Christ’s miracles and resurrection demystified

Christ would not have been able to expose falseness and delusion, as he was able to do, had he been false and deluded. Honesty is therapy, it is the ultimate healing force—as Christ himself said, ‘the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32)—and Christ’s unresigned unevasiveness and resulting ability to expose falseness and delusion, while it could be extremely confronting, was also what centred people and made them well. It was what released them from their psychosis, from their crippling state of soul-denial. His honesty defeated their lies that were in effect killing them. His soundness healed people, brought them home from where they were living ‘out in the cold’, brought them back from their disconnected, estranged, separated, alienated state. Since the word ‘psychiatry’ comes from psyche meaning soul and iatreia meaning healing (literally ‘soul healing’), Christ’s completely denial-free mind meant he was the ultimate psychotherapist.

Immensely confronting as Christ’s soundness was—it was the reason he was eventually murdered, crucified on a wooden cross—it was also immensely healing. His unevasiveness allowed Christ to see through people’s denials and think truthfully and thus effectively about their situation. He could see where and why people were ‘lost’ or alienated. He could ‘understand’ them, not in terms of first principle explanation of their condition (in Christ’s time there was no first principle scientific knowledge with which to explain the human condition), but in terms of being able to see into their situation, and this ‘understanding’ or appreciation represented true or pure love or compassion. To quote a reference to the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung: ‘Jung’s statement that the schizophrenic ceases to be schizophrenic when he meets someone by whom he feels understood. When this happens most of the bizarrerie which is taken as the “signs” of the “disease” simply evaporates’ (R.D. Laing, The Divided Self, 1960, p.165 of 218).

The evasive explanation for Christ’s ability to heal people was that he was able to perform supernatural feats called ‘miracles’. The concept of miracles protected humans from having to admit to Christ’s Page 434 of
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The comedian Spike Milligan had this insecurity-defying comment to make about Christ’s miracles: ‘They made him do miracles…“Loaves and fishes, loaves and fishes, just like that!” This isn’t indicative of the man. What he said and preached was enough. Why did he have to raise the dead? Did that make him holier? These are post-Jesus Christ PR stunts, raising the dead, walking on water. I find it an insult to the dignity of the man. I’ve written to The Catholic Herald about this. The outraged letters I’ve got! I said the Turin Shroud was a load of shit, I’ve said it for 15 years. Jesus Christ didn’t need to do tricks’ (Bulletin mag. 26 Dec. 1989).

To understand the loaves and fishes ‘miracle’ that took place when Christ spoke to a gathering of people, it is only necessary to understand how astonishingly honest and penetrating the unresigned mind is compared with resigned minds. Unresigned prophets are extremely rare and what they can do is utterly astonishing to resigned minds. They can talk hour after hour about so many things that resigned minds cannot go anywhere near, and because they are thinking truthfully they can clear up issue after issue, make sense of all manner of mystery. What they can do is ‘miraculous’ to resigned minds. They venture into what the resigned mind knows of as a terrifyingly dangerous minefield and do somersaults out there, lie on their backs, run around, skip, go to sleep out there—they grapple with the human condition with impunity. It is all incredible to the resigned mind but really it is just that unresigned prophets have never had to adopt lying. For humans to sit down and listen to an extremely unevasive, truthful description and analysis of themselves and their world, is mesmerising—even though the resigned mind soon afterwards starts blocking out all the truths that were brought to the surface as it realises their confronting implications. The point is while they were listening to Christ talk, the listeners would have been astonished and enthralled, and so forgotten their hunger, satisfied with the distribution of what little pooled food there was available. Later on after the event, unable to acknowledge the astonishing truth about what really took place, the resigned mind had to find an evasive way of recognising the specialness of the occasion, and that was achieved by saying ‘I remember a miracle occurred where a few fish and loaves of bread fed everybody’. Similarly, so overwhelmed would the audience Page 435 of
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The concept of miracles is the resigned mind’s way of acknowledging that an event is special without having to acknowledge its real significance. In fact the mystical interpretation the resigned world had to give to all the events in Christ’s life hid very significant truths about those events. In the case of ‘the resurrection’ Christ’s cause of offering himself as a retreat for humans from their corrupted state was martyred and thus did rise up after his death, but again, resigned humans had to find a way to mystify this important truth. Christ was murdered because resigned humans found his soundness and honesty unbearably confronting, but then resigned humans came to need and revere his soundness to such an extent that they deified him, brought him back into their lives in a very substantial way; metaphorically they did raise him from the dead (ie denied) state they had assigned him. To admit this however was to admit to being extremely corrupted which was unbearably confronting and so the best corrupted humans could do in terms of giving recognition to the marvel of Christ’s—their souls’—death and resurrection in their lives, was to say that Christ had literally risen from the dead, actually come back to life. Being able to use the description of Christ having actually risen from the dead was far less confronting than having to acknowledge that they were corrupted and needing to be born-again through the recognition they were giving Christ’s soundness.

One reason Christ had to accept martyrdom—he could have stayed away from Jerusalem where he knew there was extreme animosity towards him—was to set the standard for the resolve needed in those days to defy the denial of the soul’s true world. The other reason was that while he was present he was extremely intimidating of the egos of resigned people. As was explained in the Resignation essay in the section ‘Renegotiating resignation’, one of the problems this denial-free information faces is that it produces a Mexican stand-off, a situation where the resigned mind finds it impossible to derive an egocentric win from the denial-free understandings—the truth destroys all the lies of people’s delusions. The same egocentric stand-off was produced by the unevasive, denial-free soundness of Christ. It wasn’t until Christ had died that people were easily able to Page 436 of
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Christ clearly knew the effect of martyrdom because he explained that ‘unless an ear of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds’ (John 12:24). Throughout history we have seen the effect of martyrdom. For example Martin Luther King’s cause, his ‘dream’ of being able to ‘speed up that day when all God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands’ (Washington, 28 Aug. 1963), was given impetus when he was martyred. It is only after a gifted person dies that resigned humans have found themselves easily able to acknowledge their talent and contribution and this especially applies to the most threatening of all attributes namely innocence. There is no one more threatening to the resigned, evasive mind than a prophet. Christ knew his ‘resurrection’—the public acknowledgment of his soundness—would follow his death because he said he would ‘rise again’ after he died (see Matt. 20:19, 27:63; Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:34; Luke 18:33, 24:7,46; John 11:24, 20:9).

What needs to be emphasised is that, unlike the situation now, Christ was introducing a religion. He was the embodiment of the ideals that resigned, corrupted humans could defer to and live through. He was the focus of attention. He was what was confronting. What is being introduced now is the denial-free explanations of the human condition and it is these explanations or understandings that people live in support of. An individual isn’t the focus of attention. There is no religion involved, no faith or worship of a deity. It is the information that is doing the confronting and liberating. It is the information that resigned humans are initially at odds with, not an individual. As was described above, the Mexican stand-off is caused by the information confronting people and undermining their established practice of denial. This is significant because it means that it is not martyrdom but the logic of the explanations that ensures the denial-free state is resurrected. Recognition of the denial-free understandings of the human condition is not dependent on martyrdom but on the ability of the first-principle based, scientific explanations to make the truth undeniable. It is the accountability of the explanations, their capacity to explain the human condition and demystify our world that has, and will continue to, overcome human Page 437 of
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In fact martyrdom works against the objective of bringing first-principle based explanation of the human condition to humanity. With the blinds drawn on the world of denial it is now critical that I, the mind that was sufficiently unevasive to draw the blinds, present as much denial-free understanding as possible to avoid misunderstanding and confusion. To quote Free, ‘a complete banquet—a feast of explanation’ (p.200 of 228) has to be laid out. The more unevasive understandings available the less dangerous procrastination there will be. The priority now is to avoid procrastination with lots of explanation of the nature of the new paradigm and how it works. The need now is not to leave the door ajar so that some might be tempted to try and shut it again, but to open it completely—put an end to any doubt, insecurity and fear about the new paradigm.

The main point being made is that resigned humans had to represent Christ’s life in a non-confronting, abstract, mystical form. In particular, the way they acknowledged the soundness of Christ’s life was in the reverence they gave his life, but again this had to be done in a non-confronting, abstract, mystical way—by making him divine, from a place far away up in the clouds called ‘heaven’, sitting beside a bearded person called ‘God’. In truth, as has been explained, Christ was simply another human, with the only difference being that he had been sufficiently nurtured with love in his upbringing to not have to resign to a life of lying like virtually everyone else had to. Sir Laurens van der Post made this point about humans’ religious images reflecting their degree of alienation, when he wrote: ‘It seemed a self-evident truth that somehow the sheer geographical distance between a man and his “religious” images reflected the extent of his own inner nearness or separation from his sense of his own greatest meaning. If so this made the conventional Christian location of God in a remote blue Heaven just as alarming as, conversely, the descent of his Son to earth was reassuring’ (Jung and the Story of Our Time, 1976, p.31 of 275).