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Musical Interlude
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A Conversation with Kell Kearns
The Interview for KELL: As for the good news, there seems to be a huge coming together, a confluence of human genius and wisdom, to accommodate a great shift in humanity. From “minor” miracles like the finding of the Nag Hammadi texts within our time to the technical achievements which have truly united us in space and time on this planet...all points to history being ripe for what Jesus called the coming of the Child of Humankind, in forgiveness and oneness. ANDREW: I think that what we are now able to do is such a miracle. We’re able to look at the historical Jesus and see the shape of his really radical, revolutionary vision. Thanks to the Nag Hammadi library we’re able to hear the authentic transmission of Jesus as a liberation of all humanity. And, thanks to this vast mystical renaissance that the world is going through, open to the truths of all of the mystical traditions, all of which speak not of original sin but original blessing, we are able to make the connection between the revelation of Jesus and the fundamental revelation of divine identity and divine power as the fundamental truth of human nature and the visionary truth of all of the traditions. So, we have everything we could possibly need to incarnate now - including a vast crisis that makes it absolutely essential - the Christ force. KELL: It’s interesting that from the very beginning of the Jesus story women are presented in a revolutionary way. Jesus, as avatar, is surrounded by independent, free women. The Magnificat, The song attributed to Mary of Nazareth, when she receives divine revelation concerning the life of her son, is a profoundly dangerous piece of folk art. Mary could have been arrested and killed for making such bold statements about a world of liberation having arrived through her womb. Today she would be considered “mentally imbalanced” by the powers that be, and medicated. ANDREW: One of the deepest ways of seeing Jesus, I think, and of seeing Jesus’ teachings is as the voice of the Magnificat. Mary births him; Mary shapes him; Mary fills him with her revolutionary love passion, this revolutionary love passion that is destined to transform the world. And, he goes out then and, as a male with an essentially male audience that needs total transformation, he announces the great truths of the sacred feminine to bring them into revolutionary play in history. KELL: I’m taken by the unfolding of crucial events in Jesus’ life that mirror our own spiritual walk. The epiphany of the Baptism, the symbol of the rise of a new humanity, for instance, is followed immediately by the painful emptiness and tutoring in the wilderness. ANDREW: What happens on the path to Christ-hood, I think, is this. The first initiation is the baptism, the initiation into divine identity and the power and joy and radiance of that divine identity. But, the being who has that initiation has to prove in the deepest sense to the divine that they are willing to use these extraordinary powers that come from divine identity not for their own good but for the good of the transformation of the entire planet. So, after that first initiation there is always a temptation in which the being whom is becoming conscious of these powers is offered by their own shadow the temptation to use those powers for power. You have to be able to sacrifice your own power to the powers of love and not the power of power. So that all that you are is poured out in service to God’s great resurrection of the human race. KELL: I love your line in Son of God that, “For Jesus the entire creation and all the beings in it were light waves of a vast sea of light, of a vast ocean of divine love.” What do you suppose Jesus’ prayer and meditation time was like? We know he spent a lot of time in solitary contemplation. ANDREW: I think that Jesus understood that to be able to perform his mission he had to constantly retreat into the unified force field of God in the primordial experience of origin in the Abba. I and the Father are One, he said. What this experience feels like is almost impossible to describe, but what happens in this experience is that all the walls between you and reality fall away. And everything that arises, arises in the vast you, and you experience at the most fundamental level that unobstructed consciousness is manifesting as the creation, and that unobstructed bliss consciousness is you. From that experience of absolute divine identity arises great compassion and great energy. So, refueled from that experience you can go back into the world of duality with this secret knowledge of unity and with all the powers that that knowledge gives you of joy, of energy, of compassion and insight to work at the transfiguration of the world of duality into reflecting more and more of the world of unity. KELL: Jesus challenged his listeners to enact the truth of divine love and forgiveness here and now with ever greater focus and fervor. He bid them to begin the New Creation in their minds and then to live there upon the earth, seeing the heavenly perfection of love everywhere, thereby co-creating it everywhere. He was not an eschatological prophet. Matthew’s litany of the horrors that will lead to the coming of the Messiah are a later redaction attributed to Jesus at a time of the destruction of the temple and the slaughter of the Jewish people, when the forces of death seemed invincible to any other than violent mythic means. ANDREW: The fantasy that Jesus is talking about a time in the future has served the elites of the church all too well. Jesus is never talking about a kingdom that is coming. He is talking always about a kingdom that already exists, that the awakened eyes of the awakened heart can see, and that the awakened consciousness of the awakened divine child can know and that is demanding to be enacted in acts of sacred passion, sacred compassion and sacred hunger for justice. KELL: The New Testament and Gnostic writings assume a whole new level of meaning once you open to perceiving The Feminine. Jesus comes across as a radical feminist. He uses example after example to lift women, while deflating the oppression of the patriarchy. How much of what Jesus was about do you think had to do with transforming Patriarchy?
KELL: Against all expectations Jesus – as Christ – walked a path of absolute nonviolence. His teachings are under-girded by a sense that nonviolence with forgiveness and love is the direct path of eternal life and liberation from the tentacles of fear, hatred, oppression and murder. There was something urgent about his call for nonviolence. His shout to Peter to put down his weapon was his last admonition to his hearers while in the flesh. Speak about the depth of Jesus’ nonviolence. ANDREW: He must have understood that in the Roman addiction to power and domination and empire there was a psychosis that threatened the fundamental health of the human race. He must have understood that the only way to heal that psychosis was through the chemo-therapy of the divine feminine and the radiance of compassion. He must have understood that the very fact that the Romans had the enormous power that they had proved at some level that the human race was turning into a psychotic that could potentially destroy everything. He must have understood that the only way of healing that psychotic was to become the fully realized divine human that could radiate the power of love and not the power of power. KELL: Weigh in on the dialog about the potential of a marriage between Jesus and Mary of Magdala. ANDREW: If the whole meaning of Jesus’ transmission is to bring in the power of the sacred marriage, this marriage between heaven and earth, transcendence and immanence, the transcendent father and the embodied mother, and therefore birth a new love consciousness that can change everything, in his own life he would have to enact that sacred marriage. He would have to live it. Whether or not Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married, what they lived was obviously the profoundest imaginable mystical love affair in which the sacred masculine in him merged with the sacred feminine in her and in which almost certainly she gave him as much as he gave her. And in this relationship Jesus mirrored the new relationship possible between men and women who tantrically use human love and human sexuality as a way of merging the sacred masculine and the sacred feminine within themselves. KELL: I love the telling of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem and his death, in the Gospel of Mark. Mark is the oldest of the biographical gospels, and it depicts a Jesus proclaiming his message of a New Humanity with striking urgency and clarity as he travels from Galilee to the sacred city. He tries every means to open the eyes of his followers as to the presence within them here and now of the Kingdom of God. ANDREW: Jesus is fomenting a total revolution. He is a total revolutionary of love on every level. And the revolution starts from a revolution of heart consciousness, which exposes the person to the outrageous identity of his or her fundamental consciousness with God, fundamental identity with the whole creation, and fundamental potential in and under God for creating a new world, which actually mirrors the love and justice of the heart of God. From that revolution of the heart comes a tremendous social, political, economic program which utterly, utterly alters all of the laws, all of the elites, all of the hierarchies of the patriarchy to reveal a holy, new way of living in radical harmony, in radical unity, in radical compassion on every level with all human beings and all creation. KELL: The seeming cataclysm that ended in the miracle of resurrection....What was going on with Jesus in the agony of Gethsemane, and the tortures of the cross?
KELL: Perhaps the most triumphant point in the gospel story is when the resurrection is realized in Jesus’ followers. What does it say that Mary of Magdala was the first human being to see the Christ resurrected in Jesus? That the whole glorious myth rests on her shoulders. Why Mary? Women’s testimony wasn’t even allowed at trials in those days. ANDREW: Can you imagine seeing your Beloved transfigured in that way? She saw him resurrected! And she knew that the power and mission that he had come to bring in had resulted in a cosmic flowering of new energy on this planet to begin the great birthing process that would eventually birth the divine human in the way that he had been born himself. He had been born in the resurrection dimension, and because he had been truly born in the resurrection dimension, a great energy had been unleashed which made possible the birth of the divine human race. She knew that so she knew that she could repose in that, she could draw on that, and that energy had been unleashed. It had been like a nuclear explosion which had saturated all things with its radioactivity. She was radioactive with that realization. And she knew in infinite joy that it was the central truth of the new humanity. KELL: There is, among the Wisdom movement a strong element of quietism. Some think it does not matter what they do in acting globally, that they will hold their personal center when they can, and not venture into the wild world of apocalyptic times. Thus, they do not act for change. How do you see the importance of our spiritual efforts to spread light to the world? ANDREW: The most extraordinary thing that becomes clear on this path, I think, is that the future of humanity and the future of this birth in this world of the divine human is not only for this world. Because when this birth takes place in this dimension, and in this very intractable matter, the reverberations of that birth will alter the substance of the entire cosmos. And that explains why this battle for the future is so brutal. Because on this birth depends not only the future of this planet but the future of many, many different worlds which we have no knowledge of. We are interconnected at the most profound level with all of the realms of the entire universe. So a birth here in this difficult, intractable, fiercely darkened matter will actually open up the entire universe to a whole new level of potential. KELL: Will we survive the birth? Will the light dawn on enough of us so the world knows that only gentleness inherits the planet? ANDREW: There is something in us that does want this transformation, and there is something in us that is so depressed, so self-hating, so loathing of the life that we have created for ourselves, that it secretly longs for the destruction of the planet to get over with its pain. I think we are now in the very naked thick of that struggle, and I don’t think anybody knows what the outcome of that is going to be. I think we know that God has willed the transfiguration of humanity. But we don’t know whether human beings can will it with enough intensity and strength, and capacity for suffering and sacrifice and self-donation, to enable it to come through. Not knowing is not a source of pain to me. Not knowing is a tremendous challenge to me and you to actually get on with the business of Christing ourselves so that we can be signs of this flame-eergy, signs of this hope, signs of this creativity, so that we can wake ourselves up from this massive, world-wide depression in our own lives and show what joy is accessible to us, what energy becomes accessible to us, to inspire people. If you think the birth is inevitable, you’re going to be lazy. If you think the death is inevitable, you’re going to be despairing. The truth is that we, you and I, have to choose this birth in ourselves, be born in its dimension and radiate its powers, and gamble like heaven for the future. CLICK HERE TO ORDER CLICK HERE to order Andrew’s video, Sacred Activism CLICK HERE to access Andrew’s website COPYRIGHT 2006, Heaven on Earth Creations, LLC
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ANDREW: Every aspect of his teaching is the reversal of the values of the patriarchal domination. In place of a hunger for power, Jesus represents in his entire story the power of powerlessness, the power of vulnerability, the power of compassion, the power of gentleness. In place of the patriarchy’s emphasis on force, Jesus constantly represents the force of gentleness, the force of a vulnerability to God, the force of a vulnerability to compassion. In the place of the patriarchy’s emphasis on all of the harsh, masculine virtues, Jesus’ transmission is all about a celebration of the feminine virtues throughout. And, he knew exactly what he was doing. And he must have known that the emphasis on the patriarchy both in Judaic religion and in Rome would result in the end in the destruction of the planet. He came as a man not to emphasize the virtue of being a man, but as a man to show what a man profoundly feminized by divine love would be like as a sign to the patriarchy of the way out of the madness of patriarchy.
ANDREW: You have in Jesus’ life the most astonishing diagram, the most lucid and terrifying diagram of what it actually means to become one with The Christ. So you have the great awakening at the baptism. You have the temptation by the shadow to use the powers for darkness instead of light, for power instead of love. Then you have the plunging into the world and the expending of these powers out of absolute sacrifice, out of absolute surrender, out of absolute self-gift to heal, and to raise the dead, and to spread the transmission of this new divine humanity. And then you come to a second tremendous ordeal. Although Jesus attained a very high level of realization–and you can see that from the ministry–he was still in some subtle way, Jesus. What had to happen then is that all of this identification with his own identity had to be systematically and ruthlessly destroyed. That is why the crucifixion then manifested, and why he had to go through Gethsemane, and why in Gethsemane he had to make another surrender at an even deeper level: “ Not my will but your will”, which prepared for the absolute excruciation of the crucifixion, which prepared for the shattering of the atom of his false self to reveal the phoenix power of the resurrection force, which gave birth to a new world.