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Demon Exorcism, Possession, Goat/Sheep Metaphors

Contents

Enlightenment as exorcism of a demon. 1

Demons' animal aspect; goat-man; donkey & rider 1

3-head beast= separate-self multiplicity delusion. 3

The meek shall inherit the earth. 3

 

Enlightenment as exorcism of a demon

It's been shown as a scriptural fact that Jesus certainly was a rebel leader, and certainly was a magician, as well as certainly being a healer and teacher as everyone knows.  But by the same logical demonstration, Jesus certainly was an exorcist -- he emphasized casting out demons, or I should say *the* demonic delusion of egoic sovereign agency.  Casting out is equivalent to deliberately completely sacrificing your childish way of thinking about personal agency, which is like sacrificing animalistic thinking.  The impure are driven by semi-animalistic demons; these unsaved minds are half animal, half human in their thinking. 

I felt a feeling of logical dismay like the feeling of discovering that I had been thinking like a stupid, epistemologically gullible animal rather than using a reasoning mind.  I sought some method of forcefully breaking and terminating that way of thinking; a way to perfectly and finally prevent that deluded animalistic/childish/demonic mode of thinking from returning.  In the original or most elevated Christianity paradigm, the wretchedness of the death on the Cross depicts such finality and perfection of killing the animalistic way of thinking -- of terminating the delusion of egoic freewillist agency.  Sacrificing that way of thinking purchases a higher way of thinking.

Demons' animal aspect; goat-man; donkey & rider

Demons are drawn so as to emphasize their animal aspects.  A demon is essentially portrayed as an intelligent being that is like an animal in essence and is like a degraded mode of a human.  A demon is a lower, animalized person.  Animals, like humans under the ego delusion, take free will and self-moving agency for granted - it's how things appear in nature.

Children learn the egoic worldmodel first, naturally -- this makes sense.  It is a simple and useful way of thinking and mode of perceiving and experiencing the world and oneself.  However, what makes humans greater than animals is intelligence, and intelligence contains divine potential in that it can blossom into the transcendent worldmodel.  Humans, unlike animals, have religion.

The human during their childish, animalistic period before initiation has a degraded form of religion, but this too transforms into transcendent religion when intelligence blossoms into transcendent knowledge, in which the animal way of viewing the world is transcended both in experience and in systematic conceptual thinking.

The altered-state experience is shared by animals and occurs before intellectual enlightenment or "regeneration"; the altered state raises questions and tensions and cognitive dissonances that are eventually reasoned through, during the transformation from the egoic to the transcendent worldmodel.

The egoic mode of thinking is a child-animal mode.  Both the child and the animal as symbols are variable.  A child can represent foolish ignorant ego, or the next generation of the mind after ego has been transcended.  The goat is a symbol of egoic freewill assumption, while the sheep is a symbol of transcendent no-free-will thinking.  To portray the egoic way of thinking, animalesque demons work better than showing children. 

Of the commonly known animals, the best animal to portray egoic delusion is the willful goat, which is why the leader of the deluded people is a goat-man, the devil, the Prince of Pride.  The donkey is usually a more respectful mockery of egoic thinking, because it faithfully carries the higher mind to the point of enlightenment, like Balaam's faithful ass who successfully brings the seer Balaam to the angel of death (ego-death enlightenment) and then halts, rebuking Balaam's criticism.  "The Balaam's eyes were opened... I will speak only the words that God puts in my mouth."

>The goat also figures in the formula of shin ayin peh, I O PAN, somewhat differently from the way the goat-man is used as an anthropomorphization of the freewill assumption in Christian metaphor.

One should be cautious about too literally carrying over metaphor-matrixes from one metaphor-system to another.  It violates the rules of play in mythic-mystic-metaphor.  Each system of metaphor needs to be considered on its own terms.  All high myth is ultimately equivalent, but any one symbol, such as the goat, is joined to other symbols in a unique matrix of connections within each system.

In official Christian myth-religion, there is one God, who transcends the cosmos and created the cosmos.  In Gnostic religion, there are two gods -- the perfectly good god, who transcends the cosmos, and the evil or deluded god, creator of the cosmos.  So, is the "God" mytheme positive or negative?  It depends on the context, on which system of metaphor. 

We can say "in mythic mystic-state metaphor, the goat symbol represents individual will", but that's just a fair first-order assessment.  When considering the goat in different  religions, the statement must be qualified and there can be exceptions.

Sometimes functionally equivalent mythemes in two different systems are essentially the same, but look, at first glance, quite different: for example, Catholic "purgatory" is functionally equivalent to Buddhist "rebirth": both of these symbols represent the gradual nature of the transformation from the egoic mental worldmodel to the transcendent worldmodel during a series of intense mystic altered-state sessions.

It's natural to contrast and compare goats and sheep -- they are very similar as domesticated livestock.  There is a certain equivalence in sacrificing a sheep or goat; they both represent "something about the nature of the human 'organ' of will".  In Satanism, the goat-oriented pentagram is an affirmation of free will or the potency of will.

Goats love mushrooms and will fight for them -- see the recent book:

Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness

Giorgio Samorini

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0892819863

Greek Tragedy is "goat-song".  Tragedy and comedy were combined, altogether commenting on the pathos of the freewill delusion.  Tragedy lamented the non-sovereignty of the ego; comedy mocked and laughed at it.  Part of the festivities was to try to balance on a goatskin filled with wine (possibly mixed wine, that is, psychoactive wine).

Studying what the goat meant to the ancient Greeks would surely reveal a great deal about Hellenistic myth-religion.  Dionysus and goats are found each other.  I posted before my reading of the series of mythic initiation frescoes in an Italian villa.  Pan, panic, and ego-death are closely related.

Mythic elements always are variable, because mythic-mode cognition transcendently operates on mythic-mystic symbols.  However, the mode or ultimately implied framework; the logical mechanics, remain the same. 

There is no direct correlation of all aspects of the Pan and Devil figures, but both figures, in their respective mythic systems, are closely keyed into transcendent insight into the illusory and conventional nature of the freewill/separate-self delusion -- keyed in, one way or another, just as the serpent is an extremely variable figure, highly liable to invert.  The most highly charged symbols are the most liable to invert from representing truth and error. 

The serpent is a highly flexible figure because it can be low -- underground, as a cthonic, netherword symbol standing for death and ego-death, and can also be high, like the serpent raised up. 

Poison and healing medicine, associated with venom, were held to be related.  The term "potion" and the mytheme of "poisoned mixed wine" follow this logic, as do the dangerous scopalimine entheogens or deliriants, which are almost as likely to cause bodily death as mystic death and rebirth -- it can make you "youthful again" (reborn after mystic death", or can kill you (see the Greek myth of Hekate tricking the king's daughter into boiling to death instead of rejuvenating the king).

3-head beast= separate-self multiplicity delusion

I said that in the morning a bothersome question arises that raises doubt for my theory of mythic initiation, and that by evening I have solved it with new insights to boot.  That happened again. 

After claiming to have solved the puzzle of mystery-myth and myth in general, I imagined someone asking "but what about random Greek myths such as... the 3-headed beast?" 

A few minutes later I was in a Mexican folk-art store and there was Michael the Archangel over a 3-headed serpent.  A man had a demon and the demon said "we are legion" before being cast out.  So the multi-headed beast is the delusion of separate-self, or multiplicity of egos.  Related to the chaos-monster of false multiplicity of pseudo-independent centers of control (egos).

The meek shall inherit the earth

Neil Peart knows which religion should logically inherit Jerusalem.

Prophecy is incorrect, magic thinking.  However, prophecy can be true in a certain mythic sense.  Here is a mythic puzzle and solution:

Mystery-myth puzzle:

When Jesus returns in a cloud in the second coming, the Jews will repent and believe in him and will be saved.  They will inherit Jerusalem, and there will be peace on earth, and the world will know that God is all-powerful and that all that happens is God's will and happens according to his plan.  If read mythically, all of this is true. 

The solution is something along these lines:

The egoic thinkers can be called many equivalent epithets: the unbelievers, the uncool, the freewillists, the false sovereigns, the Jews, the sons of Ishmael, and so on and on and on.

The transcendent thinkers can be called by many opposite equivalent epithets, opposites of the above list:  as opposed to the believers in Christ.  The believers can be referred to by called many epithets: the good guys, the swell fellas, the Righteous, the double-plus good folk, those in the line of Abraham-Isaac... Jesus, the True Christians, the children of light, the saved, the elect, those who are written in the book, the lucky dudes and dudettes, the lambs, the deserving ones, the nice guys, the cool guys.

Therefore what happened in the transition from OT myth system to NT myth system amounts to a huge switch from a metaphor that is explicitly based on biological inheritance/race but esoterically based actually on belief and comprehension, to a metaphor that is explicitly belief-based -- stripped of the biological-inheritance metaphor-system.

The promised land and the whole world belongs to the good guys, the Jews, the righteous, the slaves of Allah, *whatever* you arbitrarily *choose* to call them: all mature thinkers, who realize and acknowledge the good sense and unassailable rational coherence of no-free-will.  The meek.  The sheep.  The obedient.

The world will be inherited, in the end, by those of the truth, the faithful -- the no-free-willists.  They will all acknowledge the power of God, the puppetmaster, the Great Goddess, Isis: the god of the no-free-willists, the no-separate-selfists.

Who, what race, what religion, will not inherit the earth, but will all be cast down and burnt in the flames?  The freewillists -- their church is built on sand; put it to the test, put it through the entrance of the labyrinth, turn on the strange attractor beam, and all freewillists will inevitably die, see the light, repent, turn, be forgiven, be cleared of impurity; all their demons will be cast down into the abyss.

I just realized the meaning of 2112's "And the meek shall inherit the earth."  The no-free-willists, assuming availability of entheogens and Reason, will inevitably predominate.  In a logical contest of Reason, demonic egoic freewillists thinking is doomed and no-free-will is inevitably victorious.  That bastard Neil Peart, The Artist, has already realized everything I've written in this posting.  Vapor Trail, their new album title... curses.  It's taken me, The Theorist 17 years to recognize the meaning of that line penned in full enlightened knowledge by Peart back in 1976.

http://www.egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22930 - lyrics with entheogenic mystery-myth annotations for the Rush album 2112, end of track 1, "Overture".  The complete lyrics of this movement of this album side are:

And the meek shall inherit the earth.

There are several questions to consider:

Does the Bible mean by this phrase that the no-free-willists are the truly Righteous?  I strongly argue as much.

Does Neil Peart mean that no-free-will inevitably wins in an amplified logical contest (a fight to the death)?  Yes, definitely; my worldmodel matches the philosophy revealed in the Rush devotional music.

Does adopting no-free-will make people peaceful, having ended what Wilber calls the Atman Project of chasing false goals other than what they really want (realization of no-separate-self)?

Will the no-free-willists/no-separate-selfists actually literally inherit the earth, run the world as God's direct hands, occupy Jerusalem and the literal promised land?

This seems to suggest that peace in Jerusalem and world peace would result from everyone acknowledging no-free-will (I wouldn't bank on it).  Most sensibly, the no-free-willists inherit the whole world at the end of time *mythically*.  Down on the mundane plane, the lower religionists may nevertheless blow it all up, just to demonstrate their lower-type righteousness. 

I suppose rejecting magical thinking in favor of rational mythic thinking, we should say that the "Jerusalem", or "promised land", or "earth" that the no-free-willists will inherit is merely metaphorical, not necessarily literal Jerusalem.  If anything blows up the literal Jerusalem, it will be religious literalism.  It may be -- possibly -- that the only *chance* for literal peace in literal Jerusalem is to switch from religious literalism to entheogenic mystery-myth publically. 

But the democratic polis in Athens greatly feared the abuse of the doctrine of heimarmene by would-be "divinely ordained, Necessity-elected" kings.  On the other hand, in Alexandria, crown of the intellectual philosophical/religious world, it was *not* forbidden to publically proclaim no-free-will, from what I can tell.  It is said that in Alexandria, "the mysteries were celebrated openly."

Psalm 37:

But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.

http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?passage=PS+37:11&language=english&version=NIV-IBS&showfn=on&showxref=on

Matthew 5:5

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?passage=matt+5%3A5&version=KJV&showfn=yes&showxref=yes&language=english

 


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