Read an Excerpt
The Illusion of "Truth"
The Real Jesus Behind the Grand Myth
By Thomas Daniel Nehrer John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2013 Thomas Daniel Nehrer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78279-548-3
CHAPTER 1
Focus ... Cultural Context: Overview
To clarify Jesus' "real" nature and message, it is vital to enhance the historically derived picture with a thorough illustration of the mindset of Jesus' contemporaries: how they saw their world and how he would have learned to see things. Equally necessary to explore for valid sense to be drawn from his parables is the general mindset of the common man as it has evolved over two millennia to our time. That evolution led to common western ideas you inherited, as woven into the beliefs and assumptions that color your engagement of daily life and underlie literature, history, story-telling and even language itself.
If you do not understand how you see Reality and your own Self within it, you will assume you understand life fully from this haughtily modern standpoint, presuming your default cultural complex of notions to be accurate and valid. But all people in all times fallaciously assume they understand life as they interpret experience consistent with their belief structure. Views shared by peers through common thinking, literature and arts seem always to be corroborated, thus becoming reinforced.
Until you begin to recognize that life functions in subtle ways that elude common perception and supersede the standard modern religion-and-science mindset, you will never grasp Jesus' illustrations of a "Kingdom" to be found within – a message deep and profound, cryptic to common thinking, yet blatantly obvious to one who perceives life's real function.
Oh, and ...
One other point here: I don't employ mushy New-Age generalities or glowing, light-headed spiritual claims. I don't cower daintily in awe of cultural "Truths", which aren't. Not only do I disdain political correctness, but I abhor its more insidious cousin: spiritual correctness – reverence typically accorded popular but invalid doctrines. If you aren't prepared for an in-depth, unfettered, intellectual view of Consciousness and Reality, ready with an open mind to have the grand distortion of religion exposed, you've opened – or downloaded – the wrong book.
This account will clarify precisely what Jesus meant in his teachings and quite accurately what he was – the "real" person. Beyond that even, it will clarify for you precisely what you are.
Without the latter, you'll never comprehend the former.
Without understanding your place as a conscious entity manifesting and engaging an experiential Reality, you will only be able to perceive Jesus within the confines of your belief structure. And that would present that hall-of-mirrors Jesus caricature comprising a divine myth or a deduced, amenable stick figure – either of which may perhaps satisfy your own needs, but have nothing to do with the real man.
Communicating New Vision: Hurdles Galore
Moving man's view of himself and life past common thinking, the true visionary faces great difficulty: exactly that deluded mindset the sage would have listeners outgrow is the very filter through which any new perspective must pass.
Most people, solidly frozen into long-held, common notions, are unable to grasp clearer views. But another factor further hinders any movement: established views have invariably attracted practitioners who make their living off their fields. These have a vested interest in maintaining adherents: new approaches could render religions and various healing practices obsolete; they could displace various spiritual disciplines. Each of those fields features many who make their entire living from the genre, accepted experts in the field of explaining life – those preachers, priests, healers, gurus, scientists, self-help experts, holistic practitioners, rabbis, psychologists, philosophers, imams, physicians, etc. With titles and degrees, broad respect and high status in society, will such professed experts be open to ideas that question their expertise, thus threatening their cozy niches?
For years now, I've encountered such a situation.
Already having jettisoned religion as a valid explanation for anything as a 10-year-old, thereabouts, I came to see science as an incomplete (thus faulty) account of real life by my thirties. Regarding other genres, I could detect flaws – along with occasional insights into Reality – in eastern mystical traditions, holistic health, core spirituality, modern philosophy and every other established explanation out there. Ultimately, aided by a mystic experience and facilitated by a long inner journey and fierce personal independence, I came to see, personally and intimately, the interactive nature of Consciousness/Reality – far more clearly than standard, popular and even advanced esoteric explanations did or could depict.
In short, I consciously, explicitly scoured my subconscious store of absorbed notions, layered there from childhood, and deleted any and all definitions and beliefs I held. Concurrently, recognizing the innate connection between mind and body – and subsequently between Consciousness and Reality – I cleared away a plethora of inner roots that were leading to outer health, relationship and success issues, a gesture that always spurred improvement in real life. That inner journey, spread over 30 years or so, led to personal Clear Awareness, a state of cognition equivalent to the mystic experience I'd had during my twenties – only now it is ongoing, not periodic and fleeting.
Trying to explain Clear Awareness – through a website, books and talks across the English-speaking realm – has been an adventure steeped in the above condition: some get it and benefit greatly, many others kind of get it, but don't pursue the requisite inner journey, while most just don't get it. And the preponderant horde doesn't even listen.
Visionaries of the past faced precisely the same effect. For them however, it was worse, often much worse. Socrates, blamed for aggravating gods (which, of course, didn't exist, but were widely believed in), was forced to commit suicide. Lao Tzu, tired of dealing with the blockheads of his day, wandered off, never to be seen again. Jesus of Nazareth, engaging dogmatic forces of his time, was summarily crucified. Meister Eckhart was hounded by the church over his penetrating teachings until his death, and Galileo relegated to house arrest by the same fixed thinkers.
For my part, though, complications resulting from such a gesture have eased up a bit. First, this timeframe and setting are more placid. Modern America and European-based cultures allow a freedom of expression not available earlier.
Second, modern English, flexible, concise, yet illustrative, allows fuller expression than ancient Greek, Chinese, Aramaic, Middle German or Italian of those mentioned seers. English has acquired a vocabulary allowing pointed illustration of mind elements and psychological processes adequate to illustrate inner structures that correspond to outer effects.
Third, far more people have begun to look deeply into life. The potential audience for profound insights is not only considerably larger than ever before, but also more educated, more exposed to alternate proposals and often open to considering even more advanced perspectives than they've heard. (The only down side here is that fancy new esoteric explanations abound: vaunted spiritual teachers still not quite perceiving life's functional Oneness often create new, more mystical-sounding "truths" – which, indeed, are only the same old misconceptions rephrased – providing more adorned illusions to get caught up in.)
And fourth, reaching people through advanced communication facilities in this timeframe is much easier. (With a similar drawback – lots of goofy, fallacious voices out there.)
As for any threat from irate Islamists or dull-witted fundamentalist Christians, I have come to shed the inner conflict and struggle that would entice backlash from aggressive sources. This alone should mitigate the long tradition in many creative fields that, in order to succeed, one must already be dead.
I have no more interest in martyrdom than in attracting followers or supplicants.
To Make the Point
Visionaries have two principal means to immediately communicate insights beyond people's mundane, common mindset. They can liken awareness to equivalent situations in life to which the listener can relate – using metaphor, analogy and other grammatical tools to picture points. Or they can illustrate how listeners can gain such awareness – a path to proceed on, techniques to engage, what to look for within. Both of these gestures are much more precise and expansive now than earlier visionaries had at their disposal, given reasons just listed.
Lao Tzu relished use of allusion and interconnected illustration to picture reality's flow as the Tao, an essence not explicitly describable. Gautama, the Buddha, however, was pretty good at doing just that, for he described various aspects of reality exceptionally concisely – if not always accurately. Additionally, the Buddha provided applicable techniques meant to propel the seeker toward greater awareness – meditation and corrected thinking.
Jesus of Nazareth – as we will see in great depth – relied heavily on simile with his parables, likening his "Kingdom of God" concept to various aspects of daily life for Galilean peasants he addressed. His principal gesture was simple teaching.
By comparison, for communicating means to enhance awareness, I illustrate techniques of self-hypnosis, dream analysis and other means to explore explicit information in the subconscious, then relate it to real-life meaning. Perceiving the connection between Self and experienced reality – Jesus' Kingdom – requires enhanced focus both inward and outward. While scarcely able to get there by simply reading Jesus' wisdom, one can certainly relish that wisdom having already gotten there.
Brand New Word
Before proceeding, I need to augment the English language.
Noncept. That's it: created by revising the "con-" (together, jointly) in concept (a general notion or idea) into a neutralizing "non-", and combining that with the retained "-cept" root (from Latin – cipere or capere, meaning to seize). A noncept – henceforth – is a word for something that doesn't really exist, but is formulated in the imagination with whatever characteristics are assigned to it.
That renders, in my terminology, the word "concept" as referring to a real thing – something demonstrably in existence in reality, either tangible (desk, foot) or intangible (pain, hope).
Some examples of noncepts are unicorns, fairies, the government, headaches and colds. None of these exist as understood. But each of them generates an illusion of existence based on definitions (often absorbed early in life) and commonly shared references.
(What you think of as government is actually a collection of big buildings and people carrying out tasks. Headaches and colds are conditions of the body, perceived and experienced only in the physical context. The word noncept, by the way, is not a noncept itself. I'll let you figure that out.)
Many notions of highly cherished, sacred things don't actually exist in reality, making them pure noncepts. I may rattle your contentment by exposing flawed definitions deeply embedded within your mindset by pointing that out.
In order to outgrow fallacy, it is vital – and exceptionally beneficial – to shed illusions of "Truth" embedded in cultural fallacies, however widely accepted and deeply honored they are. Let's angle right into Jesus' life with a look at essential background points.
CHAPTER 2
Slant In: Jesus' Real Life – Background and Context Freed of Myth
Christianity has coexisted for so long with evolving western culture that it has become tightly woven into the common mindset, permeating not only its world view and literature, but even language itself. However religious you might be – or might have ever been – Christianity's values (many quite negative), inferences and myths form a subtle but significant part of your "understanding".
Should you consider yourself Christian, your religious tenets may be welded so firmly to your self-image and world view that the following in-depth look at the history and myth of Christianity could prove disturbing to your equilibrium, for many "Truths" you've been handed on golden platters are, at their core, anything but.
Should "true believers" have made it even this far, recognize that I feel no need to ever sugar-coat any perspective for easier consumption. Your convictions may be shaken, but your understanding of reality can only improve.
All others will want the unbridled, unmitigated facts about the real man whose teachings and deeds led to Christian theology, spiritual dominance – or rather, imposing societal dominance based on a spiritual façade – and the structured paradigm that grew out of that unique, early first-century life of Yeshua, the man from Nazareth.
But there aren't any.
Facts, that is.
Even his name, "Yeshua" – likely pronounced ye-shew-a, a very common name in his day – was corrupted through language translations and transliterations through the Latin "Iesus" (yayzoos) to the westernized "Jesus" we know him as. However, as we will see, this phonetic alteration is nothing compared to the plethora of changes applied to his message from the outset and continued over two millennia. A tradition that garbled his name has much more thoroughly mangled the meaning to his legacy and originally simple, yet profound message.
As to "facts" as a basis of understanding things in this investigative age: if there is anything greatly preferred to valid, reliable information in our culture, it is the appearance of facts – nice, tidy story lines that seem complete and perfunctory, stories that can be widely circulated in mutual agreement, despite lacking validity. And, as there are absolutely no historical facts concerning the life of Jesus of Nazareth – not a single word about him recorded during his lifetime – Christianity provides such a wonderful substitute appearance.
Views of Jesus
There are some 1.2 to 1.3 billion people in the world who consider themselves Christian. Yet, if you queried each of them for a description of god's nature and the spirituality they believed in, you would get 1.2 to 1.3 billion different answers – that is, to the extent that many of them could actually formulate an answer. Many don't really know what they believe enough to explain it. Others, if not simply parroting stock Christian jargon, would utter inconsistent, divergent accounts and outright impossibilities – yet each explanation would be perfectly believable to the person holding the religious tenets.
That is not surprising: the mind judges "Truth" based on accepted beliefs – whatever they are, they seem valid. The shock would be the vast difference among Christians as to understanding.
Beyond those billion variations on the theme of redemption, three main views of Christianity and life will be regarded here:
1. The Orthodox: stated tenets of the Roman Catholic Church and offshoots as to:
• What life is all about, as construed through theology and tradition,
• What Jesus was and did, reconstructed consistent with the gospel accounts (less myth and accrued lore), and
• What that means, not only in itself, but to you and modern society.
2. The Scholarly: results of research and analysis of ancient manuscripts, leading to:
• An evaluation as to what the ancient writers meant,
• Who they actually were,
• How things changed all along the way, and
• How many different conclusions can be drawn from the evidence.
3. Mine: how an ancient visionary's perspectives, woven into sketchy accounts, appear to another visionary who explicitly sees reality beyond commonly held, fallacious notions.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Illusion of "Truth" by Thomas Daniel Nehrer. Copyright © 2013 Thomas Daniel Nehrer. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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