Spirituality Guide

By: Seeker
So by the time I grew old enough to leave home, I was pretty much done with the classic story of Christian Religion. What the institution had done across the centuries, the way it lied, manipulated, persecuted and tortured, the wars, pillaging and genocides more than cancelled out the good done by individuals who honestly believed and acted on the precepts of their faith.

Imagine if the Library at Alexandria was still around? How about if all the knowledge of the Mayan people, the Inca, the Native North Americans and many others had not been destroyed and the people wiped out because ‘God loves them’? How far forward would we be advanced if the Dark Ages had never happened?

For a time I was probably atheist in my views, preferring to see the whole God-problem as the sick creation of sick minds, needing to be purged from the race so we could, as a race, mature past the level of hiding under beds from the hobgoblins. But slowly, things changed for me.

Science is a good way to examine the physical world. The way things work in the three dimensions respond, mostly, quite well to the ideal of Science. Recently, with Relativity and Quantum theory, as well as the puzzling aspects of Cosmology, this has changed, but even before that, I had noticed things about the world for which Science was either reticent about explanations or it refused to accept there was a problem.

So my views changed. I came to realize that just because Man’s expression of basic Truth is flawed, it doesn’t mean that there is no Basic Truth. One of the things I like to put in signatures on forums I visit is…
‘Don’t doubt there is Truth, just doubt that you have it!’

By: Seeker
One story the pastor agreed with was the creation in Genesis chapters one and two. Man seems to be created twice. In chapter one, on day six, God creates Man and gives him dominion over the ‘fish of the sea, animals of the land and birds of the air.’ Then on day seven, God rests and decides to create Man – this time there is mention of the dust of the ground being used in the creation as God makes Adam. Adam is handed, in addition to ‘fish of the sea, animals of the land and birds of the air,’ dominion over plants.

This sounded to me very much like the move from Hunter-Gatherer to Farmer and incidentally explains, with two separate creations, just where Cain went for his wife.

Moses was a strange one. This guy does magic, takes his people out across the desert and wanders, apparently with like a million people, across the sands for forty years. This raises all kinds of questions about just what kind of desert had enough food and water to supply all those people. Even as a teen, my mind boggled at the plumbing requirements of a million people. In forty years they would leave such a layer of sewage across the desert that those downwind would STILL be talking about it.

So, never mind Samson whose hair made him strong, or the various prophets who did miraculous things that the Church would now label as satanic, there is enough in the accepted mainstream parts of the bible story to boggle the mind. At the least, there should be questions asked of those who would be our intermediary with God.

By: Seeker
There’s more in the Bible that bears a closer scrutiny. Put up your hands if you’ve heard of the Nephilim… Apparently, before the flood, some beings called the ‘Sons of God’ found human females to be rather attractive and they came to earth and had kids with them. These kids were ‘Giants’ who, it seems, were not quite what one would expect of the progeny of ‘Sons of God.’ Supposedly, the Flood of Noah took them out, leaving only the sons and daughters of Man.

Now, pardon me for asking, but if there is only one God, who the heck are these ‘Sons of God’ and just what was going on that their children got to be wiped out like that? If they weren’t meant to be on Earth spoiling the Creation, why wouldn’t God just say ‘No!’ and stop them?

This brings to mind the whole Lucifer story. Here’s a guy, second (apparently) only to the Lord God of All, who is described as the brightest and fairest in God’s Creation… and yet he is so stupid, he thinks he can somehow remove the Originator of All and take his place. I mean… come on people! Either he wasn’t very bright at all, (which would make all the other angels a pretty dim-witted bunch) or we are being told fibs.

Also, if God is so all-powerful, how is it that Lucifer gets to go play with the Creation, plotting and scheming to throw it all off track? Why would the One God, the Omnipotent, not be able to better care for his Creation than to let his arch-enemy get a free run at them all for thousands of years?

Even as a kid of eleven, I thought this sounded more like one of those palace revolutions I was reading about in the classic myths. Advisors or nobles only revolt if they think they have a chance, even in fallible Earth socities. If things are as we are being told, Lucifer had literally no chance of supplanting God and he would have to be certifiably moronic to attempt it.

By: Seeker
A part of my early problems with the orthodox story had to do with how God behaved. To be frank, he seemed schizophrenic at the best of times. At other times he was flat out psychotic.

Note I am not saying your particular God is that way, just that the biblical descriptions of what went on portray him as such. We all know (or should) from News reports how often the person being talked about is not at all like the way the media describe them.

But a God who creates people whom he KNOWS will be tempted by a commandment to not do something, and then places that something within reach is sadistic. If God knows All, why didn’t he show up when the serpent was persuading them and argue the defence side of things? How fair is it to set things up so the humans will not only have immense curiosity about the forbidden thing, but they then have to withstand the persuasions of someone who, from other stories, could apparently fool even God?

To then punish them for failing the test, with no chance to re-sit the exam is bad enough, but to go on to punish every single human ever to be born for the same mistake is psychotic beyond any definition we humans might have.

Now personally, I cannot believe in such a God, so early on I decided either there is not a God or the stories are wrong. ‘Not a God’ opens a whole other can of worms about origins and some of the strangenesses that exist in our world, and even Occam says that the path to choose is that the stories are simply incorrect.

By: Seeker
Please note: The What is Religion? Thread is not finished and will continue. This is just a byway to wander down for a little while.

Some time back, while browsing across the internet, I came across an interesting document. Before I describe it I will pass along a bit of my history.

I grew up within a family tied into a Pentecostal religion. For those who don’t know the term it refers to a group of (usually) fundamentalist churches which place a priority on the Feast of Pentecost after the Ascension of the Christ, when the Holy Spirit came down onto the crowd and filled them with the gift of tongues.

In this particular iteration, we were exhorted from the pulpit to take the bible seriously, to see it as a literal book, not one requiring interpretation nor explanation. Of course we would then get weekly (or more often) explanations of what it all meant but that apparently escaped most parishioners.

However, in the subsequent reading I did of the King James Bible, I became very curious about things I read that seemed at odds with both the scientific and historic worlds I was learning about at school AND the stories being promulgated from the lectern at the front of the church.
There are some rather interesting stories in the Bible. Particularly if one thinks about things a little and realizes that people have always been people. Just because those who lived 3,000 years back didn’t have a Chevvy doesn’t mean they didn’t have wants and needs. So when a person jumps up on a rock and starts telling of weird and wonderful things, there’s probably always been a bunch of them who snort and back away slowly, not wanting to make eye contact.

Big ‘R’ Religion is about control, about bringing a mass of people into a system whereby the few at the top can benefit from the programming of the masses. Pyramid schemes have been banned in a lot of countries and for good reason. Unless you are in the top couple of rungs of the pyramid, they are a rip-off of all those ‘faithful’ in the lower levels.

Big ‘R’ Religion is about using an intermediary to stand between a soul and its own path, to interrupt the journey forward, the gaining and application of personal views and knowledge and to use authority to forcefeed the population with ideas that have less to do with salvation and more to do with personal greed.

Please note that I am very definitely NOT condemning here everyone involved in those institutions. There are wonderful people in all areas of life who give all they have to try to make this world a better place. But the institution and those shadowy figures at the top of the tree are not those wonderful people. At some point they have sold out whatever personal belief they might have had in the Religion and they have moved soley into personal aggrandizement as a goal.

Little ‘r’ religion is about growth, about developing as a being and finding ways to improve the world for all around us. It brings techniques for doing those things we need to do for us to achieve immortality and greatness, and it can pass along knowledge from the past.

And so we now have a situation where the very institutions set up to help us through the times of darkness have been corrupted and turned from their purpose and now exist solely to provide for their own existence. Like a cancer turns the factories in the cell aside from their original tasks, something has turned the major Religions aside from their original purpose.

If we look back in history we can see the pattern – over and again the major dominant religion will spawn a new and vibrant expression of the basic purpose. The new way grows apace, until after a time, it too gets locked into tradition, starts to work solely to ensure its own survival and we see a new offshoot begin. Always the new offshoots claim to be returning to the original message, to be more true to the first purpose than the hidebound monolith the previous reformed group has become.

So ‘What is Religion?’ is perhaps best answered by changing the question into – What is religion and how does it differ from Religion?

Small ‘r’ religion is a system for passing along knowledge that is not a part of the mundane physical world. In some cases it has been information about a God or Gods, (and just who they are or were is a whole new question) but in most it has been about how to achieve enlightened status. How to achieve immortality is another theme that runs through the ideologies, and while it has been redefined in our ‘modern’ times to mean after we get to heaven, it seems clear in the myths from the past that they were a little more preoccupied with immortal status within this Universe.

While religions may have started with the best of intentions, it was seldom long before some less scrupulous leader would see the value in being able to provide the very specific goal to which the techniques being used would lead the congregation. And so, the message gets corrupted.

The originating messiah or seer, prophet or sage, will bring the message that, by doing ‘X’ a soul can find their own path to enlightenment or salvation. It is almost unknown for the originator to actually define the end point of the soul journey beyond giving it a name. Nirvana, Heaven, the Duat, Arulu – all these are names for wonderful places to be achieved when the soul progresses beyond its current limits. Note they are NOT the goal itself – in the original message, the goal is to grow and learn, to become enlightened with a greater understanding of both Self and Life.

But then the message changes. No longer is it a personal journey between Self and Godhood, instead it becomes something that you need an intermediary for, something that cannot be easily attained unless there is someone with knowledge and experience to interpret and explain.

And Heaven, Nirvana or Valhalla becomes the goal. No more do you need to do the hard tasks of learning, adjusting and changing the beingness within – all you need do is follow what the master says and all will come to you without trial. Subtly, without sparking thought or resistance, the goal has been altered and the path turned aside.

And don’t forget of course, those taking on the onerous task of helping one find one’s way to the wonderful paradise need to be paid. I remain unsure just why those in communication with such a powerful entity as the God of All would need to be supplied regularly with the dirty stuff they tell us is corrupting our souls, but so goes Religion.

‘Ask and you shall receive’ is a common theme across the ages – in The Secret they express it a little more clearly, saying that what we get is what we see as being real or a part of our lives. So if all we see is violence and rage, depravity and the use and abuse of people by others, if all we know comes from greed and a lack of self-awareness, how can the average person find a world of wonder, a place filled with hope and the possibility of greatness?

Religion in its purest form attempts to address these issues by showing us a way to find a better place, to give us the information and techniques we need to achieve the greatness within us. But there is the problem that the same techniques used to bring us up out of darkness and into Light can also be used to bring us to other places.

During a long ago war in Korea, the Chinese interrogators used what came to be known as ‘The Chinese Water Torture’ to break down their captives. This involves isolating the victim, as far as possible, from external stimuli (blocking ears, blindfold, wrapping them in soft cloth etc.) and then dripping water onto their foreheads. Eventually this would ‘drive them mad’ and disorient them to the point where they would be unable to withhold information needed by the interrogators.

The problem here is the same technique, or very similar, can be used to ‘drive them sane’ – it seems to depend on what the victim thinks it will do to them. Many people are into trying the isolation path to self-improvement, using repetition within an isolated environment to take them through trauma and unsanity so they can emerge as better human beings.

TV and the increasing invasion of the ‘real world’ is reducing the time a child can spend developing imagination, in finding their creativity while simultaneously force-feeding them models of behavior that would seem inappropriate for the young.

Six year olds should not be worrying over whether their figure is of a sort to attract a boy or girl friend. Sex is something that comes along as the body fires up for the passage into adult status, yet we constantly have adult sexual imagery and plotlines being fed to those who have yet to develop the equipment needed to express such things.

Children very quickly move away from the fantasy worlds of children’s programs and from an early age are exposed to adult programming. Sex and violence are common themes during times children are awake and watching.
Society makes noises about how we condemn the view of women as sex objects, (whatever they are) yet music videos show and do everything except naked copulation in front of young eyes. How many people bar their kids from watching music shows?

So we reach a situation where even the children no longer have the ‘eyes of a child’ through which to perceive the wonders of our Universe. This leads to a darker view of the world around, to seeing an environment where there is little wonder and where the darker side of human nature is the paramount expression of life.

Explorations into the psyche, the world as expressed through Quantum probability, and the recent popular movie ‘The Secret’ all suggest there is much to be learned from what the religions and sages have told us about how things come to us.

Across time the sages have told us that to move beyond this world, we need to view through the eyes of a child. That we need to accept that we are part of something beyond the mundane and develop a sense of wonder about the universe.

In our modern world, everything we are taught disagrees with the concept that there may be something beyond the purely physical world. Our children are no longer getting the lengthy ‘magical’ time to develop a sense of wonder. We have them ‘growing up’ at a very early age while simultaneously denying them the participation they need to round out as human beings.

What do I mean? Over the years I have lost track of the numbers of people I know or of whom I have heard who are having trouble finding the time to get everything done. Both parents are working, usually full time jobs, and there is all the work at home to do. Cooking, cleaning, sometimes looking after the younger children… and yet in none of those families are the children given chores. Somehow Mum and Dad cope, getting in a maid, cleaner or babysitter to help. And the children do nothing.

By giving our kids work to do around the house and family, we allow them to participate and belong to the family. They develop the inner knowledge that things don’t come for free and they learn skills that will help them out later in life. The lessening of tasks expected of parents gives them more time, helps them find resilience and provides a better environment in which the children can grow.

There are a number of stories about the Fall from a spiritual state. In some, it is the fall which brought us to this earth, to this three dimensional realm and the intimate contact with matter. For others, we were already here, living in this solid universe but with a much higher level of spiritual awareness. And there are a lot of stories in between or partaking of both parts of these two views.

So almost anywhere we look, we have this idea that our entire history has been at a lower level than the earlier ages. And when we look around at the monuments left behind, both above and below current water level, we have to wonder just how much truth there might be in the myths.

Yet this entire idea runs counter to that we see in the world of academics and historians. There it is firmly established that our civilization is the culmination of a steady progression upwards from cave to rockets. To suggest that, in the past, there may have been equal or even superior societies brings derision and condemnation.
To suggest that our material world may not be the best way for people to live, or that owning ‘things’ will not make us happier is tantamount to heresy.

Religions, all religions of which I have even a little knowledge, base their ideology, their philosophy and their creeds in the idea that there is a better place, or a better state of being to which we can aspire. And yet one way to view our history is as a steady descent into less happiness as we fixate on the material things, as we learn to describe our contentment on the basis of what we own rather than who we are or might become.

In our troubled world, one has to be careful of doing the following, but next time you see children playing, take the time to watch them. Or if you still remember, think back to the world you lived in as a child. There is a magic to the world of a child, a wide-eyed acceptance of things that we later learn ‘aren’t real’ and sometimes, we have to unlearn those lessons later on so we can live better lives.

In Zep Tepi, the ‘First Time’ it was a time of those who were later considered Gods. Osiris, Isis, Thoth and others were of this time. Osiris and Isis ruled for thousands of years.

Before scoffing at this idea, remember that in the Bible, many of the older stories talk of those who lived hundreds of years. Noah was supposed to be six hundred when he began the Ark, Methuselah lived for more than nine hundred years. There are a number of myths that tell of the time before the Flood as a time when men lived much longer lives.

Flood myths come from all around the world – a partial list is… | Sumerian | Babylonian | Hebrew | Australian | Chaldean | Zoroastrian | Hindu | Greco-Roman | Jicarilla | Mayan | Aztec | Squamish | Skagit | Mandingo | “People of Mount Jefferson” | Yakima | Cado | Chippewa | Navaho | Hopi | Pima | Andaman | Huarochiri | | Miao/Yao | Hawaiian | Batak | Scandinavian | Celtic | Yoruba | Kabadi | Gunwinggu | Wiranggu | Palau Isles | Tahitian | Samoan | Quillayute | Nizqualli | Kamu | Shasta | Cheyenne | Lakota | Tsetsaut | Papago | Toltec | Huichol | Malorotare | Yanomamo | Yamana | Yuma |

When Zep Tepi came to an end, there was a period, again of thousands of years, when a council of sages ruled, and this council finally ushered in the rule of the Pharaohs that Egyptologists state as being the beginning of Egyptian history.

Such things seem fantastic to our ‘worldly-wise’ ways, and yet millions of people around the world happily accept the existence of an invisible Creator who performed miracles and signs, with no more evidence than that the Church tells them it is true.

With all this talk of a Fall of Man, there is a corresponding tale of devastation and destruction, as Flood and Deluge wiped out the Golden Age. Yet behind all the physical world mayhem, there is another Fall talked about.

When looking at the spiritual side of Man, which after all is what this blog is about, there is also the Fall of our spiritual life – in biblical terms, the Fall from Grace. This is when we supposedly ‘fell’ from a state of spiritual awareness and entered into the materialistic world within which, we now are certain, all life is meant to be lived.

More famously the Mayan knowledge, what is left after the wanton desecration by the Spanish church, tells us exactly when this is supposed to occur – in their timeline, and they were fixated on time and calculating it, the end of the current ‘Sun’ or Age is December 21st, 2012AD. Of course, they didn’t write it in terms of our calendar, but that is what it translates to.

On the sub-continent, the Rig Veda and other (now written) myths or histories tell of Vishnu, Kali, Shiva and others who lived in a time of glories, far above the current state of the world, who flew in vehicles and held a war with what seems like particle beam weapons and atomic bombs.

In the Veda histories, the world goes through Ages or Yugas, with each Yuga holding a different character or emphasis. Currently we are supposed to be approaching the end of the Kai Yuga, the age of “strife, discord, quarrel or contention”. The Kali Yuga is the Age of Iron, the most solid of the Ages, and supposed to be a time of materiality, of fixation in greed and base desire, leading to conflict and wars. Note that Kali Yuga does not refer to the Goddess Kali – it comes from a different word.

In Egypt, there are the King Lists, one of the main ones being that of Manetho, which trace the Pharaonic lineage back to Menes, (also Meni or Narmer) circa 3100BC. These King lists are what Egyptologists use to provide us with the lineage of Egyptian Pharaohs.

What they don’t often mention is the Egyptians recorded, as basic true history, the story of a past that stretches back a long way before the pharaohs started their long rule.

Imagine the early times, the millennia before the cataclysmic ending of the last Ice Age. The stories that come down to us across the ages vary depending on who tells the story. The names are different with each history. The events that led to things coming to pass as they did are not the same.

Yet in all the stories, there are strong similarities. There was a civilization, a Golden Time, where Man was at peace and things prospered. Then, in one form or another, Man brought about a Fall. The race fell from the heights it had achieved and was brought low by further cataclysm, mostly Flood and Deluge but sometimes war as well.

From the Sumerian tales of the jealousies between brothers Enlil and Enki where the Annunaki created Man from a base primate to work their mines, to the Biblical Flood, there is a common theme of internal troubles with the spirituality of Man, followed by a cleansing through flood. The troubles seem to describe such things as mighty weapons and bombs that sound very much like atomic bombs.

In the Americas, the stories begin after the Flood, when strangers come to the shore, in mysterious boats, bringing strange knowledge that leads the race involved into civilization. Viracocha and Quetzacoatl brought the early peoples into a peaceful existence, codified laws and passed along a way of life devoted to knowledge. Then they left.

Some of the native tribes hold that they aren’t from here originally. The Hopi, the Aztecs and others tell how they came to this world from another place. For the Hopi it was through a hole, one they passed through from the previous age into this world, and they believe this world is about to end also.