John - Elijah
God Gives Blessings; JWK Ascent to Life 5/8
What Kaiser would call John-consciousness, is simply the state of mind that is the access door to the spiritual journey, the path to Salvation. We start out in this world thinking that we are real and that the world we see is real and that God is a dubious character who created this mess with good days and bad days, with rain and sunshine: life’s a b*tch and then you die, or so we think. That is purely dualistic thought, where the observer and the observed alike are separate from one another. The fact that God would have created the physical world, grants it objective reality, and most importantly it grants us objective reality as well.
Things begin to shift if we begin to overcome our fear and open ourselves up to more of a relationship with God, and become more accepting of the fact, that the life we experience may not just be an imposition or an attack on our peace of mind, but a series of classrooms in which we can overcome ourselves, and become freer and happier. That shift in consciousness is what A Course in Miracles in due course would call the Happy Learner.
All this the Holy Spirit sees, and teaches, simply, that all this is not true. ²To those unhappy learners who would teach themselves nothing, and delude themselves into believing that it is not nothing, the Holy Spirit says, with steadfast quietness:
³The truth is true. ⁴Nothing else matters, nothing else is real, and everything beside it is not there. ⁵Let Me make the one distinction for you that you cannot make, but need to learn. ⁶Your faith in nothing is deceiving you. ⁷Offer your faith to Me, and I will place it gently in the holy place where it belongs. ⁸You will find no deception there, but only the simple truth. ⁹And you will love it because you will understand it.
From a time where we thought our judgment was all important, and in fact made us into adults in the eyes of the world, we now come to a place where we begin to doubt our judgement, and realize that any situation, given to the Holy Spirit, is a learning opportunity and, seen in that light, it is a Blessing that life offers us to wake up from our own pseudo reality that was based on our valuations.
Kaiser cannot help himself and takes a little dig at Christianity, noting that the belief that we are saved, implied in vicarious salvation, actually kills the expectation of a coming Messiah. A few years after his death, Frank Zappa gave him a little assist with his song Catholic Girls. This is exactly the ego’s point, it merely wants its cake and eat it too, and vicarious salvation lets us off the hook.
What the ego wants to avoid at all cost is the metanoia, the change of mind that Jesus talked about, which the Course calls the miracle.
Forgiveness, on the other hand, is still, and quietly does nothing. ²It offends no aspect of reality, nor seeks to twist it to appearances it likes. ³It merely looks, and waits, and judges not. ⁴He who would not forgive must judge, for he must justify his failure to forgive. ⁵But he who would forgive himself must learn to welcome truth exactly as it is. (ACIM, W-pII.1.4:1-5)
The Course always emphasizes that unavoidably an experience will come to end your doubting, in other words, don’t worry too much about the theory, it may help you a little but it is the practice that will bring about the experience. Kaiser for his part bemoans the hypocrisy of formalized religions everywhere. He expands Marx’ dictum that religion is opium for the people, and about Christianity and its dogmas, Kaiser basically views them as a tomb where we buried the teachings of Jesus, leading to two thousand years of spiritual stagnation.