Written by Sid Arthur Tamagua   

A PAGAN’S TALE OF THE CHRIST


I was about 11 years old when, as Alan Watts once said, I lost my mind and came to my senses. It was a late afternoon in October, and I was lazily lolling back and forth on a park swing. An incredibly beautiful autumn sunset had spread across the horizon, and I gazed at it intently.
Suddenly, I lost all sense of being a separate person with a name, a place and history. I was just a consciousness, unbound and anonymous. At first I was in ecstasy; I felt no fear and no craving, no need for anything. I was in heaven, right here on Earth. Then I looked around me, and everything looked strange, unfamiliar. I knew where I was, but none of it felt familiar. “I must be going nuts,” I said to myself. In a panic, I rushed home to where I lived, but, to my horror, it, too, looked alien.
I said nothing to my parents, not wanting to upset and alarm them. After dinner, I went straight to bed, explaining to my folks that I had been running around the park and had tired myself out. When I awoke the next morning, the strangeness and the sense of being a nameless consciousness were gone. The daily routine of schoolwork, homework
TV viewing and house chores soon caused me to forget the experience,
although I would recall it from time to time, with a mixture of joy and dread.

Having been raised a Roman Catholic, I attended church on Sundays and went to religious instruction on Wednesday afternoons. My parents were indifferent and casual in their practice of Catholicism; my mother was hardly a strict practitioner of the faith, saying only that God is love. Dad hardly ever mentioned anything about religion, although he insisted that I follow the doctrine and the teachings of the Catholic Church. Sometimes we all went to church; sometimes only I went.
Basically, church attendance was demanded of me, but they only went when it was convenient. As a Catholic, I was expected to go to confession on Saturdays, to reveal to the good Father what sins I was guilty of, do my penance and get absolution in preparation for taking communion at Sunday service.

Once I obtained puberty, the same sin became prevalent, as it did for most teenage boys: masturbation. A friend of mine had introduced me to the joy of whacking off, and I became a diligent masturbator at an early age, at about 11 or 12. Another frequent sin was cursing; as an urban youth (I moved to Astoria as an adult; I grew up in Boston.) I was very quickly exposed to every four-letter expletive known to humanity.
One day, the old busybody woman who lived next door to my family ratted me out to my mom, telling her that I had used the f-word. That got me the only smack in the head mom ever gave me. Confession had become an event of extreme humiliation and embarrassment for me by the time I had reached my sub teen years. I had to admit to how many times I had pulled my peter and how often I had used swear words.

My disaffection with Roman Catholicism began at about that time. It seemed to me that having to confess all these sins was an unwarranted intrusion into my private life. More to the point, I never felt relieved and cleansed after confession---only depressed and angry. The larger problem for me was the whole idea of a personal deity who watched everything that everyone did, heard everything said, and could even know what was in your heart and mind. God was the ultimate snoop, for crying out loud! As I matured into adolescence, I became even more critical and skeptical about the concept of a personal God.
It simply made no sense to me. How could the creator of all things be any one thing, a personality who could get angry enough to destroy an entire world or vengeful enough to condemn hordes of people to eternal damnation. Moreover, it made no sense to engage in petitionary prayer, asking for this or that thing or result. If God was all powerful, all-knowing and all-loving, then he would know what suffering needed to be stopped and what crimes, catastrophes and atrocities needed to be prevented.

Finally, at about the age of 14, it came to me that all the laws and proscriptions and all the punishments for transgression were real for me only if I believed in and practiced the Roman Catholic religion; billions of people all over the planet did not practice Catholicism and were not subject to any of its beliefs or doctrines. Once I realized that, I promptly made an announcement to my parents: I do not believe in Catholicism or any other orthodox form of monotheistic religion. I was no longer going to church, going to confession or in any other way following the faith. Naturally, they were appalled; but they knew that once their son made up his mind about something, there was no changing it. They gave in without much of an argument. I suspected that my dad had never been a true believer anyway.

During my late teen years and early twenties, I became a militant atheist and even flirted with the Existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. However, the notion of man being a useless passion whose life activity was as absurd as Sisyphus endlessly rolling a rock up a mountain only to let it fall back down again, and then repeating the whole exercise over and over, left me feeling bleak and miserable. There had to be some other way of making sense of life and the cosmos. Gradually, I became aware of East Asian wisdom philosophy.

My first extended exposure to Oriental wisdom schools began with Alan Watts. Watts had written a book titled The Book—On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. In the book, Watts explained, in a lively and highly readable manner, that one’s self-sense was the result of social conditioning. The ego was a hoax; an arbitrary selection of memories that one had identified with. What we really are is an aspect of an infinite consciousness that has no name, time or place. We are localizations or centerings of that consciousness. Watts’ idea immediately resonated with me because it sounded exactly like the experience I had had many years before. Our task, according to Watts, is to remove the blinders that prevent us from seeing who we are and how we are connected to all living beings and the universe. Bingo! I began to read other literature on the subject, including the Christian Gnostic scriptures. Then I finally understood what had happened to me on that park swing on a magical October afternoon. I had experienced what I call a spontaneous remission of the ego illusion. Rare, yes, but it can and does happen. (Years later, it happened again, and on a lovely fall afternoon).

The great poet, T.S. Eliot, once wrote the following: “In my end is my beginning.” More profoundly, he also wrote: “At the end of all our exploring we shall return to where we started and know the place for the first time.” The place where I started to become enlightened was that park swing, and I came to know what I had experienced for the first time as I read the literature of the great sages of East and West.
I had come full circle.

By now, those reading this piece are probably wondering what all this has to do with its title. Well, I consider myself a pagan because I do not subscribe to any Judeo-Christian orthodoxy. Paganism covers a vast array of beliefs and traditions that pre-date Christianity; however, some contemporary pagans, like Wiccans or latter day Druids might be considered post-Christian. To be a pagan is not necessarily to be an atheist or theist. In my case, I can claim to be a panentheist, someone who sees the entire universe as a manifestation of a divine source, but-- and here is the difference between panentheism and pantheism-- the source is something more than the observable cosmos: it is the ultimate source consciousness out of which all visible phenomena come. Yes, I am saying that consciousness is the source of all visible, material things.
I am not alone in saying this: David Bohm, Robert Toben, Itzhak Bentov and Jack Sarfatti, among others, have said the same thing.
One very important thing to know about source consciousness: it is NOT a personal deity. It is pointless to pray to it, or to speak to it, or expect it to care about us. However, what we can do is learn to bond with it and liberate ourselves from the fears and cravings of egoism. And that brings me to Christ.

The word Christ means the anointed one. Whether one believes that Jesus of Nazareth ever existed in the flesh—I am inclined to believe not-Christ DOES exist, in every one of us born. We are all potentially anointed ones, endowed with the evolutionary capability to transcend the ego self. This does not mean that we become mindless automatons without individuality; on the contrary, we can become more alive in our personhood, more vitally connected to all life and to each other. We can laugh at our peculiarities and foibles, wondering what that rascal called
John or Jane is up to. Yes, the fat lady in the front row really is Christ himself, buddy, as are you and all of us.

I am especially mindful of our potential Christ-consciousness at this time of year. During the Christmas season, I recall my two incredible experiences of being born again, not in Christ or with Christ but AS
Christ, as someone who came to know who he was. Please understand,
I am not exalting myself into some sort of spiritual superman with supernatural powers. Actually, the experience leaves one feeling quite humble as a person, reminding me of the saying that God is no respecter
of persons. Being a big ego, a big I AM becomes a kind of joke, and it is on you, which is why when people have a transegoic realization experience, by whatever method they have used, or very luckily, through spontaneous remission of ego, they tend to laugh and cry at the same time. Reminds me of Ebenezer Scrooge, after he is redeemed, looking at himself in the mirror and calling himself an old humbug.
Yup, we can laugh at our bumptious pride, our puffed up little person strutting around and being a real pain in the ass; and we can cry in relief at having finally thrown off the yolk of the ego-self, relief and some remorse for having been ridiculous humbugs for so long. Then there is the mercy and joy of forgiveness, for yourself and for everyone else.

So, that’s this pagan’s tale of the Christ, the One that we have always been, whether fully realized or only as a mysterious tugging at the edges of our consciousness. It would be wonderful if, at some time in the future, we all became fully realized as Christ. Now there would be a Christmas gift that would keep on giving. Bless us….everyone!