To Live is to Die (ride the snake) - Cartagena, Colombia
Cartagena, Colombia
"Do not seek to follow the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed." - The Buddha
"He who looks outside dreams; he who looks inside awakens." - Carl Jung
"Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out." - Rainer Maria Rilke
I'm setting out to finish a journey I began a few years back, and yet I know that there can be no such thing. For the only journey is an honest and direct exploration of our inner landscapes, and the only ending is a new beginning. While comfort, stability, certainty and routine are sought by most people, life to me is about risk, variety, growth and transformation. Nevertheless, I'm the first to admit that there's a fine line between escaping and exploring. But it seems to me that notions like status, arrival and achievement often contradict the purpose of life, for they tend to become cherished dwellings instead of new points of departure. Every answer or result ought to be a springboard for new quests and inquiries. Heraclitus said, "No man can step into the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." Believing this to make perfect sense, the previous - and often foolish - posts in this blog are all defunct, just like the person who recorded them, and I'll no doubt have a similar opinion of this post and its author sooner rather than later. (Keep in mind that the word "person" is derived from the Greek prosopon and the Latin persona, both words meaning "mask", and that the concept of being according to thinkers such as Freud, Marx, Eckhart and Spinoza involves an "unmasking".) Genesis isn't the first point on a line; it's a perpetual process. The same goes for any "person", whose true nature can better be understood in terms of a seed and its shell: "Verily verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit" - John 12:24. If a chick were to identify with and conform to its shell, thereby resisting the urge to hatch, it would die without being born and bringing forth new eggs. The incessant birth of new forms cannot happen without a continuous death of old structures and conditions. Birth is NOW. Life is NOW. Death is NOW. And the Resurrection is NOW or never.
"I will show you fear in a handful of dust." - T.S. Eliot
"As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest on the dark earth." - Mircea Eliade
My last adventure in South America resulted in a fateful shattering of my own shell once I entered the realm of shamanism in the jungle, where I received a glimpse of reality unveiled. And the best part of this extraordinary encounter is that it was the very last thing I ever expected or even imagined. However, pain and confusion soon beset my efforts to understand the meaning of what had happened as a wilderness of pretenses, psychological stilts and emotional slag confronted me, revealing a conspiracy with my ungainly ego's project to keep me immured in the shadow of an impostor. But the Light has shone in the Darkness. Realizing that I had long since lost control and become exiled in the labyrinth of my psyche, I had no choice but to accept the fact that until that moment in my life, at age 35, I was unable to answer what seem to be the most elementary questions: Who am I? What am I? What is life? Why am I here? Why is anything?
Almost three years later I now understand that this shell, or "world", was nothing but a screen fashioned by my own mind, for what I had always taken for "reality" was but a terribly impoverished understanding of my own creation clouded by negative thoughts and emotions, or to put it bluntly, utter blindness. As so many of us are wont to do, I imputed most of the faults and frictions in my life to anyone's and everyone's doing but my own, thereby avoiding a lot of questions I should have been asking myself. In short, I had become an expert at eluding "truth". (If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.) Eventually I came to see that everything must be questioned, that all the answers can only be found within, and that everything depends on these answers. Meanwhile, the ineffable glimpse I got beyond my limited perspective could now be said to have only expanded the borders of my mental cage, for any attempts at describing and explaining this phenomenon in words, until exceeded, simply turn that window into a wall, for the window is not the view.
"Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing." - Aldous Huxley
Generally speaking, "reality" is nothing but a consensus based upon the unchallenged evidence of the five senses, making the visible world a crude reflection, or inverted symbol, of a far greater invisible world, for there is infinitely more than we can perceive behind and beyond the surroundings we take for granted. What is more, our relationship with our environment is far more intimate than most people believe: the inner and outer worlds are inextricably connected. (When a thief sees a saint, all he sees are his pockets.) In light of what we now know about the human brain, it could be said that the left brain is concerned with our limited personal view of the material world, the linear story we tell and sell ourselves, while the right brain is the infinite "void" where emotion, imagination, creativity and spirituality rule. The left brain is slumbering in the temporal darkness of biography, and the right brain is the light forever awake to eternity. In other words, Reality is unconscious, and always knocking on the walls of limited awareness. But don't tell that to the average "person" who will believe anything except the possibility that his ego is only a projection in a mirage, that he's a victim of mistaken identity hiding behind countless masks while playing out a role in this sensuous theater. (Maybe the ego is a medium.)
"In other living creatures ignorance of self is nature; in man it is vice." - Boethius
"There is no greater mystery than this: Being Reality ourselves, we seek to gain reality." - Ramana Maharshi
While everyone desires security in some permanent truth, in some explanation that gives them comfort and meaning, most people only find such "truths" by renouncing their independence and consuming answers - with astounding credulity - from so-called authority figures instead of employing their own gifts of intellect and reason. (Needless to say, it doesn't help that there appears to be little to no relation between competence and authority nowadays, which is part and parcel of a culture that conflates opinion with knowledge, belief with understanding, submission with freedom, pleasure with happiness, conformity with responsibility, war with hygiene, and self-righteousness with morality.) In short, most of our beliefs result from a phenomenon Schopenhauer pointed out, namely, that we take the limits of our own field of vision for the limits of the world. Using the light spectrum as an example, there is far more than meets the eye - and other sense organs - which is why we see through a glass darkly. In fact, today scientists tell us that over 90% of the universe is invisible to our eyes but can be detected with equipment sensitive to radio waves, microwaves, X rays, gamma rays and numerous other wavelengths.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein
"Everything we call real is made of things that can not be regarded as real." - Niels Bohr
Just as Gandhi said that Truth is One, paths are many, so too is there One Energy manifesting infinite multiplicity. But opposites appear when separation ensues. (Consider how white light becomes a rainbow of colors when it passes through a prism.) All that we see is merely a limited projection of an unseen essence - a nameless whole manifesting in parts that contain and reflect the whole - and just like the allegory of Plato's cave, even the countless shadows on any given day point to the One Light that casts them all before us. Any sense of separation is only an illusion: although a string may have two ends, they are not separate from each other because the string is whole. Furthermore what we call "matter" is just energy condensed into a slow vibration - energy that is neither created nor destroyed but changed from one form to another. As Einstein also stated when explaining his theory of relativity:
"It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing - a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind. Furthermore, the equation E is equal to m c-squared, in which energy is put equal to mass, multiplied by the square of the velocity of light, showed that very small amounts of mass may be converted into a very large amount of energy and vice versa. The mass and energy were in fact equivalent, according to the formula mentioned above. This was demonstrated by Cockcroft and Walton in 1932, experimentally."
"If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration." - Nikola Tesla
Think of how the spokes of a bike tire or the blades of a fan blur and appear to become a solid disk when spinning fast enough. Something similar is going on with all objects, including your body. (You're no-body.) Truth is indeed stranger than fiction...
But enough of the cute aphorisms. I declare no authority in what I post here, nor do I claim ownership of any of the ideas I'm echoing to explain what ultimately surpasses language and thought. In fact, I wouldn't recommend submitting to any authority but the one within. What I say today I may contradict or renounce tomorrow, for I know little more than that life is infinite and that I am ignorant of my own ignorance: Here are simply some ideas to ponder and contemplate. I haven't cornered truth, big T or small, and anyone who says they have is a liar, a fool or both, for Truth is beyond the limitations of thought and language. The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. My shaman in the Amazon says, "On the road of wisdom there is a beginning, but no end." I think that's a good way to look at things, for with every step you take towards the horizon, it recedes one step further. Understanding the involuted workings of my mind, finding the flaws in my thinking, aligning my energies, and facing fear head-on is more my purpose than any search or explanation, for the latter ultimately becomes just one more attachment to be coopted by the ego on its mission to sustain the illusion that it's an end instead of a means. (Maybe the ego is a door.)
"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." - Rumi
With all this in mind I will say that few things are more powerful than a healthy curiosity mixed with a good selection of books and an openness to the unknown: you can teach yourself anything with study, practice and patience. Knowledge and life are inseparable; where there is knowledge there can be no fear. Every great teacher and prophet throughout the ages has emphasized that self-knowledge is the only key to true freedom, but What is knowledge, and what is freedom? This brings me to the motivation for yet another trip to South America and the Amazon, where my life was altered indelibly during an ayahuasca ceremony in 2011 when I was guided to what may be described as the most beautiful - and dangerous - book in the world: the Bible. My ignorance of this book until then could not have been greater, though I knew enough to realize how casually the world accepts bloodshed under the banner of religion.
I needn't point out the innumerable horrors committed in the name of "God". (While I profess no religion or school of thought, I do believe they all point to the same thing and that all world scriptures are immensely meaningful guides for the human soul, but too many people never get beyond the pointer.) Although I'm no Biblical scholar, I know the Bible has been corrupted by theologians, rabbis, priests and copyists throughout the last few millennia and that what we have today is a book littered with omissions, interpolations, errors and mistranslations that has been mauled by those claiming to interpret it with the blessing of divine omniscience. Some of these perversions are deliberate while others are due to sheer ignorance. Moreover, these self-proclaimed agents of the "Heavenly Father" have saddled the "unconditional" love of "God" with countless contradictory conditions spurred by a primitive system of carrots and sticks, all the while feeding His "children" a creed that inspires guilt, fear, doubt and fault. But no matter the integrity of the Good Book, most Christians don't even read it, and many of those who do are either so witless that they take it literally or so lazy that they rely on the interpretations spoon-fed to them by churches that would cease to exist if their "flocks" actually opened their eyes and took responsibility for their own lives instead of worshiping idols, subjugating their minds to fairy tales and cowering in fear of a whimsically belligerent deity of their own creation, all the while sustaining the world's only evil, which of course they claim to be fighting: ignorance. Why think for yourself when someone else, whether it be a priest, pundit, politician, parent, advertiser or bureaucrat, can do it for you so long as you reject the Truth inside and bestow the power of authority upon those without? To seek the approval of any authority but the one within is to attempt to gain the world at the cost of the soul.
Despite the film 12 Years a Slave giving Americans a rare close-up of their pedigree in terms of the barbarous institution of slavery as told by a man who endured it in the flesh, people don't realize that subjection needn't involve whips, chains, plantations and forced labor. It's not difficult to break someone's will or manipulate their tastes and appetites, especially when they're not even aware that it's being done. Our systematic forms of indoctrination, advertising, reward, punishment, polling, propaganda and ideology all aim to manage the mind and confine it within a mold that limits inner freedom and gives a false sense of free will, all the while bombarding us with incessant noise and diversion posing as expressions of personal liberty. For example, the average citizen - who confuses spectating with participation and feeling with thought - has no choice when it comes to politics because America has a one-party system masquerading as two, under which the media is consolidated in a few private hands, the 14th Amendment has granted corporations the status of personhood, and Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission has declared money to be a form of free speech. However, the "free" citizen has an overwhelming - and ever growing - selection of food and pop culture, or what the Romans called "bread and circus". Oh, how we need our modern chariot races and gladiatorial spectacles that delude us into believing war is just a game!
"Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect." - Oswald Spengler
"The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else." - H.L. Mencken
Fear-mongering, dogmatism, nationalism, public relations, scapegoating, inciting guilt, and inculcating socially acceptable patterns of thought and behavior induce submission and serve as today's whips and shackles. We may have abolished slavery, but the practice has morphed into a more subtle iteration that initiated the systematic destruction of classical education in America during the 19th century and the concurrent acceleration of compulsory schooling with its theory that children belong to the State rather than to their parents. (Read anything by John Taylor Gatto, or search him on YouTube, for a lucid explanation.) Wiring human consciousness to the television and internet has only intensified the erosion of autonomy and rational thinking, all the while drowning truth in a flood of infotainment and triviality and portraying life as far more amusing than meaningful. The point is, if you can muddle and fetter someone's mind, there's no need to enslave their body because "the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." (Making God in the image of man, inventing the "Devil", consecrating time and money, creating allegiance to a flag, and turning the idiot box into a shrine are just a few wildly successful examples.) Adolf Hitler, a master of propaganda, said, "What luck for rulers that men do not think." Consider this in light of the fact that the only person Hitler actually killed was himself. On the other hand, the masses who bought his insane philosophy and carried it out...
"Hitler," wrote Herman Rauschning in 1939, "has a deep respect for the Catholic church and the Jesuit order; not because of their Christian doctrine, but because of the 'machinery' they have elaborated and controlled, their hierarchical system, their extremely clever tactics, their knowledge of human nature, and their wise use of human weakness in ruling over believers."
"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority." - Stanley Milgram
This is what makes authority so dangerous, especially when it takes on the form of an organized religion claiming to have the only direct line to the abode of the Almighty. The Bible is beautiful because it serves as a guide for the emancipation of man when properly understood. It is dangerous because it has been desecrated and used to keep more minds in bondage than any other book, though it does have some competition. What is worse, it's been done in the name of "God" and "His only son". But No servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him - John 13:16. There is no denying that the servant (Church) pushed the Master into an imaginary heaven and usurped His role upon its inception under the rule of Constantine as a department of State. As a result, the Christian era is a blood-soaked history about prideful kings and popes vying - when not colluding - to keep the rabble in line by yoking the mind of man to idols and devils throughout almost twenty centuries of darkness, intolerance, division, persecution, cruelty and violence. To this day most so-called Christians profess an ideology that they do anything but practice, expecting to somehow reap peace and love by sowing fear and hatred, making the "Truth" as revealed by a man named Jesus subservient to fiction and irrationality. But as always, there can be no masters unless there are consenting servants devoted to little more than passive obedience...
That so many of the well fed young television-watchers in the world's most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. 'Free as a bird', we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without being compelled to use its wings will soon renounce the privilege of flight and remain forever grounded." - Aldous Huxley
With no small amount of frustration and confusion I have studied the Bible for about two years now, which means I've barely scratched the surface. Be that as it may, what I've discovered is a far cry from the fairy tales and horror stories foisted upon the unsuspecting and uncritical public for so long. I know those gross distortions as well as anyone, for they took me on a number of wild goose chases, as some of you are well aware. Determined to understand this legendary book I eventually discovered the Hebrew alphabet and Qabala. (Qabala is an ancient science dealing with the structure of energy transformations. It means that which is received.) While my experiences in the jungle unleashed a big bang within my being (that continues to travel at light speed in all directions), the Qabala planted and then exploded a bomb of similar magnitude in my psyche. For the Bible is written in code, and without this key its deepest secrets remain encrypted. The 22 ideograms of the Hebrew alphabet represent archetypes that predate language as we know it - each glyph can be considered as a seed of consciousness - and when combined they form "abstract formulas of cosmic energy focused in the human psyche." Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is actually a letter-number, making every word a sequence of numbers that represents an equation of energy patterns. In other words, the story of Genesis isn't about the creation of the planet Earth; rather, it summons man to live without past or future, to transcend continuity and time. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Jesus and Judas are aspects of the timeless human soul immersed in time.
And the Jews marveled, saying, How knoweth this man letters, having never learned? - John 7:15.
"The Qabala postulates that knowledge is not a formulation but a cosmic energy imparted to the mind by the letter-numbers...each number having a meaning in relation to cosmic forces." The Qabala asks us not to settle on mere faith but to pursue direct perception, which begins with self-knowledge since the mind is our instrument of perception and experience is non-transferable. "For those of the Qabala, for Abraham, Moses or Jesus, the unknowable is a presence. The knowing of that presence is the unknown. There is no other revelation. It is therefore and above all necessary to reject all interpretations, explanations, creeds and dogmas, all faiths and moral laws, all traditions, philosophies and theologies, so as to allow the unknown to operate directly in our minds." In brief, we are told not to simply cling to intellectual knowledge and belief (especially belief in things we cannot possibly comprehend), but to give up our most cherished illusions, to "die to every definition of ourselves and of our supposed relationship with a God of our projection." The more we try to possess anything, whether it be an object, person or idea, the more it possesses us, resulting in our choosing monotony over spontaneity, imitation over creation, inertia over action. This cipher is a completely foreign way of thinking, but one that has existed since time immemorial. Therefore to read the Bible translated into another language is akin to being a blind man who knows color only through the descriptions someone gives him. I will relate parts of the creation myth in Eden in order to give you a general idea of what I'm trying myself to understand, citing the King James Version for simplicity's sake.
First of all, the word "God" is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament, God being beyond all knowledge and thought. Instead there is YHWH (involution, immanent but unborn divine seed, double process of inner and outer fertilization of body and psyche), ELOHIM (evolution, the total process by which the timeless cosmic immanence enters time) and YHWH-ELOHIM. The relationship between these two involves the interaction of energies: life vs. existence, time vs. timelessness, creation vs. destruction, force vs. resistance, explosion vs. compression. These schemata can only be understood by breaking them down according to their corresponding numbers and the forces they symbolize in relation to others. (Hebrew words are like chemical compounds in that they are comprised of elements that can also be broken down.) So YHWH would become Yod-Hay-Vav-Hay, with a numerical plan of 10.5.6.5 totaling 26. In English we'd simply say Jehovah, but in Hebrew it could be translated as the formula Existence-Life-Copulation-Life. (Jesus is YHSHWH, or 10.5.300.6.5, and the plan Yod-Hay-Sheen-Vav-Hay, with Sheen representing the cosmic fire, "spirit" or "breath" of God.) It's challenging and profound. But even without knowing these codes a closer inspection of the story as we have it in translation reveals quite a bit, with the importance of numbers becoming immediately evident upon any casual reading.
In short, God is Good, and what's declared good is God; there is no-thing BUT God, yet God is nothing; He is and He isn't. "And God saw that it was good" follows each day of creation. Every seed, tree and fruit in the garden is "pleasant to the sight and good for food". While God does in fact tell the man that he may eat freely of every tree, save the tree of knowledge of good and evil lest he die, the woman has yet to be created, therefore she doesn't receive the injunction. Immediately after telling Adam about the notorious tree in the middle of the garden (which He doesn't distinguish at all from other trees, placing it in the very midst where the tree of life grows), God declares one thing to be "bad": that man is alone. (Neither "death" nor the serpent receive this label of "bad" or "evil"). So God creates a series of animals for Adam, but by "naming" them Adam declares that he doesn't see himself in any of them because he can't identify with the essence of these lower species that are made "after their kind" and live according to the limited molds of instinct, repetition and pattern. Furthermore the act of naming is to fix and define something as an object instead of as a process. (Remember that all matter is actually energy, and keep in mind that to "define" something means to render it finite.) Unlike the animals, man is created in the "image and likeness of God" and possesses the powers of reason and intellect, along with the ability to alter his environment and control his own body, which Adam is told to have dominion over (animals = lower nature or conditioned sub-species of man). The animals are all offshoots on the evolutionary tree, but man is that tree's very trunk and is constrained by no limits in the process of evolution since he possesses within him the divine spark whose expression is infinite. Having passed this test, an adequate "help meet", ISHA (woman), is finally created for the purpose of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (With no one in the garden but the two of them, who else could the trees have been planted for?) We must never forget that the man and woman are two aspects of one being: the prototype of the human psyche. (Think of the positive and negative poles on a battery.)
Now keep in mind that the Bible isn't a story taking place in a linear sequence bounded by time. "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter" - Prov. 25:2. YOU and only YOU must do the work of searching out these matters. In our search we must also note what Proverbs 3:18 states loud and clear: "Wisdom is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth her."
Then along came a walking, talking serpent who is declared to be the wisest of all creatures in the garden.
Since there is nothing but God, there is nothing but Good. God created the snake just as he created "man". Everything in the garden is God. Everything in the garden is good. This includes "death". Why do people continue to believe this refers exclusively to physical death? How can anyone believe Adam and Eve were two real people born as adults - one from a human rib - with the ability to speak, who hung around in a garden that God enjoyed walking through when not performing surgery? Because that's what they've been told, and instead of thinking it through logically they swallow a literal application of a spiritual allegory and live a childish life of fear burdened by dogma and an uncertain future in a geographical heaven or hell, depending on their ability to obey the recipe for "salvation" as dictated by the princes of the world. We see the same confusion over "death" when it comes to YHSHWH or Jesus, who taught a perpetual psychological death and resurrection. (This is why Calvary is also called Golgotha, which in Hebrew means place of the skull.) Just as the absolute contains the relative and unity contains duality, life includes death, especially the death of every psychological certainty, for to settle into a fixed set of beliefs would lead to stagnation and stability. Stability breeds comfort and diminishes the ability to adapt, and as Vivekananda said, "Comfort is no test of truth; on the contrary, truth is often far from being comfortable." Life is actually life-death, yet the Church has taught a doctrine of existence-after-death, which is a very different idea. Most would agree that nobody gets out of here alive. Perhaps it's more accurate to say no body gets out of here alive, for the body is only a shell that contains an eternal seed that represents every latent possibility always ready to spring forth when "death" is truly understood and embraced.
"What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears." - Oswald Spengler
Anyway, I'm rambling, and this blog isn't about the Bible, yet there's no denying that the Bible is about me - and you too. Just like life itself, the Bible is far from being incomprehensible, so long as you use your gifts and dig deep enough to unearth the profound meanings found within that serve to develop the intellect, though eventually even the Bible must be left behind. For what is any belief, no matter how noble, other than another form of seeking permanence in a world ruled by impermanence, a tether to cling to and worship, one more partition to separate us from those with different beliefs? Since words are ultimately only symbols that point to something they signify - empty packages for contents (meaning) determined by common agreement and custom - is it hard to see that the human psyche builds and uses these limited structures in order to insulate itself from disintegration in a world where there are no absolutes? Just as we make ourselves into objects to be desired in the "personality market" by means of packaging in the form of fashion, beauty, power, wealth, prestige, social media, etc., we turn beliefs into possessions we feed upon and wield, which only keeps us mired in isolation and mutual antagonism. All beliefs have the tendency to confine us to systems and formulas that limit the expression of love and self-knowledge, which leads to awareness and at-one-ment.
“I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, and unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief. A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"To suppose that people can be saved by studying and giving assent to formulae is like supposing that one can get to Timbuctoo by pouring over a map of Africa. Maps are symbols, and even the best of them are inaccurate and imperfect symbols." - Aldous Huxley
What I'm getting at is that the Bible is not at all what so many "sheep" have been led to believe by following wolves playing shepherd. Its perverted interpretations and gross disfigurements have wreaked havoc on the world for far too long. But it's not my job to persuade you; if you're curious then "search out the matter" yourself. In the meantime I want to draw attention to one more crucial point that I believe to be of great significance. Consider all the ancient images I've placed in this entry, along with those below, that are well-known but not well-understood throughout the world.
"Just as Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness, so must the son of man be raised" - John 3:14
"And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them" - Acts 2:3
The tempter in the garden is not the serpent but God, and the reader who fails to see this is the one who is deceived. As the saying goes, "If you want to get kids to do something, tell them not to do it."
He who tastes not, knows not.
In Hebrew the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the tree of Tov-Raa. And what are the meanings of Tov (translated "good") and Raa (translated "evil")? Well, Tov expresses the continuity of existence, the status quo to which we cling as "good", while Raa expresses an openness to all the possibilities of the universe and relates that which upsets our static and repetitive habits of living and thinking as "evil". And the cause of fear of this "evil" or Raa is as clear as day: most people detest anything that troubles their peace of mind, they don't like the boat to be rocked, they favor convention over change and actually prefer not to think too much - if at all, enjoying the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought - and so anything that threatens the prized and hallowed bastion of petrified convictions they "have" is deemed "evil". (Think about this the next time you see anyone brandishing their ideas about politics or religion as if their life depended on sustaining their opinions intact, as if all we are is what we have, making a lost argument or admission of error akin to being robbed or wounded.) Therefore Tov is believed to be good despite the fact that it represents all that is passive, temporal, carnal and conditioned. Tov is the way of the world. It is a preference for rigidity and fossilization over ripening and fertility - and a surefire way to delay our own development.
"Freedom would not be so difficult to attain were prison not so sweet." - Diogenes
"People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar." - Thich Nhat Hanh
The world is truly upside down, for we have come to value what is bad as good and what is truly good as menacing, and to prove this we need only consider how hundreds of millions of our brothers and sisters honestly believe that this idyllic state of ignorance called Eden is a paradise greater than anything imaginable. What is more, they continue to mourn its supposed loss while insisting that birth itself is actually a reasonable punishment for inheriting some ancient "sin" they can't even explain. (This damaged logic is why Bar-Abbas continues to go free while Truth is condemned to death.) Clearly they have yet to discover that once Adam is put into a "deep sleep" by God in the allegory there is no verse anywhere in the entire Bible that says he actually woke up. And yet this is precisely the task of each and every one of us, for the power to awaken him is contained in the very meaning of the word ADAM according to the letter-numbers: Aleph (1), Dallet (4), Mem (40 or 600). The word DAM means "blood" in Hebrew, making ADAM a diagram of Aleph in DAM, or the unknowable and unthinkable One immense energy in the blood. What is more, the Rabbi YHSHWH, aka Jesus, is mistranslated as referring to himself as the "son of man" instead of BEN-ADAM, or son of ADAM. While the crucifixion takes place at Golgotha, or "place of the skull", the rebirth occurs in ADAM, or the resurrection of Aleph in the blood.
Speaking of blood and mistranslations - what does it mean that in Hebrew the name of Abel is actually HEVEL and translates as fruitlessness, vanity, or deluded arrogance, symbolizing a mere body full of blood? That Cain is QAHEEN and represents YHWH incarnate, and that according to His genealogy He never dies? That Cain doesn't murder but "shatters" Abel? Maybe YOU are Cain and Abel. Could these two "brothers" symbolize a complex in your own psyche? Maybe we need to stop swallowing puerile translations that unconsciously lead us to carry out the physical killing of our brother thousands of years after this profound allegory was written, and start realizing that the only battlefield is psychological. Maybe it's about time to stop feeling sorry for the mundane HEVEL, or vanity, only seeing the story from his childish perspective, and start giving Cain, that mythical destroyer of illusions, the respect He deserves. Abel must be shattered, for Cain is the calling of every human being. Why do we continue to ignore the significance of the only words spoken by HHEVA, or Eve (as opposed to "woman") when she says "I have begotten a man with the aid of the Lord" after conceiving and baring Cain? Is it possible that Cain's "curse" is actually a blessing?
"If the psyche is to awaken to what is real, then it must learn to live with and face up to uncertainty. To do so requires that it be free from all the stereotyped formulas which bind it to rigid ways of living. The psyche is subconsciously afraid. Afraid to lose its precarious security. It calls its state of fixation good. Above all, it fears to live in uncertainty. But to do so is the condition of openness to all possibilities. Man clings to the known and fears to see what is unknown because then he will have "no place to lay his head". He prefers to build nests, Chinese boxes inside boxes, endlessly. Nests in which he can live in comparative safety, insulated from the hazards of reality. He does not wish to open his eyes and see things as they really are, infinite.
"Each one of us has a choice to make and may do so freely. The choice is this: we can, if we wish, live after the manner of the animal species, which ceased to advance in the scale of evolution and continued to live within the limits of their conditionings, and the accumulation of their inherited automatisms, confined to strictly limited forms. Most of the time, we limit our conception of what we are by the patterns with which we fill our minds: our culture, our way of life, our traditions, our morals, our imitations, our ways of thinking inherited from the past, which we seek to carry into the future. By maintaining all these attitudes - with the help of our environment, our churches, and our schools - we are actually stifling and killing the human-being-to-be which waits within us." - Carlo Suares
Our own bodies destroy 10,000 cells every second while simultaneously creating 10,000 new cells. We literally live our death. Creation is about conception and flow, not continuity and fixation. Destruction is a part of creation, all death throes must become birth pangs, and to fail to see this is to refuse to grow, to prefer stasis over genesis. Raa or "evil" in Hebrew is a liberation from of our bonds, an awakening, and far from being evil is actually designed to rescue us from dying without knowing true life, to save us from living with our eyes closed. This is why the serpent is the most subtle of all creatures in the garden - and a wonderful ally - because he IS wisdom and he knows it and he's telling "woman" the truth. More importantly, "God" knows it because "He" is ONE and ALL, "He" is consciousness, and we are "His" image and likeness. The real temptation is to give in to the fear of "death" and the anxiety of the unknown and forever steer clear of the tree of knowledge of good and evil so that we never have to open our eyes and experience anything new or different. How many people continue to be seduced by the so-called bliss of ignorance and the mindless veneration of rulers?
"If we consider what happens in our body from the point of view of the archetypes, we see that the vocation of our body is to restructure itself perpetually. We have a thousand billion cells in our body. At each moment they are constantly dying and being constantly renewed by our body. The body is a living structure because it is continually dying and being reborn.
Now the psyche is a second life within the body. The body is its container. The psyche, like the body, has to grow and structure itself in order to develop into a self, an ego. But if, when the psyche reaches its maturity, it continues to build itself up, then it becomes enormous and unwieldy. It begins to accumulate all kinds of unnecessary characteristics which do not serve the purpose of its existence. It becomes an inflated gasbag of a self instead of simply a mature self. It becomes lost because it has forgotten what it is for. It operates through a mechanism that is no more than a bundle of habits, always repeating the same things it has learned to do like a mindless parrot. It is then not different in kind from any animal that is, by nature, unable to break out of the circle of its hereditary pattern of instinctive behavior. The process of evolution of the psyche has ground to a halt in some subhuman blind alley.
The further process of development of the self must, and can only, involve opening up the psyche in some way so that it can learn to live with uncertainty. The psyche must cast itself into hazard and face up to the challenge of its destiny. It has to search for its own meaning, and not rest content with any kind of temporal achievement. Instead of building itself up all the time in all it says and sees and does it has to seek out and find its own obsolete structures and destroy them. It has to learn to do this all the time. It has to seek how to destroy itself all the time so that it can become new all the time.
So we have two processes in us, moving in opposite directions: a building-up process and a breaking-down process. First of all we have to develop our psyche so that it has the strength to resist. It has to resist all the fashions of the world: all the slogans and suggestions - from within us as well as from outside us - which suggest to us that we should "go with the crowd", do the easiest thing, "follow my leader" without thought. We must develop the integrity to set something of our own up in opposition to all that. We must be able to go our own way.
When this strength of our psyche has been achieved, we must become free from it. We must not get stuck to our own structures. We must be free from them and able to do new things with them all the time. We must come into our own, whatever happens to us, in any circumstances we happen to find ourselves.
Then, if we really understand the way these energies that act through us have to be structured, the body will begin to help the psyche to free itself from all its obsolete past structures without damaging itself and the psyche will start helping the body to build itself properly. And then life becomes very simple. We don't need to be told anything more when we understand that the two living processes of body and psyche have to combine and help each other to live. Then there comes about a real transformation of the psyche and it becomes and remains an instrument of the self fulfilling its proper role. It continues to act as a resistance to the useless distractions of life but not any longer as a resistance to the self. The self becomes free of it and it no longer feels itself to be a burden that always has to behave in the same old ways." - Carlo Suares
A closer inspection of the English translation still reveals that the garden is a symbol for a womb, and that only the man is kicked out. (The Hebrew reveals that while the man exists he isn't alive, and the woman is alive but doesn't exist.) The expulsion of Adam from Eden represents a birth, and to conflate this birth with sin and call it a curse is to declare the gift of life a cruel punishment meted out by a malicious and vindictive deity who fears the evolution of the very creatures he made after his image and likeness. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share this creation myth, and almost one half of the world professes one of these three faiths. What has been the effect on the human psyche, and the world it projects, judging this myth - and countless others - in terms of the literal, misleading and childish interpretations we've subjected our minds to and perpetuated for thousands of years?
"Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." - George Orwell
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
We've been indoctrinated to see birth as sin, freedom as disobedience, curiosity as taboo, knowledge as danger, blessing as curse. As Henry David Thoreau said, "Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves." The woman eating of the fruit after encountering the serpent is an act of free will, it is an act that distinguishes us from all the animals Adam names and deems lower than he because they do not possess the gifts of reason, self-awareness and imagination or the ability to alter their surroundings and control their bodies as we do. The woman is clearly using the gift of reason in comprehending that yes, God is good; yes, this fruit looks nice and is good for food; yes, wisdom is indeed a thing to be sought before all else; yes, I was created explicitly to eat this fruit and thereby kindle the evolution of human consciousness. Mere reaction and instinct is what makes an animal an animal - obedience to a limited set of responses to various stimuli with very little room for alteration. By eating of the fruit the "woman" reasons and chooses action, and thereby engages in a powerful act of creation, sharing with Adam and causing the eyes of both of them to be opened. This is why Adam changes her name to HHEVA (Eve), for she is the mother of all living, and living is about riding the waves of life, not watching them crash on the shore from a safe distance where you can't get wet. (A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are for.) The so-called "death" induced by the fruit is a lifesaver - and an invitation to true adventure - for the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life are one and the same. As for the cherubim with flaming sword guarding the path to the tree of life, well, this too is a challenge and an invitation set before us, for God IS Life, and Life cannot deny or obstruct itself - though it can be fruitless or delayed indefinitely.
"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." - Joseph Campbell
"Not to move forward, to stay where we are, to regress, in other words to rely on what we have, is very tempting, for what we have, we know; we can hold onto it, feel secure in it. We fear, and consequently avoid, taking a step into the unknown, the uncertain; for, indeed, while the step may not appear risky to us after we have taken it, before we take that step the new aspects beyond it appear very risky, and hence frightening. Only the old, the tried, is safe; or so it seems. Every new step contains the danger of failure, and that is one of the reasons people are so afraid of freedom." - Erich Fromm
"That to which we are accustomed is always consonant: it is the instinctive goal of our bodily constitution to smooth down the strenuous tension into a comfortable customary ease. Therefore every creative effort has to break the indolence of this ease in conquering a new field of tension, in widening the volume of the new, the unaccustomed, the metaphorical, and the dissonant." - Martin Foss
"Bondage and liberation are of the mind alone." - Ramakrishna
Along with a deep affection for Latin America and an urge to learn more of Mother Nature's secrets in the Amazon, this is as close to an explanation as I can come for why I must dive deeper into the unknown to understand how to better aid and abet - and above all, love - the Mystery of this Cosmic Drama. I have no set plan and no idea where I'll wind up; I only know that my eyes were opened and my soul was transfigured by something unspeakably beautiful that I had been blind to my entire life, and it is nothing less than the Pearl of Great Price. Once a shell has been broken the old world must give way to the emergence of something new....that goes on to conceive another germ to be hatched....and again and again... Meanwhile, I have no desire to become a card-carrying member of the American Dream Club, or whatever you want to call the mechanical pursuit of material goodies and sensual highs that console the thrum and hustle. And besides, I don't care for fascism. After all, this vaunted expression of "freedom" and "civilization" is one that would go kaput without greed, fear, selfishness, ignorance, jingoism, hedonism, mindless conformity to soulless bureaucracy, pathological dependence, evermore crude forms of rivalry, and a constant supply of interchangeable and disposable cogs to keep the wheel droning in the same vicious rut as always. Most, if not all, of these characteristics are widely believed to be natural, and I'd have to agree that they are - but to those lower species from which Adam distinguishes himself as "man".
"Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man." - C.S. Lewis
"Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. Human relations are essentially those of alienated automatons, each basing his security on staying close to the herd, and not being different in thought, feeling or action. While everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome. Our civilization offers many palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this aloneness: first of all the strict routine of bureaucratized, mechanical work, which helps people to remain unaware of their most fundamental human desires, of the longing for transcendence and unity. Inasmuch as the routine alone does not succeed in this, man overcomes his unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry; furthermore by the satisfaction of buying ever new things, and soon exchanging them for others.
"Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow men, guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as: "When the individual feels, the community reels"; or "Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today," or, as the crowning statement: "Everybody is happy nowadays." Man's happiness today consists in "having fun." Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and "taking in" commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies - all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great big object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones - and the eternally disappointed ones. Our character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption...As in so many other aspects human values have become determined by economic values." - Erich Fromm
Nevertheless, I am extremely grateful for my life in today's Babylon, the United States - especially for my friends and family - in addition to the "good" and "bad" and everything in between, because Life is beautiful, and everything is sacred. I now understand the immeasurable value of any pain and adversity I've experienced in life, for the sweet isn't as sweet without the sour. Some of my greatest teachers have been life's trials and tribulations. If not for all of these experiences and the opportunities they've afforded me, I could not have received a broader idea of the meaning of life or a preference for a world of transcendence, integration, self-knowledge and "nakedness" over one founded upon dependence, division, self-image and possession. In other words, the conception of Self over the perception of an ego. One look around and it's strikingly clear that the incessant goading of every passion paired with an unrestricted satisfaction of all carnal desires is not conducive to well-being. In fact, it's a recipe for self-destruction and mass insanity. Of course, the United States must - and no doubt will - follow the same course as Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Charlemagne, the Ottoman Empire, Spain, France... And the very refusal of this imperative will only ensure that it happens more slowly, for the State, with its endless lures of bread and circus, isn't the god its servile masses elevate, pay tribute to and dote upon in awe, but rather a pagan idol doomed to become rubble like any other.
"But when Caesar got the means to destroy the world, wasn't he already divinized? Only by the consent of the people - same rabble that shouted: "Non habemus regem nisi caesarem," when confronted by Him - God Incarnate, mocked and spat upon." - Walter M. Miller
"If we don't change direction, we will likely end up where we are headed." - Chinese Proverb
"Destruction is the necessary consequence of a failure to grow." - Erich Fromm
How many flag-waving dollar-hunters finish their journey longing for the way things used to be while cashiered as liabilities by their own "blood" in one of America's Golden Years Warehouses? How many people ride out on their "savings" without realizing that the only worthwhile and permanent investments in life are immaterial and can only be found within? That no one can give you what your heart most desires but your Self? That wealth, power and fame in today's terms are nothing but childish attempts to attain immortality in a world where everything is born to die? That happiness isn't an external "thing" to be pursued and consumed like a prize but an inner state of being to conceive and express? That No man is free who is not master of himself? That maybe, just maybe, security has something to do with quitting the addiction to fear and recognizing that peace begins within by understanding and conquering the urge to attack without? That a clear view of reality is far greater than the most exotic fantasies and the most exalted idols? That there is no time but NOW? "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift." To fear and deny death is to fear and deny life itself.
"If we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay for living a thousand lives." - Jacob Bronowski
"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly." - Richard Bach
"For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it" - Luke 9:24.
"And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you" - Luke 17:20-21.
“Your total individuality is your soul. It abides in the indeterminate plurality of universes. Because it is alive, it is evolving. Because it is outside of time, its evolution is only the time that you need to permit it to find you. Because it is multidimensional, it contributes to the composition of an Ecclesia. It is one and innumerable.” – Carlo Suares
Think different…and ride the snake.