Sunday, June 25, 2006
1. How much do you know about the Judea of Jesus’ era?
While reading The Jesus Papers I discovered that I knew absolutely nothing about the time of crucifixion – less than about the same period of ancient China (Qin and Han Dynasties). And sorry, something tells me that you are no smarter than I am in this regard. It is why Michael Baigent’s assumptions were possible regarding Jesus’ family history (King David’s bloodline), Jesus’ purported marriage to Mary Magdalena, and speculations that Jesus survived crucifixion, isn’t it? There are no historic facts to prove it either way! Of course, there are many people who would imagine that they could prove Baigent wrong. Who would ever stop them? However, the point is that no one can prove a thing, as corresponding history chapters are erased from our consciousness!
I also believe that Jesus died on the cross but my belief doesn’t prevent me from being fascinated by The Jesus Papers – for its hopeless urge to find the historic Jesus under the rubble of these erased chapters… The book unfolds a panoramic view of Jesus’ era, the Jewish people’s desperate fight for national independence and freedom against the omnipotent Roman Empire, and the chain of bloody mutinies that we know nothing about. You surely have heard about Spartacus, but have you heard the name Simon Bar Koseba (Bar Kochba), a leader of the rebels, or about mass suicide at Masada, where 960 people preferred to die instead of surrendering to the Romans? Jews fought for centuries against slavery. I didn’t know that; good for you, if you did!
I was impressed by The Jesus Papers for describing the time that birthed Jesus – a time in need of Jesus’ ideas about a personal God, about “God’s kingdom within” that was available to every single man on earth, and finally – that every man is the son of God and the son of man at the same time: the very idea that our civilization is based upon!
Think of it – it was spoken out loud and was clear at a time when the Roman Empire was practicing slavery. The notion that EVERY living soul carries GOD’s sparkle was the last thing that the Roman Empire would tolerate. Would everyone among Jews who had also slaves, share that point of view? As it would mean that a slave had a soul as valuable as the master’s soul; it would mean that by killing a slave, a master was hurting the Divine, or God himself. It would mean that slavery was a godless and sinful system. Jewish priesthood would not and could not support that idea as Romans would never tolerate it. And someone had to pay for it. The charge was ridiculous. You are guilty because you call yourself “Son of God.” Who would ever punish a guy who calls himself a Napoleon? Michael Baigent testifies seeing an ancient document – where a bani meshiha (the Messiah of the Children of Israel) explains that “what he meant was not that he was “God” but that the “Spirit of God” was in him.” And it was enough for being punished the Roman way – being crucified? It could be only the challenge of slavery that made Romans to do so. After all, they crucified a healer who, according to his teaching, healed Israelites and Romans, and did not support destructive rebellions in the name of national independence. This strong was the power of the statement “every son of man carries sparkle of God within!”
A bulb goes on in my head! There has to be a serious reason why we know so little about the crucial time that spawned the ideas that our civilization is based upon.
Now I have to make a confession. Probably, I would be stuck with the question of whether or not Jesus was taken off the cross alive or dead, if I hadn't received an important spirit message from a dead Russian poet, Vladimir Vysotsky.
“It’s a pity that you haven’t visited Israel. How come? It was there where the most mysterious European civilization emerged from a forgotten cross on top of a mountain… It’s a wonder that makes so many victories look like the beginning of a great failure, and so many failures look like seeds of great victories.”
And Vysotsky went on dictating a poem, “‘To be, or not to be?’, a Prince once asked.”
For those who can accept the idea of spirit talk, this poem can be found in my new book, Channeling Vysotsky: A Poet’s Journey from Limbo into the Light, at http://www.tanika.com/ (also available on Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble online).I believe that the same spirit conversant also gave me the idea why the cross as an historic artifact was forgotten by pointing at a perpetual war between facts and myths. We will talk about it the next time, when I will be finished reading The Jesus Papers.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
After I had parked my car at the Kodak Theater, I crossed the boulevard to its South side and walked toward its quiet end where office towers were scaring tourists away. Now I saw my friend as well. But instead of advancing rapidly, I was hopping along the famous strip avoiding stepping on the stars’ names. They were laid into concrete and I tiptoed around Joan Rivers’ name; then my leg was almost hitting Tom Hanks! What for?
Lately, in the Da Vinci Code, Hanks did his best trying to save a mystery plot that was taken from the book, Holy Grail, Holy Blood – Michael Baigent and his colleagues’ search for the historic Jesus, the Savior. (According to Baigent, Jesus, coming from Aramaic Yeshua, may also mean “the deliverer” or “the savior” and christos, or Christ is a Greek translation of meshiha or “Messiah” in Aramaic.) Brown did not get into depth in the ideas that he was stealing, or at least, was not able to put his heart into them. However, as life isn’t always just, Brown’s shallowness did not obstruct the sale of 40 million copies of pulp fiction extracted from Baigent’s research of the secret societies that guarded the facts of life of the historic Jesus. In other words, secrets and crimes (both real and fantasized) of the European aristocracy and the shamelessly rich Vatican paid off, proving over and over again that there are many ways to skin a cat and reach the American dream.
The exchange of values took place. I gave my friend a warm hug, and she delivered me a Xeroxed description of theft perpetrated by the Russian president. My friend was already on her way back to the lift, being whisked to floor X of one of morbid office towers (invented, I believe, to secure a salary for the 9-to-5 folks -- the majority of the urban population both in America and Russia).
I was walking back to my car at the Kodak Theater, therefore, I had some time to analyze why I felt so uncomfortable stepping on Paul Newman’s face… Sorry! It was the name on the pavement -- but Putin was okay with nibbling away at other people’s intellectual property. But was Putin’s case so exceptional? As we have already learned, he had company in America. Dan Brown also did not mind stealing Michael Baigent’s ideas about the historic Jesus. There was a trial in London; Brown was forced to reveal his writing methods, and his revelations made journalists scream with joy, as Russian journalists had a field day with Putin’s story. Who was better or worse – Dan Brown or Vladimir Putin? Do I have to look up at them or down at them? Or how can I avoid looking at them at all?
Interestingly enough, the media bombards us with the names of these two gentlemen of honor day by day, year after year, forgetting the names of the real stars. Some of these names would fade away before reaching the pinnacle of their fame. Bette Davis was an exception who climbed to the top with her leading role in Baby Jane. We may forget all her other roles because by embodying Baby Jane, she was whisked off to the Elysian Fields of immortality. Would Nicole Kidman and Kim Basinger be blessed with roles of the same caliber? Or would Hollywood forget them as their divorced status wouldn’t sufficiently feed the PR machine? Instead Hollywood busies itself inventing starlet stories of zero-personality actresses with faces that hardly differ, so that we can barely remember them.
The Kodak Theater was still ahead of me. I looked down under my feet and saw stars that should be high in heaven and vice versa. Up there, especially among politicians, we see too often stars that would fit on Hollywood pavements -- to be trampled upon by the flocks of chitchatting tourists.
“Life is a strange media,” flashes through my head. As I still do not know where to look – up or down – I feel dizzy. Then I get it; in order to overcome dizziness, one has to look straight in front of him – or herself, postponing star – gazing for another time, maybe for another lifetime!
Tatyana Tanika,
The author of “Channeling Vysotsky,” a Russian megastar.
We give incredible power to the stars we admire! Why? Do we project our own dream of becoming famous by delivering that power to them? Common sense would advise us to take back that power, but if we do, what will happen to our dreams to be perfect, beautiful, loved, rich and famous? While writing “Channeling Vysotsky,”– channeling a Russian megastar – I was thinking, but still not sure, what is better: to live with a dream, or without it?
You may learn more about my book at my web site: www.tanika.com,
Thursday, June 08, 2006
The following poem about the suicide bombers hell was given in December 23, 2004, when the manuscript was ready to go to the printer – at the last minute. As channeling poems come through very fast, writing them down I have no time to realize, what I am really writing down. Only later, reading it again, I could sense the “wing” of Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri protecting this piece, or more – delivering the purpose of this book – first of all to me, the one who wrote it down and compiled into a manuscript, and secondly to the readers.
Please, pay attention to the ease with which the spirit communicator moves from verses to prose, securing the necessary lightening up of the mood while we leave this morbid corner of universe and return to our normal state of consciousness.
INFERNO
December 23, 2004
Explosion, bang, the hero is torn into pieces,
Blood, mutilation, death.
The mission has been accomplished:
Fear has been imprinted into the enemy’s every cell.
But where is the reward ―
The gate to Paradise?
The hug from Allah or Mohammed?
Maids, festive food, and joy?
All that mullah had promised so lavishly?
I descended into hell, we sank into Bardo darkness,
Into nobody’s zone between heaven and earth.
Where yelling, curses, and moaning were heard.
(...)
… Former heroes are still yelling,
Cursing liars and deceivers.
They shout, “Damn you!
Come here, mullahs, walk in our shoes!
Let’s trade places:
You stay here for a while,
And we’ll go home
To our fathers, mothers, loved ones.
We have not lived yet, not loved yet… yet… “
There is emptiness all around. No one is there to answer.
Death shows them their karmic movie —
The suffering of those, whom their explosions killed.
Their victims also want to go home!
They also have not lived yet, have not loved yet… not… yet!
…
The “movie” starts over and over again—
Explosion, bang, the hero is torn into pieces,
Blood, mutilation, death.
The moaning of widows and mothers…
… These explosions will disturb space for centuries
Until the cosmic eons will straighten out these vibrations.
….
“Okay, let’s go,” said my Guiding Angel and Protector,
A nice fellow, a poet who walked on Earth a shorter time than I.
We took to the cosmic paths back toward the light,
Scooping up a couple of victims who still couldn’t grasp
That they had left earth without saying their good-byes.
We walked in silence, making fun of the newcomers’ fear they felt having us around. They held tightly to their wallets, guarding their pockets. It was OK with us. They will learn soon that in the afterlife money does not buy a thing and the only currency that works here is kindness, truthfulness, and compassion.
We all ― righteous and guilty ― arrive in the spacious cosmic land as beggars ― because we come from our mad worlds ― socialist, communist, capitalist ― if you only dare to believe me.
… The theme of the wing and protection came through already in the first channeled poem that I received in summer of the year 2000.
THE SERAPH
March 29, 2000
A human labors along a wild trail…
Heaven disperses its clouds
Cliffs depart ― the universe stands still
Listening to the breath of the last Mohican,
He is the last, and he is the first
Who is chosen to start it all over…
He’ll wake up in paradise, willing to depart for the journey
This time to reach the light and
Truthfulness, forgiveness and move deeper into the universe.
Not to be bond to ego and nothingness.
Seraph, unfold your wing to cover the human, the last and the first in one!
Seraph, why are your eyes so piercing?
What is your reason? Do you not like us?
Was it us who set the explosions*?
Was it us who promoted tyrants, criminals, and mass murderers
To lead humanity and
Intergalactic confederations?
Seraph, you’d better cover us,
If you are not afraid of your odd bosses
Who never walked the Earth.
Or fraternized with disaster.
Never stepped with a naked heel on a rusted nail.
Never died from love.
Never fled from a betrayal.
You go on naming it...
This is why, Seraph, you'd better unfold your wing,
To cover the last human
Who is out there to get the Sun, the Truth, and Justice.
And don’t judge us, as you taught us not to judge others.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And as a sample, here comes an excerpt from a message in prose:
Vysotsky (1938-1980) speaks about the festivities at Taganka Theatre, the theatre where he was a stuff actor almost his entire career. (Taganka Theatre is a Moscow legendary theatre that exploited innovative methods of theatrical staging when the Communist Party used to control everything, including the style of theatrical productions.)
I, already American citizen, haven’t visited Moscow since the day of my escape from the former Soviet Union in 1989. Living already 15 years in Los Angeles, I had no idea of the anniversary in question. As an Estonian film critic, I had no ties to that theater and had no special interest in its affairs.
Firstly, the spirit communicator told me the news. Looking for confirmations I went to Internet and found out that Taganka Theatre was founded on April 23, 1964, and in 2004 celebrated its 40th anniversary. Internet told about an exhibition dedicated to that anniversary as well.
The entire episode tells us that spirit communicator moves freely in space (between the USA and Russia) and 24 years after his death can be present at a celebration, to have an opinion and share it with a person on earth who can hear him.
Here comes the excerpt, Channeling Vysotsky, p. 333…
REVISITING TAGANKA THEATER
May 21, 2004
Moscow is beautifying itself. The people grow poorer and they dream of castles in the air. The fast fortunes spread putrid smells, and in the museum (Vysotsky museum—T.T.) nothing happens.
It is time to finish this project. Please, focus on it like hard-working Americans do. I could stay in Moscow and visit with them as long as I wished. But I hated their overall hodgepodge ― I hope ― temporarily, and I ran away as soon as they were done with the so-called official part.
Yuri Petrovich (Lubimov, the director—T.T.) ... I saw him in a totally new light. In the future, I do not want to see him again, or have anything more in common! Thank you very much! I do not need his f... innovative theater any more. Sorry... I shouldn’t say that!
I looked into the souls of some of my former peers, and I could see they felt the same way. They try to stage something, but I see panic in their souls. There is nothing to fight against any more. Now they have to earn money. But in order to become a box-office success they need change their theater. Modern times ask for different tunes, and no one knows how to perform these new tunes.
This Moscow visit had great impact on Vysotsky. He started talking freely about his past in that theater — his roles and relationships. I found Vysotsky’s ideas about Hamlet, The Cherry Orchard and Crime and Punishment interesting and worth sharing.
Look up more excerpts from this unusual book on www.tanika.com.
