Even though I have come to the point in my journey of discovery where I have no doubt the Bible it totally the work of human hands and ideas, there still remains the mystery of the Bible Wheel - it’s seemingly supernatural pattern stands as unshakable as ever. “How did it get there and why?” is the question that continues to haunt my mind?
It seems that when the animal mind reached a large enough capacity for self consciousness to arise, it enabled the human consciousness to connect back to its source which I will call the “Collective Cosmic Consciousness”, or the Ground of all Being. The glimpse of the Collective Cosmic Consciousness we humans get is manifested through archetypes which are innate in every human being. This archetypal framework common to us all is shaped and colored by each individual, thus creating our own clothed mental image. Throughout the course of history people have given identities to these archetypes as their source of being. In the biblical narrative we can see the creator archetype taking the form of a single male deity clothed in the image of a warrior; this differed from the former plural deities, and goddess deities of earlier cultures.
The primary ways people connect to the Collective Cosmic Consciousness (of which we are a part) while living in these mortal bodies is through dreams, visions, intuitions and meditations. This is the way the Collective Cosmic Consciousness can interact with the human mind to guide and impart knowledge.
My journey to discover the true origins of the Bible has lead me to the conclusion that it is no more than an anthology of what men perceived to be the deity who created the world and the laws that the deity imposed upon mankind. Many words of wisdom and truths are contained within this work of the human experience of the divine. For example the teachings of Jesus promoting equality of women and men, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor are for the most part revolutionary for the time period he lived in.
When Jesus appeared in that pivotal point of history as a teacher, he was a man “out of time” because his ideas were advanced well beyond the views of the male dominated society then prevalent. His ideas of loving others as you love yourself, treating women as equals, and universal acceptance went far beyond what most men believed to be true…especially those of his own race, whose religion taught that they were the exclusive benefactors of God’s blessings and grace.
We can see that Jesus came at a pivotal point in human history and pulled together in one place ideas not only from the Old Testament, but also from many previous great thinkers such as, Socrates, Confucius, Buddha, and Philo of Alexandria to name just a few. The message of Jesus was universal love and equality for all humans no matter what the race or gender. His ideas of oneness, and unity were the closest up to that point of the true archetypal framework of the Collective Cosmic Consciousness. Since Jesus was a man born of Jewish roots many of his ideas were mapped onto the foundation of the Old Covenant System, so from within that structure he tried to transform their ideas of a god who required sacrifice by identifying himself as god/man and giving his life for that required sacrifice. I believe Jesus drew many of his ideas from his connection to the Collective Cosmic Consciousness, but when his teachings were interpreted by others such as Paul their true meaning became clothed in many of the male traditions, and customs of the time, thus losing some of the advanced ideas on universal love and equality. Even though Paul taught there was no male or female, Jew or Gentile many of his words spoke just the opposite, condemning women to a life of subjectivity to men. Even after the New Testament was complete, there were still many more interpretive changes to the original teaching of Jesus that came about by the early church fathers, which ended up obscuring the message of universal love and equality and promoting a message of intolerance and inequality.
Considering the course that the sharing of the message of the Gospel has taken through the last two millennia, it almost seems like a hopeless cause to ever be able to redeem the teachings of Jesus, which are love and equality from the pages of the Bible; but I think it is possible with the help of the Bible Wheel. Again, at another pivotal point in history – the ending of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century – the emergence of this simulacrum could salvage the message of love and equality obscured within the pages of a book known as the Word of God.
The Bible Wheel reveals the framework of the Bible, out of which emerged Jesus’ ideas of universal love and equality; born from the materials of the old myths, but having wholly new message of grace. Men who are so set in their patriarchal, dominator ways – beginning with the Epistles of Paul – took the teachings of Jesus and imposed upon them their own “dominator” male customs and interpretations, many times obscuring the essence of his message.
The way the manifestation of the Bible Wheel may be able to salvage the message of Jesus is by its exemplification of him….by this I mean that the symbol that emerges from its structure proclaims Jesus. The Tri-Radiant is the penultimate symbol of Jesus that manifests itself as a result of “rolling up the Bible” into the Bible Wheel, revealing his message of love and equality as its final proclamation. When the Bible is viewed in this manner its culminating message of love, and equality exemplified by Jesus takes precedence over the underlying primitive ideas of the Old Covenant sacrificial system governed by the Hebrew war god Yahweh.
Now, back to the original question of: “How did the supernatural pattern of the Bible Wheel happen?” At this point in my journey the closest I can come to answering that question is to refer back to the idea I presented in the opening part of this article, which is the concept of a Collective Cosmic Consciousness which we are a part of and interact with by intuitions, dreams, visions, and meditations…that is to say, another realm of reality. These interactions give us glimpses into that realm and impart knowledge which helps to guide the progress of our human walk. In this manner I propose that all the human hands that had a part in the formation of what we now call the Protestant Cannon – made up of 66 books – were each guided in some small way to construct a composite whole that rises above the bloody foundation of its roots and radiates a symbol which overshadows the bad with the essential teachings of Jesus…love and equality. This in essence swings the Bible back from the imbalance found in the Old.
The Bible can now be redeemed without condoning or justifying the abominations which it contains, for they are merely a part of the history of mankind struggling to understand the divine by constructing a mythical deity to fit their own conceptions of the realm of reality which cannot be seen with human eyes. The deity of the Bible just happens to be a male war god, which is the myth that Jesus inherited by being born a Jew, but that does not lessen the validity of his universal message. Given the wide circulation of the Bible what better medium to covey this truth – that the only way mankind will ever reach a unity of the whole is by sharing a common unity of love and equality for all.