Interviews from Beyond the Grave: Jesus and Jim Morrison

Interviews from Beyond the Grave
brought to you by
The Academy of the Dead



MICHAEL: Good evening, I am your host and welcome to another edition of Interviews Beyond the Grave from The Academy of the Dead. Here, we are limited by neither space, time nor geography, and able to access the Imaginal Realm without the forms required by the usual sensory organs. We always bring you some of the most unlikely match-ups imaginable.

Tonight we have Jim Morrison, a co-founder of the popular 20th century band, The Doors, and Jesus of Nazareth who needs no introduction. Let’s begin with Jim, welcome to Interviews Beyond the Grave Mr. Morrison, or should I say Mr. Mojo Risin?

JIM MORRISON: Thank you, great to be here, and I just wanna say how privileged I feel to be hanging out with Jesus, the original Door, the real Mr.Mojo Risin, if ya know what I mean.

MICHAEL: I don’t know what you mean, unless you are referring to the resurrection.

JIM MORRISON: Yep, that’s the risin I’m talking about.

MICHAEL: So Jesus, welcome, and let me ask you about this controversial miracle of the resurrection; we moderns aren’t too keen on this idea that dead men come back to life – did it really happen?

JESUS: Good to be here, and yes, it did happen.

MICHAEL: Can you prove it to modern readers who have evolved beyond the fairy tale mentality of gullible primitives?

JESUS: They are reading an interview with a couple of dead guys aren’t they?

MICHAEL: I see, but they will say that this is an imaginary interview.

JESUS: I prefer the word Imaginal.

MICHAEL: Meaning?

JESUS: Imaginary assumes we made it up and that it never existed apart from our brains; Imaginal recognizes a Realm that actually exists beyond normal space and time – you know, like dreams.

MICHAEL: But could people have touched your body in the first century, was it real?

JESUS: Are your dreams real?

MICHAEL: Yes.

JESUS: Can you touch them?

MICHAEL: Well, not really, but they do touch me.

JESUS: Exactly…the resurrection really happened.

MICHAEL: But Jesus, come on now, we all know now that dreams are just biological burps in the restless brain during sleep, or, how did Ebeneezer Scrooge put in when he saw his first ghost, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than grave about you, whatever you are.”

JESUS: Have you never wondered why so many people who wrote about seeing me experienced the same biological burp simultaneously? Do you suppose that they all ate from the same underdone potato?

JIM MORRISON: Whoa! Dude! See why I say he is the Original Door!

MICHAEL: Jim, say more about that, why do you call Jesus the original door?

JIM MORRISON: Well, the door metaphor comes from the Gospel of John, as I recall. I was reading it the night I accidentally overdosed in the tub in France - John 10:9 in the King Jimmy Version where Jesus says, “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.” At that point in my life I knew I was no door, more like a bloated alcoholic boor.

See, originally I thought Aldous Huxley came up with the door idea when he was writing about mind expanding drugs and his 1954 book, The Doors of Perception, which by the way is where we got the name of our band ya know – well, actually Huxley borrowed if from the mystical poet William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

In 1965 I was reading Huxley’s book one night, trippin out on Mescaline, looked up at the television, and that funky door from the Twilight Zone came spinning onto the screen and Rod Serling was sayin, “You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension. A dimension of sound... a dimension of sight... a dimension of mind. You are moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into... The Twilight Zone.”

I think that is the Imaginal Realm Jesus was talking about – it’s not imaginary, or a figment of human fantasies, but an actual realm that is seen with an organ most modern people don’t even know about.

JESUS: I called it the Kingdom of Heaven.

JIM MORRISON: Sounds about right…so I just wanna say I know more now what those guys were sayin, about doors to infinity, narrow chinks in the cavern, other dimensions and crossing over and stuff like that. Jesus was talking about that door a long time ago, and he wasn’t even trippin!

MICHAEL: Jesus, anything to add to that?

JESUS: Not really, it is good to be here, but I do want to take issue with one thing you said in the beginning of the interview…

MICHAEL: Please do.

JESUS: You said that I needed no introduction, well, that may not be so true.

MICHAEL: Meaning?

JESUS: After 2,000 years, there are a few misunderstandings about me. People assume that I was always some sort of mystical do-gooder and lover of humanity - that I dropped from my mother’s womb turning water into breast milk. Nope, I had a very human life before I became Jesus ‘the Christ’. People forget that to become a mature Human or Son of Man and Son of God is to experience the process of going through real life stuff.

MICHAEL: Tell us more about that.

JESUS: Well, Jim Morrison and I are not so different in some ways. I was also pretty wild in my teens and twenties. I have read all those modern books that said I went to Babylon or Egypt and studied with great spiritual masters - one book said I practiced Buddhism for twenty years and another said that I was abducted by aliens and taken to a planet in the Pleides and instructed in esoteric interplanetary wisdom. Nah, all false. I was actually, how do the modern kids say it, ‘partying hearty’ for a number of years. That’s why the Pharisees were always accusing me of hanging out with drunks and hookers; I was.

JIM MORRISON: Whoa! You serious man?

JESUS: Very serious. Remember the parable of the prodigal son? That’s autobiographical – that’s why there is so much detail in that story. I spruced it up a little bit since my father Joseph didn’t have that much money, but I took what he had saved and went to Sepphoris near Nazareth and raised holy hell for a few years. That's where I met Matthew, the drunken, cheating tax collector. He still laughs when people call him Saint Matthew!

I was pretty wild, but always interested in God, and I hated religion! I partied until I was physically, financially, emotionally and spiritually broken in spirit - literally ended up in a pig pen, feeding and sleeping with the hogs. The only thing I had left of any value was a pearl ring given to me by mother, which fell off of my finger into the muck; a herd of hungry pigs knocked me over to get to it and swallowed it before I could pick it up. That’s why I later told people to never cast pearls of wisdom before swine; don’t waste your time on people whose egos are still in tact, especially some religious people. Many of them couldn’t have seen the truth even if God had showed up in the flesh, which is what God always does by the way.

MICHAEL: This admission is not going to be received too well by most of your loyal followers. They say you were sinless; in fact, I am more than a little shocked and disappointed myself.

JESUS: My followers? My followers are those who do the will of God, those who have experienced ego deflation and a broken and contrite heart. That rarely comes to a man or woman without some sort of personal crisis. What kind of Savior would I be if I hadn’t suffered like other ordinary people? Many of my followers are stuck in religious and theological egoism, the most insidious and most difficult egoism to overcome. Those people would rather worship and read about me than examine the demons in their own souls. And let me just add, not every one needs to end up in a pig pen to wake up…but it sure helps.

JIM MORRISON: Amazing! That’s exactly where I was when I died in France. Dude, I was so depressed, discouraged, deflated and in deep despair, but couldn’t kick the smack and Jack Daniels habit. I had tons of money, but my soul was in the pig pen, and I was praying everyday. Why did God fail me?

JESUS: Your death Jim, like mine, did more to move people to God than if you had lived.

JIM MORRISON: Huh?

JESUS: John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens and thousands of people read the headlines the day after you died and looked at their own hearts and behaviors in ways they never had before. Evangelism, as some call it, happens in many fascinating ways on planet earth. Every single action is either an expression of Spirit or a motivation toward the Holy Spirit. You motivated people to evaluate their paths Jim. Your life wasn’t a waste. Everybody is a door for somebody in one way or another. That’s what I meant when I said the ‘first shall be last and the last shall be first.' You got more me people through the Door than most preachers!

JIM MORRISON: So is that what Blake meant when he said, "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom?"

JESUS: Partly, yes, but he forgot to add that the road usually contains hospitals, jails, courts, treatment centers and morgues. It’s not the road I’d recommend.

JIM MORRISON: Modern versions of pig pens...

JESUS: Potentially, yep.

MICHAEL: Well, our time is up for today’s show. I want to thank you gentlemen for a most fascinating conversation from the Realm of the Imaginal.

JIM MORRISON: My pleasure.

JESUS: Me too, and I was wondering Jim, could you play that ‘Jesus is Just Alright With Me’ song?

JIM MORRISON: That’s the Doobie Brothers, but I can play 'The End'.

JESUS: Cool.

[Overheard as the credits roll:]

Michael: So I understand Janis Joplin and Mary Magdalene are in the Green Room, perhaps the five of us could go out for a bite to eat after the show.

Jesus: Great idea. My friend, Peter, runs the To Hell and Back Hard Rock Café.

Jim Morrison: Cool, is that the place across from the Next Whiskey Bar?

[End of Credits - Screen Freezes]

In truth, all modern education consists of conversations with the dead from the Imaginal Realm. Every eternal Idea or memorable Deed originates from this Realm and is recorded, bound in a tome, and exhumed or resurrected by somber seekers, otherwise known as grave robbers...