Sarasvati
Sep 5, 2008, 7:02 PM
Following on from recent threads concerning religion, I happened to find the piece below in an old surrealist text. Rather bizarre but intriguing I think, just thought I'd pass it on for the amusement or otherwise of others.
The World of Being
In the beginning there were two unequally matched rivals, Good and Evil, and Good said;
”Being is better than not being and so I will create a world where being can be, and being can beget being, and being can beget the world, and begetting can be.”
And so The World of Being came to be, a permanent now in which what was and what will be could exist in Unified Harmony as what is and The One was The Infinite and The Infinite The One, inseparable, individable and whole. And The World of Being knew itself.
Good was pleased with his creation. But so too was Evil.
Lacking Good’s creative principle, the envious Evil elected to stand between Good and The World of Being so as to deny Good sight of his own creation.
And Good created sorrow and anger and blending both, he forged an axe which he called The Opposite and sent it into The World of Being so that Life could split Evil down the middle and restore to Good his sight of his own creation. In doing so, Good had been duped into creating The Destruction but his was righteous.
Evil was not slow to move and countered by peppering The World of Being with the Notion of Truth. This was the seed of doubt. Unified Harmony was confused and Life could not decide where to swing The Opposite.
In the permanent now , WHAT IS is and can not not be and the Question is not required. But the Notion of Truth issued forth the Question which gave birth to the begetting of ignorance and The World of Being no longer knew itself. Existence itself had become the Question . Unified Harmony had been deceived into believing itself a scattering of parts and The One and The Infinite separable and contradictory.
Good could not allow this reason to go unchallenged and created The Mirror out of the falsehood which he then placed in front of Evil.
“In The Mirror is a reflection,” Good said to Life. “A copy of The World of Being, but use the falsehood from which it is composed and recognise that the copy and the being are not identical.”
“There is being and there is the reflection of being, and both are, and what was and was its reflection, and, what will be and will be its reflection, can all exist in Unified Harmony .”
“But being is superior to not being and the reflection of being, though it is and is therefore superior to not being, is not being and is inferior to it.”
“And Superiority is Good Law.”
“View The Mirror clearly and adhere to The Principles of Superiority and you will have alchemised The Mirror into a window and once again Life will know where to swing The Opposite.”
“And then you will remember The One is The Infinite and The Infinite The One and ignorance will be uprooted from Unified Harmony and the Question will no longer be asked and The World of Being will know itself again.”
void()
Sep 7, 2008, 10:53 PM
Here's something that appeals to me for its illustration of hope. It's attributed to being written by Plato. Not sure it was but it does have a certain bit of his style.
Gasping Air
A young man found out that one of the richest men in
all the land lived in his town. So he decided to visit
the rich man. As he came up to the front of the man's
home, he could not help but marvel at the wealth and
beauty he saw.
Summing up his courage, he knocked on door and much to
his surprise, the old man himself answered the door.
The young man was a bit nervous and managed to stammer
out "Sir, I understand you are one of the richest men
in the world."
The old man acknowledged the fact.
The young man then went on to ask "I would like to ask
you the secret to your success."
With a smile on his face, the old man replied, "I will
not only tell you, son, but I will show you" and
invited him in.
With great joy in his heart, the young man stepped into
the elegant home. The old gent walked all the way
through the house, with the younger one close behind,
in awe at all the wealth he saw. He got a chance to see
the happy family who lived there. Soon they went out
the back door and through the garden. The old gent led
the way down to the beach and then waded into the ocean
water.
Soon they were up to their ankles in water, then up to
their knees, their waist, and finally the old man
stopped when they were in up to their shoulders.
The younger man was a bit nervous, because he was not
too good a swimmer!
The old man then placed his hands on the head of the
younger and pushed him under the water. And held him
there for 10 seconds, 20 second, a half minute.
The young man was rapidly running out of air! Then
finally after a full minute, he could stand it no more!
He shook free of the hands on his head and burst
through the surface of the water and gulped some air!
He turned to the old man and yelled "What were you
trying to do, DROWN ME?"
The old man just smiled and replied "When you want
success as much as you wanted that gulp of air, THEN
you will be successful!"
FalconAngel
Sep 8, 2008, 1:29 AM
Here's an interesting take from one of the Pagan websites that we belong to:
"We Are the Other People"
by Oberon Zell
"Ding-dong!" goes the doorbell. Is it Avon calling? Or perhaps Ed McMahon with my three million dollars? No, it's Yahweh's Witlesses again, just wanting to have a nice little chat about the Bible...
Boy, did they ever come to the wrong house! So we invite them in: "Enter freely and of your own will..." (Hey, it's Sunday morning, nothing much going on, why not have a little entertainment?) Diane and I amuse ourselves watching their expressions as they check out the living room: great horned owl on the back of my chair; ceremonial masks and medicine skulls of dragons and unicorns on the wall; crystals, wands, staffs, swords; lots of Goddess figures and several altars; boa constrictors draped in amorous embrace over the elkhorn; white doves sitting in the hanging planters; cats and weasels underfoot; iron dragon snorting steam atop the wood stove; posters and paintings of wizards and dinosaurs and witchy women, some proudly naked; sculptures of mythological beasties and lots more dinosaurs; warp six on the star-filled viewscreen of my computer; a five-foot model of the USS Enterprise and the skeleton of a plesiosaur hanging from the ceiling; very, very many books, most of them dealing with obviously weird subjects... To say nothing of the great horned owl perched on the back of my chair and the Unicorn grazing in the front yard. You know; early Addams Family decor.
And then, of course, it being late in the morning, you can expect Morning Glory to come wandering out naked, looking for her wake-up cup of tea. Morning Glory naked is a truly impressive sight, and the Witlesses look as if she'd set titties on stun as they stand immobilized, hands clasped over their genitals. With the stage set and all the actors in place, the show is ready to begin.
Their mission, of course, it to save our heathen souls by turning us on to "The Word of the Lord" - their Bible. I guess they figure some of us just haven't heard about it yet, and we're all eagerly awaiting their joyous tidings of personal salvation through giving our rational faculties to Jesus. Every time they come around, I look forward to trying out a new riposte. Sure, it may be cruel and sadistic of me, but hey, I didn't call them up and ask them to come over; they entered at their own risk!
This time should be pretty good. After letting them run off their basic rap while lovely Morning Glory serves us all hot herb tea, I innocently remark: "But none of that applies to us. We have no need for salvation because we don't have original sin. We are the Other People."
"Hunh? What?" they reply eloquently. It's clear they've never heard this one before.
"Right," I say. "It's all in your Bible." And I proceed to tell them the story, using their own book for reference:
Genesis 1:26 - The [Elohim] said, "Let us make humanity in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild beasts and all the reptiles that crawl upon the earth."
Elohim is a plural word, including male and female, and should properly be translated "Gods" or "Pantheon."
27 The Gods created humanity in the image of themselves, In the image of the Gods they created them, Male and Female they created them.
28 The Gods blessed them, saying to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all living animals on the earth."
Now clearly, here we are talking about the original creation of the human species: male and female. All the animals,plants, etc. have all been created in previous verses. This is before the Garden of Eden, and Yahweh is not mentioned as the creator of these people. The next chapter talks about how Yahweh, an individual member of the Pantheon, goes about assembling his own special little botanical and zoological Garden in Eden, and making his own little man to inhabit it:
Gen 2:7 - Yahweh God fashioned a man of dust from the soil. Then he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus the man became a living being.
8 Yahweh God planted a garden in Eden which is in the east, and there he put the man he had fashioned.
9 Yahweh God caused to spring up from the soil every kind of tree, enticing to look at and good to eat, with the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden.
15 Yahweh God took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to cultivate and take care of it.
Now this next is crucial: note Yahweh's precise words:
16 Then Yahweh God gave the man this admonition, "You may eat indeed of all the trees in the garden.
17 Nevertheless of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die."
Fateful words, those. We will refer back to this admonition later.
Then Yahweh decides to make a woman to go with the man. Now, don't forget that the Pantheon had earlier created a whole population of people, "male and female," who are presumably doing just fine somewhere "outside the gates of Eden." But this setup in Eden is Yahweh's own little experiment, and will unfold to its own separate destiny.
21 So Yahweh God made the man fall into a deep sleep. And while he slept, he took one of his ribs and enclosed it in flesh.
22 Yahweh God built the rib he had taken from the man into a woman, and brought her to the man.
Right. Man gives birth to woman. Sure he does. But that's the way the story is told here.
25 Now both of them were naked, the man and his wife, but they felt no shame in front of each other.
Well, of course not! Why should they? But take careful note of those words, as they also will prove to be significant . . .
Now this next part is where it starts to get interesting. Enter the Serpent:
Gen. 3:1 - The serpent was the most subtle of all the wild beasts that Yahweh God had made. It asked the woman, "Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?"
2 The woman answered the serpent, "We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden.
3 "But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, 'You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death'"
4 Then the serpent said to the woman, "No! You will not die!
5 "God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil."
What a remarkable statement! "Your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil." The Serpent directly contradicts Yahweh.
Obviously, one of them has to be lying. Which one, do you suppose? And, if the serpent speaks true, wouldn't you wish to eat of the magic fruit? Wouldn't it be a good thing, to become "like gods, knowing good and evil"? Or is it preferable to remain in ignorance?
6 The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was desirable for the knowledge that it could give. So she took some of its fruit and ate it. She gave some also to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.
7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together to make themselves loincloths.
The author makes an interesting assumption here: that if you realize you are naked you will automatically want to cover yourself. Further implications will unfold shortly...
8 The man and his wife heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from Yahweh God among the trees of the garden.
9 But Yahweh God called to the man. "Where are you?" he asked.
10 "I heard the sound of you in the garden," he replied. "I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid."
11 "Who told you that you were naked?" he asked. "Have you been eating of the tree I forbade you to eat?"
And so the sign of the Fall becomes modesty. Take note of this. The descendants of Adam and Eve will be distinguished throughout history from virtually all other peoples by their obsessive modesty taboos, wherein they will feel ashamed of being naked. It follows that those who feel no shame in being naked are, by definition, not carriers of this spiritual disease of original sin!
12 The man replied, "It was the woman you put with me; she gave me the fruit, and I ate it."
Right. Blame the woman. What a turkey!
13 Then Yahweh God asked the woman, "What is this you have done?" The woman replied, "The serpent tempted me and I ate."
So of course she blames the serpent. But just what did the serpent do that was so evil? Why, he called Yahweh a liar! Was he wrong? Let's see...
21 Yahweh God made clothes out of skins for the man and his wife, and they put them on.
Out of skins? This means that Yahweh had to kill some innocent animals to pander to Adam and Eve's new obsession with modesty!
And now we come to the crux of the Fall. Yahweh had said back there in chapter 2:17, regarding the fruit of the tree of knowledge, that "on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die." The Serpent, on the other hand, had contradicted Yahweh in chapter 3:4-5: "No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil." So what actually happened? Who lied and who told the truth about this remarkable fruit? The answer is given in the next verse:
22 Then Yahweh God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out next and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and live forever."
Get that? Yahweh himself admits that he had lied! In fact, and in Yahweh's own words, the Serpent spoke the absolute truth! And moreover, Yahweh tells the rest of the Pantheon that he intends to evict Adam (and presumably Eve as well) to keep them from gaining immortality to go with their newly-acquired divine knowledge. To prevent them, in other words, from truly becoming gods! So who, in this story, comes off as a benefactor of humanity, and who comes off as a tyrant? THE SERPENT NEVER LIED!
This story, to digress slightly, bears a remarkable resemblance to a contemporary tale from ancient Greece. In that version, the Serpent (later identified as Lucifer, the Light-Bearer) may be equated with the heroic titan Prometheus, who championed humanity against the tyranny of Zeus, who wished for people to be mere slaves of the gods. Prometheus, whose name means "forethought," gave people wisdom, intelligence, and fire stolen from Olympus. Moreover, he ordained the portions of animal sacrifice so that humans got the best parts (the meat and hides) while the portion that was burned to the gods was the bones and fat. In punishment for this defiance of his divine authority, Zeus condemned Prometheus to a terrible punishment for an immortal: to be chained to a mountain in the Caucasus, where Zeus' gryphon/eagle (actually a Lammergier) would devour his liver each day. It would grow back each night. Zeus promised to relent if Prometheus would reveal his great secret knowledge: Who would succeed Zeus as supreme god? Prometheus refused to tell, but history has revealed the answer...
The interesting thing about all this is that the Greeks properly regarded Prometheus as a noble hero in his defiance of unjust tyranny. One may wonder why the Serpent is not so well regarded. On the contrary, snakes are loathed throughout Christiandom.
23 So Yahweh God expelled him from the garden of Eden, to till the soil from which he had been taken.
24 He banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden he posted the cherubs, and the flame of a flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.
So that's it for the Fall. But the story of Adam and Eve doesn't end there.
Gen 4:1 - The man had intercourse with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain...
2 She gave birth to a second child, Abel, the brother of Cain. Now Abel became a shepherd and kept flocks, while Cain tilled the soil.
3 Time passed and Cain brought some of the produce of the soil as an offering for Yahweh,
4 while Abel for his part brought the first-born of his flock and some of their fat as well. Yahweh looked with favor on Abel and his offering. But he did not look with favor on Cain and his offering, and Cain was very angry and downcast.
Well, why shouldn't he be? Both brothers had brought forth their first fruits as offerings, but Yahveh rejected the vegetables and only accepted the blood sacrifice. This was to set a gruesome precedent:
8 Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go out;" and while they were in the open country, Cain set on his brother Abel and killed him.
Accursed and marked for fratricide,
16 Cain left the presence of Yahweh and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
We can assume that the phrase "left the presence of Yahweh" implies that Yahweh is a local deity, and not omnipresent. Now Eden, according to Gen. 2:14-15, was situated at the source of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, apparently right where Lake Van is now, in Turkey. "East of Eden," therefore, would probably be along the shores of the Caspian Sea, right in the Indo-European heartland. Cain settled in there, among the people of Nod, and married one of the women of that country. Here, for the first time, is specifically mentioned the "other people" who are not of the lineage of Adam and Eve. I.e., the Pagans.
So let's look at this story from another viewpoint: There we were, around six thousand years ago, living in our little farming communities around the Caspian Sea, in the land of Nod, when this dude with a terrible scar comes stumbling in out of the sunset. He tells us this bizarre story, about how his mother and father had been created by some god named Jahweh, and put in charge of a beautiful garden somewhere out west, and how they had gotten thrown out for disobedience after eating some of the landlord's forbidden magic fruit of enlightenment. He tells us of murdering his brother, as the god of his parents would only accept blood sacrifice, and of receiving that scar as a mark so that all would know him as a fratricide. The poor guy is really a mess psychologically, obsessed with guilt. He is also obsessively modest, insisting on wearing clothes even in the hottest summer, and he has a hard time with our penchant for skinny-dipping in the warm inland sea. He seems to believe that he is tainted by the "sin" of his parent's disobedience; that it is in his blood, somehow, and will continue to contaminate his children and his children's children. One of our healing women takes pity on the poor sucker, and marries him...
17 Cain had intercourse with his wife, and she conceived and gave birth to Enoch. He became builder of a town, and he gave the town the name of his son Enoch.
With both of their first sons not turning out very well, Adam and Eve decided to try again:
25 Adam had intercourse with his wife, and she gave birth to a son whom she named Seth...
26 A son was also born to Seth, and he named him Enosh. This man was the first to invoke the name of Yahweh.
Now it doesn't mention here where Seth's wife came from. Another woman from Nod, possibly, or maybe someone from another neolithic community downstream in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. But her folks also, cannot be of the lineage of Adam and Eve, and must also be counted among "the other people."
But whatever happened to Adam? After all, way back there in chapter 2:17, warning Adam about the magic fruit of knowlege, Jahweh had told him that "on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die." So, when did Adam die?
Gen. 5:4 - Adam lived for eight hundred years after the birth of Seth and he became the father of sons and daughters.
5 In all, Adam lived for nine hundred and thirty years; then he died.
Hey, that's pretty good! Nine hundred and some odd years isn't bad for a man who's been told he's gonna die the next day!
Well, the story goes on, and maybe next time the Witlesses come to visit I'll tell more of it. But suffice it to say that those of us who are not of Semitic descent (i.e., not of the lineage of Adam and Eve) cannot share in the Original Sin that comes with that lineage. Being that the Bible is the story of that lineage, of Adam and Eve's descendants and their special relationship with their particular god, Yahweh, it follows that this is not the story of the rest of us. We may have been Cain's wife's people, or Seth's wife's people, or some other people over the hill and far away, but whichever people the rest of us are, as far as the Bible is concerned, we are the Other People, and so we are continually referred to throughout. Later books of the Bible are filled with admonitions to the followers of Jahweh to "learn not the ways of the Pagans..." (Jer 10:2) with detailed descriptions of exactly what it is we do, such as erect standing stones and sacred poles, worship in sacred groves and practice divination and magic. And worship the sun, moon, stars and the "Queen of Heaven." "You must not behave as they do in Egypt where once you lived; you must not behave as they do in Canaan where I am taking you. You must not follow their laws." (Lev 18:3) For Yahweh, as he so clearly emphasises, is not the god of the Pagans. We have our own lineage and our own heritage, and our tale is not told in the Bible.
We were not "made" like clay figurines by a male deity out of "dust from the soil." We were born of our Mother the Earth, and have evolved over aeons in Her nurturing embrace. All of us, in our many and diverse tribes, have creation myths and legends of our origins and history; some of these tales may even be actually true. Like the descendants of Adam and Eve, many of us also have stories of great floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other cataclysms that wiped out whole communities of our people, wherein "I alone survived to tell the tale." Nearly all of our ancestral tribes (and especially those of us who today are reclaiming our own Pagan heritage) lack that peculiar obsessive body modesty that seems to be a hallmark of the original sin alluded to in the story of the Fall. We can be naked and unashamed! Why, our Goddess even tells us, "as a sign that you are truly free, you shall be naked in your rites." Not being born into sin, we have no need of salvation, and no need of a Messiah to redeem our sinful souls. Neither heaven nor hell is our destination in the afterlife; we have our own various arrangements with our own various deities. The Bible is not our story; we have our own stories to tell, and they are many and diverse. In a long life, you may get to hear many of them...
May you live long and prosper!
Bluebiyou
Sep 9, 2008, 10:18 AM
Falcon,
I like you and genuinely care about you and the Mrs. very much (you are really cool people!).
That said, (hold onto your boot straps) I have a much easier 'proof' against the 'absolute truth' status of the bible:
New testament scripture:
"God is love."
"Love is never jealous."
and old testament preamble to the 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, etc. commandments (depending on how you count them),
"I, the Lord your God am a jealous God"
Simple mathematic proofing. God is love, A = B. Love is never jealous, B (does not equal) C. Finally, I, the Lord your God am a jealous God, A=C.
A=B, B(does not equal)C, A=C.
This said, I still maintain (most of) my Catholic faith and very grave respect for my superiors (measured in personal devotion to faith), the JWs. Their faith lies up there with the Quakers and the Amish. The non-violent caring folks (I don't know that much of the Quakers, but from what I do know...).
I also maintain respect for your views, and Fran's views.
Any one of us could be right, we could all be right, we could all be wrong. More probably, (all who seek God/truth) we're all partially right.
This is a basic article of faith. An axiom, if you will.
I LIKE this thread! I find it personally challenging!
FalconAngel
Sep 9, 2008, 8:14 PM
Falcon,
I like you and genuinely care about you and the Mrs. very much (you are really cool people!).
That said, (hold onto your boot straps) I have a much easier 'proof' against the 'absolute truth' status of the bible:
New testament scripture:
"God is love."
"Love is never jealous."
and old testament preamble to the 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, etc. commandments (depending on how you count them),
"I, the Lord your God am a jealous God"
Simple mathematic proofing. God is love, A = B. Love is never jealous, B (does not equal) C. Finally, I, the Lord your God am a jealous God, A=C.
A=B, B(does not equal)C, A=C.
This said, I still maintain (most of) my Catholic faith and very grave respect for my superiors (measured in personal devotion to faith), the JWs. Their faith lies up there with the Quakers and the Amish. The non-violent caring folks (I don't know that much of the Quakers, but from what I do know...).
I also maintain respect for your views, and Fran's views.
Any one of us could be right, we could all be right, we could all be wrong. More probably, (all who seek God/truth) we're all partially right.
This is a basic article of faith. An axiom, if you will.
I LIKE this thread! I find it personally challenging!
Well, we believe that all religions are paths to the divine, but there are some that have regressed to cults, rather than staying as religions. Those are the ones that your well thought out algabraic formula will not work on, since those folks do not believe in science and logic.
It is a compelling argument, though, for all of us that think for ourselves.:bigrin: