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myth : religion
All of life is a meditation.
Most
meditation is unintentional.
The
unintentional concern about material conditions is a burden never
lifted.
Material concerns can never be completely solved as they are
infinite.
There is absolutely no way of making a organic organism
perfectly secure.
Human beings rise above material concerns when
realizing satisfaction of the flesh is
an impossibility that can never be
accomplished in reality.
Adults have
attempted to communicate spiritual
consciousness to children throughout human history by
fabricating mythical
narratives in attempts to explain
the ineffable in
a metaphoric allegoric manner.
Myths, always about the
human journey through life, are designed to bring us to
a level of consciousness that is
spiritual in essence.
Myths offer life models.
Life models to live
by.
Living
models to imitate and
mimic.
For the living models of myths to perform their
function correctly they must be both culturally and temporally in tune with
their social group.
The religious
myth, a model for living, must be
appropriate for time and
place to function smoothly
as the moral order.
Dogmatic literialist
intrepretation of religious myths belongs in
the mystical past when giants
roamed and gods descended to Earth.
To interpret religious myths literally
is to become out of sync with present social cultural conditions and
values.
To
oaccept religious myths literally is to descend into a hyperreality in
which everything must be given a mask to
conform to the dogmatic belief system.
As children grow into adults
they recognize the impossibilty of interpreting the imaginative religious myths literally and
lose faith in the dogmatic
literialist religion that has been taught them.
At this point in time the child must become an adult
with adult responsibilities if the tribe is to survive.
Initiation
ceremonies into the tribe are designed to break the
self-centered worldview
of a child and initiate
a paradigm shift in
understanding.
The main responsibility of the child, up until this
time, was to simply survive in an inhospitable world of ice and steam but now,
he or she, must contribute to the continual prosperity of the tribe.
So
the tribe introduces the child to their ineffable patron, breaks the
self-centered worldview and welcomes the newly rebirthed member a place at the
meeting table with the adults.
All cultural symbols originate in a
cultures founding psychological system.
The cultural symbols of
the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam originated in
a priestly elite of Akhenaten that
had fled the counter revolution that deposed Tutankhamun.
The priestly elite of
Moshe Rabbenu needed another theological
system other than that of the deposed
Tutankhamun while fully
adhering to the monotheistic
tradition began by Akhenaten
with which to lead their rag tag band of ignorant nomadic warriors.
Moshe Rabbenu
cobbled together various local myths
to come up with the
socially engineered foundation for their local nomadic warrior god Yahweh.
Unfortunately certain ponerological elements
crept in originally to keep the warriors under social control and later to
assimilate the Canaanites.
To
keep the warriors under control the priests of Yahweh came up with the concept
of being born into sin after being separated from Yahweh.
The idea
of inherent spiritual
corruption placed upon your Eternal Soul at birth as ordained by Yahweh
puts the victim who falls for the
ponerological pathology into a servile condition to those who
claim to be interpreters of the will
of Yahweh and those who claim to be
intercessors for Yahweh.
To assimilate
the Canaanites the
Cult of Yahweh had to demonize
the religion of the Canaanites,
originally an Egyptian colony,
as Baal, fertility god of the
Canaanites was the Apis bull,
fertility god of the Egyptians.
The Cult of Yahweh
hybrid engineered religious
tradition rejected the symbiotic relation with nature by
derogation of 'nature
religions'.
In
place of the forces of nature, which define reality quite eloquently, concepts
of what is good for people and what is bad for people originate in the minds of
men who may, or may not, be correct in their assessment.
The shift
from a nature religion to
a sociological religion
makes it difficult for us to link back
to nature. When the
focus was moved off nature the focus was moved onto identifying human behavior
as either good or evil.
When
the foundation of the
religion is laid in the mortar of the ethics of
what behavior is considered good
and what is behavior is considered evil then
everything must be catagorized as
either good or evil and
these judgements of behavior morph
over time as ethics of
good or evil are defined by
the tribe who
very well may have demons of their
own that they are attempting to exorcise:
James C. Dobson,
Jim Bakker,
David Koresh,
Marshall Applewhite,
Jimmy Swaggart,
Marion Gordon
Robertson, Ted Haggard,
William Eugene Scott.
When a religion gets mired in
allowing a priestly class to decide for the Creator and Sustainer what is good
for humankind and what is bad for humankind then you are in for a rough
ride.
The original symbolic archetypical conceptual imagery of the religion may very well be
corrupted to the point were it conveys a message that is
anti-thesis to its original intent.
"Every
religion is true when understood metaphorically.
When a religion gets stuck to its own metaphors,
interpreting metaphors as literal facts, then you are in trouble."
- Joseph Campbell
The mystical experience and its
interpretation through
metaphors becomes a threat to the existing
order.
"The difference between a priest and a
shaman is that the priest is a functionary and the shaman is someone who has
had a mystical experience. In
our tradition it is the monk who seeks the
mystical experience, while the
priest is the one who has studied to serve the
community.
I had a friend who
attended an international meeting of the Roman Catholic
meditative orders, which was held in
Bangkok. He told me that the Catholic
monks had no problems understanding the Buddhist monks, but that it was the clergy
of the two religions who were unable to understand each other.
In India, I have seen a red
ring put around a lingam stone, and then
the lingam stone is regarded as an
incarnation of the mystery of
life. Typically people think of things in practical material terms, but you
can think of anything in terms of its mystery.
Take any object.
Draw a ring around the object and regard the object in terms of it's
mystery, of it's
essence, of it's every facet, it's every
perspective and it's every dimension.
Doing this
essentially consecrates the object in your mind making it sacred as you now
know the object intimately.
Do you really know what anything truly
is ?
It exists in time and space .
How mysterious it is that anything should exist
!
Make the object the center of meditation,
the center of the intelligible mystery
of existence, which fully
immerses and surrounds us.
This object now becomes the center of the
universe.
The axis mundi is the
still point in the chaotic frantic motion of reality.
In a
mythological systems in which the metaphor of the
mystery of reality is
the Father you are going to have
a different set of thought
structures than if the metaphor for the
wisdom and
mystery of reality is
the Mother.
Christ says, "No one gets to
the Father but by me."
The
Father that he is talking about is the Creator.
It might be that you
can get to God, the Father, only by
way of Christ.
But
suppose you need a more nuturing feminine approach.
Then, perhaps, you
need to go by way of the Mother.
There you might
prefer Wicca and hymns to the Goddess.
That is simply another way
to get to the mystery of life.
Understand that each religion holds
within itself a complete worldview that works well only within the bounded
symbolic conceptual imagery of the initial religious culture that first created
it.
adapted from Joseph Campbell
"How can any cultural in-group
claim ownership of God?
This is a problem you get in the book of
Kings and in Samuel. The various Hebrew kings were sacrificing on
the mountain tops. And they did wrong in
the sight of Yahweh.
The Cult of Yahweh
was a specific movement in the Hebrew
community, which finally conquered the Land of Canaan.
The Cult of Yahweh pushed through a
temple bound patriarchal warrior god, normally worshiped by nomads in the
great outdoors, against
the nature cult of the
Mother which was celebrated in all
farming cultures by settled peoples.
This imperialistic thrust of an 'in group'
culture continues in the West." - Joseph Campbell
"We are by
nature sorters.
We evolved
in small bands of hunter-gathers when there was a selection for within-group
amity and between-group enmity.
With our fellow in-group members,
we are cooperative and altruistic.
Unfortunately, the downside to
this social bonding is that we are also
quite tribal and xeno-phobic to
out-group members.
Only when all people are considered
to be members of one global in-group can we begin to attenuate these out-group
associations." - Michael Shermer
Old testament biblical perspectives of
reality are poneroligically biased.
They are not in accord with our
current conceptual understanding of either reality or
the dignity of man.
The religions of
Judaism,
Christianity, and
Islam, as institutionally
practiced, are good examples of the failure of
religion to function as
originally designed.
These three religions were designed for entirely
different social and cultural conditions than those today.
It's right
there in Book of Genesis: We are to
be the masters of the Earth.
The truth is this way of living, as masters
of the Earth, actually worked just fine and would work just fine on an Earth in
which industry was based on sustainable agriculture. Unfortunately this is no
longer true.
These three traditional mythologies are fighting a war that is already lost. By
doing so they have disqualified themselves for the future.
They have disqualified themselves not because they refuse to
adapt in social and cultural ways to popular cultural but because their whole
understanding of reality is based on the
biblical condemnation
of nature.
To them a patriarchical warrior god,
separate from nature and the
noumenon
condemning man to a bleak existence seperate
from God, groveling for approval and mercy." - Joseph Campbell
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