The fellow who quite confidently asserted that the fear of death is irrational, might not be as accepting of his stance later as he is at present. I hope he lives present tense for the remainder of his life. I?m aware that many of self-professing highly rational and intellectual types find spirituality and especially Christ to somehow be beneath their progressive mental evolution, but I would encourage you to resist the temptation of capriciously dividing the field into your predetermined and often parroted conclusions. Here is a verse from Hebrews 2:14-16: ?Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death?that is, the devil? (I know, but read on) and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham?s descendants.? Even if you think of the bible and all as mythology, continue with it as a ternary or non-dualistic newly open minded way of perceiving. Contempt prior to evaluation is our egos ?devilish? one trick pony approach. Christ introduced Non-dualistic thinking to the Western world. Many Eastern religious (practices), not merely ?belief systems?, such as we have sorrowfully in the United States and much of Europe, have been using non-dualistic thinking even since before Jesus. (Christ was before the Big Bang but more on this as we will read on down in a bit). Jesus said, ?Love thine enemies,? and ?If someone slaps you on the cheek, turn to them the other also,? and ?Do not resist evil people,? and ?You must become again as little children.? These obviously are highly counterintuitive statements and certainly leave a tension hanging between, ?I?m right, you?re wrong!? (Dualistic thinking) as contrasted with the ?third eye? or ?trinity? manner of perceiving reality as it is. Imagine it this way. Say you have a circle with 2 entities in it. This very imagery lends itself towards the 2 being in opposition. Even if the 2 agree on seemingly everything, there is no space or place for a more discerning or alternate arrival at the ?truth.? On the other hand, imagine placing one more entity in this circle and with this ?Third Eye? of interpretation, the opposition necessarily now must yield to eternal implications and possibilities. I put it thus: ?Two is conflict, three is a merciful third truth.? This mediator or ambassador is called ?The Spirit of Truth,? and everyone ever born is born with Her. For example, when Christ spoke to the rich young ruler regarding his riches and material hoarding, He first asked him if he kept the law of Moses or the 10 commandments. The fellow replied that he had kept them all since childhood. Now, that?s what I think most of us would term some form of ?objective morality.? Everything neat, tidy, moralistic, hard if not impossible to maintain for life. Christ tells him he hasn?t kept the most important and lovingly generous ?commandment.? Namely, to sell all of his material goods (his temporal attachments by use of exaggeration to teach a point) and use the proceeds to give to the poor. This is metaphorical symbolism, and is used to make a greater point. Again, this seems, specially in Europe and America, to be absurdly counterintuitive. But note that the story doesn?t stop when the wealthy fellow walks off apparently somewhat dejected. Once out of eyesight, one of Christ?s followers asked Him, ?If this man?s only wrongdoing is his having an abundance of possessions and even he can?t see the kingdom of God, then how is possible for anyone whosoever to enter into heaven?? Christ?s answer is wildly non-dualistic as He replies, ?Humanly speaking, it is impossible; but with God all things are possible.? Another metaphor that we still use today that Christ spoke was, ?Stop gagging on gnats yet swallowing elephants.? This gagging on gnats is a perfect example of dualistic, ALL or NOTHING thinking. Read the following by the late CS Lewis in his book, ?The Great Divorce.?
?Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment?s real resistance to the loss of our faith??
A kind of Polly doesn?t want a Cracker or to keep parroting shopworn platitudes as handed down from one ALL or NOTHING generation to the next. Perhaps, Polly wants to get out of her damnable birdcage. Bear in mind another and better alternative to what we think of as ?prayer.? Tell God what we want and babble on nonsense that He/She already knew. Indeed, what is called ?contemplative? prayer is a wholly and quite peaceable Eternal Now sort of simply being in silence and solitude (or in your closet as Christ mentions) while observing one?s repetitive, compulsive, negative, judgmental, labeling, blaming, pigeon holing sort of constantly intrusive thought patterns. It is to listen and observe to one?s own egoistic and mostly unconscious self-talk and see how utterly absurd and humiliating these long-held dualistic and, frankly, disturbing thought ?patterns? have attached themselves to one?s mind, their very identity. This is why many people will not even attempt it or if they begin, they?ll bail out when they observe their ?false self? identity crumbling down like a house of cards. The ?false self? represents the ego and its highly insecure demand for some kind of, any kind of identity - be it from titles, income, cars, status, position, station in life, education level, any sort of exclusionary separation from others that helps them to temporally if not painfully maintain a ?better than?, ?more than,? and even ?less than? ephemeral and shallow type of identity. ?The first shall be last and the last shall be first.? Christ, not ?Christianity,? operates from a bottom up, never a top down sort of power tripping compliance methodology. Thus, to say the United States is a ?Christian? nation through and through is oxymoronic. Hindus and Buddhist don?t enjoin the pyramid power scheme either. Even Muslim mystics have offered remarkable insights into spiritual and nonviolent teachings. Faith is not the opposite of doubt, it?s the opposite of certitude. The contemplative mind is the most absolute assault on the secular world view that you can have, because it really is a different mind. The present moment has no competition; it is not judged in comparison to any other. It has never happened before and will not happen again. But when I?m in competition, I?m not in love. I can?t get to love because I?m looking for a new way to dominate. Life is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are, but it is a self that we largely do not know. People who?ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don?t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind. Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear. Gandhi wrote: ?In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart. The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.?
Another writing by CS Lewis below evidences this non-dualistic way of perceiving morality from an entirely new, liberating and exceedingly less punitive, rewards/punishment, fire and brimstone way in which the vast majority of Catholics, Protestants, Fundamentalist (egregiously literal unyielding sort of ?one size fits all? mindset) as well as the other fractured, splinter celled 30,000 de-nominations who, with an arrogant degree of certitude, have rigidly moralistic ideas of who will earn their way into heaven OR be eternally tortured in hell. Note, Christ never espoused a commandment that, ?Thou shalt be Right!? Hardly. Sadly, religion managed to maul that to pieces for one primary reason: To keep their flock coming back for more hopeful and yet distressing good and, if honest, bad news (dualism). Attendance and membership have been the main measuring rods to soothe fragile egos. A rather childish means to satiate the pastor?s personal performance evaluation. Christ is not a belief system for fearfully inclined people to buy a fire insurance policy while lifelessly meandering around this world without any concern about heaven other than it to be an emergency evacuation plan. Such people say: ?To hell with the poor rubes left behind!? CS Lewis?s insightful jot below:
?The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured . And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the Congressional Medal of Honor. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend. It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.?
While I haven?t gotten into A Priori and Empirical philosophical jargon, I trust that this less formal narrative language approach can offer insights into morality without being moralistic and dogmatic.
The God of the universe cannot possibly be contained and detained within the Bible. The last sentence in the book of John says: ?There are many more things that Jesus did. If all of them were written down, I suppose not even the world itself would have space for the books that would be written.?
Now, it is important and helpful to once and finally see what most church going people seemingly don?t see or know to even acknowledge and this isn?t anyone?s fault. Christ?s having entered into this world some 2000 years ago was not His Father?s Plan B or rather a quickly contrived backup manoeuvre because God hadn?t planned ahead properly before He spoke the cosmos (Big Bang) into material existence. Plan A is and has always been, Plan A. In myth, legend, or what we term the real world's storyline, you'll always see a redemptive thread, especially when you're taught how to see, not merely what you must, ought, should merely look at.
Then God said, "Let US (plural) make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." -Genesis 1:26
?In the beginning the Word (Christ) already existed. The Word (Christ) was with God, and the Word was God. He (Christ) existed in the beginning with God. God created everything through him (Christ) and nothing was created except through him (Christ). The Word gave life to everything that was created, and his life brought light to everyone. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness can never extinguish it.? -John?s prologue
?He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the (FIRSTBORN over all creation). For by Him (Christ) all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him (Christ) and for Him (Christ). And He (Christ) is BEFORE all things, and in Him (Christ) all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who IS the beginning, the (FIRSTBORN from the dead), that in all things He may have the preeminence.? -Colossians 1:14?18
A Cosmic Christ who when spoke into material existence from and out of the trinity (Father, Son, Spirit of Truth), caused a literal atomic Big Bang outwardly spiral dynamics cosmological order to include entropy and even what quantum physics is revealing about the patterns of law and the principle of three.
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SOOOoo yeah, have fun and cya next time, pa.
