Margaret Laird has said, “"In my CS re-exploration, I learned that error is eliminated by dealing with it as a statement of Truth.” 2x2=5 is nothing but 2x2=4 incompletely understood. Addictions persist not because they are anything of themselves, but because they are symbols incorrectly interpreted.
Accepting the dualistic belief of divisible (di = two, + visible) Being -- of a visible (humanity) and an invisible (divinity) -- as the way I am, I am confronted with a dualistic universe of frustrating alternatives. The parables of Jesus identify this original fallacy (sin) as the basic “dis-ease” (suffering). Each parable confronts a particular dualism and explodes it. For example:
"Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax-collector. The Pharisee, prayed to himself thus, 'God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.' But the tax collector standing far off would not even raise his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' I tell you this man went home justified rather than the other. (Gospel of Luke 8:10-14)
The parable of the two “pray-ers” has to do with human maps of territory and not with human concepts of morality. The Pharisee and the “sinner” are not the central focus since they are nothing but roles in a script. Jesus simply evokes popular conformity to a false religious ideal in order to set the stage for his parable.
The purpose of the Jesus parables, according to Bernard Brandon Scott, in his masterly book, Hear Then the Parable, is to subvert the listener’s ordinary levels of discursive thought. The parable throws a pebble in the gears of popular mind’s machinery, so its ritualized thinking begins to grind and not work so smoothly.
With the predictable stage set, the socially acceptable story grinds automatically on its way towards its conventional conclusion: reinforcing a religious dualism. But the storyteller short-circuits the expected finale and stuns the audience with an inverse conclusion. "The publican went home justified. The other did not." This felt like a slap in the face to his listeners, since they cannot understand what the characters did to get such reward-punishment. The white hat happy ending is abruptly aborted. They don’t get it.
Thanks to traditional biblical interpretation it is easy to not get the point of the Jesus parables and see their real targets. In this case, there are not just two characters presented. There are four. Jesus dismisses the obvious (visible) two humans and focuses on the not-so-obvious other two (invisible) characters. Jesus himself and the Temple are juxtaposed here---two views of divinity, one of which Jesus is indicating as an unseen evil. And it is this that shocks the listeners back into listening. Since clearly Jesus’ message is: The Goddess in a Box has to go! He is profaning the Temple, the God/Goddess in a box which claims that only religious insiders are presided over by a supreme, benevolent supernatural Big Religious Insider giving out good. Get the Box, get inside and get the good. In vandalizing the Temple symbol, Jesus reverses the absurd sacred-profane dualism behind the symbol and declares that God now dwells in the profane no longer in the “sacred.” The Word makes itself FLESH!
Mrs. Laird’s statement goes on: "In my CS re-exploration, I learned that error is eliminated by dealing with it as a statement of Truth. For instance, the concept "he who sins must suffer" (SH37) evolves from the fact that the I or Ego is Mind. Sin is the belief or theory that the I is man instead of Mind. The repudiation of one's divinity (sin) is responsible for the wants and woes of the human race."
All addictions are “getting” errors and not “doing” errors. They arise from incomplete Self-ownership and are frustrating attempts to possess Good. Possessiveness, apparent, for example, as both “obesity” and “anorexia”, is the overweening need to get control over Other. Behind every addiction is the sin of wanting “otherness” to rule the self, of wanting to be liked by the Goddess in a box in order to get good. Jesus is de-sacralizing this profanity and re-sacralizing ordinary, simple human being profaned by this false dualism.
Elsewhere Jesus calls the Temple the “Treasury.” Long before the word addiction meant being “abnormally tolerant to and dependent on something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming (especially alcohol or narcotic drugs)” it was a Roman economic term for the formal award by a court sentence in a lawsuit over debt. A slave-debtor was awarded surrendering to his master-creditor and forced to surrender. This false economic policy stands behind all the addictive roles of insider/outsider, of wanting/not wanting Other’s approval.
In this obsolete approach to being, no redeeming is possible. But Science, today’s language of Spirit, sees a misconception like 2x2=5 as nothing but the incomplete understanding of 2x2=4, and not as profanity. Today, the leading expert on dysfunctional, addictive societies, Ann Schaef Wilson, who wrote the book, “When Society is the Addict” consults with the Trappist monks about their not getting along with each other. Where is the boundary between profane and sacred today?
Science, the intuitive feeling of individual divine allness misinterpreted as every human addiction is coming to self-divinity for correction. Believing that this split in two feeling actually is, and naming it the spirit and the flesh, just sends me back inside the God-box buying into the belief that I must be liked by God. And I am on my way to growing a new addiction.
One sure sign that I am trapped inside my “sacred space” profaning myself by splitting theological hairs, is the loss of my sense of humor and a refusal to let language evolve, pretending that all my language is not ambiguous. My every addiction is mortal self saying, “I don’t get it. I need to get it; please help me get it.” Loss of humor is loss of true self-perspective. Without this perspective, humorlessly trapped in myself, I cannot get the laugh inside the joke I am as the divine-human being.
Everyday for months, I drove to work passing among all things, a church with a sign. The sign had a 6 word sermon and viewing it only as my old identification with Theology I rankled every time I passed it preaching to me. Then one day, Science re-interpreted it to me and I bellowed laughing out loud. The sign read: “God is still on the throne,” it said. Does “He” need some paper I wondered devilishly?
