This is in contradistinction to the Old Testament teaching, which can be characterized as the Gospel of Punishment. Moses, the Old Testament, taught an eye for an eye, punishment for the wrongs done to one.

Jesus Christ taught forgiveness for all wrongs done to one. Thus, the Old and New Testaments are diametrically different from each other; the two cannot, therefore, mix. They should not even be contained in the same book, Bible, except in so far that the Old Testament gave some sort of historical perspective to the teachings of the New Testament; that is, the Old Testament describes the world and its laws that the New Testament came to replace, supercedes.

Let us briefly recapitulate what Jesus Christ taught his followers. He said that all the teachings of past teachers of God, prophets, could be summarized as: “Do unto others as one wants them to do to one”. How does one want others to do to one? One wants other people to love one. Therefore, one must do unto others how one wants them to do to one: love them. Jesus taught love for all people.

Loving other people, he said, includes forgiving them the wrongs they do to one. Whereas the world does not forgive those who wrong it, those who follow his teaching, Jesus said, are different from the rest of the world because they forgive those who wronged them.

In the only prayer Jesus taught his disciples, the “Our Lord’s Prayer”, he taught them to pray thus: “Our father, who is in heaven, forgive us our sins because we have first forgiven those who sinned against us”. That is to say that, as it were, we have a covenant, a contract with our father in heaven, God, to forgive us our sins only when we forgive each other our sins against each other.

In the story of a man going to worship God and remembered that his neighbor wronged him, Jesus said that the man must first go home and forgive his neighbor before he prays to, worships, God.

How many times should we forgive our neighbors wrongs, someone asked him? He said: seventy seven times seventy seven times; that is, infinitely.

Elsewhere, Jesus said that God does hear all our prayers to him. Indeed, that he has already answered all our prayers and granted all our requests before we ask for them, for he knows what our needs are before we ask for them. However, to receive the answers to our requests, prayers, that God has already given us, we must forgive one another.

He made it crystal clear that it is on forgiveness that hinges receiving the gifts of God: peace, happiness and abundance.
And to test him, to see if he really teaches a different gospel from the one taught by Moses, the Old Testament, hence violates the Mosaic Law that prevailed in the land, they brought a woman who had committed adultery and was caught red handed in the act.

Jesus was going about teaching forgiveness for sins, so here is a test case to see whether he would forgive the sinner, thereby publicly violating the laws of Moses. If he did, he would have become a lawbreaker, hence is arrested, tried and punished according to the laws of Moses.

Jesus knew why they brought the test case to him. The case was chosen to give him a public opportunity to declare his teaching, to point out the distinctions between his from Moses teaching. (Please do not see Jesus as a victim. He knew that he chose everything that happened to him. He knew that our lives on earth are like a script that he and all of us collectively wrote. Each of us is merely enacting out what is in our collective script, the play, the drama of the world. As such none of us is a victim. Jesus knew exactly what was going to happen before it happened. He knew that the Jews would test him, would bring the adulterous woman to test him. He knew what his response would be. He knew that it was necessary for him to use that episode to clarify his teachings.

Because he knew that he was going through a script all of us wrote he had no fear or anger at the consequences of the action he took. He knew that his teachings that superseded the Mosaic teaching would be rejected by the people and as a result that they would reject and kill him. He also knew that he would resurrect from death. That was part of his script, our collective script. The rest of us chose to forget that we collectively wrote the script. We forget it and then see ourselves as victims unto whom bad things are happening. We then feel fear and anger. It is part of our own script to choose and forget our role in so choosing so as to justify seeing the external environment as harming us to justify anger and fear, hatred of God and each other etc.)

For a while, he seemed to ignore the wily foxes of this world, but eventually outfoxed them. He said: let him who has not sinned cast the first stone at the sinful woman.

Since we are all sinners, we have no right to judge other people as sinners and should not punish sinners.

Thus the accusers left and did not punish the woman.
Jesus said to the woman: where are they that accused you of sin? She said that they are gone. He said that he, Jesus, did not accuse her of sin, either, but that she should go and sin no more. Sin is not to be encouraged but to be eliminated, yet that is no reason to judge and punish sinners.

Jesus walked his talk. He was arrested and his irascible apostle, Peter, tried to defend him by drawing his sward and attacking one of those who came to arrest him; that is, Peter tried to defend Jesus.

Jesus said to Peter: put away your swords for those who live by the sword, war, die by his sword, and die in war.
He said that if he had wanted to defend himself that he could have marshaled legions to defend him but that he came to show the world a different mode for dealing with conflict/attack:

defenselessness, which is forgiveness. He said that defenselessness/ forgiveness gives peace and joy, whereas defensiveness and attack results in conflict and war.

Finally, they subjected Jesus to a kangaroo court, accused him of doing what he did not do; he brought peace but they accused him of bringing war against the Roman overlords, tried him and found him guilty.

While being tried, Jesus did not defend himself. They sentenced him to death. Before he died on the Cross-he asked God to forgive those who were murdering, him for they do not know what they are doing.

There is no two ways of looking at it. Jesus taught the gospel of forgiveness. He told those slapped on one cheek to turn the other cheek to be slapped, rather than defend them selves; those whose clothes were stolen to give the rest of their properties to the thief, rather than fight and punish him.

Simply stated, Jesus taught forgiveness as the true meaning of love. To him, forgiveness gives peace and joy and is the only path to salvation.

You either accept what Jesus taught: forgiveness and love, or you do not; but you cannot make any mistake as to what he taught you.

That does not mean that what the man taught makes sense. Clearly, it does not make sense to our rational egos. Our rational egos tell us that if we permit those who attack us to do so, that they could harm and even kill us. The ego tells us that if we want to survive in the physical plane that we must not forgive our attackers, that we must defend ourselves and, if necessary, kill our attackers before they kill us.

The gospel of self-defense and punishment, the gospel of Moses, makes for adaptation to the exigencies of this world. If we did not defend ourselves, we could be killed, hence the gospel of forgiveness taught by Jesus, our earthly ego based reason tells us is the gospel of death, and escape from this world.

Nietzsche said it all: Jesus, the rational philosopher tells us, teaches a gospel of death, for if you do not defend yourself, if you forgive those bent on attacking and killing you, you will be killed and die. To Nietzsche, Jesus’ teaching is nihilistic, that is, it negates this world, negates the individual’s life, the ego, and is an escape from the realities of this world. Christianity, Nietzsche says, is a gospel of weak women cringing for life and he wants us to throw it away and embrace the gospel of power, attack and defense, the gospel of the pure human being, the ego, Zarathustra, the human animal, the blond beast. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra.)

In light of the empirical fact that forgiveness may lead to death and exit from this world, why should a rational person take Jesus and his gospel of forgiveness seriously? This really is the only question one must ask. The question is not what Jesus taught, for he taught love and forgiveness, but whether we should accept it, and why should we do so?

If we follow the logic of this world, which is to do whatever we could to survive as physical beings, we cannot accept the doctrine of forgiveness, we cannot accept Jesus’ teaching, and we cannot be Christians. For us to accept the teaching of forgiveness, defenselessness and love we must have a different frame of reference, one that transcends the frame of reference of this world.


The premise on which the concept of forgiveness is predicated is that the external world we see is not real is like a dream and that what is done in it is like activities in a dream.

What is done in a dream has not happened. The person you see attack, harm, even destroy your body did what he or she did to you in a dream; he did so in your and his mutual dream. In reality, what he did, and what you did, has not happened except as in a dream. (This is solipsism, idealism, as in George Berkeley’s Dialogues and Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea.)

In a dream, it is the dreamers that are responsible for projecting out their dream world. One projected out the person who hurt one.

The world is a mutual dream, therefore, the person who hurt one projected out the person he hurt in his own dream.

In effect, you, the dreamer, made the person who hurt you to do so; he made himself to do what he did, to hurt you. Both of you agreed to do to what you did to each other and for each other.

In reality, both of you did not, in fact, do anything hurtful to one another, for what is done in a dream has not been done in fact.

Therefore, you must forgive what you see other people do to you on earth, in the dream, and must forgive yourself what you did to you and to other people. (Whether other people, those you forgive, forgive you or not is for them to decide and is not your concern, what should concern you is whether you forgive other people.)

Forgiveness is for all things done on this earth, including what ordinarily we call heinous crimes, such as murder, discrimination, rape, slavery etc. Do you need example? What did Jesus do? He forgave those who murdered him, implying that if you accept his gospel that you, too, must forgive those who murder you.

It is only a dream. The person who seems to have killed you in the dream has not, in fact, killed you; the person you seem to have killed in a dream has not been killed. Neither of you did anything other than dream that killing each other is possible. This world is a dream where we dream that it is possible to hurt each other, and eventually kill each other.

Life extended its permanent self to us; God created us eternal; but we dream the opposite of how God created us, joyous and eternal, and dream that harm and death is possible.

Despite our dreams, we remain as God created us, formless spirit, unified with God and with one another, eternal and immortal and nothing can harm us. We are eternally safe in God. We are protected in God while dreaming that we can be hurt on earth.

In practical terms, this means that a sociopath who hurts other people should not feel guilty or remorseful. A sociopath does not feel remorseful, anyway. That is to say that the sociopath is actually more realistic, for he knows that he, in fact, did nothing to the persons he seems to have hurt. The seeming amoral criminal does not feel guilty for he knows that no matter what he does to other people that he did not do wrong. (And by the same token, if you shoot and kill criminals, you should not feel guilty, for you did not do anything wrong. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.)

To feel guilty and remorseful is to assume that what one does on earth is real and is not done in dream. But if what is done on earth is like actions in a dream, one should never feel guilty for anything one did wrong to other people. By the same token, other people should not feel guilty for anything wrong that you believe that they did to one.
You should not forgive any one for what he did to you or ask people to forgive you for what you think that you did wrong to them. Neither you nor they have done any wrong to each other (or good either, for what is done in a dream is neither good nor bad).

Do not ask other people to forgive you, for what you did to them; you did nothing to them. Do not ask those you murder to forgive you, for you did not murder any one. By the same token, do not expect other people to ask you for forgiveness even if they killed you, for they did nothing of that sort, they did not kill you, for in real life no one can kill you, you are always free and eternal; you are always as God created you.

THE ILLUSION OF FORGIVENESS

It is because you believe that you did wrong by hurting other people, and other people believe that they did wrong by hurting you, that forgiveness seems required.

In as much as you believe in wrong doing, then forgive it, that is, overlook it, and come to accept that no wrong and no good was done to you or by you to other people, for it was all a dream wrong and right, not real.

Overlook the dream, the world and what is done in it and you feel free, happy and peaceful.

INVITATION TO MUTUAL ATTACKS

If a person did something wrong to you, say, discriminated against you, you invited him to do so, and by the same token, he invited himself to do so, hence invited you to, if you choose, do something wrong to him. If you killed him, he invited it; he asked for it, he killed himself. (Ultimately, nothing was done.)

The oppressor wants to be oppressed. If you choose, you can go-ahead and oppress him in return, even kill him, for that is what he invited you to do.

If you killed the oppressor, you should not feel guilty from doing so, for you only did so in a dream and nothing was done. You just dreamed that you killed an oppressor; that is all there is to it.

By the same token, if the person you harmed decided to harm or even kill you, you invited him to do so by harming him and must accept what he does to you. Ultimately, he did nothing to you and you did nothing to him, both of you just had a not particularly pleasant dream in which you seem to harm, even kill each other.

(In reality both of you cannot be harmed and cannot die, so it was a mere dream of harm and death, not a factual one).

AMORAL PHILOSOPHY?

The philosophy propounded above would seem to make the world an amoral place. It would seem to suggest that folks should go ahead and do whatever they want to do, including stealing and killing people, and should not feel guilty or remorseful from their behaviors?

If that philosophy makes you feel self-righteous; may I ask you what type of world do you think that you already live in? We already live in an amoral world, don’t we? Is there morality in this world? Is there morality in a world where white Americans killed Indians and took their land and enslaved Africans? Is there morality in Nigeria where a band of thieves took over the government and do with the public treasury as they please, while the masses suffer?

Morality is make belief; morality is man made. Nature destroys people as it destroys rats and plants. Germs, virus, bacteria, fungi, diseases kill us as if we are nothing worthwhile. Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, hurricanes, draughts etc destroy people as they destroy rats.

Human beings’ egos and bodies are completely worthless and valueless. They are dream selves and dream bodies and have no value whatsoever that pure reason can ascertain.

TAKING ONES SELF SERIOUSLY

Some human beings like to take themselves too seriously. Taking ones self seriously is an egoistic behavior. Taking ones self seriously is actually an effort to convince ones self that ones ego and the body that houses it has worth and is important.

The ego, that is, the separated self-concept, and the body that houses it, do not have worth and value. Therefore, let go of the nonsense of personal worth and value; do not take yourself seriously.

If you stop taking your ego and body seriously you feel light, and life becomes light and mirthful. You smile and laugh a lot; you appreciate that people are nothingness trying to seem like they are something important.


FEAR, ANGER, PRIDE, VANITY, NARCISSISM, DEPRESSION, PARANOIA ARE ALL PRODUCTS OF IDENTIFYING WITH FALSE SEPARATED SELF, THE EGO

No pride, vanity and narcissism mean total peace and happiness. To the extent that you retain your ego, pride and narcissism you disturb your peace.

Fear and anger are means of defending the separated self and feeling emotional upset. If you did not have an ego and did not defend it, you would not feel fear, anger, pride, shame, depression, paranoia and other emotional upsets; you would be perpetually calm, peaceful and happy.

As long as you identify with the ego, you must feel emotional upsets, and must be in this world. When you let go of the ego and no longer desire or defend it, you would no longer feel fear, anger, pride, shame, depression, and paranoia and other mental disorders.
The gift of peace and joy, bliss comes from not having a separated self, ego, self-concept, self-image, and no body to identify and defend.

DISCUSSION


Are there benefits, positive payoff from relinquishing the false separated self, and the ego? I think so. Peace and joy. The problem is that that gift requires one to exit this world.

Is this world so beautiful that one wants to stay in it?
Give up the ego now and exit the world now and return to the abode of undifferentiated self, which is the condition for peace and joy, bliss.

Or stay in this world, that is, retain a separated self, the ego, live in hell and mitigate it by mostly overlooking what is done in the world, forgiving your and other people’s mistakes. To the extent that you learn to love and forgive all people, you give yourself peace and give those you forgive some of your peace. Peace is not a shabby thing, wouldn’t you say?

I recommend that one stays in this world and live to however long ones body can last. I recommend forgiving most of the wrongs people do to one, loving people, realizing that total forgiveness entails permitting other people to harm one and even kill one while one does not defend ones self. If one chooses total forgiveness and defenselessness, as Jesus did, one could die, exit this world and return to undifferentiated oneness, spirit, eternal peace and happiness. I do not ask any one to hasten to bliss. I myself will defend myself if attacked, will attack and in fact kill the person who attacks me, for I still want to live in this world. I am not in a hurry to get out of this world. I want to be here and study the world scientifically and use technology to adapt to it.

Nevertheless, as a thinker, I am motivated to provide thinking on the implication of the gospel of forgiveness and love that brother Jesus taught to the world. That gospel leads to death and exit from this world and that is why it is mostly practiced in the breach, for very few want to leave this world yet. If you want to practice it, that is your choice. You know the consequences of your choice. It is true that you will experience peace and joy if you practice forgiveness but is that what you want? Do you want peace and joy badly enough to sacrifice your physical life for it? Just know what you are doing. I know what I am doing. I agree with Nietzsche that forgiveness is nihilistic but on the other hand, I also know that there is eternal life of peace after this world. I choose to be in this world and that requires defensiveness and me to be sometimes unforgiving.

Those who call themselves Christians talk about the gospel of love and forgiveness that their savior, Jesus Christ, brought to the world. Good. But very few of them practice that gospel. Thus, you conclude that they are hypocrites, those who say one thing and do another. In fact, you might even see them as dangerous since they urge naïve persons to forgive those who wronged them while they themselves do not forgive any one.

Christian Europe talked about love and forgiveness and killed Indians and enslaved Africans. How hypocritical can human beings be? In college, I told myself not to listen to these European criminals.

In this paper, I have taken the trouble to show you that Jesus Christ did, in fact, teach love and forgiveness and that those variables are necessary for peace and happiness. I have also taken the trouble to show you how unmitigated forgiveness and love would lead to exposing yourself to harm and death, to exiting from this world.

There is another world all right. I know that for a fact. God, unified spirit, is real. In fact, God is the only reality there is.

The choice is yours whether you want to return to your creator, God, by being totally loving and forgiving. But if you are not ready to return to your maker, please do not always forgive those who trespass against you, fight back. The decision is yours to make, I cannot make it for you, and no one else can make it for you.

The individual can only choose for himself, he cannot choose for other persons, though his choice affects all others. If he chooses defense (to attacks on him) he gives conflict to himself and to those around him; if he chooses defenselessness, forgiveness, he gives peace to himself and to those around him.

I have chosen peace and joy, which means love and forgiveness; but, then, again, I have chosen conflict and war, which is not to love and forgive at all times.

Please do not try to understand my and other people’s choices. You cannot understand them, even if you tried. Never mind my choice. I do not worry about your choices. Worry about your own choices. It is for you to save you, not other people. It is for other people to save themselves, not save you. Your primary function is to save you, not to save other people.

The secret of salvation is the realization that you, the individual, chose whatever happens to you/him while he is on earth. Jesus was saved because derecognized and accepted that he chose everything that happened to him while he was on earth. He chose to be killed, so that he would resurrect and teach himself and the rest of us that death is not real. He chose those who killed him and those who did any other thing to him for they had to do so for him to accomplish his mission. Because he knew that he chose everything that he experienced, he could not feel fear and anger at any one that did to him what he wanted to experience. He chose his accusers, he chose his murderers, he chose his disciples, (and the people he chose, chose him, for the world is a play we all coauthored).

Whereas Jesus knew that he chose everything that happened to him, hence not angry at the world that seemed to harm him, those who played roles in his drama did not know that they, too, chose to play roles in his play. They chose and forget that they so chose. Thus, they felt guilty for murdering him.(People today are still feeling guilty for killing the son of God, Jesus and all of us, for taking on a different identity, ego, and denying their true identity, Christ.)

Feeling guilty make people run from Christ and from his father, God, whose son they believe that they killed and that God is, therefore, out to punish them. This is a strategy to avoid God, to separate from God.

No human being could kill God’s son for he is immortal. We have done nothing; all we do is dream that we did anything.

We choose collectively; you and your parents choose each other; you and your immediate group, kindred, tribe, race etc, choose each other; and ultimately, you and the rest of the world choose each other.

There are no accidents in the world. You choose exactly whatever is happening to you at any moment, as those doing things to you choose to-do so in your and their drama of separation; both of you forget what you choose, so to justify anger and fear. You and they are not victims, although in your separated identity, ego, you believe that you are victims, for you see things happening to you and forget that you chose to have those things happen to you.

Because we choose to experience certain things and choose to forget that we chose them, we choose the Holy Spirit, the Wholly Spirit part of us, our higher selves, to remember for us what we choose to forget.

The Holy Spirit knows that we choose our script and enact it out and that, as such, we are not victims. He knows our past, present and future. He does not pity us for experiencing what we experience, for we want to do so. He merely wants us to remember that we choose what we experience and do so without fear and anger, do so with forgiveness and love. Jesus listened to the Holy Spirit and remembered that he chose his world’s experience hence went through this world without fear and anger at any one playing roles in his script. The Holy Spirit’s mission is to enable all of us do what Jesus did, remember that we chose our life and experiences on earth, hence go through our sojourn on earth peacefully and happily, have a happy dream while at it dreaming.

I chose to have everything that happens to me to happen to me. I chose to live in America so as to experience racism first hand. Initially, I forgot that I so chose and felt angry at whites. Then I realized that I chose to experience racism and chose the whites that discriminated against me. As such, my discriminators were merely playing a role I desired for them to play for me, a role they wanted to play for me. Thus, I stopped being angry at whites. I forgave them; I overlooked their role in my dance of victim hood, and death.

I know where the dance is leading. The goal is for me to play my chosen role of rearticulating the perennial wisdom of mankind in my own language, as I am doing here. I am not doing anything new. Other folks have articulated that wisdom in their own language; Buddha and Jesus did. But I must do it in my own voice, so that those who can learn it from the way I put it can learn it; those who chose to learn it from me can do so; those whose script calls for me to be the one who wrote it in a manner they want to learn it to learn it from me, from themselves, since they are part of me as I am part of them.

When a person knows that the world is a script that he helped write and enact his part in it without fear and anger he gets out of the play, he does not return to this world upon death. He is now a world teacher of God, teaching us all that we are not victims unto whom bad things are happening; he teaches us that we mutually choose what is happening to us. Such a person has overcome the dream of forgetfulness and is now fully awake.

If you are wake and not sleeping and dreaming, why return to the abode of forgetfulness and dreaming, our world? You are out of here. You do not come back to the world; you have broken the wheel of rebirth; you no longer reincarnate in the world, you are no longer dreaming.

But until you accept responsibility for your dreaming, for the script you enact out in this world, for whatever you experience in this world, as long as you see yourself as a victim unto whom what you do not wish happens to, you must keep coming back to this world until you accept responsibility for separation and the dance of the opposite of heaven, opposite of oneness.

I have accepted responsibility for my role in the fragmentation of God’s unified son; I have also accepted return to union, I am saved. Therefore, do not worry about me, worry about your own salvation.

The individual, you, cannot change the world’s script, play. But you can remember that it is only a play and play your part in it calmly. You chose to play your part and all of us, the entire world, chose that part for you, as you helped choose other people’s parts.
Each person must play his part in the show, for it is in each playing his part that the whole show is completed.

Future generations will come to play their part and it is on your playing your part that they will play their parts. Every part is necessary for the salvation of God’s unified son, just as we all played parts in his condemnation, in separation.

There is no meaning to the play we are involved in, for the world is a meaningless, purposeless show; yet each of us must do his part in.

The ultimate goal is for all of us to remember that the world is meaningless and stop trying to play a role in it. When the individual recognizes the silliness of the show, plays his part in it, he, as the world judges it, dies and is seen no more by those still in the show, those still in the world. He exits the play and henceforth lives in formless unified spirit.

From there, he helps those on earth who choose to consult him, to learn that the world’s drama is meaningless and purposeless and that the only meaning to it is to awaken from it, and become enlightened to the unified light we are, and be illuminated to our light which is life.

No one can change the show or stop it, but every one must return to the show over and over and play his part until he gets it right, until he understands that it is he who chose it and that no body chose it for him. When that recognition is made, one smiles at those children of God who still believe that the impossible, separation, is possible. He laughs at a silly world, as I am laughing, yet does his part in its salvation.

Cheers.

Ozodi@africainstituteseattle.org