Home (ego death and self-control cybernetics)
In the transaction of the "ransom slave exchange", Jesus gave up free life, in a physical and psychological sense, so that we may have (virtually) free life: God pinned His son [took away his existence as sovereign agent] to free us children of god [give us virtual existence as sovereign agents]. Forget Paul's interpretation and look further back to the exchange-system of ancient sacrifice. Blood was life, the power to create, the ability to cybernetically (or governmentally) steer the group toward survival and prosperity. Give the GOB blood, the GOB gives you sustenance. Jesus gives his lifeblood, he gives us ... we give his flesh/life/blood, we get life. We want the impossible: egoic agency/responsibility. What can purchase this? The life/blood of god himself. We want not our own life, we want God's life, godly life. So godly blood is needed to buy godly life. When we want favor from the gods, we sacrifice -- in sacrificing, we take something of personal value from ourselves, and give it as a gift/price to the god. We give our highest earthly ruler as personal value, and instead of our using it, we give it to god as a price/gift. What are we purchasing? We are purchasing godly power. We sacrifice what we really want -- god himself -- to get god for ourselves, to have god, consume god, take on his power. We give the blood of god, to own (take on, take over) the power of god. We give meat, the god gives us life/sustenance. We give Jesus' meat (spilled blood), the god gives us life/sustenance (virtual agency, moral autonomy -- *heaven and hell* which are "food" for earthly moral control-agents who need these moral prop fantasies. God gave us not salvation from hell, but rather, virtual moral culpability. We give his lifeblood, we get the fantasy of personal moral existence (which must include the prop of the fantasy of moral sorting into heaven/hell as moral reward/punishment). We give his sovereign life/power, we get his sovereign life/power. dissemination of sovereign life/power. We give (or Jesus gives on our behalf) God's sovereign life/power, what we get in return is sovereign life/power. Blood for blood, life for life, power for power. It's a power-exchange -- not an exchange of freedom or life, so much as *power* -- religious power-exchange/ religious controllership exchange. To get lifepower as steersmen, we must sacrifice (give god) steersman-type lifepower --
"This is the time of the Sacrificial King, whose self sacrifice allows the people who worship him to survive through the winter. We say that his blood is poured out upon the fields so that the corn and grain harvest will thrive. His Spirit enters into the corn and the grain, and is then known as John Barleycorn. As the God dies with the harvesting of the grain, so also is he resurrected in the new sprouts. So therefore, we are given the myths of the Gods who are sacrificed, and then reborn, again and again. These myths occur in every country and culture, and are just too numerous to name here. "Ancient Ways" by Pauline and Dan Campanelli, and "The King Must Die" (I forget the author on this one) are highly recommended for further reading."
The firstborn son is one's power of action/creation - so he is sacrificed. The father/ruler of the house permits the next son to live. Ancient Semitic religion. "I have created". Why must one sacrifice what one has created -- an investment, in the ability to create even more? Give, that you shall receive in greater abundance. When you first take on power, you must sacrifice, to get even more power. When you first create life, you must sacrifice life, to gain even more power to create life.
I have to understand agriculture -- the harvest and the new crop in the spring.
In the King the creative/procreative essence is embodied/trapped, in his blood. Jesus' blood is creative sovereign power and life. Spilling that "releases" the power for the community to survive..... releases that power into the crops so that they will arise again. The crops are harvested, they arise again. The king's essence is "harvested" and given to the crops so that they will arise again. The king's essence is "harvested" so that we will arise again after we are harvested in the fall -- we will arise again in the spring of heaven. We want to rise again after death, like crops? Then we need the blood/essence of the procreative/creative essence of the king. The king is sacrificed BUT HE IS REBORN. The king is not a substitute sacrifice; his *son* is a subst sac *for him*. Jesus is not my son -- I am not a king. Jesus is the son of god - so jesus must be a substitute for God's pouring out of his essence. God doesn't really pour out his essence to revitalize us as a crop for hsi people... God pours his blood the only way he can, through pouring out his son's blood.
"Animals were viewed as the essences of higher beings and holocausted to "release" the "power of the Gods", from which the whole community benefited. Identical procedures are recorded in the case of human sacrifice, usually by willing, royal victims (sacrificial kings). A plurality of higher beings endowed with "special knowledge & power" emerged in the form of archaic pantheons, often given some shape and projected on astral cycles (like the stations of the Moon or the cardinal points of the local horizon)."
"the Jewish prayers do not liberate "divine energy" trapped in the form of a sacrificial animal, nor command the "gods" by knowing their light, but form a continuous reply to the original Divine speech, using the Words of that original speech, and thus reenacting the experience initiating the covenant. Revelation always implies a direct relationship between humanity and the Divine. When this is established, no creature is necessary, not even a higher one." Jesus did *not* die... he spilled his blood and enacted death.
I do believe God poured out his sovereign essence through Jesus and acted as though his power were cancelled. But all the sin loading were a second, though necessary aspect. Gave us delusion of power, and gave us guilt and moral afterlife concern.
King as procreative essence / self-re-creating essence -- king as sovereign steering mechanism / governor. Scapegoat - king as scapegoat? To be a king is to be a scapegoat? He took on our sins? But is this a valid interpretation for Jesus' time and culture? Caesar was not a sacrificial king. By taking on our sins he created the impossible construction of sin, giving us sovereignty, gave us godly essence, autonousmous free moral agency, sovereign power. He reified sin, reified agency and personal sovereign power. He propped up the myth of the harvest and re-sprouting (resurrection of the crops/souls) by spilling his blood as a predestined sacrifice and then himself being reborn, reincarnated. In spilling hsi blood he enabled us to be reincarnated with him, to have a life after the death of this life, as the crops have a new life in the spring after being killed in the harvest in the fall.
How does Jesus spilling his blood, as a sacrifice, purchase my re-sprouting after the "winter" of my death? He creates the afterlife, he assures me that there is a morally-sorted afterlife, thus propping up morality. I spill my bllod/essence of godly/kingly life, so that you can have life -- so that you can re-surrect/resprout after the windter of death, into a *good* place. Without Jesus's spilling his blood, we would all be resurrected (like crops in the spring), but into hell rather than heaven.
Jesus did not die so that we could be resurrected - that wouold happen anyway. He died so that our sins would be removed during the moral sorting into {the heavenly moral reward afterlife} vs. {the hellish moral punishment afterlife}. How does that work? He took on my sins, and was punished for them, so there is no need to punish me for my sins -- my sins are forgiven as far as I am concerned because they were transferred to Jesus, who was punished for them though he was innocent of them and of any sin. That's why I will be sorted into moral heaven rather than moral-punishment hell. -- then heaven is *not* a reward for my own actions; it is a reward or a gift for transferring my sins to jesus. One goes to heaven because one is innocent, rather than because one was good and deserves heaven. no one was good, no one deserves heaven. I get to go to heaven because I was bad in my actions but good in transferring my sins to Jesus, who fulfilled the punishment for them by giving his life, paying the highest possible price. I get to go to heaven because my evils were paied for by the giving of the highest price, that of Jesus' godly essence.
Now, any theology based on Jesus' actual *death* as opposed to mere spilling of blood (and self-cancellation of governmetn) is a false, wrong theology. Paul says in the same breath that Jesus' death (not his blood) is the point, and he says that the right interpretation of what was accomplished in the crucifixion is transferral of sins. [the reality is that what was accomplished was the *reification* of sin and thus personal sovereign autonomy -- the ego.] I suppose Paul knew the Truth -- that Jesus didn't die on the cross. So his utterance that Jesus died is linked as far as truth value, with his utterance that what Jesus accomplished is transferral of our sins to Jesus so that we can go to heaven rather than hell, after everyone is resurrected. Paul was a supreme spreader of moral propping -- sin is real, our moral agency is genuine, heaven and hell are real and are punishments or rewards for our moral actions, which we really own and create.
Jesus's act, particularly after processed through Paul's interpretation/distortion, created the ego. Paul created the ego, and Jesus provided himself, his life, his blood, his illusion of death on the cross, as material for this ego.
Jesus and Paul together created Christian moral ego, but Paul created the sin/guilt transferral theology and the afterlife -- the moral afterlife and ... how will I be saved "believe in me". What did "saved" there mean?
Saving the world from the oblivion of unawareness (Q1 23-25, 54, 61) which represses the memory of the fact that the Father does not forget us (Q1 49, 53, 63-71) is all what is needed to experience the Divine Presence (realised without people being open enough to notice it).
Is Jesus Son of God (so can be subst for God's sacrifice) or son of man (so that he is a subst for me, being sacrifiied as my son in my stead)?
http://www.oneworld.org/globalprojects/7ejesus5.htm#2 - good stuff here.
"Sacrifice effects a necessary and efficacious relationship with sacred power and of establishing man and his world in the sacred order. What made the Christian version of the sacrifice so particular, was the fact that the sacrificer is sacrificed, for the priests acts "in persona Christi" and repeats the drama of Jesus' passion & death to make Him Present in the consecrated Host and consume Him."
Why was the king sacrificed? The king was the controllership of the people -- he represented the ultimate steersman. sacrificial governor/agent. The direction, directorship, steersman, governor -- the ego/controller of the people. They give their ego/controller power, to get life. Ego/director/steersman/rudder... rudder. The rudder king. When is the rudder the helm? Ego as rudder/helm. cybernetic helm/tiller/rudder. The steering mechanism. The king is the steering/governing mechanism. Cybernetic steering power
We sacrifice our king to god to get more life
becomes
We sacrifice our cybernetic steering power to god to get more life
Jesus was given to us to be our cybernetic steering power: our governor, our ruler, our steering mechanism. To get life, to give us life, this king -- this cybernetic steering governor agent representative -- sacrificed himself to get more life for us.
The king is the most valuable life, the most revered and feared life. That was replaced by the king's firstborn son (who was a substitute for the king)...
Instead of sacrificing the king (each of us as sovereign) we said "not me, I want to *remain* king - let me do a subst sacr instead, of my firstborn son -- so Jesus then is like my firstborn son.
How can Jesus be considered my firstborn son? I am as a king, and I don't want to be sacrificed, so I sacrifice Jesus instead as a substitute sacrifice. I want to be king but I don't want to die the king's death of being sacrificed. So that we can remain alive, as sovereign autonomous agents, as kings,
Why is the king's death a sacrificial death? To be a king means to be sacrificed. You are sov auton agent? Then you are a king, which means that you must be sacrificed.
The king *is* a sacrifice for his kingdom. He collects all power and glory and value to himself, then disseminates it to the kingdom via sacrifice -- from king to god to kingdom. The sacrificial power-transferral path from king to god to kingdom.
Why did ancient religions sacrifice the king? What was their religion about? About an exchange with their gods. Life for life. Valuable life for their own lives. We give you this valuable life... this ruler, this collective ego/controller, this collective agency... the king gave himself in sacrifice to bring something to the people: power and prosperity. Jesus/God gives himself in sacrifice to bring power and prosperity to us -- to bring moral power (moral being) to us.
The animal contains divine essence/power. Why horned animals? Why especially particularly the bull? Procreative essence and mushrooms. Source of divine mushrooms.
Transcendent knowledge, doesn't study ego as isolated being; it studies ego as sovereign controller-agent. Unlike Watts, established sprituality tends to dwell on the transcendence of the isolating-being boundary, to the exclusion of the topic of this isolated being as a controller-agent.
Jesus' concern emphasizes the delusion of power-wielding agency, and eventually the transcendence of that delusion -- not just spiritual union (merging of quasi-isolated separate being). Existing systems of transcendence are overly ontological and emotional; emphasize merging-sensation and emotional happiness, rather than control-agency (governing-agency). Jesus was not just about personal being; he was in particular about personal being as personal governing-agency. -- moral being w/ emphasis on the delusion of moral agency -- seeking to nourish yet t'd, develop fully and then t'd, moral agency. X'ty is about moral agency, not about separate being. People say "Xty is not really about sin and morality; it's about seeing through the illusion of separate-self." That is utterly misguided. To understand what's important and core of the illusion of separate self, that is precisely, moral agency and the delusion of governing agency. Xty is about the problematic nature of freedom, and our metaphysical slavery.
You can be a co-controller with the Ground, but can never be a creator independent of the Ground. You can apply your power of will but cannot originate your power of will, and do not now have the power(now) to coerce/control your will(future).
>If there really is an all-powerful, all-good God, why does he allow world hunger and war? Why didn't he intervene is the Auschwitz?
God's obvious intervention in human affairs would ruin the free-will effect, which is necessary to prop up the appearance of moral culpability. The system of morality would be broken, as all good and evil become attributed to God rather than egoic homunculii. If God took over our actions, we would no longer live in the form of autonomous agents. We would no longer be moral agents -- we would no longer exist, as moral agents. Our virtual moral agency would die.
God gave us moral life, moral existence, as freely willing agents, cut off from God's rulership.
The Protestant Fundamentalist interpretation of Jewish oppression is that the Jews are (genuinely, morally) guilty of rejecting Jesus as the prophecied Messiah they had been waiting for. God announced through the prophets that he would use the chronic oppression of the Jews, his originally priveledged people, as proof that he is in control of world events. When the entire world is being rapidly destroyed in the holocaust, the Jews will finally recognize that Jesus fits all their prophecies, and that their oppression is fits the prophecies in God's covenant with Israel, and they will finally accept Jesus as their long-awaited Messiah, repent, and be saved from the destruction. God's intervention in Auschwitz would have been a reversal of his promised punishment for rejecting Jesus.
Auschwitz taught us to truly fear evil in modern society, even among the most cultivated society. Evil, sin, delusion, and freedom arise together.
If God really is in control of everything, and our free will is an illusion that he deliberately gave us, then morality is unreal, and all acts that are conventionally considered morally good and morally evil are actually morally null. All good and evil acts are the result of God's deliberate choices. If such a system exists, which denies the possibility of moral right and wrong, this could not be rejected as an evil system, because evil would be unreal.
If God is responsible or takes responsibility for all acts, good and evil, then He ought to be punished personally for all of the world's sins. But it doesn't make much sense for God to voluntarily punish himself when He is the only moral agent in the world. Such a crucifixion would be a farce just like the moral agency, the loads and loads of contentless guilt, that He piles onto humans when he gives them their sense of free agency.
The crucifixion would be a temporary moral head-trip. It is a moral contradiction to punish God for causing all the evil in the world, when such was necessary to give everyone their lives in the mode of virtual free agency. This punishment unravels as an extremely unlikely hoax, a hack, a workaround by which He could spill some of his blood without completely dying. If a sacrificial victim spills his sacrificial blood but does not die, then the sacrifice is illegitimate, virtual, symbolic, make-believe, as-if.
Because the rebellious world refuses to love God, but listens to their own will (as God has forced them to), God, who is the god of love, will send Jesus down on a cloud to kill all these wicked worshippers of Satan and punish their folly of freely choosing to reject their Lord, by casting them into the pit to be eternally tormented, because he is the god of Justice, and will destroy those who would reject His government of peace. In so doing, God will prove, through his fulfillment of his prophecies, that he has complete control over history, and even over people's belief in Him of love of Him. Repent of your guilty ways, before this sinful world is destroyed. Accept loving Jesus into your heart and accept God's loving invitation... or suffer eternal punishment of your wickedness -- the free choice is yours.
Jesus as substitute governor agent; model governor-agent; sacrificial false governor agent. The governor-agent is false and should be cast down (its power negated by Truth). Jesus is both a model (false) governor-agent, and a sacrificial false governor-agent. Exist in the form of a false (but compassionate) governor agent, like me; I have constructed and developed an archetype of (false) governorship for you to reproduce in yourselves, to offer you the experience of freedom and control-agency/governing-agency (this effect requires the semblance of moral agency). To compensate for this falseness I encourage, I will negate that archetype by symbolically killing myself. What is really sacrificed is vivid awareness of Truth, to purchase the predominance of the semblance of personal free agency.
Jesus/God says "the governing-agent self is viable and desirable, even though metaphysically invalid". The governing-agent self is viable (practical) and desirable, even though metaphysically invalid. power = food = birth = procreative power = life = blood. Blood = cause-of-life, matter from which life is made. want crops to come out of the ground? Must put blood into the ground.
jesus poured blood into the ground -- into the world -- so that a crop of _____ would be produced. I say, "virtual moral agents" is the answer, *not* moral agents really destined for heaven or hell.
Giving his real blood in a mock-sacrifice of a mock-king. The god/king sacrifices himself, opens up his concentrated power
Symbolism. That led to real action. God gave his power to *me* instead of to my older brother Jesus. He did this in a good way: by not actually killing the older brother, but only by symbolically killing him. So, my older brother is still alive and is the real inheritor of power (symbolically speaking). inheritance of power
To whom shall God pass on his kingdom and his power? To me, or to someone else? Is mine the kingdom of God? Will the kingdom of God be passed onto me as the new God? The kingdom goes to the 2nd-born son. Though the higher-level reality is that the kingdom only belongs to the first-born son. Instead of giving my kingdom to my 1st-born son, ... that son then becomes identified with the essence of my prosperity. That son is then sacrificed and poured into the earth, to buy crops.
I want food. I give food. I give my power -- my firstborn son, my procreative power, in most concentrated form, to you, the earth.
In this way I have a marriage covenant with the Earth. I give her my procreative essence (pouring the blood of my first-born son), she gives me crops and livestock. So I am wedded to the earth. I give her my procreative blood so that she gives me crops. She feeds me with her body, I feed her with my prcreative essence/energies.
He who has the power shall be sacrificed. Yet this death is only symbolic, virtual death. You shall be permitted to live. Jesus = able to inherit the kingdom *without* becoming a sacrifice.
The first son is the true noble son who is the sacrificial victim: he *is* the father's power, the father's creation. To father = to create = to give power = to empower. To create = to empower.
To estabilish a covenant with the earth.
To create is to pass on (give out) power.
When woman/earth *gives* blood, no life comes forth. When woman/earth *withholds* blood, life is going to issue forth. Blood is life, creative procreative power. Give blood to the earth, the earth gives life in return.
I want my woman (and crops) to be fertile. I want them to take in blood, rather than releasing it.
Jesus spilled his blood/life into the world, to create/give life. The world was able to give birth to us because Jesus/god/king poured his potent blood into the earth, enabling her to give birth to us in the afterlife.
Pregnancy/creation is a better metaphor than forgiveness of sins. The shroud shows a pregnant woman. He "had to spill his blood" for the equation to work. Pour kingly blood into the Earth/womb, get life in return: crops will be born from the earth.
Analogies between plant gestation/procreation and animal gestation/procreation, based on a misunderstanding of the role of blood in the procreation process.
The connection between crucifixion and mystic ego death is the revealing and acknowledgement of the illusory nature of moral agency:
crucifixion/taking on all guilt -- moral agency and punishment/ deluded concept of culpability -- ego death insight/ mystic rapture
This explanation of moral theology finally integrates the crucifixion with cybernetic ego death, the self-debunking of the illusion of personal control. This connects mystic ego death (rapture/rape of the controller-agent by the soveriegn power of God) with the crucifixion; the connecting idea is that of the illusory, deluded nature of the apparently independent controller or moral agent, with the crucifixion being seen as a mythical enactment of responsibility itself and punishment itself, with a direct association of responsibility, delusion, punishment, and moral agency. The crucifixion was a hoax but was a myth spreading the ideas of responsibility, delusion, punishment, and moral agency, even while leaving evidence that this death, to purchase moral reclaiming, was symbolic rather than literal. The myth enactment spreads the ideas of responsibility and moral agency and metaphysical freedom, even while generating the seeds (the Turin shroud and the hints in the gospel) that will reveal that state as delusion and mere appearance, merely virtually true.
I spent a couple months researching ancient religion and finally gained a deep understanding of Jesus' symbolic crucifixion, as well as the logic of sacred sacrifice of the king (such as in the book The Golden Bough). I am sure that Jesus did not actually die on the cross, but merely recovered. There are about five very interesting indications of this scenario, and it fits so beautifully. Christian salvation is based on a deliberate hoax, a falsehood. The most beautiful, chilling insight I ever had: all of a sudden, every way of thinking split into two alternatives: the Bible subtly sets up two alternative readings. Once you study the Bible and think very critically, you can believe in either perspective 1 or 2 below:
This was a particularly memorable revelation and awesome insight into the nature of human existence and transcendent truth. I will never forget the afternoon when the New Testament shifted into two alternative options: superstitious wishful thinking, and sober, transcendent truth. Unlike my other revelations, that was the day I became a mature adult and a realized Christian -- the day I became a Church Elder -- the day I finally recognized all wishful thinking as a distinct, bounded aspect of religion, the day I differentiated clearly between superstition/myth and transcendent truth. Rationalists risk discarding transcendent truth (transcendent knowledge) along with discarding mythical and superstitious thinking. They need to differentiate between these, to discard taking mythical thinking literally, while understanding mythical meaning and how it relates to transcendent knowledge. Jesus' death on the cross and miraculous resurrection form a myth in the best and highest sense. He enacted the then-widespread Greek myth/ mystery tale, of the sacrificial resurrected savior who takes on and exculpates sins (the morally compromised state of existence). Yet he might have had a deep understanding of the full metaphysical potential implications of taking on all moral being and cancelling this state of moral agency.
Jesus' myth enactment acknowledges the error of the concept of moral agency, yet also loads us with moral being (and the concommitant moral quasi-existence and personal freedom and sovereignty) even as he acknowledges the illusory, false nature of personal freedom and moral agency and moral culpability. His punishment is a complex meta statement about the nature of guilt itself. Guiltiness itself is error, a lie. Jesus takes on all guiltiness itself and all moral punishment itself, and all moral agency itself, and is symbolically (and literally) released from that punishment (through recovery from his injuries, cast as miraculous recovery from literal death) even though he in some sense undergoes all possible punishment for all possible guiltiness. Jesus symbolically becomes The Moral Agent, or Moral Agency itself, and symbolically takes on All Guilt, and symbolically endures All Punishment, as moral agency itself is killed. Yet he is released from this punishment as well, as all agents are released from being punished for actions which they conducted under an impossible state of existence. It is impossible for Jesus to be guilty as a true moral agent, just as it is impossible for anyone to be guilty as a true moral agent, because true moral agency is impossible.
There is really only one king, one sovereign, one controller, ultimately, upon whose strings will all dance as helpless puppets -- that king is God, the ground of being, the block universe. Jesus can be the representative, only, of this single ultimate all-powerful sovereign; the only agent culpable and able to rationally take the blame for anything is God himself; just as Jesus acts as the single moral agent on all our behalf, he acts as the single ultimate moral agent on God's behalf, and thus reconciles the true responsibility of God with the false responsibility of humans. Only God (or the ground of being, or the Fates) could possibly be truly guilty of anything; the only legitimate punishment would have to be punishment of God himself, or the ground of being, itself.
What was Jesus accused of? Claiming to be a king, in conflict with the established governmental king, the sovereign: Caesar. Was he guilty of that, or not? His answer in court was just silence. He took on the role of God the king, the only real moral agent, in being punished. But this kind of kingship was not directly a contender against worldly kingship. His taking on the higher kingly role actually supported worldly systems of sovereign government and personal moral responsibility. When God's sovereignty and man's sovereigty came into conflict, that time, God chose to fall, in a certain manner, rather than making man fall. But in reality, God, or the ground of being, cannot help but be the real, ultimate ruler and controller of all human actions, thoughts, and activities, and destiny. God does what he can to suppress his own true responsibility, in order that he effectively, virtually parcel out his responsibility to each human agent. They all become virtual sovereigns, yet theirs is a false agency, with false responsibility, unable to deserve a true, just punishment. Jesus was guilty of pretending to be sovereign (god/king) just as deluded, apparently free moral agents are guilty of pretending to be sovereign self-governors (independent self-commanders, self-steerers, self-controllers, self-originators of thoughts and actions). We are guilty for thinking we could be guilty of anything; we cannot be truly guilty of anything, including our own delusion. Guilt is just as impossible (or logically unsound and compromised) as moral agency. The crucifixion and its cancellation by resurrection does away not with real guilt, but with the pretense of guilt and the pretense of personal power. It's a merely symbolic forgiveness for a merely virtual guilt, a guilt that is really just delusion, a delusion that is inherently and unavoidably part of our nature during the middle, egoic phase of collective human development.
This is the real heart of theology: the problem of sin and the problem of grace. The latter is the problem of God's sovereignty in choosing upon whom he forces his grace; there is nothing you can do to receive the gift of the grace to believe in God -- so again, only God can be blamed if you do not believe in Him. The problem of sin: God is omnipotent, therefore only God can be blamed for sin; the devil is just a puppet of God; God created evil and ultimately controls evil, and so is the only legitimate entity to be punished for evil. God is the only real, ultimate controller, not humans. Humans are not true sovereign controllers, independent cybernetic agents, or governors/steersmen; they are just responsive gears cast forth by the ground of being, therefore they cannot possibly be ultimately responsible for their own actions and cannot be legitimately punished as moral agents.
To perceive the falsity and illusory nature of oneself as an independent cybernetic control agent, to perceive oneself as a false moral agent, is to experience ego death. To perceive moral agency as impossible (or fatally compromised) is to experience revelation and return to Greek consciousness before the city-state's system of laws which for the first time maintained, at least formally and unconvincingly on paper, that people are genuine, accountable moral agents rather than helpless puppets of the Fates. See the book _Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece_ by Jean-Pierre Vernant (1988), for more on the latter theme.
The correct wording for the mysterious third of the trinity is "The Holy Spirit of Truth". Belief in Jesus' death and miraculous recovery is not in the spirit of truth; such belief is in the spirit of falsehood and deception. Believing Jesus' hoax (against which he gave us disproof in hints in the Gospel and incontrovertible scientific evidence in his shroud) is spiritual immaturity, is of the devil, the father of lies and deceit. Jesus gave the devil ammunition. Belief in heaven and hell and moral agency is belief in lies, untruths, appearance.
The correct wording of the "paraclete" or "helper" that Jesus sends after he is gone: he sends a helper, an assistant; this assistant is an agent of the holy spirit of transcendent truth. This assistant is the mystic altered state and the agents that trigger that state of receptivity to truth and encourage the perception of reality as it is, not as we wish it were. Two authors wrote books asserting that Jesus was in a mushroom cult; this is supported by the emphasis on "the sacred food and drink of the masters", in the Manual of Discipline in the Dead Sea scrolls that have only recently become available for everyone to study.
Did you know that the account of Mark is suddenly, abruptly interrupted right at the very most important point - about the nature of Jesus' resurrection/recovery, his "rising from among the dead"? The ending of Mark in our Bibles has a note, "this ending was added later". Apparently, the original Mark said something that undercut the very foundation of Christianity, and so was removed.
Jesus' miraculous recovery from literal death is the foundation of Christianity, is the foundation upon which we all place our hope in our own miraculous resurrection into the afterlife, to receive our reward or punishment as moral beings. But Jesus left us concrete scientific evidence that demonstrates in many ways that he was in fact alive when removed from the cross. Jesus is the pillar of the church of falsehood, yet he also gives us proof that his pillarhood is false. We have a sort of two-stage development here. Belief in his resurrection, and all resurrection, and moral agency, is a transitional phase for humanity; Jesus supports our belief in his hoax for awhile, then reveals to the advanced, inquisitive, reasoning minds, that it was just a hoax. At that point, we return to Greek thinking in terms of fatalism rather than metaphysical freedom. The egoic state of independent metaphysical personal agency was just a phase, the core middle high era of human deluded belief in personal metaphysical freedom. Jesus gave us delusion of personal independence and moral culpability; Jesus gave us this deluded "life". Jesus gave us delusion; he gave us "life" as we know it, even while shepherding us through that delusion ultimately toward the truth, the transcendent truth that we are puppets controlled and cast forth by the fixed, timeless ground of being.
The Protestant church is founded on a lie, a gullible belief in Jesus' crucifixion hoax, but at least they believe in studying the Bible and physical evidence such as the Turin shroud, and believing in no other authority than the Bible -- they are set up to discover that their church is founded on a hoax. Catholics are in much worse shape; they inherently are superstitious and non-scholarly and accept human authority outside the Bible as the holy truth. Protestants are more likely to realize and accept and solve the puzzle of the New Testament, and accept the earth-shattering significance of the Turin shroud.
It is theologically rich with possibilities to consider the doubts that the Bible includes about whether Jesus actually completely died on the cross. The Bible provides reason to doubt Jesus' death on the cross: he died and was removed so quickly that Pontius Pilate was suspicious, and a hundred pounds of aloe, a healing herb, were brought into the tomb; only a virtual death could be a just "punishment" for the virtual sins of moral puppets.
Most people assume that Jesus died on the cross, and proceed to argue over whether or not he was miraculously resurrected from this assumed complete death. But if the assumption of His complete death is wrong, a whole new vista of theological hermeneutics (potential meanings and interpretations) opens up.
So that our faith is challenged and not too easily founded, the Bible encourages us to doubt whether Jesus reached complete death on the cross. There are a few books about this possibility, but they don't examine the rich theological potentials of the scenario they argue for -- that Jesus was taken down from the cross before death, and revived.
The Bible does not explicitly say that we must believe that Jesus died and was resurrected, if we are to be saved. It does report Jesus asking what he could possibly do to get more people to believe in him.
Book: The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Truth about the Resurrection
If you have any interest in conspiracies, hoaxes, debunking, or the foundation of Christianity, read Holger Kersten's book _The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud & The Truth about the Resurrection_. Unfortunately, he is not a philosopher of religion, so cannot explain why Jesus willingly initiated this hoax. Jesus willingly gave himself up to the Romans; he was a willing sacrifice -- he did not simply find himself victimized and carry out the virtual crucifixion-death just as an escape tactic. His motives went beyond simply escaping from punishment -- way beyond, into the very depths of metaphysical meaning about human agency and culpability. Even though he has transcended belief in fairy tales about heaven and hell, he still considered transcendent truth to be weighty and profound (rather than just falling into despair about the meaninglessness of living life without escape into superstition and fantasies).
I have many philosophy and theology books. This is one of the very most important books I have read. It is intriguing how the Church is set atop a single slender pillar, so that such evidence as this threatens to bring the whole institution crashing down upon everyone's heads.
It seems that just as the novelty of Abraham is that he did *not* follow through with the custom of killing his firstborn son as in the ancient religions that God so strongly condemns, so does God indicate that he is *willing* to kill his son to allow *our* power of rulership -- but does not need to actually follow through by killing Jesus. From ancient human sacrifice, Christianity rises up to the level of purely gestural, symbolic, substitutive, *mock* sacrifices. There is rich material here for a drastic revision of theology, though this book concentrates on proving that Jesus was alive when taken down from the Cross. It is interesting how the authors are not able to propose why Jesus willingly gave himself into the hands of the worldly government. After reading this book I concluded that Jesus' mission was to prop up belief in and commitment to moral agency and personal human responsibility, despite God's omnipotence; to prop up the illusion of moral agency, Jesus supported popular belief in resurrection, while also giving clues for others that our resurrection and moral punishment or reward is a psychological need (part of our personal self-control system) rather than a warranted hypothesis.
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Hot area of philosophy: "contemporary metaphysics". This site is the premiere explanation of the most coherent metaphysical system.
>The "Magic, Medicine, and Science" course sounds very cool. Do you know anything about the writings of Egyptologist Margaret Murray, which were cornerstone to the contemporary neo-pagan movement even though they have been debunked? Does you course cover in of the Victorian figures such as Crowley, or the more recent LeVey?
You should definitely read _The Jesus Conspiracy_. It's infinitely more important than other hoaxes. It also has a lot about non-miraculous healing techniques and herbs. It's more relevant than other conspiracies and books. The Essenes were healers, doctors. The perfect group to pull off the greatest resurrection hoax of all time.
Book: Jesus Lived in India
The Bible has about 6 clues that cast doubt on whether Jesus reached death before he was put into the catacomb. These are discussed in _Jesus Lived in India_. I think that's the title.
I'm not referring to the book by Elizabeth Claire Prophet, but one by a German man. He wrote two similar books.
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The penalty for sin is death, but sin might be an illusion, as might have been Jesus's death. Punishment for committing an illusory type of sin would be profoundly unjust -- unjust in a different way than practical, earthly injustice. If sin is not as we are used to thinking of it, then the only transcendently just punishment for this quasi-violation would be some sort of alternative, quasi-punishment.
Jesus accepted our egoic existence (our mental processing in the form of deluded autonomous moral steersmen-agents) and *willed* us while we were in our sin (our self-deceived error about our cybernetic sovereignty), in fact he willed us to be in error, to exist as cybernetic sovereigns, self-governing agents.
Sin is unreal or distorted, if God is omnipotent but chooses to effectively transfer some of His power to His created beings. Can God legitimately give away some of His all-encompassing power to fill us with a freedom that is independent of His will? God's will is all-powerful, yet He lets us have our own independent will, in some way. Insofar as our will exists independently of God, we have freedom and the fundmental sinful state that goes with it. To have free choice is to be in a state of sin. To have free choice and an autonomous will is to be a moral agent, and to be subject to morality. Moral agency and sin arise together. Where there is no moral agency and moral culpability, there is no sin. If moral agency is an illusion, because God ultimately pulls all our strings, then sin is an illusion as well.
The nature of sin may be just a cognitive error; morality might be an illegitimate concept. In that case, we could not say that sin is immoral, because immorality wouldn't really exist. Sin would be just a cognitive error -- the error of conceiving of our own will as self-originating; the error of thinking that we are autonomous agents subject to morality.
If freedom is only virtual, then all the world's sin is only virtual, and the only just punishment for this sin would be virtual death.
Jesus's atonement; the twisted logic of the immorality of religious disbelief
>Jesus did not die on the cross [but neither did he simply recover as an ordinary man might]. The average man can die and be no more but Jesus couldn't die.
The Bible seems to say that Jesus died. It's worth looking up the multiple phrasings of this assertion -- such as "he rose from among the dead", a weak phrasing. The Bible says that average men all die, and have eternal souls in the afterlife. It's unbiblical to say that Jesus did not die on the cross. It's unbiblical to say that the average man exists no more after death.
The Bible does not say that Jesus definitely died, without doubt, in a standard, uneventful crucifixion. It was a very odd, suspicious crucifixion. He expired suspiciously quickly -- Pontius Pilate didn't believe that he was dead so soon. A hundred pounds of aloes -- healing herbs -- were brought into the catacomb. These suspicious factors are spelled out clearly.
>Thus the sacrifice of Jesus is illogical -- futile, or impossible.
You seem to mean that Jesus would be an invalid creature to sacrifice, because he is incapable of ordinary physical death. Whether he was incapable of death or not, he did fulfill part of the standard requirement of sacrifice: he spilled his blood for others. Perhaps he bought either or both of the following for us: the sense of free will along with effective autonomy, and eternal presence in heaven with God.
>All that happened is that Jesus left his Earthly body and Earthy abode for his spiritual body and spiritual abode.He is eternal and cannot die.
>The thought that Jesus died for the sins of all man both past and present lacks credibility and justice. Each person pays for their own sins against their fellow man and this Earth when they enter the world of the dead.
>The failure to believe cannot be punished because it [such punishment] goes against true justice. Thus no [good but disbelieving] man need fear true justice.
I agree that it would be unjust to punish someone just for disbelief.
The Bible declares that the high crime worthy of eternal suffering or eternal "separation from God" is not committing specific evil deeds, but merely the lack of belief in Jesus as the messiah, our savior, and God's son. What a strange and unique type of "crime"! This is a crime like being a Christian in a Muslim country. Actually this type of constructed "crime" is not so unusual. It's typical for an ancient form of government in which worship and government are undifferentiated. To worship incorrectly is a crime against the kingdom. To fail to worship the (right) king is to be in rebellion against that king.
To fail to believe in Jesus is to commit the crime of rebelling against God himself -- a very serious crime, deserving of eternal punishment (either suffered yourself, or by a scapegoat).
This is the "logic" of the immorality of disbelief. Actually, disbelief is cast as "belief in the wrong God -- to disbelieve Jesus is to believe and worship Satan, even if you mean to worship God.
>Jesus died because he stood up for God against the cruel Roman oppression of his people. He stood up against those who aided and assisted the Romans against the Jewish People. He was a true fiery Jewish Prophet of God who died for his people whom he loved best.
As far as I understand, the Romans didn't care about Jesus, and the Jews are fully responsible for his death. Pontius Pilate found Jesus innocent. The Jewish leaders chose Jesus rather than the criminal for crucifixion.
>Paul turned him into the Christ of Gentile mythology. There is a degree of truth in that since Jesus is the highest Jewish Prophet and thus the highest authority upon the Earth.For man will be judged by Moses, the Prophets of Israel and Jesus.
The Road to Eleusis is available online. It's about psychedelics and the
Greek Mysteries.
http://www.calyx.net/~schaffer/lsd/eleucont.html
The Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece involved the Kykeon beverage, which Hofmann argued and demonstrated was probably a lysergic acid amide, produced in ancient Greece by an extraction of the ergot fungus.
>In Verona, Italy, I met with Martino Mardersteig, printer of some of the finest books in the world, including those of Gordon Wasson. I am pleased to announce that Signore Mardersteig will gladly produce another edition of The Road To Eleusis for the Albert Hofmann Foundation, complete with an addendum by Albert Hoffmann: On the Relevance of the Eleusinian Mysteries For Today's World.
>The Road to Eleusis, by Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Rudy Ruck, is an argument that the sacred kykeon of the Eleusinian Mysteries was derived from ergot, the fungus which grows on grain that contain lysergic acid amides, very similar to lysergic acid. The book has been out of print for about fifteen years and never got the attention it deserved when it was in print. Essentially it makes the point that the central religious event for two thousand plus years of ancient Greek civilization was an entheogen initiation. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and other seminal philosophers were all initiates.
>A secret religion existed for 2,000 years in Greece (until the Christians displaced it around 400 AD). The initiation was open to anyone who spoke Greek. Various greek prominant figures attended the rituals. After 6 month long preparatory rituals, members walked to Eleusius whereupon they underwent secret rituals. The rituals remained secret until the 1970's.
>Wasson, an ethnomycological scholar and former banker (and the first white to trip on shrooms with the mexican indians) proposed the following explanation of the Eleusian mysteries to Hoffman, an ergot-alkaloid expert chemist, and Ruck, a greek scholar:
>It was a crime to use Kykeon outside the rituals, but some people did at private gatherings.
>The Secret of the ritual involved the personal visions induced by drinking the grain decoction administered to the initiates. The domestication of grains permitted the development of greek civilization; it also brought ergot fungus (of St. Anthony's fire infamy).
>Wasson provides some background on the use of mushrooms and grains and their role in the culture; Hofmann on the psychoactivity of ergot strains; and Ruck on the mythological and cultural backround of the sect.
>Hofmann dosed himself with large (ergot-derived) doses of obstetric compounds to assay their hallucinogenic potential, and found them to possess such activity. The Eleusian temple site still remains, but there is no room to view theatric performances, just rows of tripping initiates, further supporting their argument.
The culture that lead to the Western industrial one evidently had psychedelic rites.
Lysergic acid is the most perfect key for metaprogramming the mind.
It enabled my discovery of The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence. Our human self-control cybernetics logic is not all it's cracked up to be. Free will is largely a hoax, and the Greeks were correct: apprehending total eternal Fate is the most far out thing. _The Road to Eleusis_ is about to be reprinted and available in the bookstores. It's about how the Greeks blew their minds. (I don't know if those famous research chemists know this, but Tragedy is about Fate, not Oedipal sex. Tragedy and the Eleusian mysteries are related in that they apprehend the illusory nature of homuncular self-steering.)
>This coming spring, May 6-8 1996, the University of Oregon will host an
international conference on ethics after the Holocaust, featuring the world's
leading thinkers on this topic. The conference will focus on the broader
questions raised by the Holocaust--about the nature of good and evil, the
possibilities of human goodness, and the conditions of resistance to hatred and
genocide; it will also focus on some of the leading writers associated with
post-Holocaust philosophy.
Ayn Rand claims that philosophy can and should be accessible, because philosophy exists because of people's real, practical needs. She claims that Weimar culture was caused by a certain philosophy, and that collectivism and Nazism are the necessary outcomes of Kant's philosophy of altruism (deny your own needs, live for others). For her, philosophy is urgent; I suppose this is generally true for activist politically-oriented philosophers, but most professional philosophers are elitist and seem to want to be the only ones to be authorized to control philosophy.
Leonard Peikoff's gripping book _The Ominous Parallels_, is about the similarity of Weimar culture and contemporary American culture. After his discussions about the bizzare focus on pure anti-reasoning dominance and submission in the camps, I am sure that the psychology of dominance and submission has a power so strong that it is religious. This connection is made in Erich Fromm's _Escape from Freedom_.
I hope this conference is not empty moralizing. "People really, really should be nice to each other." This attitude would fail to address the deep psychological potential needs for dominance and submission. The dynamics of power and will, and the reversable dynamic of sadism and masochism, are related issues that must be addressed.
I read an interesting book that I can recommend.
The New Satanists
by Linda Blood
1994
(She claims that's her actual married name.)
This book tells the similarities (and differences) between Satanism - as it's actually practiced - and Nazism. Both of them are asymetrical systems of conduct in that they give an in-crowd full power over other people. This power is accessed through self-cancellation and self-transgression of one's own deepest moral constraints.
I read another excellent book, about Nazism and how Kant's ethical system led into the death camps. It's truly an explanation of the camps.
The Ominous Parallels [between Wiemar Republic 1920s and contemporary
American culture]
by Leonard Peikoff
1982
The Ayn Rand library. This is surely the most gripping book in that series.
Based on comparing the distorted psychology of the transcendence/transgression of self-will in these two books, I have concluded that it makes a great deal of sense that the trans-ethical principles of Satanism would have to lead to ingenuities of transgression, straining at the very limits of them. Also, I now see the obvious way that pagan sex rites go hand in hand with child sacrifice. The problem with having sex is that it makes babies. But what to do with all these unwanted babies? The pagans have a modest solution to the sacred byproduct of sex, a solution that makes good sense.
Also I have been enlightened about slavery. Until recently, there were slaves everywhere. Slavery was the norm. A main function of slaves was sex.
All these "preposterous" accusations against Satanists are more than merely reasonable -- actually, the activities of humanity across history show Satanism to be just more of the usual form of rulership and human conduct. Studying history takes a strong stomach, if you read the uncut version. Those who find ritual cannibalism, child sacrfice, sexual slavery, and torture to be unbelievable are hopelessly trapped in a little middle-class bubble of conventional horizons. This are just business as usual, under the government of the ruler of this fallen world.
>Postmodernism = Facism
>The death of the individual can be interpreted in no other way.
There's 'death of the individual' in one sense, and in another. Mystic ego death (and ego transcendence) can preserve political freedom.
When reading Leonard Peikoff's _The Ominous Parallels_ about the similarity of Weimar culture and contemporary American culture, what was disturbing is that since the book was written in 1982, postmodernism has hit America, and the character of postmodernism is very similar to Peikoff's portrayal of Weimar culture. The book argues that Kantian philosophy of altruism (reject oneself, live for others) is anti-individualist and pro-collectivist, and thus Kant is the root of Nazism. Peikoff says that Americans are too individualistic and confident to succumb to this.
>Saying everything is "connected" does not mean "everything causes everything". From the popular non-technical explanations I've read, non-locality in modern physics implies that there are non-causal connections between events.
I have an existential theory of the function of the muddleheadedness of Christianity. I know that there are many apocrypha and sources and versions, telling conflicting stories as far as their emphasis. I think that Christianity is a muddled mess that, because it is so muddled, gives us more freedom, more fear, more dilemmas, more contradictions... and makes us more of autonomous, independent agents, who consciously are forced to choose the moral systems guiding us. This makes us experience life as free, sovereign agents. Like Paul, I am interested in the meaning of the crucifixion, but I reach some different, existential conclusions about a loving God giving us the gift of the feeling of separateness and freedom, though He, or Fate, is omnipotent and the future is predecided.
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