Make a monkey out of Darwin
How to use the unlimited power of the paradigm shift.
Your Daily Bard
Bite-sized morsels of Shakespeare’s divine heresy.
Darwin says we’re descended from monkeys. Shakespeare says we’re descended from God.
Wouldn’t you like to know the truth?
“If music be the food of love, play on.” — 12th Night
Tim Denning once said, ‘It’s not your problems you need to solve. It’s how you think that unlocks your potential.’
What if one of the greatest keys to spiritual growth and unbridled happiness is to think about scripture and ancient wisdom in new ways? What if Shakespeare has given us 37 plays outlining for us exactly how to do this? What if Shakespeare secretly made monkeys out of Darwin, the Church, and the Crown — right under their upward-pointing noses?
The key to the power of our greatest potential lies not within the minds of monkeys, but uniquely in the hearts of man. It’s our innate ability to shift paradigms — to see the same thing from multiple viewing points — shift our altitude — to lift our attitude — to get free from the prison of the locked mind-set.
When you wrench your understanding of scripture and literature from the pit-bull-grip of dogmatic, literal interpretation you can imbibe some unsullied universal insights and timeless wisdoms.
Example:
Four hundred years ago, in Shakespeare’s day, I would have been burned at the stake for the answer I give to this deceptively innocent question: Why would he name a play Twelfth Night (the date of the Epiphany — when the shepherds and the 3 wise men came to see the baby Jesus) and say nothing whatsoever about the epiphany in the play?
He wouldn’t. He didn’t. In the subtext throughout all his plays I have found a cryptic, heretical treatise on the evolution of the human soul. The evolution of the human body might very well have included a sojourn as a monkey. But the body is not who we are. Who we really are is the soul inside the body. Had his heresies not been camouflaged with such genius, he would have been executed without mercy.
Heresy comes from the Greek heraitikos meaning choice. A heretic is someone who claims the divine right to freedom of choice and refuses to be cowed into submission by a tyrannical doctrine.
I’m a tad like this myself. The orthodoxy really does not like people like me. But due to my rebellious nature and a weird penchant for understanding ancient symbols of arcane knowledge, I find it hard to keep my mouth shut.
If you wish to taste the ambrosia and inhale the nectar of the food of love play on. Open up your intuitive heart and give your judgmental, over-critical mind a weekend off.
Contemplate the phrase the food of love and observe what floats up. In the context of the Christian calendar, most people I ask this say something about the Last Supper, the Eucharist, the bread and the wine. No one ever thinks of the Epiphany.
But think about it now — in a different way. At the Epiphany, the body of Christ (the baby Jesus) was literally placed in a manger. A manger is a vessel for food. At the Last Supper, the body of Christ (the bread) was symbolically placed in the Grail chalice — also a vessel for food. This says that the Bible is not necessarily recounting history, but communicating symbols. The Epiphany becomes a symbol for and foreshadowing of the Last Supper: the very moment the Grail legend was incepted.
Interesting, eh?
In Shakespeare’s divine heresy, he goes even further out on a limb. This will sound weird. But here lies one of Shakespeare’s fundamental revelations. I shall be developing this theme as we progress. Rather than simply feed us the superficial fact that Jesus died on the cross, consider that he is feeding us one of many inconvenient truths the Church do not wish us to know: in 12th Night, say, by way of Malvolio’s cross-gartered (suspended by a cross) demise and downfall, he dares to imply it was really Satan that died on the cross!
In the play, further cryptic depictions abound disguised as poetry, farce, and comedic confusions. The bottom line being that: if Satan is now dead, so too is sin, and so too is guilt. But the orthodoxy desperately needs to promote superstitious belief in Satan, hell, guilt and sin. And has done a damn good job of so doing.
I shall be developing this (heretical but insightful) way of seeing and thinking as I feed and water YOUR DAILY BARD in the days to come.
Meanwhile, feed me your thoughts.
Why does the orthodoxy refuse to tell us what Jesus really did?
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