Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)
Family Relationship Metaphors, Rebirth Metaphors
Contents
Love, heart, compassion, nurturing,
and mercy
Friend of God; higher/lower self as
loving family
Twice-born, ego ghost, godman's
parent-spouse-sibling
Birth from cave, spiritual womb of
cosmos
Metaphor: young/old, mover/moved,
freewill/no-free-will
I was born
from a woman, and I was born by the Holy Spirit sent by God. Both of them gave me birth. If you put the accent on the Holy Spirit,
then I am born from two mothers. If you
put the accent on God, then I am born from a mortal mother and an immortal
Father.
I was born
out of a woman's womb and I was born out of the spacetime matrix, as Jesus came
forth from the rock tomb and as Mithras came forth from the cave rock cosmos
and as Dionysus was born forth from Zeus' "thigh", forming a close
symmetry: Dionysus is born out of a mortal woman's womb and then out of an
immortal God's scrotum: Dionysus has a mortal woman and a God as parents.
The Titans
are mortals prior to initiation, the participants who ingest the psychoactive
flesh of Dionysus, thus tearing him to pieces and eating him. Then Zeus kills us Titans with lightning
ego-death, pushing us back down from our intrusion on his power.
I am twice
born, from two mothers: a woman and the cosmic matrix.
Rigid,
brittle, logical consistency is not the point.
Poetic fudging is very common, in fact is a sign of more advanced
mastery of the symbol-system language of mythic allegorization. Before long, the question arises, how far
can you stretch the game before it shatters into nonsense?
It's
strange talking about being born forth out from the frozen spacetime block, but
it actually does make sense as an experiential report and consistent,
meaningful and even unambiguous allegorical description of what the
psychoactive wine mixture presents.
Once, I was frozen into the spacetime block, crucified on the spacetime
cross -- I was there next to Christ's cross; I experienced it firsthand. Yet later, I am walking about, experiencing
apparent freedom.
This is
what most scholars totally lack: the ability to think *experientially*, to
recognize metaphors alluding to the *experiences* of the mystic altered
state. In this way we could say
experience is the key to the whole conceptual language of mystery-religion
myth, or "mystery myth".
No one who
is in the throes of the ego death *experience* needs it explained what the
Beatles are referring to by "we're dying to take you away". This forms an insider/outsider divide based
on who is Experienced and who is not.
Thus the Greeks spoke often, in public, of "The initiated will
understand what I am saying."
I can
systematically explain all such Jewish/Hellenistic mythic mappings of religious
experience, but such "systematic explanation" has a flavor that might
not quite be what was expected.
These
sometimes irrational or wholly arbitrary sounding metaphors are, in fact, controlled
-- by the rule that they must describe the standard set of phenomena, such as
the experience of timelessness, perceptual distortion and visual waving. No initiate can doubt that I speak
correctly, or allegorize correctly, when I report that I have been born forth
from the cave rock cosmos, and that I have "two parents" -- a woman
and a divine parent (God or Ground or Matrix or Goddess or Holy Spirit or
Father).
There are
*degrees* of stretched allegorization; this "two parents" idea I
would call "moderately venturesome" -- a nice degree because it's not
*so* obvious that every initiate can instantly guess the meaning, and it's not
so abstruse as to be unclear to most initiates.
In
ordinary language, words have a certain amount of play and looseness; mystery
myth is no different. Mystery myth is
as precise, rational, meaningful, and specific as ordinary language, though it
is typically as playful as poetry. You
could program an expert system to translate between mystery myth and ordinary
language that is informed by transcendent theory.
From
Acharya S:
http://www.truthbeknown.com/lifeofbuddha.htm
>>The
fact that Buddha was depicted as having been a deva, in several
"lives" and before taking birth as Siddhartha, nevertheless makes him
a divine being, or godman. Indeed, Buddhist inscriptions address not only the
celestial "self-existent Being" but also the "Supreme
Being," as exemplified by the following inscription, found in Bengal at
Budhagaya, and part of Moor's original chapter on Buddhism:
>>"Reverence
be unto thee, in the form of Buddha: reverence be unto the Lord of the earth:
reverence be unto thee, an incarnation of the Deity, and the Eternal One:
reverence be unto thee, O God! in the form of the God of Mercy: the dispeller
of pain and trouble; the Lord of all things; the Deity who overcomest the sins
of the Kali Yug; the guardian of the universe; the emblem of mercy toward those
who serve thee--O'M! the possessor of all things in vital form. Thou art
Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesa; thou are Lord of the universe;… Reverence be unto
the bestower of salvation… I adore thee, who art celebrated by a thousand
names, and under various forms, in the shape of Buddha, the God of Mercy.--Be
propitious, O Most High God!"
>>Here,
then, is a primary source that demonstrates a few important things: One is that
Buddha himself is a god--the God, in fact. Another important point is that he
is identified as Brahma and Vishnu, and the third is the similarity between his
nature and that of Jesus.
>>As
seen from this inscription, Buddha is "Lord of the earth," "an
incarnation of the Deity," "O God!" the "God of
mercy," "Lord of all things," "Lord of the universe"
and "Most High God." Along with these divine epithets, Buddha is
called "God of Gods," as well as "the great Physician,"
"Healer," "Savior," "Blessed One," "Savior
of the World" and "God among gods."
A deity
can be compassionate and wrathful, judgmental and forgiving, slaying the ego
and then releasing the person. Myth-religion
is, first of all, metaphorical description of phenomena of the mystic altered
state -- this fundamental fact and basis is far more important than trivial
details of theology such as whether "Buddhists" "believe
in" "God".
The entire
issue of "whether religionists believe in God" fades to lesser
significance, or entirely changes in character, when remembering to start one's
thinking from a basis in metaphorical description of phenomena of the mystic
altered state. Before we can even start
asking "Did X believe Y?", we must *first* fully reconceive Y as
*not* some ordinary-state belief, but rather, as some metaphorical description
of some phenomenon encountered in the intense mystic altered state.
What does
a technical intellectual theory and model of religion say about heart, love,
compassion, nurturing, and mercy?
Again, before we can ask "Does X spiritual system believe in heart
& love?", we must *first* begin by reconceiving heart & love as
*not* some ordinary-state belief, but rather, as some metaphorical description
of some phenomenon encountered in the intense mystic altered state.
Religious
heart & love is *not* to be confused with ordinary-state heart & love;
rather, mysticism *uses* familiar ordinary-state heart & love as a way of
metaphorically describing certain feelings, experiences, and attitudes that are
felt in and are pertinent to the intense mystic altered state.
Mystic
"heart & love" is *like* ordinary-state "heart &
love", but these two versions of "heart & love" are distinct
as in "as above, so below".
In the mystic state, the higher mind, identified with deity-mind and
unity-consciousness mind, must have an attitude both of judging the lower mind
as deluded and incorrect regarding moral agency, time, self, control, and will,
while also balancing out that judgment with compassion, forgiveness, mercy,
acceptance, nurturing, heart, and love.
o As in doctrinaire systematic theology (which
actually is ultimately based on the phenomena of the intense mystic altered
state), we can say that the Old Testament God is forgiving and nurturing as
well as wrathful and condemning, and that the New Testament God is wrathful and
condemning as well as forgiving and merciful.
o Or, equivalently in the matters of import,
according to a more Gnostic way of arranging the surface metaphorical elements,
we can coherently say that the Old Testament God is a symbol purely of wrath
and judgment and condemnation, while the New Testament God is a personification
of mystic-state love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, protection, and
nurturing.
o Or, again equivalently in the matters of
import, per popular Catholic mystic-mythic metaphor, we can use the Queen of
Heaven figure to personify the mystic-state principle of mercy and compassion,
while using the Jesus figure to represent wrath and judgment and condemnation.
o Or, again equivalently in the matters of
import, per Gnostic dualist metaphor, we can use the Demiurge God (creator of
the world) figure to personify wrath and judgment and condemnation, while using
the transcendent black-box mysterious hidden God figure entirely outside the
cosmos to represent the mystic-state principle of mercy and compassion.
When
people make the mistake of the ordinary-state assumption, that goes
hand-in-hand with literalism, and they foolishly talk about "different
belief systems", which is essentially off-base nonsense because given that
framework of thinking, "belief" is misconceived in a rigid,
literalist, ordinary-state sense. When
thinking about religious ideas and symbols, we must be *firmly grounded* in the
intense mystic altered state. Even the
very *idea* of "symbol" is essentially and fundamentally misconstrued
in nearly all theoretical writings about religious symbology.
Such
ordinary-state thinkers *assume* the framework of thinking and the style of
symbol-usage endemic to the ordinary state of consciousness, then proceed to
presumably discuss the "meaning" of the symbols -- but that entire
framework of thinking is fundamentally off-base and the actual meaning of the
symbolic realm eludes it completely.
When considering a religious or esoteric symbol, we must first start by
plugging the symbol into the assumed framework of the intense mystic altered
state -- *not* the ordinary state of cognition.
This is
true for each spiritual, religious, or mythic term, such as "love" in
the spiritual sense, or "heart" in the spiritual sense. Ordinary-state love and heart are real, but
lower and stepped-down, less intense and less "real" by mystic
standards, than mystic-altered-state "love" or
"heart".
Yes, we
must honor both the ordinary state and the intense mystic state, but they are
two distinct modes of cognition and we must not dissolve-away and forget the
higher mode of "love" or "heart" by reducing the range of
our assumed frameworks to only the ordinary-state framework; nor must we
falsely elevate and relabel the ordinary-state framework for "love"
or "heart" as the mystic-altered-state framework for "love"
or "heart" -- to do so would be distortion, loss, and narrowing; it
would be 'reductionism', in Ken Wilber's sound sense of the term.
To confuse
and conflate ordinary-state "love" or "heart" with
mystic-state "love" or "heart" is distortion, loss,
narrowing, and reductionism. The two
modes or versions shed light on each other yet remain also differentiated. The high can elevate the low, the mystic
state can elevate the ordinary state, but the two remain distinct. We can't discard either type of
"love" -- ordinary-state or mystic-state -- without loss.
It is all
functionally the same thing, the same cognitive dynamic, whether one cries to
Buddha, the compassionate deities, Mary, the New Testament God, Jesus, the Old
Testament Father, or the Gnostic transcendent God for "mercy", for
dispelling of "pain and trouble"; for guardianship, for mercy toward
those who call out in reverence for bestowal of "rescue and
salvation", calling out to the God of Mercy to be "propitious",
for "healing" and "curing".
These are
emphatically *not* the ordinary-state mercy, love, heart, compassion, shelter,
rescue, and help; rather, ordinary-state mercy and forgiveness and help are
being used to represent and conceptualize the high intense mystic altered-state
type of urgently and desperately needed mercy, love, heart, compassion,
shelter, rescue, and help.
What type
of faith, is universe uncaring so it would just as soon destroy as nurture and
preserve? These are the times -- in the
peak window of the intense mystic altered state -- that try men's souls, that
provide the test of faith in one's loving relation to the divine. The peak state is the state of perceiving
the universe as ruled by mindless, heartless determinism, a giant fascist
corporate-State Borg mechanism that would demolish one's stability of viable
self-governance just as soon as it would sustain and preserve the viability of
the personal control agent.
To regain
control-stability, one's only hope is to postulate transcendent compassion;
this is the real meaning of "faith" or "faith in God". Nothing is more absurd than watching Gnostic
scholars disparage faith as against Gnosis; terms such as these are only
meaningful within a particular interpretive framework: such scholars have no
feel for the essential nature of language; terms only have meaning within and
relative to a conceptual network of word-meanings.
Such
"scholars of Gnosticism" are not only terrible Gnostics, lousy
Philosophers, but lousy modern-philosophy students as well. At least modern philosophy has graduated
from infantile reductionist studies of isolated words up to the level of
considering words grouped as sentences.
The word 'faith' means nothing until related to a full-fledged
conceptual system. Similarly,
dismissals of Marian Catholicism because of its harsh portrayal of Jesus as unmerciful
are as absurd; what matters is the overall functional balance within a
metaphorical system.
A test of
one's maturity is one's ability to reverse the superficial symbols while
preserving the underlying functional balance.
The literalist camp in whatever religion -- *not* just in Catholicism --
completely errs in taking the surface symbols as the main thing, when actually,
the mystic mapping to the overall functional balance of mystic-state phenomena
is the significant, substantial thing.
This is
the "multiplicity and free-thinking", the "choice/heresy"
that any superficial rigid exoteric reading of any spiritual system
resists. Orthodoxies such as the
Catholic Church try to say "only *this particular* set of surface symbols
is true", while freethinkers are interested in shifting the surface to
shake it free from the expressed, conveyed, underlying meaning.
An old
tradition among Gnostic and Christian heretics is the suppressed yet always
resurgent Friends of God underground tradition.
According
to early indications, cybernetic self-control theory and research comes to the
same conclusion as the Greeks and many other religious philosophers, that the
mind may need to have a personal relationship of love in relation to the
transcendent Tao or Ground or hypothetical creator of such. What did Plotinus think about that proposal,
that the anti-mythical philosopher needs to have a loving personal relationship
with the Ground or perhaps with the higher self?
The mind
in the throes of ego death conceives of and calls out to a higher self outside
time. "Higher self outside time, I
hope you exist and are compassionate and powerful, because I broke my
self-control and need something a bit easier to trust than a big machine, to
make my future thoughts stable and nondestructive.
I picture
Plotinus, if he was an initiate, understanding the need to be a friend of The
One. Instead of *thinking* of this as
"faith in God as your personal savior", maybe the equivalent would be
more acceptable to the rational self-control theorist: "a friend
relationship between a person's lower, self-controlling mind and the hidden,
higher Self outside time".
This would
be like being a Friend Of The Tao, with the Tao considered as a benevolent
higher level of the person and therefore loving of the lower person. Plotinus emphasized The One's embrace of the
many; if we say that that "embrace" is personal or benevolent just as
part of a person is benevolent to the rest of the person, we eventually connect
with the saying attributed to the Christ figure:
Love
everyone and love God.
Self-control
gets caught in its own trap and escapes its own attempts to control itself --
self-control, when combined with clear introspection and clear thinking, ends
up killing itself and going fully out of control. The mind is then presented with a transcendent solution of crying
"Uncle" and pleading for a transcendent caring rescuer from outside
time (the paraclete/helper/assistant/advocate sent by the godman).
Next, that
caring rescuer can be considered to be one's hidden higher Self, which is
largely defined as being a controller residing outside of time. Then, we can soberly talk of a personal
relationship between one's lower self and one's higher Self. Finally, we can show how this is equivalent
to the One Commandment attributed to the Christ figure: "Love
God."
And, this
beautifully fits with the book Lost Goddess: In the religious myth cycle, when
Jesus dies (or at least his messiahnic kingship candidacy is invalidated) on
the cross, his last will and testament is:
Mother,
take the disciple as your beloved son; disciple, take this as your beloved
mother.
In other
words: Higher Self, take the lower self as your beloved child; child self, take
the higher Self as your beloved parent -- forming one household, that is, one
complete and self-integrated psyche comprising the lower, self-control oriented
egoic system inside time, and the higher, transcendent mental model as a
presumed controller outside time.
The higher
loving hidden self outside time is the Virgin Mary, and the lower self in time
is Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene is
also known as: the writer of the Gospel of John, the apostle John, the beloved
disciple, Lazarus.
Thus you
will find that the heretics over the ages followed the original Christian
tradition: they used psychoactives, especially represented by the Lord of
Hosts, Amanita; and they worshipped, or practiced in the
philosophical-religious tradition of, Mary Magdalene united with Mother Mary as
lower self with higher self.
Jesus and
the Lost Goddess : The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians
by
Timothy Freke, Peter Gandy
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609607677
However
much Plotinus may seek to clear away myth to gain philosophical clarity, I
would expect his system of The One to be equivalent in establishing a tightly
integrated personal relationship between the higher and lower selves as
compassionate personal entities.
The result
in either case, whether the consistent myth cycle of the Friends of God or
Plotinus' system, should look very different than the supernaturalist
Literalist religion that was forced upon everyone by the Roman Empire disguised
as the Catholic Church.
http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?passage=john+19&language=english&version=NIV-IBS
John
19:25-30 --
Near the
cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas,
and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his
mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his
mother, "Dear woman, here is your son," and to the disciple,
"Here is your mother." From that time on, this disciple took her into
his home.
Later,
knowing that all was now completed, and so that the Scripture would be
fulfilled, Jesus said, "I am thirsty." A jar of wine vinegar was
there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the hyssop
plant, and lifted it to Jesus' lips. When he had received the drink, Jesus
said, "It is finished." With that, he bowed his head and gave up his
spirit.
The
"son" refers to Mary Magdalene, and "his home" refers to
Mary Magdalene's home. This isn't
really about gender and a literal family and house, but rather, higher and
lower parts of the psyche; the initiate's transcendent higher self and egoic lower
self.
From your
clear explanation of Jesus' last action from the cross, I grokked the
familial-home love relationship that is required between the lower Mary
Magdalene and higher Mother Mary. To
survive ego-death, one must take a personal loving stance to some divine higher
Self and must solicit empowered love or Eros from that hidden higher Self.
This is
presented to us by the Roman Empire/Catholic Church as "pleading for mercy
from supernatural God whom you are commanded to love with all your heart and
mind", but the Gnostic Jesus figure frames it, like the Friends of God
surely do, as a familial/home loving relation between oneself as transcendent
parent and oneself as lower child.
Supernatural terrifying God the suspect alien puppetmaster over you,
becomes "myself as hidden loving parent of myself as manifest
child-in-time".
That
solves a problem I've been reflecting on for over a year: it seems like a
person's personal controller-mind is reduced to postulating an absurd
supernatural God to rescue the mind's self-control from itself in the
terrifying labyrinth, but isn't such a fear of God missing the point, if there
is no self but only God and Ground? Why
should a mind, which *is* the Ground or "of the Ground", fear its
creator which is the mind's *own* transcendent Being?
It seemed
like a deep re-conception of the hidden terrifying puppetmaster was logically
called for. Just such a Right
Relationship is expressed by the Jesus figure from the cross:
Jesus said
to his mother, "Dear woman, here is your son," and to the disciple,
"Here is your mother." From that time on, this disciple took her into
his home.
Thank you
for revealing this egoic-and-transcendent *Ioving* reconciliation within the
complete psyche as the ultimate goal of the Bible, Christianity, and
religion. This is equivalent to, but
much more comprehensible than, being commanded to love an alien
incomprehensible supernatural hostile Jehovah-God as presented by the Roman
Empire Catholic Church that strives to keep people alienated from their own
higher Self and prevent reconciliation and consummation, in order to
financially profit.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=twice-born+dionysus
http://www.mistral.co.uk/hammerwood/dion.htm
-- excerpts with my annotations:
[Dionysus']
mother is Semele and that he was fathered by Zeus. When Hera, Zeus's wife,
learns of Zeus's infidelity and the approaching birth, she disguises herself as
Semele's nurse and convinces [Semele, like psychonaut] to demand that Zeus
reveal himself in the totality of his godliness to her. Zeus appears to Semele
in the fullness of his thunder and lightning. The appearance strikes Semele
dead [ego-death upon comprehending metaphysical puppethood], but just before her
[the initiate's] death Zeus snatches Dionysus from her womb [the initiate like
Virgin Mary gives birth to the godman, one's higher self], cuts open his thigh,
and places the child therein; after nine months Dionysus is born from the thigh
of Zeus. Dionysus is called the twice-born--from the womb of Semele and the
thigh of Zeus.
Dionysus's
appearance always seems to be accompanied by some violent activity that
presents a threat to conventional order. As the center of an orgiastic mystical
cult, he tends to break the bonds of social life. Euripides, in his drama The
Bacchae, describes the Dionysian cult. (Dionysus is also called Bromios, the
Boisterous, or BACCHUS.) The aim of the cult was to produce ecstasy--the
experience of standing outside of oneself--or enthusiasm--the experience of
being filled with the god. The heart of the Dionysian mystery was that the
devotee and the god become identical. The majority of the cult followers were
women, the MAENADS, those who had gone mad [loose cognition] in their ecstasy.
When the priest of Dionysus played on his flute, the devotees went into a
frenzy, in which they were said to dismember animals.
[The
"animal" you "dismember" is the lower, animal-suited, child
way of thinking, the egoic mental model.
Loose cognition enables re-indexing the dynamic mental constructs that
constitute the mental worldmodel.]
Apollo
stands in contrast to Dionysus. Whereas Dionysus orients his devotees to wild
orgiastic rites, Apollo is the god of moderation and represents the legal or
statutory meaning of religion. Apollo is foremost a god of law [as in
democratic law of the polis]; he is described by Plato as the source of law. In
his role as lawgiver, Apollo refers to the precedents of the gods and laws of
the city.
[Apollo is
like democratic law that declares each person is to be legally considered as
though a responsible moral agent possessing metaphysically free will. It's a false way of thinking which we agree
to for the sake of order; we sacrifice the purity of thinking in order to
purchase social order and personal moral stability as well.]
Apollo has
another side, however. Like Dionysus, he was related to the oracle of DELPHI,
and his devotees there were enthusiastic and ecstatically possessed. W. K. C.
Guthrie, in The Greeks and Their Gods, suggests that Apollo originated in
Siberia and that the ecstatic powers attached to his cult were derived from the
tribal [entheogenic] shamanism of that area rather than from the Dionysian cult
at Delphi. Because of the common ecstatic elements, Apollo 's cult exerted a
moderating influence upon the distinctly non-Olympian religious experience of
Dionysus.
http://www.dl.ket.org/latin1/mythology/1deities/gods/lesser/dionysus.htm
-- excerpts with my annotations:
certain
nymphs were in charge of his upbringing, thus the title
"Dithyrambos," meaning "twice born." His childhood was
spent in innocence and happiness [like the uninitiated] among the nymphs,
satrys [note: animal below, sexually aroused, man above], herdsmen, and
vine-tenders [vine represents psychoactives, not alcohol] of Nysa. Dionysus was
born of fire and nursed by rain, the hard buring heat that ripens the grapes
and the water that keeps the plant alive.
At manhood
he set out on a journey through all known countries, even into the remotest
parts of India, instructing the people how to tend the vine [and mix
psychoactive mixtures preserved in wine], and how to practice many other arts
of peace. He was praised everywhere as the greatest benefactor of mankind. He
met occasionally with great resistance on his journey, but always overcame it
and punished those who opposed him most severely [dismemberment (of egoic
cognition), (ego-) death].
The
Maenads, (Bacchantes) were Dionysus' female votaries who accompanied him when
he traveled. Frenzied with wine[-preserved psychoactive mixture] they rushed
through woods and over mountains uttering sharp cries, waving pine-cone-tipped
wands (thyrsi) [pine = Amanita host]. They danced and sang exultant songs,
wearing fawn-skins [white spots on reddish skin, like Amanita] over their
robes. Nothing could stop them. They would tear to pieces the wild creatures
[egoic cognition] they met and devour the bloody shreds of [Amanita and other
entheogen] flesh.
The
sufferings [of ego death and puppet humiliation] which the god was supposed to
endure in winter led him to be associated with Demeter in the mysteries of
Eleusis. His festival, the Great Dionysia, was open to all the world. The
ceremony became more elaborate each year. Drama developed out of his worship. A
theater became the scene of splendid dramatic performances. The poets were the
prophets and priests. Actors and singers took part in the sacred performances.
All ordinary businees was stopped, no one could be put into prison, and
spectators along with the writers and the performers, were engaged in an act of
worship whose purpose was to purify the emoitions [and comment on the tragic
contradiction between the legal responsible ego and the religious truth of
no-ego/ all is Fated by Necessity]. The greatest poetry in Greece was written
in tragic plays and was never equaled except by Shakespeare. Comedies were
produced but tragedies far outnumbered them.
Like
Persephone Dionysus died with the coming of the cold. Unlike her, his death was
terrible: he was torn to pieces [loose cognition disassembling the egoic mental
model of self, time, and control], in some stories by the Titans [egoic
initiates who overreach their cybernetic power and attain egodeath], in others
by Hera's orders. He was always brought back to life [just as mundane egoic
thinking and tight cognition resume after initiation]. He presented [mental,
cybernetic] death and resurrection which first centered in Persephone, but she
held power in death as queen of the Underworld [where egos go when they die as
irrational illusions]. Dionysus was never thought of as a power in the kingdom
of the dead. He only rescued his mother from it [compare Jesus rescuing Sophia
per Lost Goddess book -- also, "his mother" here is "the
initiate who gives birth to their own godman self].
___________
I consider
my last point to be an insight past Freke & Gandy's book Lost Goddess. After reading such books it remains really
confusing, the relation between Jesus and Mary Magdalene vs. Virgin Mary vs.
Sophia. How is the woman the mother and
wife and sister of Jesus? How does a
single woman give birth to Jesus, and marry him, and be a sibling of his?
The Virgin
Mary represents the initiate who gives birth to the godman -- that is, the
adult, initiated self (a no-separate-self) sacrifices the childself to become
or "give birth to" the godman.
An uninitiated person is not in any way a godman. The person only *becomes* a godman after
initiation. The "old self" is
the once-born, the child-self, the uninitiated -- the person's life prior to
initiation. That old self lives on
after ego death but only in Hades, shadowy land where dead egos go.
Consider a
complete life or worldline of an initiate.
Prior to initiation, they are egoic.
After initiation, the ego remains but only in a shadowy way, and, the
adult, transcendent thinking is present.
So during the period after initiation, the mind is godman-shaped: it
contains a higher, adult way of thinking and a lower, child way of thinking.
The
initiate gives birth to the godman and is saved by the godman. Mythically: Virgin Mary (the initiate
working with God) gives birth to Jesus, and Jesus saves Mary Magdalene (the
previously disobedient, willful, unfaithful, self-willed, freewillist harlot --
the initiate prior to initiation).
Finally the initiate marries Jesus as his wife.
The
initiate is the mother of the godman.
The initiate together with God brings forth the initiate's higher self.
The
initiate is the lover/prostitute who is saved by the godman. In the control-death panic seizure in the
labyrinth, the godman thought, or mental reconfiguration, saves the mind from
harmful control loss and cybernetic mental crisis.
The
initiate is the sister or sibling of the godman, being shaped as the same
archetype.
Does
anyone know books that put forth these ideas?
I may need to re-read Lost Goddess -- which is good because I have a
nice, signed, unread extra copy that I didn't know what to do with.
Jesus and
the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians
Timothy
Freke, Peter Gandy
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609607677
I have
always found the term "Holy Ghost" puzzling, while "Holy
Spirit" is instantly understood as the loose-cognition, mystic altered
state. The semi-continuance of the dead
ego may relate to the term "Holy Ghost".
A classic
experience is taking entheogens in a pitch-black cave, combining sensory
deprivation with entheogenic loose cognition.
In some tourist caves, my guide turned off the lights and said that
after 15 minutes, you'll see visions.
The cave
meditator would experience death and rebirth, and would come forth from the
cave, with transformed thinking: born from the cosmic cave. This is how we can straightforwardly
consider a cave to be the almost literal womb that gave us our second birth.
>Where does the term 'godman' come from? I know it's used by Freke and Gandy, but what is the difference between a Hellenistic godman and a Hellenistic god, and why is the former preferable?
Here are Hellenistic mystery-religion definitions of gods, godmen, and mortals.
A god resides entirely in the divine realm and has power over mortals and cannot die. Gods include Jehovah and Zeus, and possibly the Fates. A god is especially that which controls human destiny and weaves the thread, situated in spacetime, that comprises the experienced life of a mortal.
A godman dies but rises again, and serves as an archetypal template for mystery-religion initiation experience. Godmen include Jesus, Dionysus, and, I think, Prometheus. A godman interacts with gods and mortals. He is partly of divine origin, and partly of human origin.
A mortal is a man. He is not an animal, but when a child, thinks much like an animal. He is mortal in two ways: during initiation, he experiences death of himself as child; his childish way of thinking is sacrificed. At the end of bodily life, he dies bodily. Hellenistic mystery-religions and Greek myth are more concerned with initiation death than bodily death.
The emphasis of "mortal" is not bodily mortality but mental mortality of the child mind. After initiation death, it could be said that we have conquered death and have proven resurrection. A mortal is like a godman: during initiation his thinking is torn apart and he is born again; his child self is affixed to the rock, tree, or cross and his adult self is victoriously born.
Andrew
Smith wrote:
>I've
been wondering for a while where the term 'godman' comes from. I know it's used
by Freke and Gandy, but what is the difference between a Hellenistic godman and
a Hellenistic god, and why is the former preferable?
In
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JesusMysteries/message/6772
Michael
Hoffman wrote:
>Here
are Hellenistic mystery-religion definitions of gods, godmen, and mortals. ...
We are
used to thinking horizontally, with two human parents giving birth to one human
child -- but to understand divine sonship and divine family relationships such
as the Holy Family, we must think vertically, within a 2-level psyche. Before initiation, the person is a
"mortal", subject to ego-death of the apparent sovereign, kingly
self-controller. After initiation, one
becomes a godman or becomes "in the godman": a half-mortal. One's lower, egoic, self-controlling,
in-time child-self is mortal.
One's
higher, transcendent, outside-time self is immortal. Jesus Christ is a godman, which is to say that he is half-mortal:
his lower, egoic self dies in mystery-religion ego-death, so that
pseudo-sovereign self-controllership dies on the spacetime cross that one
experiences during initiation, and yet one clearly continues to live, now with
an enlightened, transcendent psyche that no longer takes the personal
self-control sovereignty (kingship) delusion as a literal reality.
There is
enormous mythic hermeneutic potential in the swoon theory, in which the
fictional Jesus character, like in the Homeric stories, is rescued just in time
from the cross and revived. That would
enable the Jesus character to be like the initiate, who continues to live after
the ego-death experience through a quasi-miracle of divine rescue of oneself
from impending disaster, and it also would make the mythic-initiation point
that what specifically dies is Jesus' *candidacy for messianic kingship*, just
as the initiate survives initiation at the cost of their former deluded
assumption that they wield self-control sovereignty.
The egoic,
in-time "Jesus" is mortal and died on the cross as a king, but the
transcendent, outside-time "Christ" is immortal. Jesus Christ is a mortal-and-immortal; a
man-god or godman. Per Freke &
Gandy's book Jesus and the Lost Goddess, the same structure applies to the
initiate, represented by the Magdalene-Madonna that Jesus puts together as a
loving household, or two-level psyche, as his last action from the cross.
Jesus and
the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians
Timothy
Freke, Peter Gandy
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0609607677
The same
is true for other godmen, icons, myths, and religious stories that have a
bigger self over a lower self, such as donkey and rider, in which the donkey is
liable to sit down (ego-death) but the rider is higher and half-independent of
the donkey-vehicle (ego). Here are
diverse equivalent metaphors; all of them include 3 elements: a higher, a
lower, and a negation of a lower:
o Michael the Archangel over a multi-headed
serpent, pinning it
o Balaam riding a donkey that sits down
o Paul's fall (from a donkey, implied by
isomorphism) during the trip to Damascus
o Jesus' entry to Jerusalem on a donkey as a
sacrificial king
o Christ ascended above Jesus dead on the
cross
o Prostitute Mary Magdalene taking virgin
Mother Mary into his home
Consider
how the integrated Magdalene-Madonna psyche of the initiate is godman-shaped. The human prostitute Mary Magdalene is
impure or morally "dead" -- that's mortality as a moral agent. The divine virgin Mother Mary is pure and
morally incorruptible -- that's immortality on the plane of psyche that
transcends the mundane moral world. In
the mature, healthy, integrated psyche of the initiate of the Christian
mysteries, the lower part of the psyche has a familial love of the higher part,
and the higher part has a familial love of the lower part -- isomorphic to the
love of Jesus Christ the son for God the Father, and the love of God the Father
for his son Jesus Christ.
According
to the book Jesus and the Lost Goddess, which is the sequel to the book The
Jesus Mysteries, the true goal of Christianity is not salvation from eternal
torture in hell as per the Roman Empire Catholic Church Corporation, but
rather, for the Christian initiate to become a Magdalene-Madonna harmonious
two-level psyche that maps to the mortal-immortal man-god Jesus Christ, whose
lower self was sacrificed, denied, or refuted on the cross in order to realize
Christ-consciousness, which includes but subsumes the lower Jesus identity,
declaring that lower identity to be merely virtual-, pseudo-kingship (or
pseudo-controllership, as I would emphasize).
Scriptures
should be read with vigilance, always looking out for metaphorical descriptions
of mystic-state experiencing.
http://bible.gospelcom.net/bible?passage=John+21%3A18-23
--
Jesus
said, "Feed my sheep. I tell you the truth, when you were younger you
dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will
stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you
do not want to go." Jesus said
this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he
said to him, "Follow me!"
The
passage is a meaning-puzzle supporting a mystic metaphorical reading.
When you
were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are
old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead
you where you do not want to go.
This is a
kind of death that glorifies God; the kind like that of Jesus.
Before
initiation, one thinks in the shape of a self-moving agent wielding freewill
power, moving oneself freely through spacetime. During and after full initiation, one thinks in the shape of a
2nd-order-only control agent frozen into spacetime, moved by something that
transcends personal control agency.
Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)