taking a retrograde step

I had said if I were the Source, the Wellspring, the Great Ah-Hoo-Ah-Hoo-Ah, I would have wanted to incarnate and see what it is like as a human. Brad said, with a grin, yes and see what this thing'll do -- implying a take-it-to-the-limits test drive on the open road. Exactly! You can see why I like talking with Brad.

So we have the Jesus journey by God and all we have made of that and all we are still making of it. It's my take that we got a bunch of things wrong about God's Jesus journey but that's my take on it and you are welcome to your opinion which you will have anyway whether I welcome it or not -- as evidenced by the approximately 34,000 different Christian groups in the world. And of course, each one thinks they have it right. So I may as well make it 34,001.

Brad had opened this particular topic of conversation by asking me what was going on, a question he really looked to have answered rather than it being merely a superficially polite inquiry like you hear everyday from folk whose eyes glaze over if you take the question sincerely and really tell them. Brad and I are buddies and we speak and listen from our hearts. I said, I think I'm becoming a fookin' Christian!

He understood exactly what I meant -- knowing of my disdain for formal religion (for myself, not necessarily for others). After he listened for a few moments, he said you are taking what Nietzsche called a retrograde step. And you know what, he was exactly right. He sent me this quote from Nietzsche a little later --

"A few steps back -- One, certainly very high level of culture has been attained when a man emerges from superstitious and religious concepts and fears and no longer believes in angels, for example, or in original sin, and has ceased to speak of the salvation of souls: if he is at this level of liberation he now has, with the greatest exertion of mind, to overcome metaphysics. Then, however, he needs to take a retrograde step: he has to grasp the historical justification that resides in such ideas, likewise the psychological; he has to recognize that they have been most responsible for the advancement of mankind and that without such a retrograde step he will deprive himself of the best that mankind has hitherto produced. In regard to philosophical metaphysics, I see more and more who are making for the negative goal (that all positive metaphysics is an error), but still few who are taking a few steps back; for one may well want to look out over the topmost rung of the ladder, but one ought not to want to stand on it. The most enlightened get only as far as liberating themselves from metaphysics and looking back on it from above: whereas here too, as in the hippodrome, at the end of the track it is necessary to turn the corner." (22, Human, All Too Human: A Book For Free Spirits).

I am turning a corner. I am taking a retrograde step. I am moving more deeply into the realm of mystical christianity, not creed-al, form-al, dogma-l, orthodox-ical, or society-al christianity. Mystical christianity could also be termed energetic or imaginal -- imaginal similar to what Ibn Arabi means when he speaks of the creative imagination as a realm of reality on a par with sensible reality and intellectual reality.