Spirituality Guide

There’s a problem with Hell. No, it isn’t about how bad it is, nor about how it is the home of Satan nor even how all us bad boys and girls are going there.

The problem with Hell is that, by the bible in its original form, it simply doesn’t exist!

Hell is a creation of the church. In the bible there are numerous places where, in the interpreted and re-written version, Hell is mentioned, but it turns out to be faked. The original words used do NOT mean what the Christian world has come to think of as Hell. About the worst version means the place the body goes when we die. Look it up; there are numerous sites online that will go through the various words and their real meanings.

Hell is a punishment for all the bad people who don’t toe the line as scratched in the ground by the church. Hell is the big stick for those who need the guilt goad, for those who might inadvertently wonder about the con-job that is Original Sin. The ‘if you don’t do as you are told you will suffer forever for your sins’ guilt whip is reinforced by making sex an evil thing – everyone thinks about sex, it is a natural impulse to look at a member of the opposite sex and wonder. So they make it evil and by pushing the message into us while we are very young they ensure that, just as we start to move out into the world and find out who we are, we feel the pangs of guilt which brings the fear of Hell and eternal damnation.

And right there is the church, ready to hear confession or pray for your forgiveness so you get your shot at Heaven.

From the texts of old, the ones that DIDN’T get manhandled by those with an agenda, and from the world of the Gnostics, it is clear that, not long after the time of the Christ, there was a Church of James, the brother of Jesus. This church wasn’t the sort that required large buildings or authoritative messages from ‘superior’ ministers.

The Council of Nicaea comes into this. Constantine, Emperor of the Roman Empire remnant, had a problem. As we see even today, the Christians were intolerant of any other belief. It was bad enough that the mores of the Empire were being ignored by Christians berating anyone who wouldn’t accept their God as the one and only, they were even fighting among themselves as to whose version of God and which version of how to be a Christian was right. Any who weren’t of precisely the beliefs of the one speaking were heathen, sinners and non-believing scum who needed to convert or die.

Constantine got everyone together and hammered out an agreement that would be enforced by the Empire. It ratified the Pauline concept of the Church and selected books for the new bible that confirmed the Christ as the Son of God rather than as a Man. The Christ told us we could do as He did, that we could grow from who we are and even exceed His works, but making Him the miracle Son of God removed that from us and legitimized the Church as the guardian of our souls.

From that moment on, the church ruled. Any who disagreed were excommunicated, thus losing their spiritual future and being condemned into a life away from the Light.

Not long after that, the church invented Hell.

The biggest wrong of the modern churches, the most galring way in which it is obvious they are NOT the inheritors of the teachings of the Christ, is something read out in every Christian church of which I’ve heard. The message of the Christ is that salvation is personal. It is a covenant or relationship between a person and God the Father.

It is very clear in the bible that the only help a person needs in getting close to God is the Holy Spirit. There is no mention in the message from the Christ of anyone being a teacher of groups of people, of anyone needing to listen on God’s behalf to the sins we wish to confess, or of any man being the one to decide what punishment we deserve for our ‘sins.’

In fact, the Christ makes it quite clear there is no penance or need for recompense for sin – all we need do is ask the Father to forgive us and it is done.

So what has happened that these things are seen to be part of the normal way of doing things? While the confession/penance idea might be the province of the Catholic churches, the intercession of an oversight of some kind is common to all the Christian churches.

How did it come about that a personal relationship between human and God got so rapidly entangled in authoritarian oversight and expert interpretation of things that were meant to be personal to each person? Why is it accepted by people all over the world that some fallible human can tell them what to do and how to think about their personal relationship with the Sublime?

Did he really exist? Again the issue is the bible. It is the only real testimony to the existence of a man who might have been a visitation of God. But the bible has reliability issues.

Some claim Josephus mentions the Christ and so is an independent confirmation. A problem here is the writings of Josephus were interpreted by exactly the same people who translated the bible several times. Back in the centuries after Christ, most people could not read. They certainly couldn’t read the Hebrew or Greek of the Old and New Testaments if they didn’t live in either of those places.

The folk who did the record keeping, the writing and copying, and the translating were exactly those who had very good reason to maintain the version of the bible they had inherited after the Council of Nicaea and also an overwhelming purpose in adding a touch here and there to Josephus to ensure an ‘independent’ confirmation of someone mentioned nowhere else.

I’ve also read a pretty solid theory that Josephus was in reality Saul of Tarsus; now there is a character who needs careful examination. The founder of the modern version of Christianity, the tax collector who originally persecuted the Christians suddenly became the champion of them, yet his conversion isn’t witnessed by anyone, his moment on the road to Damascus is evidenced only by his own story.

The Pauline Church was the model on which the Roman Church was built, but in the early days, as we’ve since found out, there were other models and those models seem to follow the original teachings of the Christ far more closely

Given the uncertainties of the writings that have come down to us, it is unfortunately necessary to examine whether there was ever a Christ. One of the problems we have is the main text, the bible, is not only full of allegory, metaphor and parable, it is quite likely written from a mystical point of view, it has obviously borrowed heavily from a variety of other religions, creeds and myths, and in recent times (the last 2000 years or so) it has been picked over, altered, translated and interpreted until it is likely the Christ would never recognize most of it as anything to do with his message.

Is it factual? Well if it is, Christians and most others have some startling facts to absorb. Men and women from the Old Testament lived extraordinary lives. Many pre-Flood lived for hundreds of years; Methuselah lived till nine hundred and sixty-nine years, Noah began to build the Ark when he was six hundred and even after the flood, Abraham’s wife fell pregnant at ninety.

And speaking of pre-Flood, we have the strange story of the Nephilim – beings who were the progeny of human females and (fallen?) Sons of God who found our women attractive enough to come mate with them. Their children were supposedly giants and men of might who rampaged at will through the world pre-Noah.

The story of the flood itself seems to be unsubstantiated if we accept the biblical story. At the time we can work out for the bible’s version there is no evidence of a huge Flood. There is, however, considerable evidence for a Flood that might even have been truly worldwide set in a time thousands of years earlier – in fact there may have been several instances.

This is a vexing question for most people who have an interest. The problem is, there is no solid evidence of such a person. The bible has no direct writings of the Christ, no books, nothing we can point to and say ‘He said that’ – all we have is 2nd hand reports of things he may have said. In fact, all we really have is 3rd or 4th hand hearsay.

You see, the problem is, until recently when some ancient texts were found, the only evidence of the New Testament was to be found in texts that were copies of texts written well after the time of the Christ. Even in our corrupt system, it is difficult to get people to accept hearsay evidence, yet for some reason the established churches demand we accept not only hearsay as being true, but that it is the unchanged and unchallengeable word of God.

Adding to this is issue that the recent texts, from both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi suggest that our books as found in the bible are, to say the least, a limited selection of those available back when the bible was put together. And unfortunately for the established churches, these sources are far more authoritative than the bible – they have been in situ for almost all the two thousand years, they have not been translated and preferentially chosen to further control of an empire, and at least some of them appear to have been written by direct participants of the time.

Sadly, the modern version of Christianity is as little able to adjust to new information as were the times when any slight differences brought Inquisition, torture and death.

There’re more things to wonder about when we begin to examine reality. One is a BIG one.

Science tells us that inside atoms are protons, neutrons and electrons. Inside them are quarks. But some oddities in physics have brought forth a new theory to explain some odd goings on. String Theory tells us that at base of everything are strings, so small that an atom compared to the Earth is a far closer match than a string compared to an atom.

Strings are tiny bits of… we are not sure what, but the best of theory says that for at least part of the time, they are somewhere else. They vibrate in and out of our reality. Strings make up everything we experience, yet for part of the time they are just not here.

So with all those things pointing at a reality a bit different from that being taught in schools, we have to wonder what is really Real.

At the moment it would seem only one thing can be relied on. With the universe a hologram, with memories being part of a mental hologram we call Consciousness and Mind, with the evidence that there is nothing at all that inside the smallest things we can conceive of, it would seem that the only real thing is us.

Strange that after all these years, after brilliant men have worked their minds for decades in study and discovery, we find ourselves heading back towards the idea that only Life has meaning, that ‘All the World’s a Stage’ or that lives are played in the Cave as Shadows on a Wall with the real players back off behind us.

If all this speculation is right, being worried about the world around us if like being worried if you’re behaving right in a dream you had last night. If the world around us is a creation of ours, if how we see it can change what we experience, then it would seem it is what is in us that matters.

To review briefly some of the ideas behind all this speculation – from Science we have the theory that we are inside a hologram. When I first heard about holograms, almost nobody knew what they are, but since Princess Leia’s message to Luke as a hologram from R2D2 and Neo’s Matrix worlds, most people now have some idea of what one is.

Relativity tells us that the frame or location of the observer is important – where the observer is and what he is doing can alter what he sees and when.

Quantum Theory tells us that everything is random jiggles of a quantum foam and the only apparent causation for a reality is Consciousness – in other words it is the perception of the quantum state that causes it to collapse into entanglement – to become real, or perhaps just to Become!

Brains are not where it is at. We can probe and scan all we like, but there’s some steps missing in the idea that brains are US. One you might want to ask is, where are the memories stored? When they talk memories with brains, they show us where particular types of memories are processed, they show us what parts trigger when certain associations are made, but what they don’t show us (because they can’t) is where the bytes of memory storage are actually held.

I’m not sure why but it seems to be a question not being asked.

Currently we are hampered not just by the way things are being run, which removes effectiveness from the very people who are the mainstay of the society, but those people are also being crippled from childhood by an education system designed to ensure they never learn to think properly and always find authority more important than individuality. Those who break the mould normally find the people around them work to bring them back to the normal level – in my opinion because the example of someone not conforming raises uncomfortable subconscious thoughts about why one isn’t also throwing off the chains.

It can be hard to break the chains of normalcy, particularly when those in whom we confide put us down for trying, or when those we love or trust will not or cannot back us in our path. Sometimes I think the road is hard, not through any particular quality of the road, not because we have to walk it all alone as the Christ and all the real sages have said, but because those we know are standing by the side of it, mocking and throwing clods of dirt at us until we turn aside and return to the dullness of the daily grind.

There’re times I think it takes more courage to be able to tell those around you that you aren’t going to keep on with the role they have you slotted into, that you are finding a new pathway through life, than it does to actually start the new life itself. When we are ready to start our new life, when things have clarified enough to goad us into new directions, the steps can seem natural – finding the guts to tell a loved one you aren’t going to keep on with something they expect isn’t something we want to do to someone we love or care about.

In a thread on a forum, a discussion started over whether people liked the world or not. One person was talking about how things aren’t good for us, we have little or no control and hardly anyone has a decent life. Another responded by saying most people were content with their life, living day by day and making their way.

For me the question would be more whether they accept the world with its faults or have they no alternatives? Seems to me when I talk to people (I did bar work for a decade) about the world they all have complaints as you say, but they also have no way to change anything. Some surprising people think the election system is a fraud, that banks should be neutralised somehow, or that corporations are the true rulers of our world, but when you ask how we can go about changing it they pick up their drinks, shrug their shoulders and turn back to the cricket.

The conversation included reference to Zeitgeist, a movie detailing the world around us with a view of religion and banks that feeds directly into the theory of how there’s those who control our lives, who sit above the top of all the various organizations and manipulate the world so as to increase and hold power.

I don’t think the problem is getting people to realise there’s something smelly in our pig pen, although films such as Zeitgeist help detail the aroma, it is finding air freshener that we can all use. Rather than detailing in ever more complexity how many ways the shite stinks, we need to be working on ways to grow a new world from it, one in which people get to learn and live, if not happily, at least with some expectation they might be able to influence the path of their own lives.

To illustrate the point - you’re familiar with the appearance of the Milky Way, correct? Yet here… …you will find views of it which look radically different from what you see in the sky - simply because the ‘collector’ isn’t being limited to the tiny amount your eye can see - change the frequency and the picture is entirely different.

It isn’t hard to imagine that there may be a lot of our cosmos we don’t perceive simply because we don’t know how to look for it. Instruments can assist us but instruments are also a part of the hologram like our bodies and so only report what is IN the hologram, leaving aside the limitations we may be building into them because of our own perceptive deficiencies.

So if the Milky Way can look so radically different simply by altering what we see, is it so hard to accept that maybe the universe itself might also seem different at different frequencies? Or one step further, that Reality might be different if we could find some other way to view it?

The mystics tell us that enlightenment is simply a new way of seeing things; that the path is a personal one because we need to change our view of reality. Only when we can change our focus from the day-to-day, when we can stop seeing only the purely physical world around us will we find the new reality, the path beyond this one.

Of course that’s the rub, isn’t it? How do we change our world view? If you’ve been reading my posts, you will know I view learning as the purpose for which we are here – finding new knowledge, applying it to gain wisdom and so come to know ourselves and our Reality is what it is about… I think, anyway.

And learning is how we can change our world view.

Not only is the cosmos a fake, a creation of consciousness, but in these bodies we don’t even see all of the fake! We live in a box that only partially resembles what is actually present in the hologram. We’re inside a world where it may not be real, where it might all be a creation of our own consciousness and yet we are unable to perceive anything but the tiniest fleck of it.

And it is worse than we think – it’s estimated that if you look at a picture on your 19 inch widescreen monitor, filling the screen, the part of it you actually can focus on is about one pixel or less! Of all the information coming into us from the outside world, that’s how much is being perceived by the spotlight of our attention. The floodlight sees it all, but we are carefully brought up to not use the floodlight awareness consciously.

For those wondering what I am on about, look earlier in my posts for ‘How Do We Perceive’ and ‘The Other Perception’ – they talk about how we spend our lives living in the Spotlight world while the floodlight world mostly passes us by.

As it turns out, we can change our view simply by changing the frequency we see or hear. Dolphins in Port Phillip Bay here in Melbourne have stopped using audible sounds because of the boat traffic on the Bay. They still communicate; they just do it in ranges that are not interfered with by our technology. You can imagine another dolphin from elsewhere coming in through the Heads, listening for a bit then going away thinking the place is empty, simply because there’s no normal dolphin noise. (not quite, but you get what I mean I hope)

I can’t help wondering if there IS a Law of Attraction. When we look at how much the quantum reality depends on consciousness to trigger the probability collapse into a coherent state, when the implications of entanglement are taken up, (and I am by no means promoting myself as expert in these areas) it seems to me that rather than a Law, it is a matter of what we allow ourselves to actually see or experience.

I hold the view that our senses are NOT things which enable us - rather they are limits. We can see, but only a fraction of a line infinitely long, we can hear a tiny amount of what sound can offer, we smell (well some do) only a fraction of what animals can achieve etc.

If the Universe is a hologram, some kind of image of a real reality in which we partake as active contributors by perceiving it, then our perceptions are crucial to how it unfolds. We’ve all seen this because we live in a society.

Two people are in identical situations, with the exact same things happening to them – perhaps colleagues side by side in a workplace, or neighbours on the same street. One person will moan and groan about their fate, seeing the worst of events, able to predict with almost uncanny vision how all the events are going to make things worse for him.

The other one will see the same things happening but sees them in a more positive light, able to bounce back and find new paths through the exact same situations. The only things different in the two situations are their views of things, yet they have very different experiences from the same circumstances.

Can we really say these two people are living in the same reality?