Behold the Man
by
by
The Question of a Personal Ethic
Acting into a new way of thinking is always more effective than trying to think into a new way of acting. Perhaps this is the secret Jesus wanted to convey. If so, it’s to be expected that he ended up where he did, on a gibbet. His actions created a new mode of thought. Unfortunately his followers went back to thinking instead of acting. This led, of course, to the same old rationalised actions.
Karl Glogauer is a devotee of Carl Jung. He knows the drill about actions creating reality. Thinking creates... well just more thought. So he inserts himself into a situation in which he must act differently. By literally putting himself in a time-capsule, he is transported to Roman Palestine. In light of his miraculous appearance on this “chariot from no-where” he is taken for the long-awaited Messiah by the locals. Glogauer does what he must; he acts his way into the role. He becomes the eternal Christ.
This is the essential paradox of the life of Jesus. It is based on a central idea - that ideas are created by actions. We are, or more accurately become, what we do and those we do it with. That is to say, we are deeply superficial. There is nothing real about us aside from the way we act with each other. So Karl attracted crowds not for what he said but for how he acted: “It was his sympathy that they responded to, rather than the words he spoke.” And this way of acting had a remarkable effect: “For the first time in his life, Karl Glogauer had forgotten about Karl Glogauer.”
Living this way is dangerous. To bring a myth to life means being, at best, the object of scorn; and, at worst, a threat to all those who use ideas, the devils within us, to oppress others. Reality can be discovered only after overcoming all ideas about it. Only then does it reveal itself... in death. And this, according to the original gospel of Mark (the oldest, ending at 16:8), is Jesus’s triumph - his ‘raising up’ onto the cross of his glory, over and over again.
Acting into a new way of thinking is always more effective than trying to think into a new way of acting. Perhaps this is the secret Jesus wanted to convey. If so, it’s to be expected that he ended up where he did, on a gibbet. His actions created a new mode of thought. Unfortunately his followers went back to thinking instead of acting. This led, of course, to the same old rationalised actions.
Karl Glogauer is a devotee of Carl Jung. He knows the drill about actions creating reality. Thinking creates... well just more thought. So he inserts himself into a situation in which he must act differently. By literally putting himself in a time-capsule, he is transported to Roman Palestine. In light of his miraculous appearance on this “chariot from no-where” he is taken for the long-awaited Messiah by the locals. Glogauer does what he must; he acts his way into the role. He becomes the eternal Christ.
This is the essential paradox of the life of Jesus. It is based on a central idea - that ideas are created by actions. We are, or more accurately become, what we do and those we do it with. That is to say, we are deeply superficial. There is nothing real about us aside from the way we act with each other. So Karl attracted crowds not for what he said but for how he acted: “It was his sympathy that they responded to, rather than the words he spoke.” And this way of acting had a remarkable effect: “For the first time in his life, Karl Glogauer had forgotten about Karl Glogauer.”
Living this way is dangerous. To bring a myth to life means being, at best, the object of scorn; and, at worst, a threat to all those who use ideas, the devils within us, to oppress others. Reality can be discovered only after overcoming all ideas about it. Only then does it reveal itself... in death. And this, according to the original gospel of Mark (the oldest, ending at 16:8), is Jesus’s triumph - his ‘raising up’ onto the cross of his glory, over and over again.
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ March 08, 2020 0 Comments
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