As a kind of preview, here are the titles of the first sets of videos (keep in mind that because YouTube limits the videos of most of us to 10 minutes it is not yet possible for me to present material except in this kind of broken up fashion - that is as sets of videos - in order to adequately cover any particular theme) - these are (the active link leads to the essay as written - the video involves the reading of the essay to the camera):

Sam Harris, and humanity’s moral future - which is a reply to Harris’s recent TED conference speech.

Saving the Catholic Religion from the Roman Church: through deepening our understanding of the Third Fatima Prophecy, the writing of which was prompted by the current abuse scandal in Europe and the relationship of the present Pope to that scandal.

Barack Obama and the reality of the anti-Christ spirit - which concerns a confusion that is too much entertained by too many regarding what this term (the anti-Christ spirit), taken from the Letters of John in the New Testament, actually means.

Here is a link to that section of my YouTube Channel (joel232001) containing the videos on the Coming Metamorphosis of Christianity in playlist form.

I should not fail to mention that I have written two books so far on this theme of the metamorphosis of Christianity: The Way of the Fool: the conscious development of our human character, and the future of Christianity - both to be born out of the natural union of Faith and Gnosis; and New Wine: foundational essays out of a Science of the Spirit, in support of the coming living metamorphosis of Christianity, a collection which includes an important piece called: The Natural Christian, written especially for those many people who would say something on the order of: “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual”.

The fact is that the Christianity that many see today is much confused, as most people with common sense realize when they compare the actions, of many who give themselves the name Christian, to what is actually the teachings of Christ as represented in the Four Gospels.  There are many other matters of import regarding this situation that need to be developed carefully, but with this brief message I wanted to lay out somewhat why this theme of the Metamorphosis of Christianity has been added to my other video and written work.

Mostly it should be kept in mind that this work of mine that is presented here is grounded in practice, such that through practice the inner life of thinking, feeling and willing is transformed.  As a result when we produce any cognitive content (the themes) it has been  thoroughly informed with many years of experience and is not a mere exercise of the intellectual arts.

For a more careful elaboration of this cognitive development, see my essay/booklet Living Thinking in Action.

This year of 2010 was one of those seventh year climaxes, and since part of this aspect of soul life is enhanced when we consciously participate in it, then you might be able to guess that I had to become very involved in a review of the past aspects of my soul, and an evaluation of whether they should be allowed to die away.  In terms of the inner life of thought, one will find in my works in various places a discussion of the practice of sacrifice of thoughts, and some years during the Season of Easter, this process can become rather deep in nature, and including then  habits of feeling and will as well as thought-content.

We could say that the more we identify with the teachings of Christ and the more we manifest those teachings out of our own free will, the more deeply the soul feels the rhythm of the Year, especially the process of Death and Resurrection representative of the Easter Season.  What we let go of that which within us has become old and now dying is then reborn in a new way during Easter Week, usually beginning as early as Good Friday.  Resurrection is something new, not a return to the old.

As my soul underwent this transformation in 2010, there followed various changes in my life that included taking up more deeply in thought that aspect of the future of humanity that is connected to the future of Christianity.   This is not a simple matter on the one hand, yet very simple on another.

Once more in different words: the present day religious expression of the teachings of Christ, which we tend to call Christianity, does not reveal, in far to many instances, what is potential when one follows more fully those teachings as a spiritual practice.   This is not to say that those who call themselves Christians are in particular any kind of spiritual failures, only that the teachings of Christ, in practice, are as difficult as everyone realizes.   As a result, the religion of Christianity can only grow and become over time, as people discover how to better incarnate the teachings.   Mostly the problems come when we institutionalize small parts of the teachings, and reduce them to human-created fixed dogmas and doctrines, thus driving out of them the living substance of Christ’s own always ongoing participation, as He promised:  Whenever two or more are gathered in my name, I am there; and, I will be with you until the ends of time.

It may be useful to those who hear this to consider the possibility that we do not yet have the full richness of understanding of the true Being of Christ, even in the conceptions put forward by present day institutional Christian Religions.   The contemporary Idea of God and the Reality of God are much different, especially since scientific materialism has come to seem to explain physical reality with such force of conviction.

Contemporary natural science is itself quite limited in its appreciation of existential reality, given that this science has systematically reduced itself to only that which can be represented by numbers - that is quantities - by leaving outside of its considerations all that is qualitative and which is also part of our experience.   This approach, to only making scientifically real that which can be counted, has warped the conclusions of natural science away from reality in a very large way, and as we go into the future this religious-like scientism of the mere countable-physical will have to be overcome.

Should we find our way, over time, to a true idea of the nature of God and of the significance of the Christ Incarnation within that understanding, we will come to realize that the same Divine Mystery named by the ancient civilizations of the Vedanta type, or Hindu type or Egyptian type is the same Being throughout time  - what aboriginal Americans call: the Creator.  The Mystery of 2000 years ago was that the Creator, in the form of the Son, so loved human beings, that He could not but follow us into material existence, and left for a time the higher worlds of the Divine Mystery to become human and then go through the gate of death as all of us must do.  Through this action He committed Himself to being fully with us.

The Son aspect of Creator-God then lived as a human being for a time in between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea, and left behind teachings which are for our benefit.  Following this, and in accord with His promise to be with us to the ends of time, He became the Spirit of Earth existence as part of  His Death and Resurrection, which among other matters means that we now live literally inside the Son aspect of the Divine Creator Being, which surrounds us and permeates us.  The work on this theme of the Metamorphosis of Christianity will go into this fact in some detail, and show how even through the activity of the scientific mind, we may come to a deeper knowledge of the meaning and utility of our religious nature.

Let me just reference something here which may seem a bit odd, yet which is a clue for a great deal that is to come in the future to our understanding.

In the famous Prologue to the John Gospel, which begins: In the Beginning was the Word ... we find this phrase shortly after those first words: In it was Life and the Life was the Light of the World.  Once we understanding our existence, out of a science that does not systematically exclude the investigation of the spirit- of qualities, we will come to see that this phrase in the Prologue is precisely and exactly true, even in a scientific and rational sense.  In the Word - in the Divine Creator-Being - was Life, and this Life has manifested right into our material-physical existence as the Light we see by everyday.  So when I write, as I did above, that the Spirit of the Earth - that is the Cosmic Christ - surrounds and permeates us, I mean this literally, and perceptually.   When we walk in the Sunlight on a warm spring day, we are not only spiritually inside the Creator-Being, but we are physically within the manifestations of this Creator-Being, and the many hierarchies of Beings that serve the larger elements of the Mystery.

When we breath we are filled with this Life, and that manifests as our experience of being alive.  When we have thoughts and imaginations that are filled with inner light and life, - this too is a participation within the Divine Creator-Being.  Let me begin to end this introduction to this new theme for my video work by quoting some verses by the Moody Blues, which shows that they too understood this, out of their own Way of learning to see:

From the Album Octave released in 1978, the words of the song: One Step into the Light

One step into the light

One step away from night

It's the hardest step you're gonna take

The ship to take you there

Is waiting at the head

Of the stairs that lead up through your opening mind

Above the dark despair

Shines a light that we can share

Close your eyes and look up in between your brows

Then slowly breathing in

Feel the LIFE FORCE streaming in

Hold it there, then send it back to him

All the old things are returning

Cosmic circles ever turning

All the truth we've been yearning for

Life is our saviour, saviour, saviour, save your soul

The river of LIVING BREATH

Is flowing through the SUN

He was there before the earth began

The world will drag on you

Use his love to pull you through

Find the mission of YOUR LIFE and start to BE

All the old things are returning

Cosmic circles ever turning

All the truth we've been yearning for

Life is our saviour, saviour, saviour, save your soul

There's one thing I can do

Play my Mellotron for you

Try to blow away your city blues

Your dreams are not unfound

Get your feet back on the ground

The TRUTH will set us FREE, we cannot lose

We cannot lose, we just have to CHOOSE

It is then my hope in these videos on the theme of the Metamorphosis of Christianity to take us into a realm of thought and understanding that is becoming more and more common today, and which does not leave outside of its substance the aspect of our human nature that is rational and scientific.  Certainly in my videos on the Songs of a True White Brother of the Hopi Prophecy, I have come at this same truth from one direction, and now in this additional material I will be able to focus on ongoing transformations of Christianity itself, as these too manifest the coming spiritual processes that are living so strongly in the events of our time.

One final thought, prompted by the reading of an interesting article in a recent New Yorker magazine.  A problem for a long time in Christian thought has concerned the idea of the End Times, and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, and other such ideas based upon statements of Christ collected in the Gospels, and then re-imagined in the writings of such as St. Paul and the author Revelations.

Perhaps this idea will help.

The Christ Incarnation occurred at a moment in Cosmic time when the Creation was at its mid-point, and certain up-building processes of a material nature were mostly finished.  This is particularly true with regard to material reality and is marked in our scientific observations by a change in the state of matter such that it could no longer become more dense in accordance with those processes of rhythmic compression that accompanied the Creation.  We noticed this change, in scientific language, when we discovered the property of matter that we name: radiation.

During the process of the precipitation of more and more dense elements, there finally came a time, at what we call erroneously the atomic level, when the forces we name abstractly as gravity could no hold matter together and it began to spontaneously decompose.  This is the secret hidden in the periodic table of elements, which reveals the order of the creation of the elements, starting with the smaller and more universal first, until such time as it becomes impossible to maintain this tendency to increased material density given the other forces (will of Beings) at play in the Creation.

Just as Christianity is undergoing a metamorphosis, so is all of the Creation, including materiality, subject to the laws of Life - the principle one being: metamorphosis, or the continual unfolding of the new out of the old.

This beginning of the end of the material earth existence corresponded with a change in the nature of humanity’s spiritual life, where we started to leave our spiritual childhood behind and begin the long hard road to spiritual adulthood; and, where at a certain stage in the future we will leave behind material existence itself.

Thus the seer Rudolf Steiner described the Incarnation of the Son aspect of the Creator as: the Turning Point of Time.  At this point then began the end of earth existence, a long process from a human perspective, but a much shorter one from a cosmic perspective.   At this point of maximum density, such that the physical Earth would now begin to age and then die, the Son aspect of the Creator Being incarnated to join His Being to our future in such a way that we would have His company for all future time to come.

The central point of these above comments is that we need to realize we have yet a great deal more to learn about ourselves and about cosmic and human past and future existence.  What is in the Gospels is only an introduction, and the understanding of natural science of material reality only a prelude to a much more magnificent, and scientifically rational, appreciation of the true nature of the Creation and the Beings that brought it about.

As these videos unfold we will enter into how to attain knowledge of the true Second Coming, which has already begun, and much else besides.  However, as these matters require that they be approached from multiple directions and in a kind of subtle and delicate fashion, the watcher of these videos (and the reader of the related essays) ought not to expect all will be made apparent in any kind of easy or simple way.  Whenever new knowledge, or in this case new revelation, comes toward us, our ability to understand it and eventually work practically with it in our lives -  this ability is entirely dependent on the attitude and thoroughness of a disciplined inner life that we bring to what is offered.

The apt cliche is: no pain no gain.  Without a corresponding effort on the part of those who receive these words, little of the truth will become known.  Or, to return to how Christ put it at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: without practice, we build the house, of our soul and spiritual life, upon sand.