Jesus Heals the Gerasene Demoniac (Rabel)

(Back) Parable of the Tares Woman Who Touched Christ's Garment (Next)

Matt. 8:28-34 Mark 5:1-20 Luke 8:26-39, Harmony Gospels p.71, pp. 96-100 of transcript

This healing is found in the three synoptic Gospels and it is not like the other demon possession healings Jesus performs, because this one contains a lot of detail. It is an in-depth narrative of the incident, and especially two things are brought out here which are not present in the other demon healings that Jesus performs. The first significant thing is when Jesus asks the patient his name. This is very unusual; ordinarily Jesus does not ask people's names. He knows what their names are, but he asks this man his name, as you will see, because of the answer He knew He will get which is very significant. He asks, "what is thy name?" And he saith unto him, My name is Legion; for we are many. And then the other thing which is not so easy to deal with is what happens after the demons leave the patient. The demons apparently leave the patient and then enter into a herd of swine and they proceed to madly throw themselves off of a cliff into the sea.

First of all we have the significance of the patient declaring his name is Legion for we are many. This parallels the plight of many persons today who are not literally insane, who are quite functional and who would not appear as ill or irrational to any but a very practiced eye. The name Legion could identify anyone who is currently obsessed with the parts he lets play him in life. In other words, you are not playing a role consciously in this state; you become the toy of the roles who choose to play you. It is the surrendering to false personality and becoming subjective to the whims, the mental suggestions, the prevalent emotions running around. When these are adopted consciously by a person, they become part of the make-up he applies in his role play and in any drama in which you are currently role playing consciously, you are the star, you are not the part of the mob. This is when you know what you are doing. That is, you and I often find ourselves not being able to be ourselves in certain situations in life; it wouldn't do. So, life being what it is, because of personalities being what they are, life events still being formed by the secondary power of thought instead of the first or creative power of thought, we are often placed in what we call false positions or unreal situations and we being as we are, with our integrity and our vulnerability, often realize that in order to keep things falling into place, in order to prevent unnecessary wounding to occur here, we have to play the game, we have to render unto Caesar for the time being, that is, a part of you has to do this, not all of you do this. The part of me, the real of me, will remember who and what I really am and nothing can change it, nothing can violate it; but I still am a part of the crew on this ship of life. We have different demands made upon us and I can't always be only acting as my absolutely perfect self; I can always know this within myself and express from that awareness but I must learn how to adapt myself to life's enforced roles I will have to play. As long as I am doing this connected with my awareness of my real self, I will play my current roles consciously, which will cause it to be creative, beneficial. It will have its validity within the grand purpose even though it may be a role which is not particularly attractive at the moment; yet it will be your role that life has placed on me. If I keep myself aware of my real self, my divine origin, that knowing will keep the connections for me to play any role I am cast in at any moment in life in a creative and constructive manner; but that is pretty idealistic. We often, for various reasons, forget our real self and get caught up entirely in the role playing and we are not longer doing it consciously. We are doing it subjectively and in some cases insanely and the role then will have the tendency to play us. We identify with the role. Now, once a role becomes our identity, that is, we identify so much with it that it becomes us, one of the first things it does is the same thing that the evil spirit did when he went out on his cyclic journey to race consciousness, He gathered unto himself seven (seven symbolic) brothers worse than himself. The same thing happens to a person who subjects himself to the role where the role plays him; pretty soon he is not playing just that negative role, a whole cast of negative roles begin playing him until he will eventually get himself into such a state of confusion that he doesn't even know what his main name is. Do you see the analogy between these negative roles and demons? They are negative roles that we allow to assume us in life. Even if the role starts out being a positive, desirable role, the moment you let it take you over it becomes a demon and even if the name of that role is Unity Minister. You let that role take you over and you and the Christ will be disconnected in consciousness and you and the role have become one and funny things can happen, strange things can happen. The thing to do is always make sure that you do not ever call your Christ self a role in your consciousness. It is the casting director, it is the author, it is the publisher, it is the producer, it is the talent, it is the genius that goes into it all. Never identify with any role; always see that as the real eternal reality of your being, and these comings and goings of roles in life, you will be able to handle them. Remember that any role you play in consciously you are the star; when you begin to unconsciously play the roles, you are not the star. You are the mob, and then, from there you can become victim.

These demons symbolize the negative traits of human nature which then assume personalities through one's part in life; they take possession quickly when one is not alert and honest in his own observation of oneself. Many of these things begin by suppressing negative emotions and thinking that thereby one has got to do that instead of denying them. If they are suppressed they become unconscious roles and that won't work; they can tear a person apart emotionally if they get too bad. Now, they are cast out, of course, when they are recognized for what they are and we return in consciousness to an awareness of our true self, our real self, the unified Christ self, not the Legion of false personalities but the unified, totally unified Christ self within, personified by Jesus.

(Don't equate denial with repression, they are two different ball games, one of them is a losing game.)

When you and I turn within and recognize who you and I really are, then all roles that have been taking us over lose their dominance; they cannot obfuscate any moment; there cannot be room for two things in one spot and that spot is your consciously accepted belief about yourself. Spiritual Awareness casteth them out.

In the story they are cast out and enter this herd of swine which will pursue its self-destruction by drowning in the sea. We have a very big problem here in being clear-headed about this, I wish I could straighten it out and rationalize it all but I can only throw some tentative hints about this. For one thing, our attitude toward animal life has changed vastly in the last few centuries; at one time mankind on earth was on a level of feeling, knowing, unfoldment, where animal life meant little or nothing to him. They had practically no respect for animal life and the like and that has changed drastically so that it is quite possible that this event occurring to the herd of swine at the time these Gospels were written could be a matter of great indifference to the witnesses and to the writers. The attitude could have been something like this, "So what if a herd of swine got infected with the demons and threw themselves into the sea, who cares, we don't need pork anyway in our house." It is quite possible that the general trend of indifference toward the animal life got into this somehow. Nowadays you read this and the average person is hurt by it, why did Jesus involve himself in an incident where an innocent herd of swine would be forced to commit suicide as they did? I can't take it any further in that direction. But there is a metaphysical, even more strongly, there is an occult factor here; and I am just going to mention it, I really do not want discussion on this. There is a very mysterious process that goes on in our world that has been noted by many illumined people; especially in occult religions it has been quite strongly noticed. It has been mentioned many times in certain metaphysical teachings that I have investigated that has to do with the fact that man infuses into nature certain things which proceed directly from himself. In most cases it occurs in certain manner that is hardly noticeable; it is carried on in such a diffused indirect way that we, for the most part, see no connection between what emanates from us and happenings in nature and this would include the lower forms of life such as animal, plant and mineral life. Now, we are beginning to notice this very strongly in the infusion man can cause to enter into plant life; this is the big fact these days. It is a rather recent development but it is big, and so people now are talking to their plants, are touching them, are kissing them, are loving them and getting wonderful results. That is part of what we are talking about here; through man's consciousness he can directly infuse other forms of life and even natural phenomena with his emanations, now. If he is conscious and he knows who and what he is, what kind of emanations will he always be sure they are? Good, beneficial, uplifting emanations, that is the whole idea of pet ownership. Do you think you own a pet just to keep your company? You are doing something for the pet which that pet understands only a human being could do for it; and it is much more than food, clothing and shelter, it has something to do with evolution. The man in the parable was not aware of who or what he was; he was insane, he was possessed of negative roles, so after his healing, these demons that went from him did not go directly into the dissolving process which would have happened could he had been consciously using denials; in other words, the demon would then, as all negativity does, when you are rightly using denial, doesn't touch anybody else in its dissolving journey. It simply goes from you back to where it came from; no one is infected along the way because there is consciousness, there is denial. But here we have a different case; here we have a man who was in such an extreme situation that he couldn't do his own denial.

Jesus evidently did it for him, but even so the case was so bad and since the denials and purification did not come directly from the man's own consciousness, the demons could not go into direct harmlessness and dissolution. That took a detour on their way back and they hit the most vulnerable forms of consciousness available to them to enter before their last gasp. Even negativity being denied back to the wonderful state of substance, even it has the instinct for self-preservation. Even when something is going to change for our highest good, we will often resist the change of form initially; so it seems logical that this accumulated negativity of the personality, which at a moment is resisting going back to formless substance, would in its panic seek to enter the first vulnerable state of consciousness he could enter. Here are the innocent little pigs, a whole herd of them, completely subjective creatures and not hurting anybody, minding their own business but vulnerable because they are not in conscious control and that this negative energy emanating from the patient not going back into the dissolving process makes a detour into the innocent animals and causes them to fulfill the process. (I hope some of those little pigs have reincarnated as a human being and are now on the way of spiritual consciousness.) Many many animals are sacrificed in the processes of nature for a higher good in the greater purpose and I am convinced that those animal entities are reborn. I really believe this, animals are not what they seem to be to us. They are not as great as some of us think they are, and they are not as dumb as some of us think they are. They are valid life expressions in their own particular dimension of evolution and more than anything else, they need our help.

Q. Could you tell us how this healing relates to the process of developing a healing consciousness as far as adding to the teaching the awareness of a new ingredient that will complete the picture as the other healings do? A. This healing does not offer any ingredient to learn because the man was insane; everything on the patient's part was subjective while the ingredients must be developed consciously, that is why the demons got in his mind. It was Jesus' healing consciousness who healed him; if it had been his healing consciousness, the demons wouldn't have got into him, they would have gone directly into the denial process to dissolution. In this case and in many others, Jesus himself is the total healing consciousness, and in those cases where not only did they not have a healing consciousness but rejected the healing consciousness.

This is something that I wrote long long ago, "the demons entering the swine points to a very mysterious point which has to do with man's infusion into nature of certain things which proceed from himself. This is a very strange and complex subject, not necessary to explore as yet in this type of Bible interpretation."

Text of the original transcript from the top of page 90 through the second paragraph of page 100.
Transcribed by Rev. Cecilia Loving and Marlon Cromwell on September 5, 2013.