The Jesus Session

The spirit of translation. The translation of spirit.

Part cultural critique, part prayerful murmur,
this time Jesus will be a prism, and a prompt, and a verb. 

Online Event Experience Includes

-Three recordings from the 2017 Orphan Wisdom School Session
-Filmed recordings from inside the Teaching Hall at Orphan Wisdom with Stephen speaking with Janeta Kobes and Andrew McLuhan
-Private community chat group with an opportunity to bring your questions and wonderings to the conversation

Excerpt from the recordings from 2017 Orphan Wisdom School Session that will be provided as part of the online event.
by Stephen Jenkinson

By virtue of the architecture and the circuitry, the only belief systems there are, are religious belief systems.

Now, I’m arbitrarily just saying this. I’m choosing these words. I’m gathering them. I’m saying that that’s what you do, by which I’m saying to you, the capacity to make religion is one of the things we have available to us. It doesn’t disqualify anything to say that all belief systems are religious. But you just have to do something about your garden variety understanding of what constitutes “religious”.

And the way you do that is to employ the etymology I’ve entrusted you with. The root word is “lig”. So you remember all this, right? You remember all these, so I don’t need to review it.

Now, you have this “r-e” in front. Ah, this puts a particular inflection on the obligation to understand, doesn’t it? It inflects it differently. It tells you something has happened prior that makes the re-lig-ion function appear to be necessary. So then you realize, and it’s in the word itself, that religion is rehabilitative or reactive in its nature. It’s responding to something. And in that sense, I’d ask you to consider the real possibility that religion is not a naturally occurring event that arises from the natural order of things proceeding as it does.

The advent of all religiosity is a human-scaled attempt to reconvene the premorbid state that is either remembered or longed after, or nostalgized or alleged or something. I can’t think of a belief system that does not say, “Well, back in the day”. By inflection or in some other fashion, you have this feeling that it was not always as it is now. And the “re” in front of the word tells you volumes. It means “again”. So it means it didn’t work the first time. The ‘ligion’ didn’t work, so we got to have re-ligion apparently. See? To re-align.

So it’s right in the word. There’s no discrediting in saying this. I hope you can hear that clearly, because it’s proper to react. “Desperate times, desperate measures”, and all the rest. Okay, so religion is that scrambling. As programmatic as it might be, that’s true for all the systematic religions that you may or may not have read and so forth, all the religions who claim they’re not religions. There’s lots of those, right? The ones who are religion-free, who basically think religion is the problem.

Oh, you believe that? Pardon? You believe that religion is the problem?

“It’s not a belief”.

Okay, watch, I’ll show you this: religion’s not the problem.

Not a belief anymore, huh? Yeah, it’s a belief. Like “reality.” Reality’s a belief system. What a concept! That’s how you show it in high relief. That’s a shamanic function.

You remember one of the parlour tricks of shamanism is to get things to appear which are reluctant to do so. And one of the ways you do it is you get that mouthful of spirits and you have to choose the right morning. You have to know a lot of things. And then you have to know how to spray, really fine. And as you spray, it begins to articulate the shape, the outline of what’s there, ever so briefly. That’s what you see me do when I’m speaking to you, but it can’t last very long. And then they land, and then eventually you decide what I meant or how little I know, or whatever it is.

So, it’s the same thing with religion now. I’m just trying to get it to appear. I’m not shaming it. I mean, I’m as religious as the next guy. You know, I want a better day. I got a hankering after the idea that it wasn’t always as it is now and so forth, but I just don’t have the plan. And that’s why I could never join anything. And I tried. Jesus, I tried. God knows I tried. Oh, I tried and I got invited too. Oh yeah. It doesn’t make me special. All I’m saying to you is, I’m standing up here in my own little grizzled chapel. It’s made out of the world. It’s not made out of belief. Just made out of the world, trued up, made by people half my age. Thank God. And sooner or later we’re going to have to entrust it to them, that “I hope you made this good because it’s yours now”, kind of thing.

So, I’ve said it to you before. Now I think it’ll hang differently for you when I say to you, you cannot make religion out of what I’m giving you. That’s part of my scheme. You cannot make a religion out of this. You can try, but you can’t.

Why?

Because there’s no answer. There’s no answer. There’s just questions. And you cannot make a religion out of questions, because it’s in the nature of realigning to banish questions for the sake of stability, for the sake of being able to go forward. That’s why I keep giving you that Samuel Beckett thing. You know, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”. That’s not a solution. “I’ll go on” is not a solution to not being able to, if you’ve ever been depressed. You hear what I’m saying?

The next day does not solve your depression, does it? You don’t have to. You don’t have to nod. I’m not asking you to out yourself, but you understand what I mean. I’m not talking about having a bad day here. I’m talking about you’ve eaten a bitter fruit.

And you know the next day coming does not reeducate you about your depression. It affirms that fucker. That’s the black dog.

Anyway, so there are no solutions, and with no solutions, you can’t make a religion. So this is the cabal of wonder. That’s all it is.