Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)
Contents
'Surrender' as mystic metaphor or
literal miliary idea
Mythic concepts of ransom, threat,
and release-price
Historical development of godman
ransom allegory
thomaskft
wrote:
>>…
I'm a semi-regular on Acharya's lists. Her work often appears in Steamshovel
Press, a magazine I publish. …
>>This
concept of surrendering to the will of God is quite apropos to AS' historical
thesis. In its more benevolent expression, as in various American New Age
interpretations of Buddhism for instance, the idea seems to surface as one of
reaching an egoless state or a communion with nature. (The varieties of actual
Buddhist experience, of course, spanning the range from atheism to Pure Land
ritualism.)
Michael
Sharp wrote:
>You
are right about the Christian idea. At the core though it isn't about
surrending to a higher power but allowing more of your own consciousness to
enter into your body. In uncorrupted
form this is about becoming more of you you are deep down inside with teh
assumption being that your full consciousness does not automatically enter into
the body. I think in this form it's benign and empowering but in other forms
where you are asked to surrender to authority (God, the church, the professor,
etc.) it is profoundly disempowering.
thomaskft
wrote:
>>In
Christianity, however, this military ideation ("surrendering")
dominates, right down to an anthropomorphic commander in charge of it all. It
supports Christ Con's argument that Christianity was a military tactic by the
Roman state to consolidate the various pre-Christian sun cults under its rule.
>>That's
what's particularly pernicious about Christianity as it is typically practiced.
What seems like a desirable state -- natural harmony -- has been corrupted to
serve a military hierarchy. It takes tremendous intelligence and individualism
to war against that and protect the innocents. So I would hope that individual
consciousness exists. How else to keep away the Borg?
A concept
or metaphorical idea can't be judged as helpful or harmful without reference to
a context. The concept of the surrender
of the personal will to the will of God is interesting and valuable in an
authentic esoteric mystic-state context.
The concept, like any, can be used in an evil, harmful way -- this
concept of surrender becomes harmful when interpreted literally, partly because
a harmful meaning is added and partly because a helpful meaning is
removed. In practice, it's a matter of
emphasis.
The mystic
reading of 'surrender' uses military concepts as a metaphor for mystic-state
phenomena. The literal reading of
'surrender' then turns that mystic usage back around again to prop up
religiously-based literal militarism.
The two domains of mystic phenomena and military warfare are often
mapped to each other in religion, including Ruler Cult. The mystic-mythic metaphor system used in
Christianity was largely a counter-response to the mystic-mythic metaphor
system used in Ruler Cult.
In both
cases, the realm of military-political ideas was deliberately and adeptly used
as a source of metaphors to describe and convey mystic-state phenomena, and
mystic-state phenomena were used to form military-political ideas. The military realm drew upon the mystic
realm, and the mystic realm drew upon the military realm -- in both Ruler Cult
and in the variant form of Ruler Cult, Christianity.
Similarly,
the realm of astrology drew upon the mystic-experiencing realm for ideas and
metaphorical expressions (remembering that all language is richly
metaphorical), and the mystic-experiencing realm drew metaphors and concepts
from astrology. In such a way in
ancient and in Western esoteric thinking, the domain of mystic-state
experiencing acted as a glue to closely interrelate all realms of human
knowledge and activity, including interrelating astrology and
military-politics.
Mystic
surrendering means a particular kind of loss of individuality: the cessation of
being deluded by the illusion of being a separate-self, a metaphysically
sovereign prime-mover agent. It's easy
to map this to military ideas of power, freedom, and capturing, releasing, and
exchanging prisoners in battle. Such
military ideas were prominent metaphors in Ruler Cult and in Christianity,
probably used in Ruler Cult as well as in Christian initiation to describe
mystic-state experiences of loss of the sense of being in control of one's
thoughts, actions, and movements of will.
Jesus-myth
related ideas to consider from perspective of Roman culture:
Paid the costly
ransom price to set many prisoners/hostages free.
Exchange
negotiated: if you do X, we'll free Y individuals and release the captives and
permit them to live.
How did
the idea of the cross and ransom of prisoners develop?
God/Fate/Ground
of Being puts you as self-control agent in a self-control bind, where extreme
doom is a vivid serious threat, and then makes a deal and releases you. This is the type of thinking needed to
comprehend the mystical meaning of the Cross and similar godman saviors and divine
sacrifices.
Who and
when rejected pure no-fw and insisted on genuine simple moral responsibility?
Power-coercion
dealing: I have the power to kill you or let you live. I will let you live if you do X. Coercively forcing someone's will.
Consider
how ransom works in a Roman battle, where the war is between our power as
personal (perhaps "egoic") control agents and God's power.
Who can
pay an infinite ransom price to God?
What person do we have that is so valued by God, he'll gladly release us
in exchange? As "leader of the
enemy army", God doesn't really want to kill us; he wants to *use* us as
ransomed hostages, using the threat of killing us, to coerce the collective
will of our people, or our leaders, to hand over our most valuable leader, our
king.
So we are
made to want to have a king that we can hand over to God in order to set all of
us (members of that king's kingdom and army) free.
A battle
of us against God: he has us in his grip; he has captured us and is holding us
ransom. His deal is that if our side
gives over our most valuable person on our side -- our king & military
leader -- God will permit us to live and release us. How can we have such a valuable king? God gives his son as the king for us to give to God to fulfill
God's high ransom price to release us and set us free.
There was
some debate over whether the ransom price was paid to the Devil
(personification of egoic deluded freewill controllership) or paid by God to
himself.
Within
this framework of thinking, the moment the spacetime-affixed, fate-threatened
captive mystic calls out "ok, we will hand over our king (Jesus) if you
release us", God sets the mystics free and there is peace between the
military force of God and the control-power of our side. The military enemy leader, God, demands a
high ransom price to release us -- an extremely valuable king. We do not have, of ourselves, such an
extremely or infinitely valuable king.
Then how can we be set free?
God the
hostile military commander holding us captive with a death threat, out of
infinite undeserved generosity, provides us with such a valuable king -- his
own son. Because it is his own son,
provided now as our own military leader and king, God thereby effectively brings
us over to his side, away from the Devil's armies. We are released and now owned by God, and have been -- switching
the ideas around symmetrically -- ransomed from being held by the Devil.
This is
the general type of analysis to use in making sense out of the idea of Jesus as
ransom sacrifice to set us free -- it makes sense if viewed from the proper
context of Roman warfare conventions.
This does not mean that enlightenment, mystic ego death and release into
new reconciled and enlightened freedom is "the" way to understand
transcendent knowledge or the Jesus figure or mythic godmen.
This is
one of many allegories describing the experience of spacetime fixity, coercion
of the mystic's will by the uncontrollable transcendent controller, and the
homeostatic state shift from one stable controllership state (egoic thinking)
to another (transcendent thinking).
Unfortunately
for me as intellectual laborer pressed for time, this means that there is no
single reading of the Cross as allegory, or Christian myth. I'm still forced to spend time doing a
separate analysis of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, and the idea of
the sacrificial lamb -- even explaining two such close things as Abraham's lamb
sacrifice and the Passover lamb sacrifice require two distinct explanations in
terms of the cybernetic self-control model of mystic experiencing and insight.
The
Christian myth-system is complex, not a single meaning or a single puzzle. It is a complex, large set of
mythic-mystic-experiencing puzzles to solve.
However, the idea of "ransom" is one of the main descriptions
of the main myth (the Cross) of the main religion (Christianity). I have justified why a cybernetics theory of
enlightenment must explain Christianity, but I have yet to select which of the Christian
mythic episodes or aspects are most important.
I have yet
to pin down exactly who and why, the Jesus version of the Hellenistic
mystery-religion & myth took off.
Who actually "pushed" it, who actually initially created it,
who so loved the later idea of adding the Jesus lifestory to the totally
abstract "Jesus' cross" Pauline idea?
Who
created, promoted, and embraced the gospel story (with the Romans, last supper,
trial, betrayal, crucifixion, removal, and ascension), when, and why? Who liked it at the very start, and why --
and who liked it later, and why? When
did the "ransom" notion become prominent: is it "original",
starting when the gospel storyline was created, or is it earlier, in the
Pauline letters?
Does the
ransom idea appear in the other mythic mystery-religions, such as Attis and
Osiris and Dionysus? Was the Jesus myth
embraced because the military ransom and political theme was so relevant and
moving to people of various classes, while Attis, Osisis, and Dionysus seemed
too fantastic and not the most worthy allegorical framework to lay over the
standard Hellenistic core entheogenic initiation technology?
A strong
candidate I'm proposing lately is that everyone understood the
mythic-mystic-state meaning of all the myths and recognized the brilliant
relevance of this particular story, which was set among "the Jews" as
a fictional backdrop because the Jews generally represented the idea of
loathing and resisting the domination system of Caesar. Maybe everyone was rooting for the Jews and
loved them because they dared resist the Romans so much and chose death with
integrity over honoring the system of Caesar.
Maybe
people didn't give a damn about the Jews themselves, but *loved* the *idea* of
choosing death with integrity over honoring the system of Caesar, and the Jews
served well to represent that idea. The
mythmakers and initiates were idea-people -- moderns don't grasp that, and
assume that people had simple political and racial and religious divisions like
we do.
Perhaps
the idea of "Jew" became synonymous with the idea of refusal to the
death of honoring the system of Caesar; maybe "Jew" meant "one
who refuses to honor the system of Caesar". We can suppose with some confidence that the idea was hugely
popular, of refusing to honor the system of Caesar, and this was the main
reason why people loved the Jewish-extracted version of the Hellenistic
godman.
"I
sure don't want to literally be a Jew, but I'm all for the idea of refusing to
honor the system of Caesar." This
would explain the rapidly growing popularity of the Jesus religion after the
gospel storyline was created and prior to its takeover by the power
hierarchy. Phases to analyze are then:
1 CE --
Gnostic godman, no Roman crucifixion storyline yet; Jesus is abstract wisdom
personification per Paul.
150 CE --
Gospel storyline created: the Romans, last supper, trial, betrayal,
crucifixion, removal, and ascension.
Becomes popular in lower and middle classes. Starts becoming an independent State within the State.
313 CE --
Christianity co-opted and taken over by the power-hierarchy that it was
designed to resist and repudiate.
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