Dr. Freeman

Hello friends

My first book has just been published by Peter Lang and is out now!
 
It’s titled: Post-Metaphysics and the Paradoxical Teachings of Jesus: the Structure of the Real… and you can check it at and even take a peek inside here…

It’s revolutionary stuff… Within its 330 pages I uncover the authentic voice-print of Jesus’ radical teachings on the Kingdom of God and thereby outlines a new approach to theological language after the end of metaphysics.

By showing that the paradoxical deep structure of Jesus’ most radical teachings survives the Death of God and the deconstruction of metaphysics in twentieth-century continental philosophy, this book aims to reconstruct the original teachings of Jesus in a way that can begin a new conversation on what it means to be a Christian in a post-Christian world, while drawing on a remarkable range of supporting material, including John D. Caputo’s award-winning theological appropriation of Derridas deconstruction, the pioneering work of John Dominic Crossan on the parables of Jesus, and the novel insights of Jesus Seminar scholars Robert Funk and Branden Scott. Beginning with questions surrounding the end of metaphysics in Martin Heideggers existentialist philosophy and moving on to the ethico-political dimensions of Derridas work, this volume examines Nicholas of Cusas notion of God as the coincidence of opposites, Buddhist genius Nagarjunas dialectic of Emptiness, and the Hindu concept of non-duality in raising the possibility of a post-metaphysical theology. Following an original unpacking of the parables of Jesus, the central thesis is woven together with reference to Moltmanns important work on the crucified God, as well as Kierkegaard and the Absolute Paradox, negative/mystical theology in the Christian tradition, twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro, and aspects of Nietzsche, Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Aristotle, Meister Eckhart, G. K. Chesterton, Slavoj Zizek and Ken Wilber.

Here’s a couple of reviews to hopefully spark your interest:
 
“Cameron Freeman breathes a new life of interaction with the Word into the familiar stories of Jesus that we so easily and dangerously think we understand. Freeman shows how continuously subverting is the teaching of Jesus towards all complacency and all attempts to tame that radical knowing of God that is the Gospel and that has changed the way human beings see God and themselves. With intelligence and careful scholarship this book also transmits that first thrill of seeing what Jesus is really getting at and the relief of seeing superficial interpretations collapse.”

-Father Laurence Freeman director of the World Community of Christian Meditation and widely published author

“In this fascinating book, Cameron Freeman has done two things usually considered to be between the improbable and the impossible. First, he says something new and interesting about the parables of Jesus by pondering them not just as discrete stories but as a total discourse. Second, he challenges the long-held ascendancy of philosophy over theology by using the deep structure of that parabolic complex as normative not just for Christian theology but even for post-modern philosophy itself.”

-John Dominic Crossan world renowned New Testament scholar, best-selling author and co-founder of the Jesus Seminar

“This work undercuts the assumption that post modernism’s criticism of Western metaphysics leads to either nihilism or atheism. Dr. Freeman takes to heart the criticism of Heidegger and Derrida and uses their insights to illuminate the heart of the Christian message making it accessible to the post modern mind. It is an invaluable contribution that will set the pace of theology well into the future.”

-Rev. Gregory J. Mayers, C.Ss.R., Zen Teacher of the Sanbo-Kyodan Religious Foundation and of the Empty Cloud Sangha, Director of the East-West Meditation Program at Mercy Center in Burlingame, CA 
 
Take a look and buy yourselves a copy. Why? Because the paradoxical secret in radical center of Christ’s teachings is guaranteed to shatter the complacency of civilized normalacy with a weird intrusion from the Real… for Truth is not so much “inner peace” but a painful, traumatic encounter with the dazzling obscurity of the midnight sun!
The reverse side also has a reverse side.

G’day each and all,

A big hello from Kao San road (Bangkok)…. and a brief update on my
Euro-Asian travel adventures, where the goal of the journey is always
and already accomplished, and so never really attained… Some
memorable fragments in chronological order:

Thailand - I suppose Cold Chisel put it best in the Aussie rock
classic Kao San, “I’ve been to South East Asia, and the Answer sure
ain’t there…” Sagely advice, for IMHO we would do well to give up on
the popular Western idea that the ultimate pillar of Wisdom, the
secret spiritual treasure can be recaptured out here in the East, in
this forbidden exotic place… The ugly truth is that Thailand is
really just an Asian version of the capitalist Wild West - karaoke
bars intermingled with Buddhist theme parks and massage parlors for
Western tourists… Ko Phi Phi Island is great case in point – sublime
and majestic when first seen from afar, a kind of heaven on earth…
but up close it is a paradise of filth, a gigantic pile of shit… Go
there and see for yourself… And Patong – where civilized Westerners
come by the thousands to do the Western men do - penetrate the exotic
Other - is both fascinating and terrifying… A little friendly
advice, the best looking girls are really boys and don’t ring the bell
at the bar – or you’ll be shouting the entire bar a drink…

So to escape the debauchery of Phuket in the south I went directly to
Chang Mai in the north where I met a girl named Fhar, we drank
together most evenings while I tried to convert her to Christianity
arguing that Buddhism seeks a fictitious peace beyond the pull of
competing forces… and that in SE Asia this once noble religion has
become a blank screen for the projection of Western ideological
fantasies… this last shelter of ancient Wisdom is really just a
primitive superstition propped up by cheap tricks and magic rituals…
She is still a Buddhist - and I don’t know who I am, but we had a
memorable time together…

Europe…

I agree with Ken Wilber here: I love the southern European climate
(France, Italy, Croatia) but prefer the northern European people
(Germans, Dutch, some of the English). Unfortunately in Europe you
can’t have it all - it’s either one or the other… Nature or
Culture… I think this is what Slovenian philosopher Zizek means by
the irreducible “gap” in the heart of the Real…

Germany/Mainz – I was here for a Christian meditation conference,
which reminded me of precisely how deluded and ignorant I really am –
and that joining a monastic community would only reinforce this
illusion…

But one of the most memorable experiences was sitting at the local bar
in Mainz pretending to read the drinks menu in German, only to lookup
up and see a long pair of German legs attached to a g-string and a
topless red hot body standing above me on the bar – I open my mouth in
astonishment and this very cheeky woman begins to pour a bottle of
vodka down my throat… after which I could speak fluid German…
later that night I met and flirted with the two blonde-bombshells from
the band “Funk Factory”, who were actually on TV the following day,
apparently their really big in Hamburg…

France/Taize – a very unique place for thousands of young Christians
to come to live and worship in a contemporary style of contemplative
prayer, with some very wise and compassionate brothers running the
show… One time, we studied the Book of Job at one of the gatherings
and I learnt a lot about “letting go” of the need to make meaning out
of ones life… The shocking truth of the Book of Job (one of the
central texts Western civilization) is that God does NOT guarantee for
us in an orderly universe or a purposeful existence - Rather, God
tells Job that the whole of creation is a radical accident… and
since there is no Big Story that makes things make sense, we are
better off just accepting that we live in a world of meaningless
suffering…

So the key to deep and abiding peace is to give up the need to find an
explanation for our suffering or a “reason why” to explain what
happens to us - The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are just
a heroic fiction - nothing more - things DO NOT happen for a reason…
The secret is that there is no Secret that makes things make sense –
Yeah, the Bible rocks!

Next installment coming soon…

Cameron Freeman

Two men, having had a drink or two, go to the theatre, where they become thoroughly bored with the play. One feels a pressing need to urinate, so he tells his friend to mind his seat while he goes to find a toilet. “I think I saw one down the corridor outside,” says his friend. The man wanders down the corridor, but finds no WC. Wandering further, he walks through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it, he returns to his seat. His friend says, “What a pity! You missed the best part. Some fellow just came on the stage and pissed in that plant pot.”

I’ve recently had a paper published in the International Journal of Zizek studies titled, “There’s a Crack in Everything that’s How the Light Gets In” . Slavoj Zizek is arguably the world’s most famous living philosopher. He is an eccentric wild man with a comic wit and has recently had a feature documentary made about him (Zizek!)

This paper draws a somewhat disturbing connection between Zizek’s magus opus “The Parallax View” - and the paradoxical teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (a central theme of this blog). As such, it opens the space for a revolutionary politics that can shatter the co-ordinates of the existing order with an unexpected intrusion from an altogether unheard of dimension…. So this paper is basically the groundwork for the political future of the crucified God, and as good Christians have always known - we do not need to wait for the right moment to start the revolution anymore, for the Christ-event had already happened… we can simply act as of the Kingdom is already at hand

Also, check out The Universe According to Slavoj Zizek for a brief video introduction to his absurdly optimistic and unpredictable view of the world

Thanks for reading

Are you sick of pretending to have your shit together? Is the task of feigning sanity driving you mad?? Is the honest confession that you may be totally deceived in your highest aspirations precisely the thing that makes your passion for life authentic?

No, not me either… for just as the real journey only begins when we do not see exactly where we are going, and just as existential resolve is never stronger than in the morning after the night when it was never weaker, in a time of peace the war like man sets about surrendering everything to a passion for Not-Knowing that undermines all his claims to premature self-actualization with a free gift of Love that costs him precisely everything…

And just as God created the world “ex nihilo” (out of Nothing), when this very same God wants to bring forth a great man he must also firstly reduce him to nothing… and thereby show him that in order to live fully and authentically, you must engage in a life and death struggle to subvert, transgress, deconstruct the thin veil of righteousness that centers everything around itself, become vulnerable to the strange truths that threaten one’s self-boundaries and honestly face up to the Impossible/Real in which the absolute Truth is logical nonsense…

So with a tremendous affirmation of the Mystery that derails or unsettles the standard use of language on the basis of its established meanings, leaving it’s reference (developmental signified) Empty, I will infuriate politically correct thought police and hereby maintain the radical un-decidability between the sacred and the obscene, the existential ambiguity between love and murder, and the phenomenological confusion between God and Terror – for all of these are radically Not-Two!

Both the actual occasion of ones profound spiritual awakening and the most overwhelming forms of violence (e.g. the Tsunami that occurred on the day after Christmas 2004 destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and the world-wide shock and awe stemming from the terror attacks of 911) - both of these events – the wonder of radical awakening and the horror of meaningless suffering – events that are said to be at opposite ends of the spectrum of human experience, are intrinsically unforeseeable, utterly unimaginable and totally unbelievable. That is, both Love and Death come to us from out of nowhere and leave us spell-bound and speechless, both come to us as an absolute surprise, and often as something monstrous, a horrendous apparition that explodes all our standards for harmony, order and ethical conduct… Yes friends, both Terrorism (Death) and God (Love) go past all conventional standards and ethical value-judgments in a dreadful awakening to the groundless abyss, and so the question remains: how much truth can you handle without the sugar coated defense against the shattering experience of chaotic vulnerability??

As all those Christians who read their Bible and all radical Muslims know, just like Abraham going up the mountain to sacrifice Issac, when we obey the unconditional claim of God on our lives we must give up any human justification, any rational grounds, and any merely human calculation. For as soon as you know for sure where you’re going and seek make everything turn on a clear-cut distinction between the Divine and the Demonic, the saint and the heretic, the messiah and the false prophet, as soon as you think you have a handle on this distinction, then that is the foreclosure of faith, the end of hope and an obstacle to love!

When you are sure you have the Real one, you can be sure that you’re lost in the wilderness, and so maybe it is better that the Secret remains secret after all… for who can we trust to administer it, interpret it, protect it?? In other words, if the Secret were given, the cure would quickly turn to poison…

And so in the cloud of Un-Knowing, where we give up any calculation, any claim to know the Name of that One, if God is found anywhere it is in the Nameless - i.e. the crucified, the abandoned, the destitute and those despised by those well bred, well-fed upholders of the established structures of goodness, truth and beauty…

Yes indeed, there is time-honored trajectory in the Western tradition from Isaiah to Paul to Luther to Kierkegaard to Derrida: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise… I will deconstruct the civilized madness of the ones who are supposed to know… for the foolishness of God always trumps the wisdom of the world.

The Christ-event is therefore a radical New Beginning, accompanied by the violent, traumatic, and contingent intrusion of Another Dimension that disrupts and destabilizes the predominant symbolic code. And since this event is not mediated by the domain of terrestrial finitude with its propensity for corruption and the abuse of power, this intrusion of the traumatic Real - this crucified God - renders obsolete the conventional distinction between the believers and the infidels, the saved and the lost, the theists and atheists with an amoral reversal that cuts to the heart of Jesus’ own radical teachings on the Kingdom of God.

For in the in-breaking of the already/not-yet Kingdom where everything is turned inside-out and up-side down, who can be left out?? And who can say for sure that they are in?? For where the absolute religious experience is made possible by “an asymmetrical obedience to an absurd order” (Derrida), an space that is otherwise than the structures of power that service the privileged few, everything that goes by the name of religion, philosophy, truth and goodness would actually get in the way – lest we forget the dangerous memory of Jesus of Nazareth - for the Truth will strike us as deeply Absurd, and come to us as something that we did Not see coming… so all we can do is stay open to an unpredictable earthquake, and hope and pray for something, we know not what… as our true purpose in life will come over us in an event that at first looks like a sheer accident, a complete failure or an unmitigated disaster…

So, when all the boundaries between God and Satan collapse then we have no way of telling a terrorist from a freedom fighter, a democratically elected leader from a religious fundamentalist, a nation of civilized people from a collection of fearful and desperate barbarians, an illegal bombing from a legal war… and when we shatter the categories that hold together our fragile grasp on (so-called) reality then we are in a fruitful space, an empty/pregnant/void in which all values can be created anew. So rather than radically dissociating Good and Evil, Us and Them, Resurrection and Death, I suggest that we are to assume our mortality and suffering in its most radical form. To be sure, the incomprehensibility of Terror IS indistinguishable from our divine stupor before the un-knowable Other-ness of God… and neither of these limit-experiences can be domesticated or made ones own… for they both elude all our programs of mastery, slip through the grasp of all our schemes, and resist reduction to all history, revelation, and all truth…

And so maybe behind it all there is Nothing behind it all, there is nothing to prop up our established beliefs and practices – maybe that is the condition of Truth. It is there, from a time out of mind… It already has me, before I have IT, before I Am – it is there – a matter of my undoing, like the heat death of the Universe… I am made destitute by It… I am debilitated by It… It holds me there ‘without remission’… I cannot say what it is - Being and God and Truth have been reduced to ashes and consumed by this nameless, formless Impossibility… this indeterminate desert-like emptiness that antedates all determinate forms and structures… it is Nothing that I own but Something to which I must own up… I call out and it doesn’t answer – there’s no body there… Its bottomless depth eludes my grasp, haunting me, unknown, ungraspable, an Abyss that threatens to swallow up everything that keeps me here… like a black hole that follows the death of a star absorbing the light of all the smaller bodies around it. Yet, it is there. This is what has us…and maybe all our little truths, and virtues and institutions and programs for self-improvement will be reduced to ashes without a trace… for all we know the stars twinkle in the void of endless space and the little planet teeming with life will one day sink back into the sun… Will anyone ever know that we were here?