The Child Is Tasked with Cleansing the World of a Taint Passed Down from the Beginnings of Time: The First Fall From Grace, Sperm/Egg and Conception, Part Five — “Mending the Catastrophe”

Collective and Ancestral Memory … “Original Sin”: From the Perspective of Cells, Parents are “Blemished Gods” … For Parents, Children Are Their Immortality and Atman Projects

Mending the Catastrophe

To continue, Shoham writes that God needs man to mend this catastrophe of the vessels, and that this is part of the symbiosis, that this is part of what we’re doing in our dialogue with the divine.

Considering my interpretation of the breaking of the vessels as the creation and release of the sperm and egg, we might say that the mending, then, of that breaking would be the sperm meeting the egg and the formation of a new union.

Blemished Gods

But Shoham also talks about the God that is represented in these myths as being an imperfect God, a “blemished God.” I will not go into his reasons for such an understanding. But consider that from the vantage point of the events surrounding conception this understanding of a “blemished God” fits as well: For when we are inside of our fathers and mothers and we are cells—either a sperm cell or an egg cell, either way—we are part of a being who’s damn sure imperfect, acknowledged to be imperfect at that time. Partaking of our parents’ beingness at that time, which both biologically and experientially is the case, we are identified with someone who is analogically Divine yet in their humanness is indisputably less than perfect—”blemished Gods.”

Children Are Parents’ Immortality and Atman Projects

Furthermore, this ties in to what has been observed to be a primary and pervasive reason for parents having children. That is, parents want children in order to have a continuation of their selves. Essentially the child becomes the parent’s “atman project”—that is, the continuation of the parent’s attempt at perfection or of reuniting with or creating the lost and unconsciously yearned for state of divinity. A similar way of saying this is that children are parents’ “immortality projects.”

So basically children are released from parents, they “emanate” from parents, in order to try to mend what the parents feel themselves to have broken. The child represents the hope of the parent to be vindicated, completed; the chance for the adult to get it right, if not in his or her own lifetime, then at a time after one’s death, through the actions of the biological being emanated from oneself.

Thus, in such mythology, God is very often accurately interpreted as the parent. What we have is a situation where children come out from the father and mother to try to mend their lives; so children are a continuation of the parents’ [life] “project.”

Collective and Ancestral Memory

Shoham (1990) says further:

[T]his cosmic catastrophe gives Divinity a chance to cleanse him- or herself of his or her polluted components and allows man to save himself while mending the blemished divinity” (p. 36).

Thus, a new conception, the creation of a new human life is felt to allow the parent to cleanse him- or herself of his or her polluted components.

But from the perspective of the newly created individual, this world scheme gives to humankind a chance to do better next time, to do better than the parent did, to overcome the “bad karma” of the parent that was put into the universe through that particular new form, that newly created being, and which originally is recorded in the sperm and in the egg. We therefore have here an indication of collective memories and pain as well as the hope of resolution of one’s ancestral memories. This is to say that the child carries those things of its parents with it; and this world scheme gives the child a chance to cleanse the Divinity (the parent who by proxy represents the entire species and all progenitors) of its polluted components.

“Original Sin”

This, then, is the child’s chance to save itself; but the child is also coming into the world to help to cleanse the world of a taint that is passed down. It is an “Original Sin,” so to speak, because its origins extend back through the generations in an infinite regress. Why the taint is there is a whole other question, however: It happens to be the focus of an entire other work of mine, The Great Reveal by the Planetmates.

Duality and the Creation of Death

Nevertheless:

According to the myth, the outcome of the breaking of the vessels was that particles of Divinity were imbedded in all objects and life-forms of creation, serving as divine cores within profane temporal casings. Furthermore, the breaking of the vessels introduced evil to the world; before, only good emanated from the great light of infinity. (Shoham, 1990, p. 36)

In essence, then, as stated above, with the creation of sperm and egg we have the beginnings of form out of no-thing-ness. And with this creation, this first separation, evil has been created, darkness and confusion arise. For that separation is duality; and that duality is evil—the opposite of real life (God), live spelled backwards, and the beginning of the possibility of death.

Continue with Womb Existence Is a Separate But Connected State, of Space But Not Time, an Eternal Now: The First Fall From Grace, Part Six — Womb with a View, the Transpersonal Bands of Consciousness

Return to Mythology Supports What We Have Learned Experientially — The Release of Sperm and Egg Is the First Removal from Divinity: The Breaking of the Vessels and the First Separation

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Continue with Womb Existence Is a Separate But Connected State, of Space But Not Time, an Eternal Now: The First Fall From Grace, Part Six — Womb with a View, the Transpersonal Bands of Consciousness

Return to Mythology Supports What We Have Learned Experientially — The Release of Sperm and Egg Is the First Removal from Divinity: The Breaking of the Vessels and the First Separation

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The First Fall From Grace, Sperm/Egg and Conception, Part Three — “Theurgic Conception”: The Scattering of the Divine Sparks and Divine Symbiosis

Before Conception, We Experience Omnipresence and Omnipotence, Knowing We Are Particles of Divinity. In the Womb, We Sense a Euphoric Symbiosis with the Divine

Divinity “Contracted Himself”

This is the actual coming into form of sperm and egg from undifferentiated reality and infinite potentiality; experientially, the self has “contracted.”

It is also the first “split”—the first creation of something Other than One-Self.

So what I’m proposing about the experiences surrounding conception, I contend, is a better analogue to the mythological Kabbalist depiction of Tzimtzum, contraction, and the thin pipe from Infinity, than is Shoham’s interpretation of it as the umbilical cord and nourishment from the mother.

The Scattering of the Divine Sparks

Further support for this move in placing these interpretations farther back in time, to that of conception, is given by considering the Kabbalic mythical depiction of the breaking of the vessels and the scattering of the divine sparks. Shoham (1990) tells us,

The myth of the breaking of the vessels relates to the birth-giving mother and the ejection from the womb, whereas the myth of the scattering of the divine sparks, which in Lurianic Kabbala occurs as a result, relates more directly to the neonate himself. The newborn child feels himself to be a precious particle of Divinity, omnipresent and hence omnipotent, because at this stage of his life he cannot be aware of anything or anybody except himself. (p. 36)

In this way Shoham relates a myth of vessels breaking and a related myth of a scattering of divine sparks to the time of birth and the actual delivery. Contrary to what Shoham believes, I think the scattering of the divine sparks is a much more accurate depiction of what we might call “the scattering of the sperm.” For it is always sperm that need to get scattered, widely disseminated, because they do not all survive. Fish fertilization, for example, involves male sperm being scattered over the top of the eggs.

Furthermore, “The newborn child feels himself to be a precious particle of Divinity” (p. 36). Regardless of the truth of that, more obviously we re-create the universe coming into form in the spewing out into form in an ejaculation: There are these hundreds of millions of “sparks” that go out from the father and each one of them is a precious particle of divinity in that each one could create the child.

Shoham adds, “Omnipresent and hence omnipotent because at this stage of life he cannot be aware of anything or anybody except himself.” Once again, this does not fit with the later time of birth but with conception. For, as we see most clearly further on, at the time of birth and prior to it, the fetus is actually distinctly aware of an Other—distressingly and confrontationally so. Whereas around the time of conception there is that quality of omnipresence and omnipotence (more so at some times than others).

One has created form in the creation of sperm and egg, but one is only slightly removed from godhead; one still thinks oneself to be part of Everything.

Divine Symbiosis

It is not until one gets farther along in the gestation process that one feels oneself to be truly distinct or is truly aware of the separation that has occurred. This happens with the encounter with the uterine wall during the latter stages of pregnancy. And yet Shoham, in referring to this time of breaking of vessels and scattering of sparks, uses the terms the “theurgic conception” of the Kabbala. He means this in a way much different than biological conception, yet I feel he may unconsciously have revealed the more accurate interpretation. It is interesting how the unconscious will lead us along, manipulating us to reveal the hidden truths, even in the very words that come to mind and despite our conscious intention in their use.

Further support for this interpretation occurs in his use of words after “theurgic conception,” where he is overtly describing events occurring after birth. He writes, ” . . . sees every human act as having an immediate effect on Divinity. This makes for a symbiosis between God and man.” Once again, I believe he has covertly revealed the correct interpretation—in his use of the word symbiosis especially—that this is the time after conception, not after birth. During the intrauterine, post-conception time, there is exactly that quality of closeness to the Divinity. During this “BPM I” time, we have this dialectic going: this flow-in, flow-out between us and the universe, which is reflected physically (biologically) in the flow-in, flow-out between us and the mother through the umbilical cord.

Continue with Mythology Supports What We Have Learned Experientially — The Release of Sperm and Egg Is the First Removal from Divinity: The Breaking of the Vessels and the First Separation

Return to In the Beginning, the “Thin Pipe From Infinity” … “Emanated Light Into the World”: We Begin with “Contraction” … Biological and Spiritual … How We Tell Ourselves That in Myth

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Sperm Journey: From Father to Womb

Inside Testes

Ejaculation: Phoenix Rises from “Ashes”

Sperm Journey: “Immortal” Dragon Deity.

Feeling of Omnipotence. And Carries Some Personality and “Skandhas” of Mostly Negative, Some Positive, Karma from Previous Life/Lives

Sperm Journey: “Scattering of Divine Sparks” … The “Brotherhood” of the Sperm

The Egg’s Perspective of Sperm and the “Magical” Womb

Sperm Journey End: Sperm Head Explodes and DNA “Package” Delivered

Early Womb Life

Continue with Mythology Supports What We Have Learned Experientially — The Release of Sperm and Egg Is the First Removal from Divinity: The Breaking of the Vessels and the First Separation

Return to In the Beginning, the “Thin Pipe From Infinity” … “Emanated Light Into the World”: We Begin with “Contraction” … Biological and Spiritual … How We Tell Ourselves That in Myth

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The “Monsters” and Demons and Fear Do Not Exist Outside of You: A Primal Perspective on Spirituality, Part Ten — Clean and Unclean Mysticism

“You Haven’t Lost Your Human Form Yet”: Behind Personal Fear and Pain We Discover a More Pervasive Beauty and Bliss … a Universe of Grace and Love.

Unclean Mysticism (Cerebral Distortion)

For many people the result of spirituality without primaling or some other cathartic technique is the existence of symbolized pain, the many “demons” within that must constantly be fought, resisted, and pushed out of the way in order to get glimpses of the underlying bliss, beauty, and love.

It is thus interesting to note the amount of evil, fear, and ugliness that is encountered in certain disciplines, especially primitive ones.

“Allies”? Or, “Monsters”?

Carlos Castaneda’s works contain much of this, and at one point he indicates why this is so in a manner that is parallel to the point being made here. He had just had an encounter with the “allies,” which he had seen as grotesque monsters. In describing this to his companion, la Gorda, he begins to realize that she, who had been there also, had not seen the same things as he:

“The allies have no form,” she said when I had finished. “They are like a presence, like a wind, like a glow. The first one we found tonight was a blackness that wanted to get inside my body. . . . The others were just colors. Their glow was so strong, though, that it made the trail look as if it were daytime.”

“You Haven’t Lost Your Human Form Yet.”

And further on:

“Why do I see them as monsters?” I asked.

“That’s no mystery,” she said. “You haven’t lost your human form yet. The same thing happened to me. I used to see the allies as people; all of them were Indian men with horrible faces and mean looks. They used to wait for me in deserted places. I thought they were after me as a woman. The Nagual used to laugh his head off at my fears. But still I was half dead with fright. One of them used to come and sit on my bed and shake it until I would wake up. The fright that ally used to give me was something that I don’t want repeated, even now that I’m changed. Tonight I think that I was as afraid of the allies as I used to be.”

“You mean that you don’t see them as human beings anymore?”

“No. Not anymore. The Nagual told you that an ally is formless. He is right. An ally is only a presence, a helper that is nothing and yet is as real as you and me.” (1977, pp. 151-152)

“Human Form” = Ego, Unreal Self, the Pain and Culturally Determined Cerebral Distortions

The “human form” referred to here is identical to what I have been calling the familiar cerebral pathways; one might also say “persona,” ego, or “unreal self.” It is the pain and culturally determined cerebral overlay through which we perceive reality. Presumably a person with less pain, or with access to a primal-type therapy, would have fewer “monsters” getting in the way of clear perception. Or, in Rowan’s (1983, p. 24) words, “For the first time we can have a clean mysticism, not cluttered up with womb stuff, birth stuff, oral stuff, anal stuff, oedipal stuff, shadow stuff, anima stuff.”

Thus, it is not that the existence of pain prevents larger perceptions; rather, it distorts them and makes them less accessible.

“Human Form”/ Cerebral Distortion Makes for a “Polytheism” of Spiritual Understanding

It appears that some spiritual disciplines allow one to open up to parts of the mind that are preneurotic, but that in order to do so they often must cut through an incredible maze of symbolized pain and cultural overlay. Considering the myriad forms that this kind of distortion makes possible, one can speculate that it has much to do with accounting for the extent and variety of the spiritual phenomena that we see exhibited in the spiritual literature. Such distortions also can be viewed as contributing strongly to the diversity of religious concept, ritual, and artifact. Although the underlying reality may be the same for all of us and account for the similarities in concept and phenomena (as emphasized by Jung and others), the cerebral overlay can be seen to account for the vastly different contents of such.

Clean Mysticism

The “Monsters” Are not Real, A Pronoic Perspective … An Essentially Benign Universe Characterized by Grace and Love

The contribution of a primal perspective, then, is twofold. First, it becomes obvious that the “demons,” the “monsters,” the resulting fear are not “real” (in terms of being rooted in transpersonal or “objective” reality). Rather, they are personal elements invading the perception of transpersonal reality. Behind the personal fear and pain we discover a more pervasive beauty and bliss, we sense an essentially benign universe characterized by grace and love.

Exotic Phenomena ~ Spiritual Cotton Candy

Second, the primal perspective allows us to see that much of the exotic phenomena as described in the spiritual literature is a consequence of personal pain and predilection and is not real in the transpersonal sense.

Continue with Science Has Uncovered Something Subtler Than the Physical, Undergirding One’s Life, and Interconnected with All and Everyone: Deeper, and Higher, Spiritual Realities

Return to Bad Karma Enters Us Through Our Birth and Womb Experiences … Meditation as a Defense: A Primal Perspective on Spirituality, Part Nine — Karmic Genetics

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Promethean Hubris and Re-Visioning “Civilization”: On Defiance, Alienation from Nature, Eden, Pandora, Icarus, Cain and Abel, Apocalypse, and Ayn Rand

Will “Progress of Man” Be Humanity’s Epitaph? Apocalyptic Foretellings Hidden in Myth and a Re-Visioning of “Civilization” in Light of Impending Ecocide

Wounded Deer and Centaurs, Chapter Six: Civilization and Apocalypse … Deep Thoughts on The Fall

Why Humans Are the Sorriest of Species … Apocalyptic Foretellings Hidden in Myths of Eden, Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus, Cain and Abel

Prometheus, Meat-Eating, Pandora, Eden, the Apple, the Fall, Cain, Abel, and When and Why Human Life Became All About Work

Meat-Eating and Apocalypse … First Falls and Last

After writing the previous section on fire, meat, Prometheus, and Icarus, and in subsequent research into the Prometheus myth, I found there is far more connection in the myth to the eating of meat than I realized. Also, the myth’s elements underscore the idea in the previous article that in stealing fire/ eating meat, we set off the developments that would lead to our apocalyptic prognosis today. Further, it is clear that the Prometheus myth is the Greek analogue to the Judaic myth of Eden and the Fall, which supports my thinking that the apple in the Garden of Eden represents meat—meat eating…hunting…killing of planetmates.

The Greek Fall from Grace — Prometheus

Prometheus’s Meat Trick

In the Prometheus myth, the fire stealing started with a trick that Prometheus played on Zeus. Prometheus—midway between gods and men, a Titan—gave the god two offerings from which Zeus was to choose. He gave meat and bones. Zeus chose the bones, supposedly because it was packaged more attractively. This is said to be the basis for why humans eat meat, according to ancient understandings.

Zeus—Not Amused

But when Zeus realized the trick, he was pissed … understandably. He hid fire from humans in retribution. Subsequently, Prometheus stole the fire and gave it to mankind. But this angered Zeus even more. So, this time to take revenge, he sent the first woman, Pandora, to live with men.

Ha Ha … Very Funny, Zeus. Thanks a Lot for the Pandora

Pandora literally means “all gifts.” So it is that Pandora represents all the blessings that come with human advancement, represented by harnessing fire. But Pandora, as we all know, brings all troubles as well. She carries a jar that, opened, releases all “evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death.”

Pandora shuts the jar but it is too late, and many of the evils had already escaped. Interestingly, what remains in the closed jar along with the rest of the evils is hope. This is a theme that I return to again and again in this book and the subsequent one, The Great Reveal, in discussing what we need to do about our dire situation: That is, turn and face it, delve deeper into it and not turn away, for therein lies our only real hope.

Eden – the Biblical Fall – Life Becomes Endless Work and Struggle

But notice the parallels with the myth of Eden. In the Biblical rendering, the eating of the apple—which I say represents eating meat—results in the end of easy existence and that from then on humans survive only through “the sweat of one’s brow.”

The Original “Leisure Society”

Sure enough, the end of the nomadic and vegetarian existence of early humans—called the first “affluent society” because it required only three hours a day of work to garner what was needed for survival—occurs with the introduction of hunting, then agriculture, then husbandry.  [The Great Reveal and Footnote 1]

Strenuous Living, Slavery to Survival

And in the Bible, we notice that immediately after Eden, the “second generation” of humans is seen working strenuously to survive as represented by Cain and Able, who were one a tiller of the soil and the other a herder of animals.

That not bad enough, but then after Cain slew Abel, like a second fall from grace God added an even greater load of hard work. Cain was told that to punish him, the earth that had soaked up the blood he’d spilled would resist aiding him in producing his crops and he and those who came after him would have strenuous work in eking sustenance from her and a hard life in simply surviving.

As an aside, notice how whenever we talk about the deepest structures of our mind—and myths provide a glimpse into that—we see the perinatal gestalt. For the Earth here—the placenta—is no longer rich, nourishing, and helpful but, as is the case for the prenate in the late stages of gestation, is impoverished of oxygen and nutrients and less vital, less supportive of one’s continued living.

Promethean Fall – Defiance is Punished by Hard Work, Like in Eden

And the Prometheus myth also has this same sequence as in Eden and the Fall of a defiance of the ways of Nature and God followed by a punishment and suffering, but also by strenuous work as being the lot of humans from then on. For as Hesiod relates the myth, Zeus did more than take fire from humans in revenge for being tricked out of the meat that Prometheus first deprived him of (and for that you can read that humans took from God/Nature the determination of life and death, which in our deciding to kill planetmates, we most assuredly did, see next post), but Zeus also took from humans “the means of life.”

And the consequences of this are similar to being cast out of Eden. For if fire had not been stolen…meat not eaten by humans…humans not adopted hunting, horticulture, husbandry, as Hesiod puts it, “you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste.”  

Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse

Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death , Meat, and Murder… How We Started Our Slide Into Savagery

Deep Thought on the Falls – Meat, Sacrifice, and the Determination of Death

The Fall After Eden—Meat-Eating is the Issue with Cain And Abel’s Divine Offerings, Just as it Was with Prometheus’s

There are more parallels between the Eden and Prometheus myths and tie-ins to the issue of meat-eating.

Cain Killed Abel, Sedentary Farmers Superseded Nomadic Gatherers

Some scholars see the Cain and Abel struggle as representing that between nomadic hunter-gatherers and the first settled farmers. Abel is the “righteous” man, a herder of sheep, and a nomadic type. He has an affinity with planetmates being a shepherd. Later, Christ is compared with Abel as being a martyr but notice also that Christ is known as the Good Shepherd—that is, caring of animals, too.

We need to think of the different ways herders and agriculturalists might view animals. The herder needs to raise and care for planetmates, regardless that they will eventually be killed. The farmer can view planetmates as a means only to an end—as slave labor or soul-less tools to be used in the raising of crops.

The Gods Want Meat = The Gods Want to Retain Determination of Life and Death

And in the Cain and Abel story, we have the same idea of an offering of a meat and a non-meat to a god, just as in the Prometheus myth. Again, meat is the accepted and more desired sacrifice by the divine.

The Gods Want Humans to Offer Meat – to “Sacrifice” That Right of Determining Life/Death

In the Prometheus myth, it all went awry because Prometheus did NOT offer the meat he should have to God. As I said, offering the meat as a sacrifice is the same as saying that it is left to God to determine the life and death of the planetmates (animals), not humans. And in Abel’s giving up of a lamb to the Divine, the message is that the humans represented by Abel, the nomadic herder-gatherers will be willing to not eat meat, to forego it, to “sacrifice” it.

Cain’s Story of Not Sacrificing Determination of Life/Death to the Divine = Humans’ Increasing Control Over Nature

But with Cain, the farmer, it is all about control. Cain does not offer an animal. Like Prometheus he gives the divine a lesser offering—not quite a tricking of the divine as Prometheus did but close to it; he is not willing to sacrifice as much. In giving up much more abundant grain and vegetables, the price he’s willing to pay is much less than Abel’s offering of a fellow planetmate, a lamb, raised and cared for from birth. The unspoken part in this myth is provided by way of the Prometheus myth. For in not offering meat to the Divine, the assumption is that Cain will be keeping the meat for his own consumption…and by inference that Cain is keeping for himself the determination of life or death of fellow planetmates instead of putting that responsibility where it belongs—in the hands of Nature/ the Divine.

Deep Thought on the Falls – Murder

It’s No Wonder Cain’s Making of Life-Death Decisions of Animals Leads to His Doing That For a Human

Finally, the controlling, savage, and murderous qualities that come with increasing control over Nature—as I have described at length elsewhere—show up in that it is the sedentary, more controlling tiller of the soil, Cain, who has become capable of taking now, even, a human life. In The Great Reveal, I showed why that also follows: For once humans became capable of killing and eating planetmate flesh, it was not long before humans were able to kill each other.

Will “Progress of Man” Be Humanity’s Epitaph?

But all of these developments, these increases of control over Nature, are traditionally seen as the “progress of man,” the advance and evolution of humans. On the brink of ecocide and humanicide as we now are as a result of these developments, we have a unique vantage point for re-visioning these changes. Are these vaunted human “achievements” so great if they lead to species annihilation, species suicide, and ecocide as is becoming increasingly likely?

We now continue to look into these questions. And the very next thing we see is that even the myths from ancient times give us evaluations and prognoses on us that are surprising in light of our current rationalizations of ourselves as a species.

A Re-Visioning of “Civilization” in Light of Impending Apocalypse … Prometheus Made us “Civilized” … And Doomed

 

On Defiance, Alienation from Nature, “Civilization,” Apocalypse, Marxism, OWS, and Ayn Rand

Defiance, Alienation from Nature, “Civilization” … Apocalypse

Defiance = Birth Pain = Separation From the Real

Other aspects of the Prometheus and Eden myths fit with the interpretation I am making of it: Stealing fire/ eating the apple/ eating meat is the great act-out of the primal birth pain we created for ourselves by standing upright. It was a defiant act against Nature and Universal harmony, but it set us on the human path of being distinct from all other species. Without real access/ connection to the Real, we created substitute realities—culture, structured societies, status, language and writing, power relations, and abstract creative products.  [Footnote 2]

Prometheus Makes Us “Civilized” … And Doomed

Fitting with that, Prometheus is given the central role in making humans distinct from all species, creating humanity, in giving defining attributes to humans to set us apart from all species and these are said to be fire and all the civilizing skills. Prometheus is credited with, not only securing meat, fire, and all ailments and troubles (with Pandora), but also with bringing civilization and all its components of science, agriculture, mathematics, medicine, art, and literature…fine things no doubt, but all being aspects of control of Nature, opposition to the natural, abstraction and alienation from the divine, and not harmony with it or balance in relation to it. And only now are we beginning to understand the price that comes with these, as indeed we are suffering the penalties allotted Adam and Eve, Icarus, and Prometheus for their over-reaching and hubris. We are nearing the end of the slide into apocalyptic oblivion that Prometheus, Adam and Eve, and Pandora set us on (poetically speaking).

The Answers

But within these myths lie the answers to our dilemma as well. These products of the consciousness of billions of previous humans—added to and refined over the millennia—prophesize the apocalypse looming before us, but these tensions cannot exist in myth except being inextricably entwined with the very means of their release and resolution. So they lay before us the way home for us as well; and they predict our redemption and how it will happen. It is to this we now turn.

Before looking at the resolutions of the uniquely human apocalyptic dilemma we have created, let me address something that is no doubt on many readers’ minds.

How Promethean “Heroism” Set Off Our Slide Into Alienation and Apocalypse … His “Rebellion” Was an Abomination, Not a Blessing

I know you are not used to hearing the Prometheus myth interpreted as a defiant act not a heroic act. It is never compared with the defiant acts portrayed in the Eden or Icarus myths as I am here doing. Icarus is rightly said to be a tragic example of hubris or failed ambition, high-flying ambition. In Eden, Adam and Eve defy the sole divine commandment. But they can all be seen as acts of over-reaching, certainly as acts of hubris. And in all of them punishment follows the selfish act; there is karmic retribution for upsetting the natural or divine order.

 Prometheus Is a Criminal Not Heroic Figure…On Over-Reaching and Hubris

But remember that hubris and over-reaching was actually the earliest understanding of the Promethean act. It appears that time, understandably—as it does—provided a rationalization of the defiant act. [Footnote 3]

As with everything else—language, culture, hierarchical society, and the like—humans turn their faults into achievements, their crimes into heroism, their cowering before truth into brave creations of castles in the sky. So it is that the Romantic poets Shelley and Byron saw this myth as a reflection of defiance against an oppressive authority, as in their time was the Church; French Revolutionaries saw it as a poke in the eye to the parasitic blue bloods of their age; and Marxists and other activists find inspiration in it for struggle against the suffocating prerogatives of capitalism and imperialism.

They are fine to find inspiration where they can. I submit, however, that a deeper and more currently relevant understanding is the one I am presenting here and which was the earliest understanding. And despite all the rationalizing that’s been done on it, this earlier understanding—the one making it analogous to the Eden and Icarus structures—does shine through at times. In my opinion, Mary Shelley understood its real meaning when in 1818 she subtitled her masterpiece novel, Frankenstein “The Modern Prometheus.” In it, she demonstrates a remarkably current, postmodern theme of the dangers of human hubris, of taking us into arenas of knowledge that we are nowhere near capable of managing … doing again, as we did at the beginning in taking from the divine the determination of life and death over the flora, fauna, and even other humans at times, mucking with the divine order by stirring up the forces deep within the atom and the DNA, opening more and more of Pandora’s jars, which can no longer be closed, many of them. So, yes, Shelley’s understanding is closer to my interpretation of the meaning of bringing these “civilizing arts” … In other words, they are in their essence and therefore their ultimate fruits abominations!

If my interpretation of Prometheus is still not understood and one wishes to follow Marxist, revolutionary, romantic, and modern interpretations of Prometheus as a righteous defier of injustice and heroic bringer of boons—in a way as to make him a model for our real occupy wall street and Arab Spring heroes today—than consider why it is that the person on the extreme other side of this revolutionary ideology, Ayn Rand, uses Prometheus as a model for her ideology of rapacious individuality, which she does in her novels Anthemand the fanatically worshipped, Atlas Shrugged. So, no. Ayn Rand’s rendering shows the myth to be, at its base, depicting the ultimate perversion of a natural benign order and a criminal defiance of Nature—as the industrialists and polluters of today show us—and not the revolutionary overthrow of an oppressive rule, as Marxists, Romantic poets, and French Revolutionaries saw it.  [Footnote 4]

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Footnotes

1.  Excerpted from “From Hunting and Gathering to Sowing and Reaping”

Cultural evolution can be defined as the process of developing the tools and skills to deal with certain challenges. Therefore challenges present the key stimulus for any kind of development. The challenge to survive as a hunter/gatherers is not inconsiderable – and early humans met the challenge for hundreds of thousands of years, without depleting their natural environment. Agriculture was invented about 10000 years ago and many of the environmental crisis we face today are directly related to this paradigm shift, from the destruction of the world’s forests in order to grow crops, to the depletion of land due to monocultural plantations, to salination and a thousand other woes.

Early humans were nomads. They roamed within a certain range. Trespassing into another group’s range could result in conflict. However, due to population limits, each group’s range was quite extensive. It is often assumed that finding food must have been incredibly challenging and time consuming, yet, research has demonstrated that in favourable habitats only an average of 3h per day are needed to collect food, plus some more time for preparation. Anyone who has ever even partially lived on foraged foods knows that nature supplies plentifully – each thing in its season. It is also a popular idea to imagine that people were moving around constantly, only remaining in one place for a matter of days. But there is no reason to assume such restlessness. It seems far more likely that people would move from campground to campground in accordance with the seasons, in tune with the things they would find in each place. And it seems reasonable to assume that they would remain in each place long enough to gather and process for transport whatever gifts Mother Nature had offered. Only in areas that are particularly hostile, such as deserts or the circumpolar regions, would frequent moving be necessary since food supplies are less abundant.

(At the 1966 ‘Man the Hunter’ conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society,” in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers living lives “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their “affluence” came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a Zen economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer)

More at “From Hunting and Gathering to Sowing and Reaping” at http://www.sacredearth.com/ethnobotany/food/civilization.php

2.  See The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Five: The Twenty-Seventh Prasad. A-mazing Cultural Maze.

3.  On “time, understandably, as it does, provided a rationalization of the defiant act,” see “A Blessing for You…To Choose or Refuse”—The Great Reveal from The Planetmates: The Complete Prasads, especially

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Twelve: The Fourth Prasad – Origins of Ego; Human Superiority a Defense Against Actual Inferiority Relative to Planetmates (Animal Kingdom)

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Twenty-One: The Thirteenth Prasad. Breaking with Divinity, Resisting Divine Assistance

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Twenty-Two: The Fourteenth Prasad. Eating the “Apple,” Defying Divine Assistance

• The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Four: The Twenty-Sixth Prasad. Ego Towers Over Everything

4.  Regarding the glow-in-the-dark cats shown in the photo, see “12 bizarre examples of genetic engineering” at http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/photos/12-bizarre-examples-of-genetic-engineering/glow-in-the-dark-c

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When Life is Ever New, a Revelation, One Has Turned the Good into the Wonderful: Experience Is Divinity, Part Nine — God Invents Joy by Forgetting.

How to Turn Being Into Becoming and Good Into Wonderful: Forgetting Brings Delight to Getting and Becoming Human Is God’s Play

We Remove the Essence of Divinity from Our Ideas of the Divine

The point is that we keep removing the essence of Divinity—Experience—from all our depictions of Divinity, guaranteeing we will be wrong. Wrong, and even end up getting the opposite idea. We turn living Spirit into emotionless icon and end up worshiping, even emulating, the very things that our holy people exhort us to look away from.

Even the thing we know most about Christ’s life is His suffering, yet is that nothing? In meditation folks try to empty their minds and become blank and emotionless, but yet Christ suffered and that is hardly nothing … let alone emotionless. We sure don’t like suffering, but it is hardly boring. This man suffered, healed, taught, hung out with folks, threw money-changers out of a temple. He may not have been “political” but he was hardly passive. He didn’t sit at home, trying to “empty his mind,” did he?

What a Rip-Off!

And then we say He suffered for us … so that we don’t have to.

Well, what a bunch of hooey, because, that would be like saying God became God so that He could prevent us from becoming God. It’s like saying we get to have a boring life and can be dumb and unenlightened and not learn from our experiences or grow, because, well, Jesus did all that for us!

It’s such a rip off, it’s like He gets to feel, He gets to really live life, but we don’t….

How to Turn Good Into Wonderful

The point is…when you are God…and you’ve had so many lifetimes … tripping out as an animal and such and knowing your sense of Reality and all else … and knowing that it is like a movie … Don’t you think … at some point….

I mean, after all you’re God, and you know there’s nothing, nothing, nothing that could ever harm you…or harm anyone. Nothing…nobody ever gets harmed. And everybody always gets loved, and it can’t help but happen always that way. It can’t help but happen always that way because there’s nothing outside of that Truth-Awareness-Bliss-Love.

So, don’t you think that God might…

I’m going to have to edge my way into this….

What Is More Alive for Someone Who’s Nothing But Good?

Would anybody crave sameness? Why would anybody crave a death-like pall of an existence? No! We all crave what? TO BE ALIVE! MORE ALIVE!! There is a reason that the worst thing that we imagine in life, death, is depicted as something rotting, boring, uneventful…. Is it not possible that in abhorring what we think is non-existence we are sensing the real and true values of Divinity? Life, aliveness, vitality, change, exuberance, freedom, magnificence, euphoria, expansiveness… are these not values that would have to be associated with Divinity?

And what is more alive for someone who’s nothing but good?

Hopeful Sadness? Seriously?

Wouldn’t Divinity be more alive by putting a “frame” around that goodness to give it a kind of a contrast so it can be more beautiful? Think of all of the things that happen in life out of pain, and the things that we all pull ourselves to, consciously or not.

Remember the poignancy I spoke of. Would there be such a feeling, would there ever be poignancy if there wasn’t like hopeless sadness? If we had hopeful sadness, we’d never even have the experience of poignancy.

Do you see that only by forgetting who we are can we really live life, be really in it, grow in it, change in it. True, it is scary as hell. But the thing is, we all…live through it!

What Do You Call God When He’s Bungee Jumping? Answer: Human

It’s kind of like when you’re bungee jumping. Say, you’re bungee jumping off a bridge. You’re sure you’re gonna die. But you’ve been convinced that all the materials, all the equipment, are safe and sound…that you’ll be secure, that nothing bad whatsoever will happen to you.

So what do you do? Having complete faith in the people doing it and the materials and the strength of them, you do it even though you’re thinking it’s certain you’re gonna die! You have all the fears in the world. It’s you doing peek-a-boo again, only this time with yourself. You’re trying to prove to yourself that God will be always there to catch you.

And you do prove it to yourself.

But the only thing is, we as God do it one better when we come into this world as a human….

We forget…that the “rope” is good.

Forgetting Brings Delight to Getting

We just throw ourselves off and let ourselves forget that it is certain we will be just fine and that instead of dying it will be fun, that it will in fact be a blast… even if only in retrospect. Or, more accurately, in overspect.

We throw ourselves off, we come into this world, hoping…knowing! knowing that at some point we will remember, before we die, that there is never anything to fear and who we really are. We know we will remember because we know we’re never really gonna die…you’re never gonna die…. You will go from one lifetime to another and will think you die, but it is impossible to end consciousness.

So we know we’re going to succeed, at some point or other. We know we’re going to remember who we are as divinity and the incredible magnificence of this game that WE have chosen to do for an adventure and as an experiment in consciousness.

And we also know, when we throw ourselves into diminished consciousness, that is, into physical form, that we are going to experience things that we have never ever experienced before…. and that we may never want to experience again.

How to Turn Being Into Becoming

You might say that if God is eternal and unchanging and Real that there are no experiences that are not already. You might say that beingness is not becomingness. Yes, we can look at it that way. Then we can understand it better by thinking of it this way: Have you ever seen a movie or a TV show or play a second time, after a very long time, and have forgotten so much of it that in experiencing it all over again it is as much fun and as en-joy-able as the first time? The joy of experience is amplified by forgetting. That is, when life is approached as a revelation, from the stance that it is ever new, it is more delightful. THAT is how one makes the good into the wonderful.

God Invents Joy by Forgetting.

So, you see that forgetting has its uses in terms of magnifying enjoyment, pleasure, fun. Again, it is a form of peek-a-boo. By keeping something hidden from few, forgotten, it is more pleasurable, even joyous, when once again it is seen to exist!

So, you might say that becoming human is the way we, as God, play. It is the way we magnify delight and bring joy into existence. And to do that God needs to forget, to forget who She is.

God needs to create darkness to glorify the light. She needs to invent pain to put the edge of delight in pleasure. She has to create separation and division … she has to become multiple … to bring out the beauty of Love and Unity and to create the drama of re-union.

God makes Love brighter and more exquisite by making it poignant … by mixing it with loss. She makes having so much better by losing and so setting up the magnificent experience of getting … all over again.

Continue with What I Can Tell You About the Seed of Light in the Deepest Darkness: The Witness Self, The Beneficence of Experience, and the Secret About Oneself One Dares Never Reveal

Return to The Biggest Secret and Why the Bodhisattva Waits: We Remove the Essence of Divinity from Our Ideas of the Divine

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The Biggest Secret and Why the Bodhisattva Waits: We Remove the Essence of Divinity from Our Ideas of the Divine

The Cloud of Boring Sameness and Why Don’t We Stop Crucifying Christ Already: Experience Is Divinity, Part Eight — Love and Universal Consciousness

The Universe Is One Vast Expanse of Experience

And what is that One Reality we apprehend in doing service? We get a sense of the experience of another human being. We sense that our experience of the World is the same. This is called empathy; it is called compassion. But what that means is really that we sense that other people are just like us, they are “other me’s,” and that what distinguishes us is not what we are inside—meaning our experience or subjectivity of the World—but is merely the set of events and circumstances that that One Experience or subjectivity is confronted with, deals with, and focuses on. We are One Experience; the Universe is One Experience. It happens to be “looking” in different directions. We are simple foci of Awareness in the vast expanse of Experience.

Why the Bodhisattva Waits

And the other word used to describe Ultimate Reality and God, outside of being One is Love.

This follows from what was said above about the experience of Unity. For in apprehending the Truth that others are simply ourselves in other “clothing,” so to speak, we move closer to them in feeling. We call that empathy, compassion, but ultimately we call it Love.

What Is Love

Love is the feeling that another’s needs, wishes, wants, fears, pains, joys, and attainments are our own. That is, we “feel for” them; we feel also hurt when they are pained, happy when they are joyous. What they experience is additive to us, not subtractive. It is the reason the bodhisattva refuses to go into enlightenment until everyone can. For at this stage just short of enlightenment there is the experience of Unity and Love: We go beyond estrangement from others, beyond the feeling that we “are our brother’s keeper,” beyond even the sense that we are all in this together… We sense that we share in the experience of all others and our experience cannot be separated away from theirs … that we rise or fall together, not just in our fortunes but in how we feel about them.

Unity and Love

So the experience of Unity leads to the experience of empathy, then compassion… leading to the experience of Love, taking us to the shores of enlightenment, the shores of the apprehension of Ultimate Reality. They are all experiences, leading to a sense of greater experience, leading to more and more encompassing experience of Reality, of the Whole.

So, Love is closer to the truth of Ultimate Reality, or God, than what is normally thought. It is closer, but not quite it.

It is Love…. It’s also hate…in a strange way….

If God Is the Universe of Experience, She Is Also Hate

God is hate; but He is hate, as us, having allowed Himself to completely forget. So He is not hate really. God is not hate, not in essence. Hate is just an experience that a part of Him has wanted.

Hate and the evil that corresponds to it is God having a different experience than is His nature. So to have it She needs to forget who She is.

Why God would want to have such experiences that are not part of His or Her nature is the question. And it is what we take a look at shortly.

Universal Consciousness and The Cloud of Sameness

We also use the words universal consciousness to describe Divinity. But does anyone stop to think what that might mean? Can anyone even imagine or picture it?

The Cloud of Unknowing

If we try, chances are we think of something big and amorphous—something that could be both nothing and everything, like a Universal Cloud. Indeed, at least one mystic described it as the Cloud of Unknowing. And we would not attribute anything colorful to it, for how would we know which colors? So it might be a big grey cloud or a white light.

But, Consciousness? What do we think of it, how do we picture consciousness? Can you see consciousness? So how do you picture it? Like some gigantic cloud, right?

Does God Bore You? Ok, How About Truth?

Well one of the biggest secrets of all is that it is nothing like that, in fact quite the opposite. How would I know? Well, we are One with It and, like I said, we are immersed in it. It is closer to us than our breath, for it is the Experience of breathing, in that case. It is Experience, as I’ve been pointing out. And Experience is hardly dull and grey!

I said I like being an iconoclast. Why? I just gave you an indication that this idea of Consciousness…which we all see as being somehow vague is seen that way because of the words that are blocking our view, the “icons” that are in the way.. It is no thing, so we think it is nothing.

The problem with that is that it makes God, Reality, the Ultimate, and Universal Consciousness all sound pretty goddamn boring! And thinking of it that way has really hurt a lot of people when they want to become more of this Consciousness. For how can you desire very very hard and strive for something that at base seems boring, unwantable, undesirable… that’s nothing?

Is God Nothing or No Thing?

How many people have you seen—meditators and such—sitting for hours and hours and hours trying to have like nothing in their brain!?

Nothing in their brain!? That’s what they’re thinking is GOD!

Why Don’t We Stop Crucifying Christ Already…

Or do they think God’s going to show up in a nice pixie or elf uniform or something? No, so whatever they are picturing is boring.

Look at how we have changed Christ to conform to that. Do you ever see him pictured as smiling? As being anything but solemn and severe? How about playful or teasing?

He’s Actually a Nice Guy.

How could he possible have been a person and not laughed, kidded, played, and so on. Yet, all of that is removed from our depictions of him leaving a dour lifeless shell of a person, who is then said to represent Life itself. Do you see how confused … and therefore confusing … that is?

Yet even if we take a look at Christ’s life as we know it, was he passionless? Imagine how anyone could get into it with moneychangers in a temple and actually toss them out and not get a little roused up. Yet, being emotionless is even how He is depicted doing that!

We Remove the Essence of Divinity from Our Ideas of the Divine

The point is that we keep removing the essence of Divinity—Experience—from all our depictions of Divinity, guaranteeing we will be wrong. Wrong, and even end up getting the opposite idea. We turn living Spirit into emotionless icon and end up worshiping, even emulating, the very things that our holy people exhort us to look away from.

Continue with When Life is Ever New, a Revelation, One Has Turned the Good into the Wonderful: Experience Is Divinity, Part Nine — God Invents Joy by Forgetting.

Return to All Roads Lead Home and the Multi-Tasking Universe: The Universe is a Vast Expanse of Experience, “Looking” in Different Directions.

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

To purchase Experience Is Divinity, or any of Michael Adzema’s books, available in print and e-book formats, go to Michael Adzema’s books at Amazon.

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Graduate Courses in the University of Divinity. Pain Is the Professor … Bringing Us Ever hOMe: Experience Is Divinity, Part Three — All We Are Saying … Is Give Love a Chance

The Greatest Teaching Is Also the Hardest Teaching: We Are One, Not Just With What We Admire, But Also With What We Despise … We Are One With the Darkness We Deplore

This is the basis for what we call faith…which is the notion that the Universe, at base, is “friendly”…if not out and out loving…and that ultimately there is nothing to fear.

So, for pain, God is playing peek-a-boo with us…. Our Inner Divinity has blessed ourselves with it to guide us from danger toward our true path.

Of course we bitch and complain when we don’t get what we want, when misfortune brings down our cherished fantasies…and sure it is painful. But I doubt there is any of you who has not looked back at what you had intended and what you were guided to instead, and said, “Thank God I’m not in charge of my life… If I’d have gotten my way, well, hell, what a stupid idea that ended up being. God sure must love me to sustain and teach and guide me…in spite of myself.”

He does that for all of us and that’s what I meant about the pain being His blessing to us.

But of course there’s much more to it than that….

All We Are Saying … Is Give God a Chance.

Take, for example, the ideas of heaven and hell. Those are the ultimate examples we have of our beliefs that pain is evil and is about God punishing us and conversely that pleasure is good and is about God rewarding us.

Hell. Seriously?

By the way, only humans could come up with something as horrible as a hell. ONLY humans—ones who are the most removed from the Divine themselves. For God, our Inner Divinity, could never come up with something like that. I’ll get into why later, assuming it is not readily apparent to you right at the moment. But for now, let’s just put it this way: There’s no hell. Not in the ultimate sense. Take my word for it.

There’s no hell, but does that mean everybody goes to heaven? Now, not quite, not exactly. Because, would heaven be getting what you ask for? Or do you think it would be getting what God—who knows everything—knows … you … want? That is to say, what you really need and the biggest part of you really wants….

Heaven Can Wait

Divinity might protect us from making bad mistakes through pain, but the other part of it is that we are allowed to go through with it… and find out…on our own…what a bad and dumb idea that is.

So in this sense it might be seen that “heaven” … or what amounts to our idea of getting what we ask for … might actually be not very good. Some might say that it would amount to a real hell. Ask King Midas, for example.

On the flip side, if what we ask for would actually lead to more suffering in the long run, then getting what we need to be happier in the long run might be rewarding and a blessing, even if it is initially painful and something we absolutely do not want when we get it. So, in this case, what might be seen as “hell” might actually be not very bad. Ask any alcoholic or drug addict who has hit bottom, for example.

Pain Is the Teacher … to Bring Us Back to Happiness.

Pain is the teacher. But it’s not pain that’s being imposed, or, is in any way a punishment. In fact, we are the ignorant ones who are picking pain. In some respect, the amount of pain one receives correlates with the amount of ignorance one is in. That is no different from saying that the longer one persists in doing the wrong thing, the longer one will suffer from the bad consequences of doing that: If one is too ignorant to stop hitting oneself on the head with a hammer, one is going to keep suffering. If one refuses to take remedies to get well, one will stay sick. If one does not face the truth about what we are doing to ourselves by polluting and radiating the globe, we will suffer more and longer … horribly in fact … for that kind of ignore-ance.

But that is not the entire story, as it is also true that those who are further along in spiritual evolution—Christ is perhaps the best example—will take upon themselves, will bring to themselves, greater suffering for the purposes of learning the highest truths. Pain is the teacher, and some of us have opted to take graduate courses with the “master.”

Indeed, some people, who happen to be at the “highest” levels of our refinement back to Unity, to Divinity, will take upon themselves the pain of others. This is the meaning of the bodhisattva—the one who refuses to go into enlightenment until all can go. This is the meaning of Kwan Yin and Avalokiteśvara, ever tearful in compassion for the suffering of the world. This is the meaning of Christ taking upon himself the sins of the world. It is as if at a certain point of our return hOMe we begin to reflect, or manifest, most strongly the qualities of Divinity which we are approaching. It is like at a certain point our Divine Nature is the least obscured from view.

Indeed, that is how we know of the the Divine. It is because we see it reflected or shining through in the actions of wholly others. It is because we see it reflected in the compassion and selflessness of the most evolved of us.

The bodhisattva stage, like the Centaur Chiron stage, is among the last stages of our return hOMe. It is as if we stand upon the edge of Unity and take a long mournful look at the ones we leave behind and refuse to go forward while others still suffer.

This is just prior to the greatest teaching of all—which also arises out of the pain and suffering that we have chosen at that stage. And this teaching is the hardest, for it involves not just removing the barrier to Divinity, but also acknowledging this last truth, which is that it is ourselves who has been causing, not just the pain we experience, but we participate also in the creation of the pain of Others. We realize that we ourselves are part of the mistakes and cruelty that we condemn in our concern for the suffering of others. We realize that we are One not just with what we admire, but also with what we despise.

But beyond even that, suffering teaches us. We realize that there is nothing wrong with even that. We do not just forgive ourselves: We forgive others and in so doing are ourselves forgiven. The most common prayer in the Judeo-Christian world actually acknowledges this: It goes, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” People think that part is again the tit-for-tat: If we forgive others, then we will be forgiven by the Divine. In fact, what it means is that in forgiving others we are also forgiving ourselves, for we are One with them. In judging others, we are judging ourselves. And in condemning others, we keep ourselves enslaved.

The boddhisattva refuses enlightenment until we all are enlightened. Is it possible then that in his turning his back on release he is also contributing to the imprisonment of everyone. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Prior to this awakening that we are One even with the darkness we deplore, we are at the stage Christ expressed on the cross when he said, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” One is at the point at which the boddhisattva is refusing enlightenment.

But we awaken to something beyond even that: We see that the entire thing is beautiful beyond belief, that it was always beautiful, even with all the “mistakes” built into it and all the darkness painted upon it.

But after this realization, also like Christ who suffered more then on the cross and just before his death said, “I and the Father are One.” And it is at this stage that even the boddhisattva accepts enlightenment. For what is realized is that enlightenment is not a state to be achieved, it is one to be realized: For one is One with All, has always been, and the only path necessary is the One that leads to realizing there is no path, never was, and there never needed to be one.

More about that later.

But whether we are actively enrolling in advanced courses or being thrust into remedial ones through our ignoring consequences of our actions and refusing to do the “homework” we have assigned ourselves (karma), the Divine on the other side of this is ever helpful and loving, providing the exact amount of stimulus or pain to either teach us or wake us up.

So, Divinity doesn’t ever pick pain for us, except to bring us back to happiness. What I’m getting at is that God is good. The Divine defines goodness. The amount of darkness we see in the Divine is indeed equal to the amount of darkness we have created for ourselves. It may even be a while to realize that even choosing the darkness was perfect, as the light is better seen in contrast to darkness and we better understand our own nature as Divinity, we better understand Truth in relation to the Untruth we hid ourselves with.

Continue with Fetishing and Fearing What’s Hidden … Life Is a Dark Screen: To Be Ignorant of Identity with Divinity Is the Purpose of the Human Form.

Return to In Spite of Ourselves, Ultimate Trust, and the Absolute Earliest Preschool: Experience Is Divinity, Part Two — Pain Is Wisdom Gift-Wrapped

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In Spite of Ourselves, Ultimate Trust, and the Absolute Earliest Preschool: Experience Is Divinity, Part Two — Pain Is Wisdom Gift-Wrapped

How Pain Is Like Comedy:  They Help Us Remember Our Divine State of Unfear, Teach Us to Have Faith, and Reveal Wisdom Needed to Get Us hOMe

You might ask yourself why humans are the only species that laughs. And this is where it gets really freaky. So you’ll be glad we have the laughter.

Pain Is Wisdom Gift-Wrapped

If you remove the veil between you and Divinity, what is the one feeling you cannot possibly have which is also the most difficult to deal with in life and yet is central to human existence?

Fear. Of course there’s no fear. When there is nothing hidden and you are surrounded with Love, how could there be? Conversely, human existence is characterized by limited knowledge, the creation of an unknown or darkness in which we can expand fear, and the acting that comes from such limited knowing and exaggerated fear which can appear to be unloving.

And all of this creates pain.

But is pain truly unloving? I mean, in an ultimate sense?

“God So Loved the World That He Gave Us Pain.”

Let us say, “God so loves us that He gives us pain.” By that I mean, Divinity feels so much compassion for the ways we humans manage to screw up—and by that I mean are able to separate ourselves from knowing Reality and create unknowing and darkness … what psychologists call an unconscious—that It gives us reminders and road signs on the way back hOme. He gives us all the wisdom we can take in.

However, in such ignorance we reject all “His” blessings. By putting a separation between us and our Divinity we put Divinity in darkness, in the Unknown, and all with It all Its blessings, including wisdom.

We reject even the greatest gift that we as Divinity have given ourselves. We reject the clues and bread crumbs we have left for ourselves to follow to find the way back home. We reject the pain of life.

For the pain of life is actually wisdom that is gift-wrapped to hide its nature. This wisdom stays hidden until we accept our pain and open it, so to speak, to find the gift of understanding which brings with it always ever more release from the fear we have chosen….

We, as Divinity, of course want to show ourselves how there is never anything to be afraid of and that fear is an imaginary creation of ours.

Why You Don’t See Hyenas at Comedy Clubs

For if you felt one with God and thought of life’s dramas as a kind of play, would you have fear? Not a lot, would you? If you knew it was like the movie I was talking about… like you were sitting in a theater watching your life…while you would feel fear and other emotions you would do so in a way that they would even be desirable or fun, knowing there was no real dire consequences of any of it?

I’ll say this about nonhuman planetmates (a) they don’t laugh, and (b) they always have a sense that they’re one with God…. So they always have part of them knowing that they are just playing a character. But not so for us humans. So our fear and distress is magnified to the limits of our imagination. Indeed, imaginative people, creative people, will know how they have both more fear and more ecstasy than others … and so are also more likely to be labeled bipolar, by the way.

The Absolute Earliest Preschool

A lot of the way we help ourselves remember our Divine state of unfear and reveal the wisdom needed to take us hOMe comes back to that peek-a-boo I was talking about. That is one of those bread crumbs that we, as Divinity, have provided ourselves right at the beginning of life. Just as the Divine provides the laughter to humans, which is a result of our little adult games of peek-a-boo we play with ourselves and with each other. So important is such learning that it is hard to find a mother-child who has not experienced it and reveled in peek-a-boo. Though I doubt any mother ever consciously knew why she was doing it except that it was fun and gave so much pleasure! Remember that word—pleasure.

How Pain Is Like Comedy

And it is the same way with God and us as it is with mothers and their babies. Just as the Divine inspires mothers to play peek-a-boo to train children to not trust their fears as being real and we as adults act comical, tell jokes, and poke fun at each other to help each other learn there is nothing to fear, so also our Divine nature brings pain to us.

Pain is the next step of the peek-a-boo training. It is the hardest step. But the previous practices in peek-a-boo, joking and playful kidding, and laughter helps prepare us for this next step, where when we are fearful, we might have the expectation…and it would be righteous…that soon the clouds will part, the sun will shine…but even more than that…

Peek-a-Boo Is a Taste of God’s Training Later in Life

Remember, that early peek-a-boo training has an effect on you as a child: At first you were fearful but after a while you expect Mother to be there all the time…if you have enough experience of it. For, you see, peek-a-boo is a sample of training for God’s training later in life. Now…let’s put it this way:

Pain is God playing peek-a-boo with us.

He uses pain to guide us from danger and toward our true path.

In Spite of Ourselves….

When we have enough experience in life—by that I mean when we have had enough trainings, practice, and events that have revealed the falsity and groundlessness of our fears—we know that pain is not the useless thing we start out thinking it is. We learn that when things are not going right…sometimes the car breaks down or we break our ankle…there may be a better outcome for us in store than if it had gone smoothly.

It requires self-reflection, of course, to see this. But how many times have we found out after the fact that the bad or painful thing was the perfect thing to have happened? How often have we realized that it was God, or our Inner Divinity, who was helping us out, derailing our plans, because we weren’t supposed to be doing something? Or we need to be doing something different? If you are reading this, I would bet that you have reached that point where you know that you are being guided to something better through some of your bad experiences.

Pain Is God Playing Peek-a-Boo

So, just as God inspired mothers to train their infants to not trust their fears as being reality, just as we as adults enjoy the blessing of laughter as after each divine prank we learn how useless is our worry, He even set up the next step where when we are in pain we might have the expectation, and it would be true, that soon we will see things differently, that eventually we will be better for the experience, and that ultimately everything is just fine, that we even might be grateful for having gone through what we did.

This is the basis for what we call faith…which is the notion that the Universe, at base, is “friendly”…if not out and out loving…and that ultimately there is nothing to fear.

So, for pain, God is playing peek-a-boo with us…. Our Inner Divinity has blessed ourselves with it to guide us from danger toward our true path.

Of course we bitch and complain when we don’t get what we want, when misfortune brings down our cherished fantasies…and sure it is painful. But I doubt there is any of you who haven’t looked back at what we had intended and what we were guided to instead, and said, “Thank God I’m not in charge of my life… If Ida gotten my way, well, hell, what a stupid idea that ended up being. God sure must love me to sustain and teach and guide me…in spite of myself.”

He does that for all of us and that’s what I meant about the pain being His blessing to us.

But of course there’s much more to it than that….

Continue with Graduate Courses in the University of Divinity. Pain Is the Professor … Bringing Us Ever hOMe: Experience Is Divinity, Part Three — All We Are Saying … Is Give Love a Chance

Return to Our Daily “En-lighten-ments” Which Reveal Our True Nature as Bliss and the Nature of Creation as Play: Experience Is Divinity, Part One—The Cosmic Giggle

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

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Our Daily “En-lighten-ments” Which Reveal Our True Nature as Bliss and the Nature of Creation as Play: Experience Is Divinity, Part One—The Cosmic Giggle

How, From Birth, We Are Taught by Love, Prodded Out of Ego, and Embraced Again Into Unity: The Koans of Everyperson and How We Are “in Love’s Image”

Our Supposed “Superior Intellect” and Language

Our supposed superior intellect is often named as what makes us different and what makes us “in the image of God.”

But our words don’t make us superior…they make us inferior…to all the other species…who just know, without having to struggle with symbols that are easily misinterpreted.

The language of the planetmates is not language; so much as it is mind-sharing. And all that needs to can be conveyed in a precise look…sometimes a smell…or just a howl…across the forest. One might think the information contained in such things could be only rudimentary, but this is hardly the case.

One might compare humans to typewriters…laboriously trying to make ourselves understood to each other…and ourselves…. Whereas, what we lost with our separation from Nature and our devolution into ego—which came with that separation—is the kind of abilities that, as analogy, we see in computers.

Think of the size of a computer chip. It’s tiny. Now consider the amount of information it can convey, process, and so on.

Our species filter—our ego—just does not let us see that that kind of pure understanding among the parts of Nature is consistent with the natural biological perfection of all things.

Further, remember that each part of Nature is God having the fun of manifesting Him- Herself in that form, and simultaneously in all others…. And since these nonhuman beings are not split off from the All That Is like we are they are still aware of their identity with Divinity. They are as aware of their true nature as when we go to a movie and still realize that what we see is not real and that our real existence is elsewhere….

So, all of Nature, except for unfortunate humans, have the sense of watching a drama, but none of it is all that scary. One might imagine they actually enjoy the scary parts … as a thrill, just the way you might enjoy a horror flick.

So, of course, they have, without trying, the knowledge that needs communicating, whenever. And that knowledge they know, so it’s not all that common that a need to communicate it even arises.

Language Is Our Attempt to Remember What We’ve Lost

It is only our separation from All That Is and our delusion of being separated from each other that brings up a need for a language. Language is our attempt to remember what we’ve lost and to connect back with each other, since we’ve forgotten we are each “other me’s.” Language is our act out of the loss we feel inside from having separated ourselves out as individual egos. But it is a mostly futile attempt, as act outs tend to be, for it directs us away from the direct knowing of our unity with each other which is discovered in feeling, which is discovered within. And when caught up in words, most folks most of the time are distracted from feeling their unity with each other, let alone All That Is.

How We Are “in God’s Image” – Our Daily “En-lighten-ments”

So it is not in our big brains, supposed intelligence, or language that we are different from the rest of Nature and “made in God’s image,” so to speak. But there is a way that humans have a special link with the source of Love … with Divinity.

Let’s put it this way: One might say that Divinity felt so much compassion for the ways we humans managed to stray from Nature and thereby magnify our suffering that It gave us the most ordinary everyday reminder of our true Nature as unity and of the real nature of It All that we’d forgotten. In us, humans, God reflects the essence of His manifesting Himself as Creation and the delight that comes with such play. Creation is Love’s leela, or play…. And it is very much like a play.

And it requires disintegration into parts, which—essentially alike, but with this fact forgotten—can interact in dynamic, infinite, and wondrous ways. Like the Universe expanding and becoming ever more complex and differentiated, Divinity manifests. The further from original unity is this expansion, the greater is the forgetfulness, the greater is the separation from All Else and each other.

The Cosmic Giggle

But there are constant reminders of our original and essential unity and of our nature as God… daily “enlightenments” … literally… daily epiphanies if you will.

They are like the koans of every person which reveal our true Nature as Bliss.

The Universe displays the Nature of its Creation as play—which all the rest of Creation and all planetmates know intuitively—to humans in a most common yet profound way. Love is ever teaching us there is never anything to be afraid of, and that fear is an imaginary creation of ours—just the same as and going along with our separation from Nature.

It is there at the very beginnings of our lives, in fact. Love inspires the billions of human mothers … and more and more, fathers, too … to play the peek-a-boo game with their babies. Mother is not there …. the baby has a flash of distress. Where did Mother go? There is that momentary imperceptible fear that Mom is gone, disappeared, never to return.

Then suddenly Mom’s face appears from nowhere. How does the baby feel and react to it? Now, the baby is downright gleeful…and is beside her- or himself, can’t even contain her or his joy, claps its hands, laughs, and giggles….

This play, this game is the essence of something humans do throughout their lives. It is a way of toying with fear, toying with distress … over and over reminding ourselves that there is nothing to fear in life. Other planetmates don’t have it … not the way humans do.

Later in life, we have people making entire careers out of doing this “peek-a-boo” for others. It is called comedy and these peek-a-boos are called jokes, but they have the exact same structure of the early games we played as babies: There is something introduced that indicates something unwanted or stressful might happen or be happening. You are led down that path a little and feel in yourself a slight discomfort, a tension.

Then, suddenly, you discover there was never anything to be afraid of. You hear the punch line and realize, to your delighted surprise, that it was not about what you thought it was. In an instant you are aware you were wrong, you were fooled, and everything is actually right with the world. One “is downright gleeful…and is beside her- or himself, can’t even contain her or his joy, claps its hands, laughs, and giggles….”

So, the way we are made “in God’s image” and reminded of our true Nature as Bliss and our essential Unity?

It is our laughter.

Continue with In Spite of Ourselves, Ultimate Trust, and the Absolute Earliest Preschool: Experience Is Divinity, Part Two — Pain Is Wisdom Gift-Wrapped

Return to Why Scientists, Unless They Are Einstein, Make Lousy Mystics: Being Able to Control and Predict Reality Is Hardly the Same as Understanding It

To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … of which this is an excerpt, Go to Experience Is Divinity

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Why We Say One Should “Look Within” … The Highest Reality Is Also the Most Immediate One: Transpersonal Perspective, Part Seven — Experience Is Divine, Cognition Is Illusion

 

No, Bette Midler, God Is NOT Looking at You “From a Distance.” The Divine Could Not Be Any Closer, It Is Identical to Your Very Own, Immediate, Experience

I use the terms, God and the Divine, to refer to the Highest Reality, the Reality Itself or That Which Essentially Is.

Cognition is not the Reality itself any more than a picture of a beach is the actual waves hitting the sand or the feeling of the beach-goer basking in the sun.

You cannot have any “revelations” if you only allow in the thoughts you already have.

If “looking within” does not mean looking into one’s direct experience, what could it possibly mean?

 

Experience Is Divine

Since the terms God or the Divine are usually associated with what is most real or what is the highest reality, I use those terms (God and the Divine) to refer to that Reality, Highest Reality, or That Which Essentially Is throughout the text.

So since Reality can only be that which is directly experienced, and we can know nothing other than that, then Experience is God. Experience is the Divine, cognition is essentially illusion. I do not mean that the experience of cognition is illusion, for that itself is Experience, not simply cognition. When I say that cognition is illusion, I mean that the contents of cognition are illusion; and even more so, the results of cognition or reason are illusion. They are maps solely—reflections only of the That Which Is.

Now, maps can be useful. They can reorient us and send us back to Experience in a manner that allows us to experience What Is in a different way, maybe even a better way. But they are not the Reality itself any more than a picture of a beach is the actual waves hitting the sand or the feeling of the beach-goer basking in the sun. Yet a picture of a beach may allow someone experiencing a beach to have the thought of looking around for prone bodies and may open them to a different experience of beach because of that, whereas otherwise one might continue having the same, or similar, experience again and again. It is in this way that maps are part of our experience of the Other, are part of our direct experience, which “impinges” on us and leads us, ultimately, into greater beingness.

If, furthermore, that Direct Experience has other characteristics associated with the Divine—e.g. , it guides us in living, provides us with values, assists and “saves” us, and basically helps us to grow and be better beings ourselves—then essentially that Reality is acting as God and deserves to be called by that name and worshiped as such.

 

That Experience might have these characteristics is not something that can be deduced rationally or in the traditional scientific manner—it is outside those domains. But it can be empirically tested on the individual level, much as Ken Wilber (1977) has described that mysticism can be tested empirically on the individual level—i.e., if you as an individual follow these particular steps, such and such will happen to you, or will be observed by you. It is in this sense that one can say that an assertion such as that Experience provides values and assists us can be tested in a scientific manner. Once that experiment has been accomplished, one can go to the spiritual literature and see if Experience As Divine does not make sense of much of what is found there, indeed much of what is incomprehensible otherwise. This experiment is one that can only be done by each person for him- or herself.

While this conceptualization of God as Experience or Reality as Experience may seem unusually phrased, I explain that I am meaning the same thing by these statements as I believe is meant by phrases such as “Reality As Consciousness” (Wilber), or “I Am the I Am” (the meaning of Jehovah in The Bible). I believe it means the same as saying in Hinduism that Brahman (the ground of all Being) is equivalent to Atman—the “ground” of one’s individual being. As explanation of this statement, Satya Sai Baba explains that the only reality is the “I” or “the witness,” which is the watcher and Experiencer preceding all maya or illusion. But if this is so, then the Experiencer is Experience itself, is Awareness itself, for how can one distinguish the Experiencer from the contents of Experience—a point that is also made in these traditions.

Also, what else is to be meant by the terms that one should “look within” or “search within” when seeking out the presence or guidance of the Divine? If “looking within” does not mean looking into one’s direct experience, what could it possibly mean?

This is also no different from what Nietzsche meant in describing the empirical basis of all true knowing. He pointed out that what was truly real could only be that which one directly perceived. But he did not mean what one perceived only with one’s major five senses—i.e. , seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling—as his famous assertions have been taken to mean in the founding of modern science, but rather he meant a radical empiricism that could be founded only upon what one perceived in the sense of the totality of one’s experiencing.

Continue with Why Scientists, Unless They Are Einstein, Make Lousy Mystics: Being Able to Control and Predict Reality Is Hardly the Same as Understanding It

Return to Fearful of Looking Directly at Experience, We Defend Against It with Ego and by Creating Time: Experience Is Divine, Cognition Is Illusion, Part Six — The Shield of Perseus

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