Spirituality Guide

Those who are more than 40 years of age tend to look at the learning of the up and coming generation and wonder what they learn in school these days and how some of them seem to be so dumb about basic things. We tend to blame the modern system, or lazy/incompetent teachers.

But the dumbing down began in other ways, a long time ago. We have been detached from our salvation - the Buddha, the Christ and others have all taught that enlightenment, advancement and salvation is about a personal relationship between a person and the sublime (whatever name you wish to give it) But the majority of people grow up within a system where the personal relationship has been superseded by an oversight, someone to tell us what is right and wrong, to tell us the exact minutiae of the path to the Godhead.

All this begs the question of why they do all this. I think the reason is so they can perpetrate other iniquities in relative safety. A population largely untrained in critical thinking processes, uneducated in basic symbolism, and trained to listen to authority as a source of knowledge, can be manipulated and maneuvered, indoctrinated and controlled with little chance of the majority reacting.

And they have that nice little ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ conspiracy theory to take care of those who might see through the curtain. (the CT theory is one I’ve spoken about before – by setting up ridiculous figures to spout all kinds of nonsense about UFOs (for example) the general public has been conditioned to respond to anybody labeled as a Conspiracy Theorist with ridicule, hilarity and derogatory comment. Now, if someone comes forth and tries to explain how ‘group A’ is manipulating things for their own benefit, ‘group A’ simply calls them a Conspiracy Theorist and the general public will obediently ignore any facts that might show group A’s work.

It’s a nice little protection against being found out, and keeps the Powers That Be safe from the exposure that would cause even the dumb sheep of the general population from finding their freedom.

A few posts back I talked about how the politicians and the system is controlling us, taking our freedom and our lvies away from our own control and trapping us more and more within rules and constraints. The question is, how can they do this? How can so many people be allowing such venal types to run our world?

I think they can do it because we’ve been nobbled over a long period – piece by piece, rule by rule, always with the explanations of how justified such things are, we’ve been conned into allowing our children to become victims of a program that doesn’t have either our interests or that of the society we like to think we live in, at heart.

We’ve been dumbed down, in more than one way - Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt has chapter and verse on what the education system has been doing to us.
From http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/pages/book.htm
Quote:
Those ten years (1971-1981) changed my life. As an American who had spent many years working abroad, I had experienced traveling in and living in socialist countries. When I returned to the United States I realized that America’s transition from a sovereign constitutional republic to a socialist democracy would not come about through warfare (bullets and tanks) but through the implementation and installation of the “system” in all areas of government-federal, state and local. The brainwashing for acceptance of the “system’s” control would take place in the school-through indoctrination and the use of behavior modification, which comes under so many labels, the most recent labels being Outcome-Based Education, Skinnerian Mastery Learning or Direct Instruction. In the seventies I and many others waged the war against values clarification, which was later renamed “critical thinking,” which regardless of the label-and there are bound to be many more labels on the horizon-is nothing but pure, unadulterated destruction of absolute values of right and wrong upon which stable and free societies depend and upon which our nation was founded.

And from J.T. Gatto’s Underground History of American Education…
Quote:
The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t
supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately
re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals
and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of
organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull
and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real
meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered.

Schooling creates obedient little consumers who can be programmed to accept anything delivered the right way.

If there’s a definition of implacably opposed, it would say Evolutionist versus Creationist. I honestly wonder if there has ever been a convert from one side to the other since Darwin wrote his Evolution of the Species.

I have tried several times to interrupt the vitriol that builds between these two sides, so I thought I’d take a moment here to outline the situation as I see it.

It seems to me there are a number of possibilities for the start of the Universe and of Life.

1. The Universe starts up randomly, out of who knows what. Almost magically, a set of processes develops which culminates in a universe where all the factors are in just the right ranges for a chance lightning strike on a particular planet to energise a chance combination of molecules into forming the first organelle, From there, a chance encounter of another group of chemicals enable that group to ‘power up’ and become the first life form. Or perhaps the organelle WAS the first life form.

Lots of random chance in there but it can be reduced a bit by assuming a multiverse, so this universe loses it ‘magical’ coincidence of ranges in the basic factors.

The Life then follows the path of Evolution, producing ever more complex entities until multicellular ones come along - then it really takes off.

Somewhere in here is the usual choice of the ‘evidence based’ Evolutionists.

2. Another possibility is the Universe starts up randomly, out of who knows what, and something somewhere ‘guides’ it into congruence with conditions suitable for life. This immediately raises the problem of just what or who this outside influence might be. The path of Life then flows pretty much as in No 1.

3. It’s also a possibility that an energy form was the first ‘life’ and this form set about bringing conditions to a point where they were hospitable to life based in matter.

4. There’s the possibility also that the ‘outside influence’ stays involved in the process, guiding and forming the life in whatever manner it feels is right.

5. There’s a possibility that the outside influence also caused the whole process to kick off, forming the universe, creating the life etc. This has three sub possibilities I think:

a. - the outside influence simply calculated a particular event very finely, ensuring it would produce the results wanted as it happened. Then it set off the event and went about it’s business, maybe checking every now and then and adjusting things and maybe not

b. - The outside influence kept careful control over things, adjusting here, manipulating there, altering a smidge of this and a touch of that to get the result.

c. - the outside influence went ZAP! and it happened, ZAP! and something else occurred, ZAP! and it was so, until at last it had the place it had envisioned before the first ZAP!

This is the one chosen by the Creationists, where their God is responsible for the whole kit and kaboodle, running the show from his throne on high.

It seems to me we have been fed an untruth. It is one that seems common across a wide range of people and I think very few ever question it. We are taught that the opposite of a believer in God is an Atheist.

I think it isn’t true; I think an Atheist, someone who ‘knows’ there is no God, is also a believer. I think, on a line with believers in God at one end, the other end is an Agnostic. Atheists are believers just as much as those they so vehemently oppose. And just as we see various sects of particular branches of religion get riled with another sect over minor points of dogma, the two branches of believers get very heated with each other.

It’s an ongoing debate, one that never seems to convert anyone, never seems to run out of ire and agro, and seems ultimately unsolvable by mere humans.

Are Creationists right or are Evolutionists? The argument has raged since Darwin and has recently gotten even more fiery in the US with the Intelligent Design fracas. Creationists tried to remodel their beliefs into a pseudo-scientific structure in an attempt to get ID taught in schools as an alternative to Evolution. They ran into a wall by, in my opinion, over-reaching themselves – they demanded it be taught in Science classes.

Now the Theory of Evolution has the problem of being called a Theory. What most people without a science background fail to see is that a Theory, in Science, has a different meaning to how it is used out in public. The Theory of Gravitation is such a Theory – nobody flies off the surface of Earth because Gravity is a theory – the theory bit is just our explanation of it.

Evolution is the same. We have proof of changes in genomes and various life forms. We know for a fact it happens. The Theory bit is whether the random mutations in a genome can account for the variety of life we see when we look around.

A topic on a site was about gurus, talking about people with ideas and concepts, such as the Celestine Prophecy. While the Celestine Prophecy is fiction, it contains some valuable insights into how perhaps we ought to view life and maybe even how to grow in a real sense.

And somebody mentioned, in talking about gods of the past, that maybe, if someone got the people to believe in them, such as the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt did, the subject of all those beliefs might actually rise about normal human capabilities.

I try not to mention that possibility in public - we have quite enough wacko sects and cults out there already. All we need is for nut-jobs to get the idea they can get a few folk to ‘believe’ in them and it makes them God. Scary idea isn’t it?

It was something I thought long and hard about as I looked into ancient Egypt - that maybe the reason for the God-cult for Pharaohs had a basis in reality - that the people honestly believed their pharaoh was an incarnation of Ra or Atum and this made the Pharaoh (and his sister, something normally ‘overlooked’ by the male-centric historians) something more than mere human.

If we are energy beings or even something more ineffable such as fields of Consciousness, then the belief of others could easily ’strengthen’ or otherwise alter a field - and fields don’t need direct contact, they can operate at a distance, something for which we still do not have any explanation, let alone an adequate one.

If all the ‘fields of Consciousness’ that make up a group get together with one undistracted mind, of what might the focus of that group be capable? Maybe the only reason we don’t see it in daily life is the congregations are too distracted by the outside world to truly focus? Might that be the very reason for the ongoing media and entertainment blitzes? If the Christ came back, would He be more than a 30 second wonder before the people who might empower Him ‘changed the channel?’

So what does all this have to do with Spirituality?

I’ve spoken before about how I see Religion versus how I think of Spirituality. Control of the people is a function of Religion – ever since Constantine (or mabe before) ruled on what Christians would believe, the Church has been about Power.

It is quite clear even in the tiny bits remaining of the message of the Christ in the bible that He tells us our salvation is a personal journey. For the Church to stand between us and the Father is abomination, a corruption of the message that invalidates it entirely.

Now we have societies where our lives are being controlled by those solely interested in power from the secular view. At least when Kings ruled us with the authority of God, they were open about it. Now we have smarmy sleazy types who lie to us about how they are making our lives better while all the time finding new ways to take our freedom, our money and our lives from us.

How can we grow in a spiritual sense when we have people controlling us, deciding the basics of our lives and insisting we all think alike? When we are under the control of the lowest level of humanity, how can we rise to new lives?

Just as the Religion conned us out of our path to salvation, the thieves and power mongers of modern government are stealing our lives, using bureaucracies to enslave us with stupid rules, inane by-laws and restrictive procedures so that living free and intelligent, contributing willingly to our society is a concept foreign to all but a few.

It’s hard to fly like an eagle when you’re surrounded by turkeys.

And it’s working. The American experiment is all but dead in the water - the people no longer govern the people (if they ever did, given the overwhelming percentage of US leaders who have European royal genes)
While the rest of the world has a variety of Education system that seemed to be less and less effective over time, the US system is a standout among the crowd for producing people with few of the basic skills their grandparents had from fewer years of schooling.

As someone who went to school in the 60’s I find it bemusing anyone could spend 12 years at school and not be able to do basic arithmetic, be able to spell or at least duplicate the words they see in front of them and be unable to find even approximate locations of most countries on an unlabelled globe.

I’m not picking on Yanks here - virtually all the West is heading down the same path - we seem more concerned with teaching political correctness than personal self-worth, with making sure our kids know how to spend instead of how to add up. One has to wonder why the Governments INSIST all children ‘get an education’ when it has proven so ineffective - and one looks at the conformity and the undermining of the ability to apply critical thought and one begins to get an inkling of purpose.

The movies are just another tool - we get inured to things that a generation back would have had people on the streets in horror-provoked marches. We live in a society where a woman’s breast in public raises shocked headlines but the daily murder of thousands gets a brief mention on page 10.

With the use of movies and TV shows, we become accustomed to the shocking and the media knows it - they see it in how they constantly have to increase the shock value in headlines to get the attention of the masses. We look back and laugh at the simplistic adverts from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, forgetting that [i]those adverts worked![/i] because the people back then had not been traumatised by the violence and daily assault on our sensibilities that modern generations are born into.

Have you noticed lately how many of the mainstream movies are coming out dealing with far-out themes? There’s a variety of sites across the internet that wonder if we are being prepared for something. With 2012 just around the corner, the more ‘out there’ people are wondering if someone knows something about what is coming and that we are being readied, or in some cases, inured against what is coming.

They don’t have to be trying for a specific awareness in the public. I’d imagine that any potential world-controlling group would have been quite upset when the general public got an appreciation of science and the world began to be a saner place in which to live.

By putting out all these ‘non-real’ movies, these shows that play on primal fears and indulge in massive use of basic psychological and emotional symbols, they can erode the faith people have that the world is explicable, understandable and controllable by themselves. It makes it much easier to be able to have ‘big brother’ or ‘paternalistic government’ come along and look after us.

By subtly eroding our concepts, by using symbols and emotional keys to drive in the message under our conscious awareness, our view of the world as a sane and explicable place gets eaten away. When some demagogue stands at a pulpit and tells us about demons, when they explain how the enemy is in league with Satan, we are far more ready to believe them than if we see the world as a sane and reliably repeatable system.

When we have been accustomed to having violence and gore prayed across our screens in graphic detail, the horrendous numbers of maimed and dead from real life seem almost boring as we switch the channel looking for more ‘realistic’ viewing.

It’s a sad world when alien invasion or a ghoul with a chainsaw is more interesting and real than children dying because someone wanted to make money from oil.

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

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.

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.

I’m curious.

Do you think there is a path for you? In your life, are you aware of following along a way towards some kind of end or goal?

Did your goals form early in your life or did you have to work at it to find out what you wanted in life?

Or are you, like me, a drifter who found a life that was ‘good enough’ simply because I couldn’t find more pressing needs that would give me my path?

I’ve often wondered how many people fail to find their path in life. I also wonder if the increasing rage out there in our society happens, if the increased numbers using alcohol, drugs, the church or other forms of escape are doing so, because of the lack of meaningful paths for us to find.

Our society is very proud of our technological progress. Almost every views us as the pinnacle of a long line of progress from cave to shopping mall, yet even a slightly more than casual study of history will bring up indications that this is simply false-to-facts.

What if we’ve chosen incorrectly as a society? What if the path of material ownership, of instant gratification of the physical senses, is not a good way for us? We seem to be losing our sense of community; we fragment into groups based on physical things where love is not an ingredient. The village concept has been shattered on the altar of city life and we walk lonely in crowds larger than has ever been seen before.

We have people dying in our streets, overdosing on drugs because nobody has cared enough to ensure they have a life. They can’t spend because they have no money and so basic needs that were available to peasants under fiefdoms are denied them.

This is progress?