck we see beyond ikana de bas my ha ha blah nama soon Kanani amana wash clan have a mock Dehaene i Kannada phenomenal high beam will Tufnell in Asuna Ella Watson Manisha matru delaffei mallacoota Mahalo what ash bhakta the lamb I'll mean me you
The-Aramaic-Lords-Prayer-spoken-prayed-by-Neil-Douglas-Klotz_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
The-Aramaic-Lords-Prayer-spoken-prayed-by-Neil-Douglas-Klotz_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
a wound bachmeier nits are the schemata Tama Huata neck ways beyond a Kannada bachmeier of para la llamada soon Kannan Yamana wash bachlin Cobain Wachter hain I Kannada phenomenal high-beam whele Teflon Asuna Ella Watson Manisha Mutulu hay mal kuta whoa hey whoa - boertie l'olam al mean main Alam Amin Amin may the song continue renewing itself from ages to ages from gathering to gathering may this be the earth from which our new growth comes I mean
The-Meaning-of-Abwoon-dbashmaya-First-words-of-the-Aramaic-Lords-Prayer_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
The-Meaning-of-Abwoon-dbashmaya-First-words-of-the-Aramaic-Lords-Prayer_2024-02-08_en-auto-generated.txt
in prayers the cosmos five or six different ways because again this would be the of middle-eastern translation that you don't just translate words in only one way you translate them in on different levels different possible levels why would one do this well that was the type of tradition it was it was tradition to understand ourselves better and to get wisdom from the prophets rather than to say it's only this again this all fits with this notion of things are in move things are in flux things are changing this is what allowed Judaism to revive or reinvent itself after the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it reinvented itself through Midrash through looking in back at the words of Moses and reinventing itself in what is today called rabbinical Judaism well a wound a bush Maya I translated in prayers of the cosmos something like this o birth her father mother of the cosmos you create all that moves in light oh thou the breathing life of all creator of the shimmering sound that touches us wordless action silent potency were eyes and ears awaken there heaven comes it's sort of like it's really more sort of a poetic unfolding of the roots of the words because one can render the roots that is the individual letters which are themselves meanings in different ways Sothis you look up a word in the dictionary and there's the meaning now you render you render the letters as though the letters themselves were living beings because that was the tradition in ancient Hebrew ancient Aramaic and in Arabic too so the Quran can be rendered in the same way I had somewhere here and I think I lost it a short translation of oh yeah here it is that's in desert wisdom of the whole of what is ordinarily called the Lord's Prayer and again this I've ayah late the principle I just mentioned which is I translate each line one way but you understand it could be translated another way so I just translated it as literally as I could but but different than the way you've normally heard it I read the Aramaic before so this is this is one Midrash or this is one translation of of Jesus's Prayer ordinarily called the Lord's Prayer Oh breathing life your name shines everywhere release a space to plant your presence here envision your I can now embody your desire in every light and form grow through us this moment's bread and wisdom untie the knots of failure binding us as we release the strands we hold of others faults help us not forget our source yet free us from not being in the present from you arises every vision power and song from gathering to gathering amen I mean may our future actions grow from here so it's a little different but as I said in most cases what we have in the King James Version and other English versions of the Bible are not really wrong translations but they're very limited translations it's only one a very narrow spectrum of what is there in the words boast in terms of gender male female in terms of this within within outside inside among distinction and in terms of dividing things mind body soul spirit which air may peoples never did