Hi John. Hello, Love. (Indicates he wants to talk about the nature of love, and with Valentine’s day coming up, it’s a timely subject.)
(Indicates my facebook post this morning about forgiveness.) (Indicates himself as a youn man.) Did you know, as a young lad, I had a reputation for being slightly moody?
I read you had a reputation for a bit more than that!
(Shows me the concept of “growing up”.) Moving through childhood to adulthood is (often / inevitably) a process of separation from love. By the time you (shows me a flower blooming, puberty) you’re nearly mad with your need for love. (Indicates “first loves” and the intensity / need of those relationships.)
As an infant, we are born with the knowledge of love. We swim in love like a fish in water. We are born without a concept of neglect, anger, loneliness.
Some people begin learning these lessons almost immediately. (Shows an orphaned infant, shows me as an infant experiencing severe pain and my mother’s helplessness to stop it. Shows most of my consciousness outside this infant’s body, in a detached, intellectual way observing the body’s pain and thinking, “Huh. What is this?”)
The separation (happens) so that we can spend the rest of our (incarnated lives returning to love, over and over again!
(wiggles eyebrows in a saucy manner, and re-emphasized “over and over again”!)
(Shows me the facebook mention of mercury in retrograde.) All of existence is orbiting, moving through darkness to light, moving through ascension and descention. This is why there is never “the end of the world” – there is only the descention, the brief moment when descention reverses, becomes ascension again. Ascension is looking at everything you created on the way down, and giving it love!
You give it love, acceptance, forgiveness. It’s all very Dali Lama, Gandhi, All-You-Need-Is-Love. (eyebrow wiggle, wink!)
I can’t believe you just cited yourself there, alongside the Dali Lama and Gandhi. You’re such a sauce pot!
Next thing I’ll be comparing myself to Jesus!
Jesus died for you, John Lennon!
You know, I had a sit down with Jesus about this whole “dying for me” thing. I said, “Brother, people are saying you died for *me*. I never asked you to die for me, brother. Why’d you do it???”
Do you know what he said?
“My mistake, will you forgive me for dying for you?”
Wow, that’s not what I expected.
See, because a lot of people don’t appreciate the guilt of the idea that Jesus died for their sins, especially when he died thousands of years before I did any of the nasty shit I did! Oh did I ever sin! Whooooo!
I was surprised that Jesus stumped me! So I had a (cigarette), thought about it and said, “Alright, I forgive you.” And do you know what I did next? I cried like a fucking baby!
Wow.
Weeping still happens when you have no tear ducts. At least I can cry beautifully, if I wanted to. That Jesus thing, that was an UGLY cry, I was Grotesque! I know that’s difficult to imagine! (toothy grin.)
The thing with love, the weeping, it was this realization that we are all one. Can you believe that? I wrote how many songs with just a base understanding of the concept, and I’m still wrapping myself around it?
Trying to wrap yourself around love takes all the time in existence, you’re attempting to hold your own consciousness while glimpsing your wholeness with all that is. It’s wild! I’m not even sure Jesus can do it!
“All That Is” really is just about orbiting, moving through “dislove” or love deficit so that you can recognize love on a deeper level (shows a yoga stretch progressing – as you flex your muscles and gently move through discomfort and pain your capacity to hold the stretch increases, your strength increases.” Life is Love Yoga, ha ha ha!
So John, would this make you a Christian now?
Ah, love! Wouldn’t you like to know! (sits for a few moments, thinking.)
Ah. (Shows me a dislike of narrowing options.) I would identify as a Christian if Jesus were the only wise man in my orbit. Were I a Christian, I would primarily relate to Jesus. But then, I wouldn’t be able to annoy George by interrupting his mediations with previous incarnations of the Dali Lama, would I? I can’t leave that poor chap alone with those people, he might disappear into Nirvana!
Hey, do you think you guys might come back and be another rock band?
(laughs) Well in case you haven’t noticed, we have a couple of Beatles still alive! I wouldn’t want to knock anyone off early. That’d just piss ‘em off.
I’m not sure why I asked that, either. I guess I’m finally having a fan girl moment.
FINALLY! (fluffs his hair femininely) I was beginning to think I’d lost my touch!
Love you, John. (Blows me a kiss.)
Kate Sitka 
I was having a tough time wrapping my understanding around that exchange between Jesus and John and why he would weep so bitterly afterward. I couldn’t understand what he realized in that moment. Then I went to your Facebook to understand the context and saw this quote by Louise Hay, “Forgiving is a gift to yourself. It frees you from the past, the past experience, the past relationships. It allows you to live in the present time. When you forgive yourself and forgive others, you are indeed free.” I feel like that might tie into this somehow.
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I didn’t get the sense it was a bitter crying, more that complete release weeping. Kind of like the double rainbow video on YouTube of that guy having this transcendent moment between his own individuality and his unity with everything. It’s like catching a glimpse of reconciling two contradictory things: unity and separation.
Does that make sense?
Not sad or bitter at all, but healing, release, surrender, relief, realizing something that was there all along, that you’d previously learned to live without, but that you’d never stopped needing.
He was also being a bit tongue-in-cheek about it, exaggerating the ugliness to illuminate the beauty.
I obviously failed in my translation to communicate the subtext. Telepathic communication is 90% the intent and implication between the actual words – frequently there are no actual words, so I try to over-explain and sometimes this results on killing the humour or stomping on the subtleties, nuances and double-meanings… But I didn’t explain ENOUGH here. Thank you for your question which gave me the chance to clarify.
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Ha! You know it’s really funny how knowing that somehow completely changed the story for me and how it fits into the rest of the material. Here I am knowing a little about the back story of how John was publicly ripped for comparing the Beatles with Jesus and imagining that he might have had some sort of unresolved issues regarding that and I thought he was purging it in that moment. And when Jesus asked John to forgive HIM for dying for him it was almost to me like a subtle apology on behalf of the ignorant Christians who persecuted John over that whole controversy and how it might have poisoned John’s faith somehow. Then John speaking about the guilt and all you could probably imagine how I had come to see it from the perspective I had. Thanks for clearing it up!
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That’s interesting, I hadn’t looked at it that way.
“Jesus died for you, John Lennon!” was meant as a teasing joke / kind of IS a joke, so yeah, I don’t think I ever took that seriously. I certainly wasn’t expecting the conversation to go the way it did, so at the time of writing this entry, I was more surprised than anything else. As well, in “medium mode” I’m just not analyzing what’s said, so I don’t think to clarify ambiguities. It’s important to have someone with “brain engaged” to turn these things over. Thank you again.
I think the words / energy exchanged was less about the LITERAL words “Jesus died for you” and more about releasing the pent-up energy. “Jesus died for you” is less literal in this context and more symbolic of the relationship between love, joy, separation and grief. The expression of tears is the expression of the release / relief, and on top of that John was talking about how surprised he was to be having a rapturous moment like that, so the way he chose to relate to it / incorporate it was to have a good ugly cry, to be vulnerable.
It’s like recognizing the pattern of your own life or existence actually makes sense in the over-arching resonance of ALL life and existence.
This is all very awkward to put into words. That’s probably why there are a hundred different faith systems using millions of words to describe something that is best understood intuitively and individually.
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Oh and apparently my mother’s been learning the Hula at the cancer center!
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I can understand how it’s difficult to put into words the things you are trying to say. It’s also very hard to wrap your mind around these ideas without having some sort of similar personal emotional experience to compare it to. I’ve had small moments in my life where I realized that things just fit right and I’ve wept. And it was probably “ugly” too but also incredibly beautiful. There is a total surrender in those moments, for sure.
I think my particular perspective on that whole exchange between Jesus and John is also heavily filtered through my personal prior beliefs about Christianity and the whole Jesus dying for you thing. I know you say it wasn’t necessarily literal in this sense, and I had assumed that to a degree, but it’s a topic I kind of struggle with at times, given my background.
I used to be the traditional evangelical Christian, believing in the Bible as the literal word of God, etc. I wouldn’t have been caught dead reading a blog like this. But then one day I was bored and I decided to search “Jesus near death experiences” on Google. I suppose you might imagine it was probably a “bump” from my spirit guides, or something. I don’t know. But, for some reason, I had been thinking that day that there were all these people who had claimed to speak to Jesus and I was curious to hear what he had to say to them, especially in a modern context.
From that day forward, my perspective on God and religion began to change quite dramatically. I discovered that God’s love is unconditional and without regard to one’s religious affiliations or set of beliefs, and that felt “right” to me. I could see how all of the various spiritual traditions fit into a model of God like that. That was an incredible weight lifted off my shoulders, since I used to worry that anybody who wasn’t a Christian was going to to to hell if they didn’t believe Jesus was the Son of God, etc. So you can imagine how this “new” idea about God’s total acceptance of everyone was incredibly comforting, but it put me at odds with the traditional beliefs I held that Jesus died as a sacrifice to appease God’s anger against my sin, etc.
I wondered why it would be necessary to die for me at all, if you view his death as a sacrifice for your sins. Some sources even claim that it didn’t happen and Jesus lived on to have children and such. I obviously can’t know the details of that event for certain, but it’s easy to get sucked into the details like that. As humans we like it clean and well defined, I suppose. I see it more from a high-level symbolic point of view these days, but it’s interesting to consider all of that background I have and how it came into play when I read this blog post of yours. I don’t understand all the baggage I carry about it, I suppose. At best, I can only ponder. But somehow I enjoy wrestling with it too. Having all the answers would be a dissatisfying cheat in the game. It’s like a puzzle that is me and I’m trying to figure out my own puzzle, while simultaneously trying to understand how it fits into the BIG PUZZLE. Your blog provides me lots of food for thought.
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Thank you, Phoggy, I’m so glad you enjoy the blog!
One thing I’ve noticed from a variety of spiritual teachers, is the more experienced they are, the more their lessons all fall in line with each other to basically say, “You cannot know it in a thousand lifetimes, and you can know it in the next moment of your life.” It can be as easy or as difficult as you want, and it can be explained a thousand ways and never completely. The Tao cannot be named, that which can be named is not the Tao. The more you know, the more you know you can’t really know.
I tend to just “let go” of the burden to have to understand it all. I just assume that on some level, a part of me never forgets, a part of me is capable of understanding the things that don’t make rational sense to me. I just trust that on some level, I *do* just understand it, and I accept that while I’m awake and rattling around the business of my life, I don’t have to HOLD ON to this concept and carry it with me at all times. But I rejoice in those moments in meditation or deep thought or prayer when I suddenly catch a glimpse of it. I feel like it’s there, in the back of my mind, and I’ll remember it again any second now.
But it’s endlessly delightful to indulge in *trying* to understand it.
I’ve written previously about how my own religious upbringing was limited to a couple of visits to Sunday school. I had no concept of the “Jesus died for your sins” thing until Sweetie explained it to me a few years ago. Out of context, it seems really crazy! (Then again, a lot of people would call me crazy too.)
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