Around the 25th Earth year of my time as Drew Fisher, while traveling around Europe, a copy of novelist Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ leapt off of a shelf in a used book store where it secured itself into the hands of the vehicle of my eagerly awaiting mind. I remember holing up in the local Youth Hostel for three or four days as I devoured the novel. It was mesmerizing. Even in translation (the original, first published in 1953, was written in Kazantzakis' native Greek), I felt totally drawn in, totally immersed in Jesus' world, in his mind, and, more importantly, into the sacred relationship between he and his most beloved disciple, Judas.
Through his Judas and Jesus characters, Kazantzakis was able to convey his very personal interpretation of what he felt was the most misunderstood and misrepresented relationship in the history of his beloved Christian faith. In his theorization, Judas was not a traitor, he was more likely the most self-less, loving hero of Jesus' life. He was Jesus' devil's advocate, his test dummy, his butt-kicker, his no-bullshit, no-holds-barred, most honest, bestest BFF. Though our culture's collective unconscious has always shaded Judas in a shadow of evil and betrayal, Kazantzakis reminds us that Judas was, after all, one of Jesus' most trusted, most intimate followers! He was an Apostle! One of the Twelve! He may, in fact, have been the most trusted and beloved of all of the Apostles! To vilify him as history has done is to judge too quickly, to forget that we are all human, to forget that bigger, more powerful forces--forces that never knew either the real historical Judas (much less the real historical Jesus)--were motivated to color Judas as they have for reasons that we can only surmise, that we may never truly understand. But Kazantzakis chose a different perspective; he chose to have us imagine thinking that Judas' act of betrayal was done out of Love! That he was pressured by Jesus himself to perform this act. That Jesus needed someone to perform this act because it was an act that Jesus believed to be essential to the outcome of his plans--and that he chose Judas--chose Judas specifically for the reason that he knew that Judas was his strongest, most trusted, most loving, must understanding, least self-motivated, least self-conscious, least Ego-driven friend and follower.
We all think of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb, as the greatest force of Love that we've ever had in human form. In The Last Temptation, Kazantzakis is asking us to consider that perhaps Judas was one, too! After all, it was Judas' sacrifice that made Jesus' ultimate sacrifice possible! Imagine the kind of Love necessary to be that sacrificial lamb--to know that history would forever vilify you, that your name might become companion to that of Lucifer, Brutus, Marc Antony, and Hitler.
Kazantakis' refreshing view of Judas and his possible/likely relationship with Jesus was so startling to me, so contrary to all that I had been taught (and had imagined), that it caused a bursting of historical memes in me that set me into the process of questioning the "standard, accepted" version of any and every historical figure or event I came across. I was born quite a passive learner, content to observe and allow the conditioning of my family, culture, and social milieu shape my mind. I was very much a product of my conditioning. After reading The Last Temptation things changed. It seemed as if my exposure to Kazantzakis' "radical" ideas helped open the floodgates for the ensuing stream of "revisionist" or "alternative" historical books which continued to cross my path from that time on. Throughout my adult lifetime I've been privileged to have been exposed to "alternative" theories on a vast array of historical events, social-political themes--the political motives of The Roman Catholic Church, the European invasion and conquest of the Americas, the arrogance and presumptuousness of British Imperialism, the peaceful ideals and intentions of communism, socialism and anarchism, the social psychology and political-economic motivations behind the push for compulsory schooling for the masses, the illusions of U.S. freedoms and "democracy," the hidden evils of taxation, nationalism, corporate personhood, global finance, first world bias and the "evolutionary progress" of "civilization," etc., etc. The efforts of greedy, power-hungry, vindictive and fear-motivated people to conspire for their own successes has certainly played a significant role throughout the history of Homo sapiens sapiens--which has most certainly given rise to today's vast number and widely popular "conspiracy theories" and theorists (which, curiously, seems to have coincided with the sudden discouragement and diminishment of investigative journalism).
The effect the reading of The Last Temptation of Christ had on me was that I was able to experience a powerful display of the fact that there are myriad perspectives for any and every situation or event in life, that nothing is rarely what it seems, that there are alternative perspectives for the understanding, vilification, forgiveness, and love of all things. This was probably my first introduction to the concept that there is no good or evil, no right or wrong, no better or worse, there is only perspective and choice--though it would be a few years before the message and meaning of these words word first reach my consciousness.
Another teacher who helped me with the concept of expanding perspectives or using alternative perspectives--a teacher who's influence on me actually predates that of Nikos Kazantzakis by a few years--was Justin Moreward Haig, the semi-fictional, semi-biographical protagonist of Cyrill Scott's 1920 publication, The Initiate. Justin Moreward Haig--whom I shall heretofore refer to as "JMH" or "Master JMH"--was fond of repeating the phrase, "A certain point of view [or "perspective" he would also use] can be a prophylactic against all disease and to acquire the right point of view is the object of all mature thinking." This statement and all of the examples of this principle in action as lovingly recorded by Master JMH's dear friend and devote, Cyril Scott caused such a stir in my soul--a "divine disconnect" I would now call it, an awakening of my own natural curiosity--which then quite possibly led to a return to awareness of my own innate Divinity, to the growth that has, ultimately, led me to this point in my life.
Curiously, this was a book that my devoutly Roman Catholic mother had enthusiastically passed on to my brothers and I somewhere in the late 1970s after she had read it. What is, to me, unusual about this scenario, is that all five of us took inspiration from this book in vastly different ways--though in ways that did prove expansive to each of our perceptions of the world. The Initiate has been a source of reference and conversation among the five of us many times in the years since its first appearance in our lives. Several of us have read it multiple times at various times over the course of our lives.
To me The Initiate and Justin Moreward Haig represent my first exposure to spiritual human potential outside of a religious context. I had been attracted to the examples of human potential that came from the cast and characters of my parents' Roman Catholic faith--especially that of Jesus of Nazareth. But I had never before recognized a Christ-like character with spiritual acumen and spiritual power outside of a religious sect. In JMH I saw a person, albeit an extraordinary person, yet he was someone in whom I was able to identify a part of myself, a potentiality of my own; he was a person in whom I was able to recognize that regular--though perhaps more 'evolved'--humans were able to do "good" things and walk in a Christ-like way without an association or affiliation to an organized religion. You might say that Justin Moreward Haig, fictional character or not, was my first realization that messianic characters could exist in the real world--that Christ wasn't the first or only person to have mastered four-dimensional Earth-based Law through bringing spiritual Wisdom into a human bodymind.
The messianic potential of human beings has been important to me for in that through it I have been able to recognize my own true potential--which has then served to urge me on in my work toward ever-expanding Self-awareness, Self-actualization and Self-realization. Though Cyril Scott's recounting of Master JMH's oft-repeated axiom regarding perspective as prophylactic against sorrow, I eventually recognized that sorrow was a tool that one could choose for experience, for the creation of information that one could use for self-awareness and self-realization. I had learned to value the choice of joy, love, and over sorrow and suffering as the tools for my growth and unfolding but I have learned to understand that Master JMH often spoke and behaved in manners that were best understood by those with whom he interacted. Thus, the search for "the right point of view" has been understood as meaning "the point of view that best serves the highest expression of your highest vision for the greatest potential you can imagine for your Self." I have come to the current understanding that the perspective of Jesus, Justin Moreward Haig, Judas or even Journeyman Paul is holographic, that is, it is a perspective of infinite points of view, of infinite hats and cloaks, of infinite choice. Infinite possibilities.
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