TANATA:

A deceiver, a person who has deceived you or me, is not necessarily a person who is smarter than either you or me, but rather someone who is not intelligent enough to know that there is a better way.

We’re not talking about deceit or dishonesty which might arise in the most superficial of circumstances, such as fibbing to your mother that absolutely you love the color of the new chartreuse sweater with patches on the elbows that she has bought you for your birthday, or denying that your mate has gained a few pounds in a way that has made it uncomfortable for them to walk in an old pair of jeans; we’re not talking about deceit in the manner used to hide something from someone, such as a favorite piece of jewelry given to us by a former flame that is best not seen by a significant other, or even telling a white lie about our whereabouts when it might seem to a loved one to have been more of a threat to yourself or your relationship with this person than might rightly be determined by this person, your questioner, at three o’ clock in the morning (assuming that there is indeed an innocent explanation).

We’re talking about the hiding of truth when the actual intent behind this obscuring activity is overt, is offensive rather than defensive, when the act of deceit is meant for the purpose of keeping another person or people off guard and unaware when their unawareness will be most definitely hurtful to the person who is being deceived, even if they never catch on … especially if they don’t.

People of color, women, the poor, the less educated, disabled people have been made to feel that they are less than everyone else, when they aren’t. It would have helped such folks to know that the African scholar John Mark and his mother Mary were “the disciples whom Jesus loved,” the true John and Mary at the foot of Jesus’ cross, they being people of color, Jews, people who were persecuted then as they would be now … for no damn good reason.

The manner of deception we’re talking about is when the needs and desires of the deceiver are selfish … and shows more regard for the deceiver’s well-being than for the well-being of the person who is being deceived. It is this degree of deception that lies at the heart of what has motivated the obscuring for nearly 2,000 years of these two people (via tamperings and alterations of all four gospel accounts) who, if the truth had ever been known about them, would have given encouragement to people who happen to have been members of the same race as these two people, or viewed as deficient in some other way, when in God’s eyes … there is no such perception of deficiency. In fact, paradoxically, as the Beatitudes say, “Blessed are the poor, the humble, the meek, the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the disabled, the peacemakers who can’t catch a break … for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Who said that?

Mary Magdalene?

Who?

It sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it … to hide people, historical figures, because of the color of their skin, so that other people of the same color skin would not have a source of encouragement to believe that they were people as good as people who have a lighter outer covering?

Is that what the struggle has been between good and evil, is that what has been at its core … racism? Is race the wedge that evil has used to put enmity between the first two human beings who ever lived … whose skin color was so different? It sounds like a tragic play. It sounds like the conflict between the Moor and his white bride Desdemona as the evil and scheming Iago was able to achieve it by whispering lies into Othello’s ear that his bride’s love was not genuine and she was therefore not to be trusted because they were outwardly so different.

Is this how evil has sabotaged God’s creation … by instilling the thinking from the very beginning that love was not strong enough to overcome outward appearances? That love, in reality, could not sustain itself? Have all we needed after all … is love? And has creation been set against itself by making love seem implausible, completely unachievable between men and women, or people of the same sex, even of the same flesh and blood?

Is it evil not to love for any reason? Is love’s absence the very definition of evil?

As we come to the end of human history, the choice that will determine who goes forward into a matterless, immaterial spiritual world of continuing life will be whether or not we have love and have it abundantly so that we will look out for one another and so that we can all be members of one big family.

Good versus evil. Love versus hate. The needs of the one versus the needs of the many brought together as one.

Ironically, it is those who are trying to make an artificial heaven on earth, all things into one entity, to become one, without the love of all, who have been and who are causing all the problems and keeping God’s plan for that from becoming a reality.

John, baby, you had it right! … after all. If we don’t have love, if love is not what we need most of all, above all things, there is no practical way for life to exist.

A lot of goofy cliche things come to mind to say at this point, but we’ll save them for later. We’ve always been compelled to make jokes, to make light of things, because to get too serious, to appear that one has something meaningful to say has always gotten us in trouble.

The desire and the ability to laugh to find good humor in a loveless world is how any of us is going to get out of this alive.

So did you hear the one about the Moor and the white lady with a big “D” sewn on her blouse who went into a bar …? Or the black man and the white man?

My wife woke up this morning trying to do everything she could to convince herself that she was unlovable and that, therefore, I didn’t love her … and all because I had a rotten day yesterday for our anniversary and didn’t feel like following through on our plans to go to dinner. Well … I went out and got Chinese! I woke up in a good mood, or trying to be. She woke up not altogether sure why she was angry or why it was that we were having a fight … or if we had been fighting. It just seemed to her that we ought to be so she woke up ready for round two.

“We ended this fight last night, remember?” I said. “I brought you Chinese in bed and organic dark chocolate, two big bars of it … for our anniversary, with a rain check on dinner.”

“Oh,” she said.

I have so spoiled her with being extra, overly over-the-top good to her, with everything wrapped and fireworks going off … that anything reasonable is … eh, is that the best you could do? Well, hell, it was my anniversary too, you know?

So (and this was funny) she went into the next room, like she would if she was going to put on her make-up, thought about it, shook herself off, and came back out and started the morning again. She was so convinced when she woke up that there ought to be a fight, even though she didn’t know why, that she had started fighting again, picking up where she thought we had left off … when it was I, A-HA!, who had remembered! It was I who was being the peacemaker and being decent and willing to start the day as a new day, with no grudges. And I went to bed drinking whisky, for crying out loud. What Bob Dylan says is true, “A lot of people think that drinking whisky will kill you … I don’t think it will.”

We are being flooded with questions about what it is that we know about “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and how it is that we know it, and when we came to know it.

We have also been accused of being crazy, deluded, liars, gold diggers … even evil.

Maybe we are all of these things.

Maybe we are none. Who really knows anyone anymore these days?

If people have not been receptive to our observations, resistant toward or not respectful of our conclusions and findings regarding the hiding of Mary and John, as we have ascertained the obscuring of these two historic figures as fact, as we have broken down how this deception could have been perpetrated in the first place, and for what reason and by whom, which has only validated that what we have is true … these non-receptive have not been receptive for one of several reasons, as we’ve thought about it, as we have imagined how people are likely to receive the information that we have to tell, and how they are likely to react to the level of deceit in our reality — yours and mine — that we are alleging exists, it is for a range of fascinating reasons …

it is for a range of fascinating reasons … that people have concluded heretofore or at this moment that surely we must be all wet and just plain wrong, that we must have ulterior motives for saying what it is that we are saying, because no one should rightly be able to know this, what it is that we believe we know, unless there is something fishy going on.

As we have said, we were in Egypt and Ethiopia … at the right places, at the right times.

People naturally think other people whom they don’t know are all wet to begin with. It’s a defense mechanism to protect us, me and you; it is good for us to have a healthy lack of trust, up to a certain point, because people can deceive us and they can hurt us by deceiving us; they can overtly hurt us by overtly deceiving us. It takes a lot of being around someone to gain enough awareness about this person to know if he or she can be trusted, trusted to go beyond themselves in expressing concern for the significant other. It is the mark of a truly mature person who looks outside of himself or herself to the needs of others. This too is a gift, a divine gift, lest any of us should boast.

In other words, the degree of deceit, the wide measure of it, the historical scope and importance of the deceit that we are alleging must have taken place transcends reason.

It is deceit that we are alleging which is of such a profound breadth pertaining to the hidden biblical figures and who has done what to whom to maintain the deception we are alleging, so much so that seems it would be unknowable. How could we know what we know about deception that is almost 2,000 years old … and maybe older and longer than that?

We couldn’t know, some people will conclude, because the information is not knowable, ultimately. We couldn’t know because no one else has known what it is we claim we know up to this point in time. We couldn’t know because it would turn reality, what we know about reality and the Bible, the New Testament, Christianity and Judaism, Islam, what have you, upside down.

We already see upside down, don’t we, until our brains take the upside down images on our retinas and flips them?

There will be people who don’t want for us to be right in what it is that we say that we know — for reasons they may not understand, racist-oriented, xenophobic reasons. There will be those who will say, if what we say is true (and we are convinced that it is, because the source of our information is of a super credible nature) who will think that it is we who are up to no good, that we are deceptive, that we have some unfair advantage to gain by fooling someone or everyone about what it is that we say that we know.

There are some people who will be threatened intellectually and scholarly because we are saying that we know what they do not know and have not known. People will reject what we have to say because they didn’t think of it first. And, because, no one for thousands of years has thought it or come to this conclusion.

But, you see, we didn’t come to this conclusion all by ourselves, as we continue to reiterate. We got to a certain point in our quest … and then we had to travel … and then it was given to us.

If you disbelieve us, then prove us wrong. If we are hyping this, then our information should be false. If you can prove us wrong, then we are lying, we are fools, or both. And maybe, evil itself for suggesting something that should have been knowable, but has not been. If we are wrong … and we know that we are wrong, that we are being deceptive, but we persist in spinning our web of deceit … we are evil. It is evil which or who knowingly does wrong for advantage, without fear of punishment.

It is both evil and stupid.

By us suggesting that we know what it is we know, this would seem to put us in a special category, where people, normal, average, everyday people, which we are, happen to believe that we more special than everyone else. We are probably dumber and more inadequate than you.

It is not the case that we are special. The true wisdom dwells elsewhere. We just happened to be at the right place, at the right time … and to have made connections, developed assets, as it were, in our intelligence days, which have eventually paid off — assets going back some 35 years to our years in Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia.

Some people will say we want to become wealthy with the information that we have, that even if we are correct in what we say, we still just want to make money and run, get off of what it is that we say that we know as much as we can. And, they will say, if we have this motive, which is not a pure motive, then what it is that we claim to know cannot be true — that we can not really know it, but we are merely saying that we know it to make a buck.

Would we gain the world … only to lose our souls by telling what it is that we claim to know … and having it be false?

What does it profit a man if he gains all the riches he could ever want … but sacrifices his soul in the process of attaining those things? For those of us who believe we have souls … this is a prime consideration.

We prefer peace over wealth … for we have known times of great turmoil, as you no doubt have. We put a high premium on our peace. And peace can be attained … without it costing you or me a penny.

Peace is free … if you know where to get it.

We have no ulterior motives. We wish to hurt no one with the information which we have. We wish to gain no unfair advantage. We don’t wish to get rich from having this information. We are not deluded by having information that no one else has … because we ourselves did not generate this information — only partly did we work for this information and knowledge. Once we reached a certain level in our efforts, over a period of time, drips and drabs of information have been made available to us, to keep us interested.

But we only now have the whole puzzle. Others have it, too. Many others. People about whom you or I know nothing, and probably will never know … not until we are in heaven and all things have been revealed to us.

There is so much more to reality than meets the eye.

Things often are not at all what they seem.

There are forces at work in and around you and me that we do not see, that we cannot fathom. Well, who can know that? you might ask. When we say that we see a red ball … do we see a red ball, or rather a ball which is every color but red, with red being the rejected color which is being reflected back to us? If there is gravity, how does condensation occur, how is it that water rises, to form clouds, to cause more rain to fall? Rising water is a good trick. Snow is another wondrous event, which comes not from frozen drops of water … but from sparks of energy which suddenly occur in a cold mist, forming crystals.

These are knowable things that many of us rarely think about. There are sources of wisdom and knowledge which know that which seems unknowable, which will share wisdom and knowledge with us … as soon as we have poured ourselves out … and admitted over and over that we know nothing apart from the one source of all wisdom and knowledge.

There is one, only one, source of ultimate knowledge.

Are we being deceptive, are we deluded, do we have ulterior motives, do we wish to gain for ourselves at the expense of others, or just gain for ourselves, the truth be damned, are we just flat out lying because we like the attention, even if in gaining it we will ultimately be called crazy, deluded or liar? And sacrifice our souls for having gained advantages dishonestly?

Do we have an ax to grind? Do we wish to harm anyone with what it is that we say that we know?

We have nothing to gain … but everything to lose, if one wishes to look at it that way, honestly. We have nothing to gain by telling what it is that we know. So why do we tell it?

Is it because we have much to lose by not telling it?

We have been told, to go along with this information about Mary and John, that there is plenty, sufficient protection for all of those who know what it is that we just happen to have been fortunate enough to come to know. In other words, there are those who don’t want us, obviously, to share this time transcendent knowledge, which boggles our minds right along with yours. There are enemies of the truth.

We were in the right place at the right time at one of the most ancient sites, if not the most ancient site, in all the world. And it was given to us as a gift. A one in a million shot, like winning the lottery …

But we win nothing. So why are we telling what it is we know … if we can be called crazy, liar, mercenary, evil in the process of sharing it?

If you were given a pearl of great price … would you hide it … or display it for everyone else to enjoy?

For next time … what do you know of the story of Prester John? Let us leave you with these last thoughts on deceit and deceivers.

A deceiver, a person who has deceived you or me, is not necessarily a person who is smarter than either you or me, but rather it is invariably someone who is not intelligent enough to know that there is a better way.

We’re not talking about deceit or dishonesty which might arise in the most superficial of circumstances, such as fibbing to your mother that absolutely you love the color of the new chartreuse sweater with patches on the elbows that she has bought you for your birthday, or denying that your mate has gained a few pounds in a way that has made it uncomfortable for them to walk in an old pair of jeans; we’re not talking about deceit in the manner used to hide something from someone, such as a favorite piece of jewelry given to us by a former flame that is best not seen by a significant other, or even telling a white lie about our whereabouts when it might seem to a loved one to have been more of a threat to you or your relationship than might rightly be determined by your questioner at three o’ clock in the morning (assuming that there is indeed an innocent explanation). This isn’t the manner of “innocent deceit” to which we’re addressing ourselves.

We’re talking about the hiding of truth when the actual intent behind this obscuring activity is overt, is offensive rather than defensive, when the act of deceit is meant to gain advantage, when it is hatched for the purpose of keeping another person or people off guard and unaware when their unawareness will be most definitely hurtful to the person who is being deceived, even if they never catch on.

People of African descent may say that they are no worse off for not having known that an African man wrote most of the New Testament. And that it was he and his mother Mary who were the John and Mary at the foot of Jesus’ cross. If it is neither here nor there that we knew or didn’t know the truth, why have we not known it? We have not known it, as we will prove, because there have been profound, broad and very complicated efforts made so that people who are most obviously of African descent will not know (All our earliest ancestors came from Africa, science is increasingly making us aware — white, black, red, yellow it doesn’t matter, green, polka dotted, well. … In other words, as the best songwriters write … We’re all brothers and sisters. Dealing with that, embracing that, loving that … is what gets us in, you know? Which means all racists … are out. How do we know? It came with the bundle). Imagine how people of color would have been aided, helped, encouraged and found pride in knowing that one of their own was Jesus most beloved friend … and a brilliant man who wrote most of the New Testament, even putting Paul in his place?

When the needs and desires of the deceiver are selfish … and shows more regard for the deceiver’s well-being or wants and needs, inordinately more, than for the well-being of the person who is being deceived … that’s what we’re talking about. That kind of deceit is evil. It is knowingly, willfully being deceitful that makes deceit the profoundly destructive thing that it is for the deceived and the deceiver. Deceivers are most easily deceived. Those who do not deceive, who do not wish to deceive for the purpose of succeeding, are given this approach to life as a divine gift. If you’re an honest person, to a fault, it is a gift.

Deceit to hide the gaining of an unfair advantage over another person for whom the deceiver ought to be concerned and protective but apparently is not is what we’re talking about. Let us offer several examples, next time, as we proceed to discuss the obscuring of these two people, two historical figures, the obscuring of whom has only been detrimental, that is, it has been a deceitful obscuring effort intended for the obscurers to gain unfair advantage over those who are innocently unaware that they are being deceived: These two people, a mother and a son, as we have said, are named Mary and John. By hiding these two people, a whole lot of other people, a whole race of other people, have been placed in an unfair and an unhealthy circumstance.

In other words, information has been hidden from them which would have been advantageous for them to have for the purpose of making a judgment and a decision on behalf of themselves and their families to their personal benefit. What conclusions can we draw from that … as we look on down the road? What conclusions can we draw that efforts have been made to keep people from color from knowing that they are more superior than they realize? What does it say about us white folks? (I’m white, but not all of me. None of us are all white, as we’ve said. My claim to fame, to color, is my Cherokee heritage. I’m learning to make Native American flutes, by the way, but the work is slow. It has been, because it is as fun throwing a knife, at a target, as it is carving with one. Come visit us in Tennessee … and we’ll show you.)

— rcg