If Jesus Were Alive Today 3 I am not a scholar conversant in ancient things or ancient people, but I would venture to guess that a scholar is not necessarily better equipped, at least in certain respects than a poet, a mystic or a dreamer to understand what made Jesus, himself a visionary, Jesus. It is the visionary, the one who enjoys a more direct experience of the unseen (available perhaps to all of us if we are open to it and seek it), the one who lays hold of truth as the kabbalists say, by suckling on the teat of wisdom; by utilizing their intuition, their 3rd eye, their poetic imagination rather than the scholar, we should perhaps rely on when we seek to know the heart and soul of a man who, as the voice in my own dreams suggests “had a lot of dreams and thought about the dreams he had.” I am familiar with the gospel record of Jesuses’ life, but when it comes to understanding the kind of man he would be if he were with us in the flesh today, I know what I know or think I know at least for the most part, because like Jesus himself, I too read “the book of the dream,” a medium in which to my surprise, the dusty carpenter from Galilee began to appear many years ago. It was a surprise, because unlike my Christian friends, as a person raised in the Jewish faith, Jesus was, for better or worse completely absent from my religious education and family culture. Thus, my understanding of him is largely based on my independent, adult experience and that experience does not reveal Jesus to be a god or even for that matter, a perfect human being. Obviously, as a child I was aware of Jesus the way I was aware of Santa Claus and other ubiquitous figures held up for worship by the dominant culture, but I was not educated to see him as divine, as what one friend calls a “miracle…by definition.” If Jews have a “vision” of Jesus at all, it is of a false messiah the non-Jewish world used and continues to use as a cudgel with which to “beat” us. I suspect being Jewish had both a liberating and a suppressive impact on my thoughts. Liberating because I was never taught to see a man, any man as a god, suppressive because at least until I began to see him in my dreams, Jesus had no value for me at all. Neither extreme strikes me as fair… A more reasonable, balanced assessment came to me in the form of a dream-message which offered the following counsel: “Christ is the friend.” Not the savior, not the messiah, not the product of a miraculous virgin birth, just the friend and sometimes in my dreams he takes the form, literally, of a friend. I see him as a friend, sometimes male, sometimes female because there is a “Jesus,” a higher, spiritual part in all of us to which we must give voice if we are to walk in the way of the Lord. And because the associative thinking which holds sway in my unconscious mind, casts the “real” Jesus in that form. Jesus is the friend, and the friend is “Jesus.” It is part of my beliefs, which again are based not on a scholarly approach but on a 45-year exploration of my own nocturnal dreams, that human beings have a soul and that the soul lives on as a spirit after the body dies. I believe that there are states of consciousness accessible to us when we dream (meditation and certain psychotropic drugs may also work in this regard), where it is possible for the boundary between the world of the spirit and the world of the flesh to dissolve, allowing us to connect with those who dwell on the other side. Many of us have experiences in which we feel the presence in a dream or a meditation of a lost loved one or for that matter of a person important to us in the “real world,” because there is a higher part of the living soul with which I believe we can psychically connect as well. So, just to be clear when I affirm he is alive today in spirit, and alive in my dreams I do not mean to imply that I think of the Jesus figure I encounter there as anything other than the spirit of a person. Finally, my hope is that more people will come to see Jesus the way I see him in my dreams, as a wise and comforting friend. That he will cease to be a hammer those fake Christians who are as removed from Jesus as the darkness is from the light, use to beat good people down. I know in my heart that is not what Jesus would want. My hope is, that while we may cultivate a relationship with him, we will remember that while he can help us, comfort and inspire us, he cannot save us. For that matter, neither, perhaps can God, but that’s ok because we can help, and sometimes even save, each other.

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