So what is Truth?

From the outset, all we know of the Ancients tells us that they venerated the quest for immortality, the search for the fundamentals of Life. Those fundamentals were apparently things beyond the merely physical.

The cave painters drew on the walls the symbols and visions they experienced while in altered states. Shamans reach into the otherness to find solutions for troubled lives. Mystics give up any shred of comfort or luxury in their quest to find the Real. The Egyptians apparently devoted their lives to ensuring their leader found his/her way into a realm called the Duat, (a very defined location in the sky) to dwell with Gods forever.

Along the way, most of these sought very specific knowledge. Knowing the details of the Precession of the Equinox, the steady progression of Ages through time was important. Knowledge of the Ages and when they end, and how they end, was apparently crucial.

It seems a strange mix of knowledge. What we have of the Ancients talks about knowing details that they, according to modern views on how primitive they were, couldn’t have known about the real world, right alongside images and instructions about how to act, where to go and what to know, after one died.

Religion seems to have been formalized as a way to pass down this sort of information. But it is carefully encoded; none but the Initiate can find the full meaning of the stories, the parables and allegory contained in the various ‘scriptures’ that have been passed down.

Over and over, similar stories are told across the races, the nations and religions. Look at the Noah story. For one from a Judaic religion, Noah is Truth, but the story is told over and over across realms never dreamed of by the Hebrews. And when we look, we find the evidence tells us, while the tale may be truth, it could not be so for the Hebrews – it is a story brought forward from older times and altered to fit in the new story of the Judaics.

The God of the Old Testament doesn’t make much impression in the realm of sanity unless one takes into account the possibility the He is an amalgam of a number of God stories from the Ancients. The times before the first Flood must have been marvelous, but after three or more such events, the remnants of knowledge were hard to retain. Myth and legend were brought in to play. Tell someone a dramatic story with the needed details encoded and they will pass it on almost unchanged, to their progeny.

So why are we confronted and confounded in our quest for a better life? Why is Religion, once a force in our lives that drove entire civilizations to magnificent achievements, now a subjugating establishment that will kill rather than provide freedom of belief?

The Church spent the better part of two thousand years persecuting anyone who held even slightly divergent views to what was decreed from Rome. Question the authority of a regime which bled entire nations of their strength and wealth, doubt for a moment the bishops, or worse, the Pope, were truly divine and you would die. Usually horribly.

For centuries, the scriptures were printed only in Latin, a script the average person could not even attempt to read. But you could still be killed outright for failing to fully accept what was said from the pulpit or failing to offer everything you had to those already rich on the gold and blood of the subjugated.

This is not Religion, it is oppression. It has not yet released its hold on Humanity. Today the biggest threat to our personal safety comes from religious institutions and the governments who use the beliefs of the people to justify their personal agendas.

So again, Spirituality is not Religion. There are many people out there, wrapped up in religions, who are wonderful people who do their best to embody the credo of their chosen faith. Unfortunately it is extremely difficult to find leaders of those religions who actually justify the faith of those they are supposed to be shepherding.

Spirituality is personal – the message comes down through the ages, echoed again and again by sages, mystics and spiritual people throughout time. Allowing others to tell you what is spiritual, what is right and real, simply opens one up to manipulation. Billions have died throughout history because they allowed others to decide for them what Truth is.

Science has failed us as a tool. Logic was useful for some time and brought a revolution to the way we live, but it has become a tool that kicks back against the user.

Dogma has replaced the ability to think o7utside the box. If you try to open new ways of thinking, you will meet resistance. Science says you should be asked questions, be required to show how what you say provides answers. Instead, new thought is required to fit into how things are currently being seen.

If Einstein had been required to show how his ideas fit within Newton’s world, he would have remained in the Patent Office. Instead, he moved beyond what Newton saw. In this time, even those who try to use scientific method to show new knowledge are castigated and have their reputations attacked by the orthodox.

Rupert Sheldrake has some new ideas about PSI effects – he conducts large scale experiments to try to show ephemeral effects at a scientifically acceptable level – he gets ridiculed for trying.

What are they scared of?

Egypt alone has questions unable to be answered by orthodox thinking. Even if the Egyptologists are correct in their ‘history’ there are questions to be answered. To combat those questions, they remove the questioners from Egypt, they gather in numbers to ridicule the theories, and they ignore the inconvenient questions.

How did people who had only copper and then bronze, carve out granite? How did they make small radius curves in stone seats, or ‘drill’ into granite to make small bowls and vases? How did they align multi-million tone structures so exactly to the meridians? And if you can answer that, WHY did they do it?

Science should be addressing these issues as puzzles; instead, those who raise the questions find themselves cast beyond the boundaries, labeled and ridiculed as cranks or, the ultimate epithet, Conspiracy Theorists.

We have, in our lives, an entire system of living that gears us, trains us and motivates us into chasing the physical. Those who achieve in the physical world are venerated. The God of the modern human is Science – suggest anything that isn’t able to be tried and tested by science and you will meet ridicule and personally derogatory remarks – and this is from those who claim their goal is knowledge!

Don’t get me wrong; I have been interested in both science and used the scientific method for most of my life. But there are things which cannot be tested by science. Science requires the subject to be falsifiable. This means you must be able to propose a situation where, if ‘X’ isn’t true, ‘this’ will be the result. Then you set out to try to disprove ‘X’ and see if it can be done.

God is not falsifiable. This doesn’t mean God is real, just that Science can’t test for God. Equally, the Big Bang is not falsifiable – the theory says that all we know, including the laws of the Universe, came into existence with the Big Bang, so the actual event predates the Universe AND all the laws. Consciousness is likewise non-falsifiable – there can be no experiments that give results where Consciousness doesn’t exist – who would be proposing the experiments? Also, String Theory is currently non-falsifiable as we have no way to test for either the presence or absence of them.

But seeing people supposedly geared to Science, to discovering the new and the meaningful about our Universe reacting with disdain and ridicule to those who dare to think otherwise that orthodox science is disturbing. The system meant to be an alternate to that of a spiritual life, to accepting and working towards an immortal existence, is failing us.

If it is wrong to question the basics, if doing so brings personal attacks and the worst debating tactics to bring down those who question, how is this different from the religious fanatic who derides everyone who doesn’t believe in the same, exact, specific ‘god’ believed in by the derider?

Science has become the new religion.

If formal or orthodox religion isn’t really religion, what is?

Looking back to early times, religion seems to be a contact with a type of reality which is not a part of that perceived by our five senses. It may be a world hidden from us by virtue of a different fundamental frequency or perhaps one vibrating to a different melody than that within which we live.

Many of the mystics seem to have needed to renounce this world, to back away from the trappings of reality – ‘trappings’ is a peculiarly significant word for this context – to find their way to a new view of things. Science has found our minds ‘ring’ to a variety of frequencies, brainwaves that have different characteristics depending on what frequency they range in.

It’s possible some drugs, such as DMT or Ayahusca can alter our basic frequency and make available new vistas for the mind to experience. It’s also possible the same states can be achieved by dance, drumming, singing praying or chanting. Meditation can also apparently achieve such states.

If so many different things can bring about a basic change of state in so many people across time, it implies something basic in humans that is either a capability or skill, not normally available to our physical lives, to our awareness, when circumscribed to the merely mundane, to the universe of atoms and forces that makes up what we experience with our basic senses.

So perhaps Religion, in its truest form, is the daily seeking of the numinous, the regular practice of the things that take our awareness outside the physical universe and into the presence of Beingness beyond ours. It could be the development of personal awareness of the connectedness of ALL, of how everything comes from, exists because of, and contributes to the ALL-ness that IS.

Religion is not the seeking for God, or the upholding of laws imposed and enforced under threat of punishment, nor even pretending to love everyone because a book tells us to. Religion is instead, the finding of God-in-us, the upholding of personal integrity in an infinite framework and the allowance of Love to grow within as we come to be aware that we are All and All is us.

In the West, and in most formal religions today, we have a congregation being ministered to by some form of oversight. Usually, there are levels of ‘spirituality’ where the average person isn’t really ‘qualified’ or ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘holy’ enough to commune with the Deity. An intercessor is needed; someone with the spirit, the training, or the holiness to be able to intercede for the congregation and bring wisdom or light or interpretation to the masses who can’t achieve this for themselves.

Yet, without exception that I know of, ALL the religions got their beginnings with someone who had a vision, an experience or an enlightenment that brought them to a new state of being. They have then tried to bring the message to all that salvation, growth, enlightenment or whatever are available to all and are a personal experience between an individual and his/her Creator (or the Divine)

Think of Christ. Over and over the Bible tells us he stressed the personal level of experience in being saved, of achieving ‘Salvation.’ He repeated the message so strongly it has been unable to be eradicated from the scriptures, yet right from the start, the Pauline Church placed an intermediary between the people and their God.

The message was corrupted almost as soon as it was issued; thence followed the centuries of persecution and killing to ensure the people never found out they held their own salvation and didn’t need an ‘authority’ to guide or tell them what to do.

Over and again, the mystics, sages, prophets and messiahs have told us that our immortality is our own responsibility and that we need to lead our lives in a way to develop the immortal beingness that is the true ‘us.’

And let’s face it – listening to the pastors, bishops, priests, ayatollahs and popes doesn’t seem to have led us very far up the path of enlightenment.

So, what is religion? This can be broken down further – what is religion NOW and what did it begin as? In Supernatural, Graham Hancock looks into the hallucinatory drugs, how they work (from the inside rather than a chemical treatise on body effects) and why we find similar visions across the world using drugs like DMT or LSD to those painted on cave walls dating back to, as far as we can tell, the dawning of Consciousness.

There appears to be information and answers available in trance state. The ‘Sleeping Prophet,’ Edgar Cayce, would go into trance to find answers for petitioners to resolve problems ranging from illness to a life direction to follow. Shamans down the ages use trance to delve into a person and help their soul on its path through life or lives.

It goes further – Edison and other inventors deliberately pushed what is called the Hypnagogic state to find new ideas and come up with inventions. Societies around the world use various methods from drugs through dance and drums to chanting to find a path into trance. They are all firmly convinced that in trance they can find new information, new paths and ways to follow for the betterment of others.

Hancock is not saying drugs equal religion or god, he is suggesting they offered one path very early in our development to open up a facet of ourselves that we have been exploring ever since. The Indian experience, both recent and from the Vedic times, tells us that people can be happy, or at least content, with very little in the way of material things if they are actively pursuing a spiritual path in life.

Reading across the internet it is fairly easy to find references to the fall of Atlantis 12,000 years back – the tale is one of spiritual beings becoming enamoured of the flesh, finding overmuch attraction in the things of this world and seeking power for its own sake. The bible and other religious texts also talk of the Fall of Man. It can, on one level, be talking about the destruction of the ‘golden age’ of Man by consecutive cataclysms that wiped out civilization not just once, but possible 3 times within eight or nine thousand years, but it could also be talking about a more spiritual fall.

If Man was once focused on the life beyond this, on the pursuit of the development of an immortal Consciousness, and somehow we lost that focus and started to think the merely physical was all that mattered, maybe having such a view triggered by the disasters around us followed by the herculean efforts needed to regain survivability for the race, this could be a Fall from the heights.

Were the people of olden times any happier than we are today? (if, that is, you can describe the modern condition as happy) We have no direct evidence of those times, and from the Vedic tales from India, the Pyramid texts from Djoser’s tomb in Egypt, and the later fragments and myths from Sumer, Egypt and other locations, we find that those civilizations fell from three main causes.

1. Disaster. Flood and Deluge mostly. Empires at their height, brought down by ‘the Gods’ for hubris and arrogance.
2. External nations. People dying out or moving away (taken into captivity) because of strife with warlike neighbours
3. God-strife. The ‘Gods’ misbehaving like the worst of spoiled brats, causing internal strife and bringing down their own empires.

Over and again in the historical evidence we find civilizations that came from nowhere, full-blown in skills, lived pretty much as is with little later innovation except for growing in size, then suddenly vanishing from the record with no trace.

Whatever the reasons for the demise, (and it seems often associated with climate change as the Earth warmed and changed after the end of the Ice Age) what we don’t see in the record, with extremely rare exceptions, is the population revolting against their governments.

It is a truism that people get the Government they deserve, but when things get bad enough, recent history has told us the people get up in arms and revolt. What they get may not be much improvement, but they will storm the cannons barehanded if needed to replace what they see as unfair.

The White and Red Russian parties started a bitch-fight to see who would rule Russia and their depredations were so intolerable, the people brought in Communism – yet at the start of the violence, there were maybe 80,000 communists in Russia. It cost 20 million lives but the people got, in spite of what the West saw it as, a better regime than what the Tsar gave them.

So it seems, the people not only didn’t suffer enough to revolt, but they gave wholeheartedly to projects that must have required massive commitment and resources from everyone in the nation or empire. How many of us would give up our TV’s to fund a giant statue, accept a reduced ‘standard of living’ to help George Bush find immortality or even stop buying imports so our country could build a monument to stand down the ages so people knew we had been here?

Due to circumstances both in and out of my control, I haven’t been able to dedicate the time and effort to this site that I have in the past. I would certainly like to do more here, but the 24 hours in the day simply doesn’t permit it for me. Seeker is someone I trust completely to take over writing for this site while I am sorting out all these things in my personal life.

I hope you are enjoying the posts so far. Seeker didn’t intend to write so much on the subject, but you know how it goes when you are passionate about a certain subject, and Seeker is quite passionate about many things.

I wanted to let you know that I’m still here and enjoying reading Seeker’s guest posts. I will be checking in every now and then. I will be back writing for this site as soon as I get everything organized and my life permits it.

Thank you all very much for your time and understanding. If you have any questions or comments for Seeker, don’t be afraid to say so. You can leave a comment or I am happy to pass on any messages.

Have a wonderful and peaceful day.

We have evidence of a civilization that could build megalithic monuments and buildings that defy even modern abilities to duplicate. But in orthodox history, there is no trace of such people.

We have anomalous ruins across the world, built using skills we thought were modern inventions, constructed for unknown purposes. (eg. The major pyramids in Egypt provide literally no evidence they were ever used as tombs; no bodies, no funerary arrangements, and with the exception of some red paint daubs above the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid, currently disputed as forgeries, not one scrap of writing has been found in them)

There are scores, or hundreds, of myths and creation stories that tell of a world disaster, commonly a flood and deluge, that destroyed the previous world and reduced man to savagery. A savagery that ended when strangers came from the sea, with (usually) knowledge, powers and seeds, to rebuild a civilized world using the local tribe as a nucleus.

Now that we can go beneath the waves, we are finding more and more ruins, megaliths and structures, once again without any ‘normal’ historic explanation, that have to have been there for ten thousand years or more.

And all the stories, the myths and mystics, as well as what we can decipher of the lives led by those back at the purported dawn of civilization, point to the importance of a spiritual existence, of following a life that leads, not to increased possessions and money, but towards growth into immortality.

From the earliest times, painted in primal colours on cold rock walls, a spiritual theme has shown up. Among the very first messages to come from the dawn of sapience are those dealing with a world beyond, a world that extends and makes sense of the one we see around us.

The buildings, the temples, the reverence for the patterns of nature and the awe at the existence of Consciousness have all been pointed to the Immortality of Beingness and highlighted the shallowness of the purely material.

We look around us at a world that glorifies the materialistic, the ‘owning’ of things and the consuming of resources. To view our world, one would think we should be the happiest of peoples – after all, we are the pinnacle of all time, the apex of humanity in all our pride and glory.

Yet, in this age, in these circumstances, it is almost impossible to find people who don’t have an escape from life. Be it alcohols, drugs, rage, TV or handing it all to God in abnegation of self-responsibility, we all find ways to turn away from living our lives to the full. As a race, as a civilization, as individuals, we are quite apparently not happy in our lives.