Thursday and time, as measured by mortal minds, moves on as usual, and in that certain location, a father speaks to a son. “Throughout the world are stories of resurrection. From primitive villages to sophisticated cities, all tribes, cultures, religions and nations have a central story of a hero who was once dead and then resurrected himself. With religions, he is a spiritual hero, with nations, a political one, but in any enduring, cohesive group the resurrected hero is there. Why? Surely people do not really believe that a man, who was physically dead, literally returned to life when there is nothing in all of human experience to support such a notion. So what is actually going on with the resurrection stories?
You might propose that they arise from men’s fear of death, and represent his hope that it is not as final as it appears. But there are things present in man’s everyday life, (such as loss of wealth or of social standing), that frighten him more than the loss of his life, and many other passions, (such as anger and love), that overwhelm his fear of death. So there is something else: what?
Every group, be they labeled spiritual, cultural, or political, has a mythology of a founder, a hero who endured the ills common to all men, and under conditions of defending new ideas he proposed, was slain. But after a short passage of time, he returned to life, thus becoming living proof of the potency of his ideas, which now define the particular group centered around his story. But why are such tales necessary? What do they provide that each man does not already possess, in that the stories themselves flow from mortal mouths? Resurrection is a story played out endlessly by all of life for all that lives; by eating that which does no longer, but continues the life of the still and resurrects it within its own flesh.
No myths are here required, for this ceaseless cycle of life, death and resurrection, goes on automatically in the lives of all groups from grubs to man. Your constantly dying cells need no reassuring tales of an afterlife, nor your gross physique any, regarding the departing cells’ replacement. Life knows that life goes on, as does the unspeaking part of life within man. It is the vocal, conscious part of man’s brain that here stumbles, (and that is a specious, unprovable statement), but expedient for our present purposes, and as always the case; some statement is necessary to even operate under verbal conditions, but still, compared to the quiet, seamless working of man’s unconscious operations, to say that here, his consciousness ‘stumbles’ is not without merit.”
J.