EROS SUBLIMATED, THE MUNDUS IMAGINALIS OF DANTE’S DIVINE COMEDY, AND IBN ARABI’S TARJUMAN AL-ASHWAQ

“Beauty is the reflection of reality in the mirror of illusion”

“And there is no more powerful creature in the universe than woman

- for each angel that God has created from the breaths (anfas)

of women is the most powerful of angels.”

Ibn Arabi

DANTE AND ISLAM

Miguel Asín Palacios (1871–1944) was a Spanish scholar of Islamic studies and the Arabic language, and a Roman Catholic priest. He is primarily known for suggesting Muslim sources for ideas and motifs present in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which he discusses in his book La Escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia (1919). He wrote on medieval Islam, extensively on al-Ghazali (Latin: Algazel). A major book El Islam cristianizado (1931) presents a study of Sufism through the works of Muhyiddin ibn ‘Arabi (Spanish: Mohidín Abenarabe) of Murcia in Andalusia (medieval Al-Andalus). Asín also published other comparative articles regarding certain Islamic influences on Christianity and on mysticism in Spain.

Perhaps Asín Palacios a is best remembered for his 1919 book, La Escatologia Musulmana en la Divina Comedia,which suggests Islamic sources for the memorable context and perspective used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) in his work La Divina Commedia. Specifically, Asín compares the Muslim religious literature surrounding the night journey [al-'Isra wal-Mi'rag] of Muhammad (from Mecca to Jerusalem and thence up with the Prophets through the seven heavens), with Dante’s story describing his spiritual journey in which he meets various inhabitants of the afterlife and records their fate. Accordingly, Asín (I) discusses in detail the above night journey in Muslim literature,(II) compares it to episodes in the inferno, the purgatorio,and the paradiso of La Divina Commedia, (III) investigates Muslim influence on corresponding Christian literature predating the poem, and (IV) conjectures how Dante could have known directly of the Muslim literature in translation. Asín remarks that notwithstanding these Muslim sources, Dante remains a luminous figure and his poem retains its exalted place in world literature.

Asín’s book inspired a wide and energetic reaction, both positive and negative, as well as further research and academic exchanges. Eventually two scholars, an Italian and a Spaniard, independently uncovered an until-then buried Arabic source, the eleventh century Kitab al-Mi’raj [Book of the Ladder (or of the ascent)], which describes Muhammad’s night journey. This work was translated into Spanish as La Escala de Mahoma by a scribe (Abrahim Alfaquim) ofAlfonso X el Sabio in 1264. Information surfaced about another translation into Latin, Liber Scalae Machometi, which has been traced to the Italian milieu of the poet, Dante Alighieri. It appears that Dante’s mentor Brunetto Latini met the Latin translator of the Kitab al-Mi’raj while both were staying at the court of the Spanish king Alfonso X el Sabio in Castilla. Although this missing link was not available to Asín, he had based his work on several similar accounts of Muhammad’s ladder then circulating among the literary or pious Muslims of Al-Andalus.

The Kitab al Miraj (Arabic: كتاب المعراج “Book of the Ascension”) is a Muslim book concerned with Muhammad’s ascension into Heaven (known as the Miraj), following his miraculous one-night journey from Mecca to Jerusalem (the Isra). The book is divided into 7 chapters, and was written in Arabic using the Naskh script.

Kitab al-Miraj is believed to have been written by Abu’l-Qasim ‘Abdalkarîm bin Hawâzin bin ‘Abdalmalik bin Talhah bin Muhammad al-Qushairî al-Nisaburi أبو القاسم عبد الكريم بن هوازن بن عبد الملك بن طلحة بن محمد القشيري (born 376 – died 465 A.H.).

In the second half of the 13th century, the book was translated into Latin (as Liber Scale Machometi) and Spanish, and soon thereafter (in 1264) into Old French. Its Islamic depictions of Hell are believed by some scholars to have been a major influence on Dante’s 14th century masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, including Miguel Asin Palacios, and Enrico Cerulli .

I got no problem finding this associations merely anecdotic, sure reading  Kitab al Miraj could had being a source of an idea, that by the force of the Genius, and the Imagination of Dante, united to the Cosmological views of his Age contributed to his magnificent work. But I will like to point out the similitudes of the Mundus Imaginalis shared by Christain and Muslims mystics alike,as defined by Henry Corbin:   Na-kojd-Abad, the “land of No-where.”

Many centuries ago, the philosopher Suhrawardi coined the term “Na Koja-Abad” (Nowhere Land) to refer to a mythical, but nevertheless real place, situated in a kind of interworld between the realms of the senses and those of the intellect. Later Shi’ite traditions referred to it as “Hurqalya” and mentioned its two emerald cities (Jabarsa and Jabalqa) capable of being perceived solely by the Creative Imagination. (This is not the “imagination” of fancy or of wish-fulfillment, but the “Imaginatio Vera” of the medieval philosophers: a kind of organic mirror where  according to certain Ishraqi philosophers — images from the material world and archetypal forms from the sphere of the intellect are able to come together and react). Hurqalya was believed to be the real theater of life, bubbling up images into the conscious mind in the form of myth and legend.

The Oxford dictionary define it as:

The term was used first by Suhrawardi to define a ‘boundary’ realm that connects the sensory and the abstract intellectual segments of the whole continuum of being, and is the distinguishing component of non-Aristotelian cosmology in Islamic philosophy . It is constructed as the locus of visions, prophecy, and sorcery, and also defines eschatology . This wonderland is described by negating Aristotelian logical principles and laws of physics, and is employed to explain non-standard experiences such as ‘true dreams’ and ‘miraculous powers’. As the individual subject moves away from the center of the sensory segment of the continuum nearing the boundary realm, qualitative change takes place. Material bodies change to imaginalis ones; time changes, no longer confined to measure of linear space; and space is no longer limited by the Euclidean.

LA VITA NUOVA

Dante wanted to collect and publish the lyrics dealing with his love for Beatrice, explaining the autobiographical context of its composition and pointing out the expository structure of each lyric as an aid to careful reading. Though the result is a landmark in the development of emotional autobiography (the most important advance since Saint Augustine’s Confessions in the 5th century), like all medieval literature it is far removed from the modern autobiographical impulse. Instead the they are suffused with the Imagery of the Mundus Imaginalis. However, Dante and his audience were interested in the emotions of courtly love and how they develop, how they are expressed in verse, how they reveal the permanent intellectual truths of the divinely created world and how love can confer blessing on the soul and bring it closer to God

According to Dante, he first met Beatrice when his father took him to the Portinari house for a May Day party. At the time, Beatrice was eight years old, a year younger than Dante. Dante was instantly taken with her and remained so throughout her life even though she married another man, banker Simone dei Bardi, in 1287. Beatrice died three years later in June 1290 at the age of 24. Dante continued to hold an abiding love and respect for the woman after her death, even after he married Gemma Donati in 1285 and had children. After Beatrice’s death, Dante withdrew into intense study and began composing poems dedicated to her memory. The collection of these poems, along with others he had previously written in his journal in awe of Beatrice, became La Vita Nuova.

According to the autobiographic La Vita Nuova, Beatrice and Dante met only twice during their lives. Even less credible is the numerology behind these encounters, marking out Dante’s life in periods of nine years. This amount of time falls in line with Dante’s repeated use of the number three or multiples of, derived from the Holy Trinity. It is more likely that the encounters with Beatrice that Dante writes of are the two that fulfill his poetic vision, and Beatrice, like Petrarch’s Laura, seem to blur the line between an actual love interest and a means employed by the poet in his creations.

Dante in chapter XXIV, of La Vita Nuova “I Felt My Heart Awaken” (“Io mi senti’ svegliar dentro a lo core”, also translated as “I Felt a Loving Spirit Suddenly”), Dante accounts a meeting with Love, who asks the poet to do his best to honour her.

Io mi senti’ svegliar dentro a lo core

Un spirito amoroso che dormia:

E poi vidi venir da lungi Amore

Allegro sì, che appena il conoscia,

Dicendo: “Or pensa pur di farmi onore”;

E ‘n ciascuna parola sua ridia.

E poco stando meco il mio segnore,

Guardando in quella parte onde venia,

Io vidi monna Vanna e monna Bice

Venire inver lo loco là ‘v’io era,

L’una appresso de l’altra miriviglia;

E sì come la mente mi ridice,

Amor mi disse: “Quell’è Primavera,

E quell’ha nome Amor, sì mi somiglia.”

I felt awoken in my heart

a loving spirit that was sleeping;

and then I saw Love coming from far away

so glad, I could just recognize.

saying “you think you can honor me”,

and with each word laughing.

And little being with me my lord,

watching the way it came from,

I saw lady Joan and lady Bice

coming towards the spot I was at,

one wonder past another wonder.

And as my mind keeps telling me,

Love said to me “She is Spring who springs first,

and that bears the name Love, who resembles me.”

Following their first meeting, Dante was so enthralled by Beatrice that he later wrote in La Vita Nuova: Ecce Deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi (“Behold, a deity stronger than I; who coming, shall rule over me.”) Indeed, Dante frequented parts of Florence, his home city, where he thought he might catch even a glimpse of her. As he did so, he made great efforts to ensure his thoughts of Beatrice remained private, even writing poetry for another lady, so as to use her as a “screen for the truth”.

Dante’s courtly love for Beatrice continued for nine years, before the pair finally met again. This meeting occurred in a street of Florence, which she walked along dressed in white and accompanied by two older women. She turned and greeted him, her salutation filling him with such joy that he retreated to his room to think about her. In doing so, he fell asleep, and had a dream which would become the subject of the first sonnet in La Vita Nuova.

In this dream, a mighty figure appeared before him, and spoke to him. Although he could not make out all the figure said, he managed to hear “Ego dominus tuus“, which means “I am your Lord”. In the figure’s arms was Beatrice, sleeping and covered by a crimson cloth. The figure awoke Beatrice, and made her eat Dante’s burning heart. An English translation of this event, as described in La Vita Nuova, appears below:

This was the last encounter between the pair, since Beatrice died eight years later at the young age of twenty-four in 1290.

The manner in which Dante chose to express his love for Beatrice often agreed with the Middle Ages concept of courtly love. Courtly love was a secret, unrequited and highly respectful form of admiration for another person. Yet it is still not entirely clear what caused Dante to fall in love with Beatrice. Since he knew very little of the real Beatrice, and that he had no great insight to her character, it is perhaps unusual that he did. But he did, and there are clues in his works as to why:

“She has ineffable courtesy, is my beatitude, the destroyer of all vices and the queen of virtue, salvation.”

Dante saw Beatrice as a savior, one who removed all evil intentions from him. It is perhaps this idea of her being a force for good that he fell in love with, a force which he believed made him a better person. This is certainly viable, since he does not seem concerned with her appearance – at least not in his writings. He only once describes her complexion, and her “emerald” eyes.

Let’s Dante speak and tell us of his sublimation of Eros in to Agape:

“Nine times now, since my birth, the heaven of light had turned almost to the same point in its own gyration, when the glorious Lady of my mind, who was called Beatrice by many who knew not what to call her, first appeared before my eyes. She had already been in this life so long that in its course the starry heaven had moved toward the region of the East one of the twelve parts of a degree; so that at about the beginning of her ninth year she appeared to me, and I near the end of my ninth 2year saw her. She appeared to me clothed in a most noble color, a modest and becoming crimson, and she was girt and adorned in such wise as befitted her very youthful age. At that instant, I say truly that the spirit of life, which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble with such violence that it appeared fearfully in the least pulses, and, trembling, said these words: Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi [Behold a god stronger than I, who coming shall rule over me].

At that instant the spirit of the soul, which dwells in the high chamber to which all the spirits of the senses carry their perceptions, began to marvel greatly, and, speaking especially to the spirit of the sight, said these words: Apparuit jam beatitudo vestra [Now has appeared your bliss].

At that instant the natural spirit, which dwells in that part where our nourishment is supplied, began to weep, and, weeping, said these words: Heu miser! quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps [Woe is me, wretched! because often from this time forth shall I be hindered].

I say that from that time forward Love lorded it over my soul, which had been so speedily wedded to him: and he began to exercise over me such control and such lordship, through the power which my imagination gave to him, that it behooved me to do completely all his pleasure. He commanded me oft times that I should seek to see this youthful angel; so that I in my boyhood often went seeking her, and saw her of such noble and praiseworthy deportment, that truly of her might be said that word of the poet Homer, “She seems not the daughter of mortal man, but of God.” And though her image, which stayed constantly with me, gave assurance to Love to hold lordship over me, yet it was of such noble virtue that it never suffered Love to rule me without the faithful counsel of the reason in those matters in which it were useful to hear such counsel. And since to dwell upon the passions and actions of such early youth seems like telling an idle tale, I will leave them, and, passing over many things which might be drawn from the original where these lie hidden, I will come to those words which are written in my memory under larger paragraphs.

When so many days had passed that nine years were exactly complete since the above-described apparition of this most gentle lady, on the last of these days it happened that this admirable lady appeared to me, clothed in purest white, between two gentle ladies who were of greater age; and, 4passing along a street, turned her eyes toward that place where I stood very timidly; and by her ineffable courtesy, which is to-day rewarded in the eternal world, saluted me with such virtue that it seemed to me then that I saw all the bounds of bliss. The hour when her most sweet salutation reached me was precisely the ninth of that day; and since it was the first time that her words came to my ears, I took in such sweetness, that, as it were intoxicated, I turned away from the folk; and, betaking myself to the solitude of my own chamber, I sat myself down to think of this most courteous lady.

And thinking of her, a sweet slumber overcame me, in which a marvelous vision appeared to me; for me thought I saw in my chamber a cloud of the color of fire, within which I discerned a shape of a Lord of aspect fearful to whoso might look upon him; and he seemed to me so joyful within himself that a marvelous thing it was; and in his words he said many things which I understood not, save a few, among which I understood these: Ego Dominus tuus [I am thy Lord]. In his arms me seemed to see a person sleeping, naked, save that she seemed to me to be wrapped lightly in a crimson cloth; whom I, regarding very intently, recognized as the lady of the salutation, who had the day before deigned to salute me. And in one of 5his hands it seemed to me that he held a thing which was all on fire; and it seemed to me that he said to me these words: Vide cortuum [Behold thy heart]. And when he had remained awhile, it seemed to me that he awoke her that slept; and he so far prevailed upon her with his craft as to make her eat that thing which was burning in his hand; and she ate it timidly. After this, it was but a short while before his joy turned into the most bitter lament; and as he wept he gathered up this lady in his arms, and with her it seemed to me that he went away toward heaven. Whereat I felt such great anguish, that my weak slumber could not endure it, but was broken, and I awoke. And straightway I began to reflect, and found that the hour in which this vision had appeared to me had been the fourth of the night; so that, it plainly appears, it was the first hour of the nine last hours of the night.”

THE HIEROS GAMOS

Hieros gamos or Hierogamy (Greek ἱερὸς γάμος, ἱερογαμία “holy marriage”) refers to a sexual ritual that plays out a marriage between a god and a goddess, especially when enacted in a symbolic ritual where human participants represent the deities. It is the harmonization of opposites.

The notion of hieros gamos does not presuppose actual performance in ritual, but is also used in purely symbolic or mythological context, notably in alchemy and hence in Jungian psychology. The three Monotheistic Religions share in the Hieros Gamos symbolism.

Ralph Austin tell us:

“Here is introduced a theme, curious, but persistent in the three great monotheisms, of the secret consort of the High God.Whether in human or angelic form, who seems to be an essential part of the scheme of creation and salvation and who constantly, especially in mysticism, manifests the deepest desires and dreams of the Godhead. Thus, in Judaism we meet the powerfully feminine Shekinah, Cherubim and Matronit who, according to R. Patai in his very interesting book The Hebrew Goddess, personify and symbolize the maternal and feminine aspects of the divinity.  In Christianity, one need only point to the overwhelmingly influential cult of the Virgin Mary with its myriad ramifications in Christian culture. Even Islam, that bastion of patriarchal ascendancy, expresses, albeit enigmatically and cryptically, subtle but pervasive images of the “eternal feminine”, especially in Sufism and Shi’ism, as has been so well elaborated in H. Corbin’s fine work on Ibn Al-’Arabi.  Man, we are taught, is created in the image of God, his Creator, so that we may expect to find the hieros gamos, or sacred marriage of heaven reflected in human experience. Of course, men and women relate to each other in many ways, and their mutual and elemental attraction serves many quite ordinary and mundane purposes, not the least of which are the procreation of the species and the proper ordering of society. They also, however, serve as powerful images and archetypes of suprahuman forces and realities, thus opening up to each other visions and insights, mysteries and secrets which greatly transcend the ordinary and every-day concerns and experiences of the mundane world; indeed, by virtue of Man’s special intermediary and linking function in the Divine—human—universe scheme of things, both sexes serve to manifest transforming forces which may, in certain circumstances, as Rumi says, “transfigure the dustbin of this world into a rose garden”, or give flesh and substance to spiritual realities. In all of this we enter, unavoidably, into that area of human experience which is still, even in our own cerebral culture, a sphere of magic and mystery.

IBN ARABI AND LADY NIZAM

Ibn Arabi like Dante, a century earlier produced an ode to Mystical Love, disguised as courtly love when he wrote the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq (The Interpreter of Desires) Later he had to mount an apology to his critics that his poems where erotically profane, explaining the symbolism of his poetry.

His inspiration was Lady Nizam.The way in which such an image and presence serves in such cases to inspire and enrich is very well described by a recent writer on the life and work of Dante, whose own experience of Beatrice is so remarkably close to that of Ibn ‘Arabi. William Anderson writes towards the end of his book, Dante, The Maker.

Through his love of her on Earth he formed an indissoluble union of love with her that transcended the incident of her death. She mirrored to him the Incarnation of Christ, and, in purifying his individual nature as a Christian, he found that the only way to the sight of God was through her as the revelation of his soul… so she, as his illuminated soul represents the search for unity and contains in herself the still causes of history and of creation. Through the love of her his love expands to become the love of God… she is in him the gateway to ecstatic joy. the source both of his inspiration and his salvation, the maker of him as a torch of living flame and his guide towards the peace which his difficult temperament and the sorrows of his bitter political life so long denied him. Through her guidance he achieved a total transformation in his emotional and intellectual being

Here Ibn ‘Arabi is describing his encounter with a very beautiful and spiritual young woman whose physical as well as her spiritual charms affected him greatly. Here we are in the presence of a wonderful human being of flesh and blood whose memory will torment him down through the years.

Ibn Arabi relates his encounters with the sublime Nizam. Of his first meetings with her, the daughter of a Persian scholar of Isphahan. he says:

Now this shaykh had a daughter, a lissome young girl who captivated the gaze of all those who saw her, whose mere presence was the ornament of our gatherings and startled all those who contemplated it to the point of stupefaction. Her name was Nizam (Harmonia) and her surname “Eye of the Sun and of Beauty”. Learned and pious, with an experience of spiritual and mystic life, she personified the venerable antiquity of the entire Holy Land and the candid youth of the great city faithful to the Prophet. Her glance, the grace of her conversation were such an enchantment… If not for the paltry souls who are over ready for scandal and predisposed to malice, I should comment here on the beauties of her body as well as her soul, which was a garden of generosity… And I took her as a model for the inspiration of the poems… although I was unable to express so much as a part of the emotion which my soul experienced and which the company of this young girl awakened in my heart, or of the generous love I felt… since she is the object of my quest and my hope, the Virgin most pure…

 

“I was unable to express so much as part of the emotion which my soul experienced…or of the grace of her mind or the modesty of her bearing, since she is the object of my quest, and my hope the virgin most pure. Whatever name I may mention in this work, it is to her I am alluding. Whatever the house whose elegy I sing, is of her house that I am thinking…I never cease to allude to the Divine Inspirations, the spiritual visitations, the correspondence of our world, to the world of the Angelic Intelligences…this is because the the things of the invisible world attract me more than those of actual life, and because this young girl knew perfectly what I was alluding to.”

However, at the Ka’abah in the sanctuary at Mecca, he has a very different sort of meeting with a transfigured and ethereal Nizam, who proves to be a stern initiatrix into the rigors of the divine mysteries. He says:

One night I was performing the ritual circumambulations of the Ka’abah… suddenly a few lines of verse came to my mind. I recited them loudly enough to be heard… No sooner had I recited these verses than I felt on my shoulder the touch of a hand softer than silk. I turned around and found myself in the presence of a young girl, a princess from among the daughters of the Greeks. Never had I seen a woman more beautiful of face, softer of speech, more tender of heart.

This brings us to opening a window from which we can view Ibn ‘Arabî’s perception of female beauty, as far as we are able to tell. We say that the desired woman for whom Ibn ‘Arabî yearns is the woman created in his image. And by looking into his private life, we discover that Nizam bint Makinuddin is the only woman who was capable of becoming to him the “Eve” who came out of the body of “Adam”, and with whom he yearned to unite to achieve his satiation in being. He describes her at the beginning of his Diwan by qualities that serve to confirm what we have mentioned. He says:

[She is] the incomparable one of her era. Her home is the pupil in the eye, and the heart in the chest. She is of long experience-

Tarjuman Al-Ashwaq

From the tranlation of Reynold A Nicholson, and others, even mine.

Would I know if she knew what hearts she possessed?

I wish I knew what mountain pass her heart threaded!

It is the heart of my beloved throbbing for me,

or it is dead towards me?

My beloved has her beloved in her heart, but her beloved is in love

with someone else!

Lovers lose the way in love and become entangled!

Spiritual Interpretation

They,’ i.e. the Divine Ideas , of which the hearts (of gnostics) are passionately enamored, and by which the spirits are distraught, and for whose sake the godly workers  perform their works of devotion.

‘What hearts’: he refers to the perfect Muḥammadan heart, because it is not limited by stations , Nevertheless, it is possessed by the Divine Ideas, for they seek it and it seeks them. They cannot know that they possess it, for they belong to its essence, inasmuch as it beholds in them nothing except its own nature.

What mountain-pass they threaded,’ i.e. what gnostic’s heart they entered when they vanished from mine. ‘Mountain-pass’ signifies a ‘station’, which is fixed, in contrast to a ‘state’, which is fleeting.

The Divine Ideas, quâ Ideas, exist only in the existence of the seer; they are ‘dead’ in so far as the seer is nonexistent.

Lovers are perplexed between two opposite things, for the lover wishes to be in accord with the Beloved and also wishes to be united with Him, so that if the Beloved wishes to be separated from the lover, the lover is in a dilemma.

Greeting to Salmá and to those who dwell in the preserve, for it behooves one who loves tenderly like me to give greeting.

And what harm to her if she gave me a greeting in return? But fair women are subject to no authority.

They journeyed when the darkness of night had let down its curtains, and I said to her, ‘Pity a passionate lover, outcast and distraught,

Whom desires eagerly encompass and at whom speeding arrows are aimed wheresoever he bends his course.

She displayed her front-teeth and a levin flashed, and I knew not which of the twain rent the gloom,

And she said, ‘Is it not enough for him that I am in his heart and that he beholds me at every moment? Is it not enough?

Commentary

‘Salmá’: he alludes to a Solomonic ecstasy , which descended upon him from the station of Solomon in virtue of a prophetic heritage.

‘In the preserve,’ i.e. an unattainable station, viz. prophecy, whereof the gate was closed by Muḥammad, the last of the prophets. Solomon’s experience of this Divine wisdom (###) in so far as he was a prophet is different from his experience of it in so far as he was a saint, and we share it with him only in the latter case, since our experience of it is derived from the saintship which is the greatest circle

God does nothing of necessity: whatever comes to us from Him is by His favour. The author indicates this Divine Solomonic apparition (nukta) by the term ‘marble statues’ (i.e. women fair as marble statues). He means that she does not answer by speech, for if she did so her speech would be other than her essence, whereas her essence is single, so that her advent is identical with her speech and with her visible presence and with her hearing; and in this respect all the Divine Realities and Attributes resemble her.

They journeyed,’ etc.: the ascension of the prophets always took place during the night, because night is the time of mystery and concealment.

The darkness of night,’ i.e. the veil of the Unseen let down the curtains of gross corporeal existence, which is the night of this animal organism, throwing a shroud over the spiritual subtleties and noble sciences which it enshrines. These, however, are not to be reached except by journeying through bodily actions and sensual thoughts, and whilst a man is thus occupied the Divine wisdom goes away from his heart, so that on his return he finds her gone and follows her with his aspiration.

Speeding arrows’: he describes this celestial form as shooting his heart, wherever it turns, with the arrows of her glances, as God said, ‘Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah‘ (Kor. ii, 109).

She displayed her front-teeth,’ etc., i.e. this lover found his whole being illuminated, for ‘God is the light of the heavens and the earth‘ (Kor. xxiv, 35), and the Prophet also said in his prayer, ‘O God, put a light into my ear and into my eye,’ and after mentioning the different members of his body he concluded, ‘and make the whole of me one light,’ viz. by the manifestation of Thy essence. Such a manifestation is compared to a flash of lightning on account of its not continuing. The author says that he did not know whether his being was illuminated by the manifestation proceeding from this Divine wisdom, which smiled upon him, or by a simultaneous manifestation of the Divine Essence.

She said,’ etc., i.e. let him not seek me from without and let it satisfy him that I have descended into his heart, so that he beholds me in his essence and through his essence at every moment.

And for last his most famous, and commented Divan :

O Marvel! a garden amidst the flames.

My heart has become capable of every form:

it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,

and a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Kaa’ba,

and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran.

I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love’s camels take,

that is my religion and my faith.

Curro Piñana from his album De lo Humano a lo Divino (From the Human Realm to the Divine) He sings Ibn Arabi’s Poetry, here he interprets the above divan.

DELEUZE, WESTERN PHILOSOPHY AND THE ENDLESS REVERSING OF THE SOCK, THE CONCEPT, A SISYPHEAN TASK, ONENESS OF BEING, ZEN AND THE EVER CHATTING MIND

It is too clear and so it is hard to see.
A dunce once searched for a fire with a
lighted lantern.
Had he known what fire was,
He could have cooked his rice much sooner.

Joshu

A SISYPHEAN TASK

In Greek mythology Sisyphus (pron.: /sɪsɪfəs/; Greek : Σίσυφος,Sísyphos) was a king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth) punished by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action forever.

King Sisyphus promoted navigation and commerce but was avaricious and deceitful, committing many crimes,  not only against mortals, but also against the gods, even deceiving Thanatos the god of death. As a punishment for his trickery, King Sisyphus was made to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill. Before he could reach the top, however, the massive stone would always roll back down, forcing him to begin again. The maddening nature of the punishment was reserved for King Sisyphus due to his hubristic belief that his cleverness surpassed that of Zeus himself. Zeus accordingly displayed his own cleverness by enchanting the boulder into rolling away from King Sisyphus before he reached the top which ended up consigning Sisyphus to an eternity of useless efforts and unending frustration. Thus it came to pass that pointless or interminable activities are sometimes described as Sisyphean.

Friedrich Welcker suggested that he symbolizes the vain struggle of man in the pursuit of knowledge. Albert Camus, in his 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, saw Sisyphus as personifying the absurdity of human life, but Camus concludes “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” as “The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

Maybe Camus  was referring to the happiness of our Western philosophers, in their unstoppable pursuit of eternally “reversing the sock” inwards an outwards!

GILLES DELEUZE

Reversing the sock one more time

Deleuze’s main philosophical project in the works he wrote prior to his collaborations with Guattari can be baldly summarized as a systematic inversion of the traditional metaphysical relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that “X is different from Y” assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities (to name one example: Plato’s forms). To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are neither logically nor metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, “given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus.” That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from differences. Apparent identities such as “X” are composed of endless series of differences, where “X” = “the difference between x and x’”, and “x” = “the difference between…”, and so forth. Difference goes all the way down. To confront reality honestly, Deleuze claims, we must grasp beings exactly as they are, and concepts of identity (forms, categories, resemblances, unities of apperception, predicates, etc.) fail to attain what he calls “difference in itself.” “If philosophy has a positive and direct relation to things, it is only insofar as philosophy claims to grasp the thing itself, according to what it is, in its difference from everything it is not, in other words, in its internal difference.”

Deleuze’s virtual ideas borrows from Plato’s Archetypes but denies it’s transcendence, superficially resemble Plato’s forms and Kant’s ideas of pure reason, they are not originals or models, nor do they transcend possible experience; instead they are the conditions of actual experience, the internal difference in itself. “The concept they [the conditions] form is identical to its object.”A Deleuzean idea or concept of difference is not a ghost-like abstraction of an experienced thing, it is a real system of differential relations that creates actual spaces, times, and sensations. In my opinion a clever Sisyphean cunning to deny the Idealism of his idea, good try although I prefer Plato original Archetypes.

Thus Deleuze, alluding to Kant and Schelling, at times refers to his philosophy as a transcendental empiricism. In Kant’s transcendental idealism, experience only makes sense when organized by forms of sensibility (namely, space and time) and intellectual categories (such as causality). Assuming the content of these forms and categories to be qualities of the world as it exists independently of our perceptual access, according to Kant, spawns seductive but senseless metaphysical beliefs (for example, extending the concept of causality beyond possible experience results in unverifiable speculation about a first cause). Deleuze inverts the Kantian arrangement: experience exceeds our concepts by presenting novelty, and this raw experience of difference actualizes an idea, unfettered by our prior categories, forcing us to invent new ways of thinking. Once more reversing the sock: His Transcendental Empiricism vs. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, may be considered original by some, repetitive, and in vogue with our politically correct materialism for others …

Univocity

Simultaneously, Deleuze claims that being is univocal, i.e., that all of its senses are affirmed in one voice. Deleuze borrows the doctrine of ontological univocity from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus. In medieval disputes over the nature of God, many eminent theologians and philosophers (such as Thomas Aquinas) held that when one says that “God is good”, God’s goodness is only analogous to human goodness. Scotus argued to the contrary that when one says that “God is good”, the goodness in question is exactly the same sort of goodness that is meant when one says “Jane is good”. That is, God only differs from us in degree, and properties such as goodness, power, reason, and so forth are univocally applied, regardless of whether one is talking about God, a person, or a flea. Note the inversion of what is above is equal as to what is below, but nevertheless I agree that is does not matter where you find God, since He is in the flea, and the Transcendent.

Deleuze adapts the doctrine of univocity to claim that being is, univocally, difference. “With univocity, however, it is not the differences which are and must be: it is being which is Difference, in the sense that it is said of difference. Moreover, it is not we who are univocal in a Being which is not; it is we and our individuality which remains equivocal in and for a univocal Being.” Here Deleuze at once echoes and inverts Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance, God or Nature. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula “pluralism = monism” Wahdath al-Wujud (Oneness of Being)

Difference and Repetition is Deleuze’s most sustained and systematic attempt to work out the details of such a metaphysics, but his other works develop similar ideas. In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), for example, reality is a play of forces; in Anti-Oedipus (1972), a “body without organs”; in What Is Philosophy? (1991), a “plane of immanence” or “chaosmos”.

Wahdat al-Wujud

Wahdat al-Wujud literally means the “Unity of Existence“. Ibn Arabi is most often characterized in Islamic texts as the originator of the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud, however, this expression is not found in his works and the first who employed this term was perhaps, in fact, the Andalusian mystical thinker Ibn Sabin. Although he frequently makes statements that approximate it, it cannot be claimed that “Oneness of Being” is a sufficient description of his ontology, since he affirms the “manyness of reality” with equal vigor.

In his view, wujūd is the unknowable and inaccessible ground of everything that exists. God alone is true wujūd, while all things dwell in nonexistence, so also wujūd alone is nondelimited (mutlaq), while everything else is constrained, confined, and constricted. Wujūd is the absolute, infinite, nondelimited reality of God, while all others remain relative, finite, and delimited.

But we need to be careful in asserting wujūd’s nondelimitation. This must not be understood to mean that wujūd is different and only different from every delimitation. The Shaykh is quick to point out that wujūd’s nondelimitation demands that it be able to assume every delimitation. If wujūd could not become delimited, it would be limited by its own nondelimitation. Thus “He possesses nondelimitation in delimitation” Or, “God possesses nondelimited wujūd, but no delimitation prevents delimitation. Rather, He possesses all delimitations, so He is nondelimited delimitation, since no single delimitation rather than another rules over Him…. Hence nothing is to be attributed to Him in preference to anything else” . Wujūd must have the power of assuming every delimitation on pain of being limited by those delimitations that it cannot assume. At the same time, it transcends the forms by which it becomes delimited and remains untouched by their constraints.

As you can see Deleuze’s metaphysics is as new, an original as cooked beans, if you consider that the Andalusian mystics precede him by eight-hundred years!

With the added fact that the Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi wrote volumes on the subject, and the above it is just a very limited view of the theme.

Epistemology

Deleuze’s unusual metaphysics entails an equally atypical epistemology, or what he calls a transformation of “the image of thought”. According to Deleuze, the traditional image of thought, found in philosophers such as Aristotle, Descartes, and Husserl, misconceives of thinking as a mostly unproblematic business. Truth may be hard to discover—it may require a life of pure theorizing, or rigorous computation, or systematic doubt—but thinking is able, at least in principle, to correctly grasp facts, forms, ideas, etc. It may be practically impossible to attain a God’s-eye, neutral point of view, but that is the ideal to approximate: a disinterested pursuit that results in a determinate, fixed truth; an orderly extension of common sense. Deleuze rejects this view as papering over the metaphysical flux, instead claiming that genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories. Truth changes what we think; it alters what we think is possible. By setting aside the assumption that thinking has a natural ability to recognize the truth, Deleuze says, we attain a “thought without image”, a thought always determined by problems rather than solving them. “All this, however, presupposes codes or axioms which do not result by chance, but which do not have an intrinsic rationality either. It’s just like theology: everything about it is quite rational if you accept sin, the immaculate conception, and the incarnation. Reason is always a region carved out of the irrational—not sheltered from the irrational at all, but traversed by it and only defined by a particular kind of relationship among irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, and drift.”

Zen Buddhism and the Yoga Sutras

Deleuze’s peculiar readings of the history of philosophy stem from this unusual epistemological perspective. To read a philosopher is no longer to aim at finding a single, correct interpretation, but is instead to present a philosopher’s attempt to grapple with the problematic nature of reality. “Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don’t tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response. [...] The history of philosophy, rather than repeating what a philosopher says, has to say what he must have taken for granted, what he didn’t say but is nonetheless present in what he did say.”

Likewise, rather than seeing philosophy as a timeless pursuit of truth, reason, or universals, Deleuze defines philosophy as the creation of concepts. For Deleuze, concepts are not identity conditions or propositions, but metaphysical constructions that define a range of thinking, such as Plato’s ideas, Descartes’s cogito, or Kant’s doctrine of the faculties. A philosophical concept “posits itself and its object at the same time as it is created.” In Deleuze’s view, then, philosophy more closely resembles practical or artistic production than it does an adjunct to a definitive scientific description of a pre-existing world (as in the tradition of Locke or Quine).

Maybe what Deleuze understood was that the whole canon of Western philosophy is based on concepts, and that the study of philosophy in it’s Western way, is the study of words, a hopeless pursuit and not truth in a enlightened way.

Zen emphasizes the attainment of enlightenment and the personal expression of direct insight in the Buddhist teachings. As such, it de-emphasizes mere knowledge of sutras and doctrine and favors direct understanding through zazen  and interaction with an accomplished teacher.

if you’re a westerner you may find it hard to shake off the intellectual and dualist ways of thinking that dominate western culture: these can make it difficult for westerners to come to Zen.

Zen Buddhists pay less attention to scripture as a means of learning than they do to various methods of practicing Zen. The most common way of teaching is for enlightenment to be communicated direct from master to pupil.

Zen practices are aimed at taking the rational and intellectual mind out of the mental loop, so that the student can become more aware and realize their own Buddha-nature. Sometimes even (mild) physical violence is used to stop the student intellectualizing or getting stuck in some other way.

Students of Zen aim to achieve enlightenment by the way they live, and by mental actions that approach the truth without philosophical thought or intellectual endeavor.

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali tell us:

Before beginning any spiritual text it is customary to clear the mind of all distracting thoughts, to calm the breath and to purify the heart.

1.1 Now, instruction in Union.

1.2. Union is restraining the thought-streams natural to the mind.

1.3. Then the seer dwells in his own nature.

A far cry from “conceptual philosophy”

In his later work (from roughly 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each analyzing reality in different ways. While philosophy creates concepts, the arts create novel qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what Deleuze calls “percepts” and “affects”), and the sciences create quantitative theories based on fixed points of reference such as the speed of light or absolute zero (which Deleuze calls “functives”). According to Deleuze, none of these disciplines enjoy primacy over the others: they are different ways of organizing the metaphysical flux, “separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another.”For example, Deleuze does not treat cinema as an art representing an external reality, but as an ontological practice that creates different ways of organizing movement and time. Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical. Hence, instead of asking traditional questions of identity such as “is it true?” or “what is it?”, Deleuze proposes that inquiries should be functional or practical: “what does it do?” or “how does it work?”

My Zen Teacher would complain: “My novice American students, ask me to explain the concept of Zen, or how does it work? My Oriental students, ask me: ‘How it feels like?”

Zen it is not a concept to understand with our minds, it is not a definition that you put in a file on your memory, and bring it up when somebody ask you about it, as the way you learn formulas for your chemistry test, or when somebody ask you have you read so, and so? And you say yes, I read it, you have not grasped it! Zen flesh, Zen bones! Just because you climb a small hill, doesn’t mean you can climb Everest, or if you swim a few laps means you can cross the English Chanel, or because you know how to ride a bicycle means you can compete in the Tour de France, however like Zen, there is some people who do just that.

The Meaning of Practice Dogen Zenji

One of my teacher’s favorite anecdotes was Dogen meeting of his Teacher Rújìng. In 1223, Dōgen and Myōzen undertook the dangerous passage across the East China Sea to China to study in Jing-de-si (Ching-te-ssu, 景德寺) monastery as Eisai had once done.

In China, Dōgen first went to the leading Chan monasteries in Zhèjiāng province. At the time, most Chan teachers based their training around the use of gōng-àns (Japanese: kōan). Though Dōgen assiduously studied the kōans, he became disenchanted with the heavy emphasis laid upon them, and wondered why the sutras were not studied more. At one point, owing to this disenchantment, Dōgen even refused Dharma transmission from a teacher.Then, in 1225, he met a master named Rújìng (如淨; J. Nyōjo), the thirteenth patriarch of the Cáodòng (J. Sōtō) lineage of Zen Buddhism, at Mount Tiāntóng (天童山 Tiāntóngshān; J. Tendōzan) in Níngbō. Rujing was reputed to have a style of Chan that was different from the other masters whom Dōgen had thus far encountered. In later writings, Dōgen referred to Rujing as “the Old Buddha”. Additionally he affectionately described both Rujing and Myōzen assenshi (先師^?, “Former Teacher”).

In those days, even the shortest trips of this nature were arduous, and very dangerous. It took its toll on Dogen as well, who become very sick on the way. As soon as he arrived, however, his spirit returned and he set off to the Temple to begin his training. But much to his disappointment, it was not what he had expected. The training was lax, there was no discipline, and all the priest were lazy, not pursuing any types of studies at all. Heartbroken he returned to the ship thinking about heading home to Japan.

He had spent about two weeks in the ship waiting for departure, when  he happen to look at a decrepit priest of about 60 years of age, who had come to the ship to buy dried mushrooms from Japan. Dogen with nothing else to do began casual conversation with him. “What business do you come for?” Inquired Dogen.

“I have come to buy dried mushrooms for tomorrow’s soup at my temple.” Replied the old man.

“Where is your temple?”

“About 14 miles away.”

“You come that distance just for mushrooms? You are old; aren’t there younger priests who can do this work? It so hot outside and you must be very tired.” Replied Dogen.

“I have to do this work because it is my work and no one else.” Said the monk.

“Why don’t you rest here tonight and go back tomorrow morning when it is more cooler.” Dogen offered.

“I must return today because this is for tomorrow’s soup, which I must prepare. I will leave as soon as I buy this mushrooms.”

“You are obvious a senior monk at your Temple. Why don’t you spend your time studying the teachings instead of doing such menial work which the younger priest should do?” Demanded Dogen.

“The younger priest are not me, I am not them. This is my job.” Then added: “Obviously, you don’t understand the meaning of practice.”

“What do you mean by that?!” Asked the astonished Dogen.

“In anything in this world, there is nothing hidden,” said the old monk, and he left, vanishing down the road.

Of course at that time young Dogen still cling to the mind for answers, even if what he was looking for was a rigorous practice.

  The Swordsman and the Cat

From an old book on swordplay, probably written by
an early master of the Ittôryû school, which was founded
by Itô Kagehisa in the seventeenth century.

“After listening intently to the wisdom of the Cat, Shôken proposed this question: “What is meant by `There is neither the subject nor the object’ ?”

Replied the Cat: “Because of the self there is the foe; when there is no self there is no foe.  The foe means an opposition as the male is opposed to the female and fire to water.  Whatever things have form exist necessarily in opposition.  When there are no signs  stirred in your mind, no conflicts of opposition take place there; and when there are no conflicts, one trying to get the better of the other, this is known as `neither foe nor self’.  When, further, the mind itself is forgotten together with signs of thought, you enjoy a state of absolutely-doing-nothingness, you are in a state of perfect quiet passivity, you are in harmony with the world, you are one with it.  While the foe-form ceases to exist, you are not conscious of it, nor can it be said that you are altogether unconscious of it.  Your mind is cleansed of all thought movements, and you act only when there is a prompting.”

“When your mind is thus in a state of absolutely-doing-nothingness, the world is identified with your self, which means that you make no choice between right and wrong, like and dislike, and are above all forms of abstraction.  Such conditions as pleasure and pain, gain and loss, are creations of your own mind.  The whole universe is indeed not to be sought after outside the Mind.  An old poet says: `When there is as particle of dust in your eye, the triple world becomes a narrow path; have your mind completely free from objects — and how much this life expands !’  When even a tiny particle of sand gets into the eye, we cannot keep it open; the eye may be likened to the Mind which by nature is brightly illuminating and free from objects; but as soon as an object enters there its virtue is lost.  It is said again that `when one is surrounded by an enemy — hundreds of thousands in strength – this physical form  may be crushed to pieces, but the Mind is mine with which no overwhelming army can have anything to do.’  Says Confucius: `Even a plain man of the street cannot be deprived of his will.’  When however this mind is confused, it turns to be its own enemy.  This is all I can explain here, for the master’s task cannot go beyond transmitting technique and illustrating the reason for it.  It is yourself who realizes the truth of it.  The truth is self-attained, it is transmitted from mind to mind, it is a special transmission outside the scriptural teaching.  There is here no willful deviation from traditional teaching, for even the master is powerless in this respect.  Nor is this confined to the study of Zen.  From the mind-training initiated by the ancient sages down to various branches of art, self-realization is the keynote of them all, and it is transmitted from mind to mind — a special transmission outside the scriptural teaching.  What is performed by scriptural teaching is to point out for you what you have within yourself.  There is no transference of secrets from master to disciple.  Teaching is not difficult, listening is not difficult either, but what is truly difficult is to become conscious of what you have in yourself and be able to use it as your own.  This self-realization is known as `seeing into one’s own being’ which is satori.  Satori is an awakening from a dream.  Awakening and self-realization and seeing into one’s own being — these are synonymous.

To make Nature display its mysterious way of achieving things is to do away with all of your own thinking, contriving, and acting; let Nature have her own way, let her act as it feels in you , and there will be no shadows, no signs, no traces whereby you can be caught; you have then no foes who can successfully resist you. “

THE COPERNICAN REVOLUTION, WESTERN CIVILIZATION, DUALISM, AND SEPARATEDNESS, TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM, E.F. SCHUMACHER AND THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING, THE EASTERN VIEW

We are here to awaken from the

illusion of our separateness.

Thich Nhat Hanh

The Copernican Revolution

It is common in our Western societies too look in to the other to assign blame for whatever is wrong with the World, or with ourselves, our way to solve our problems it is related, not in what to do with ourselves, but how to deal with the other, if you can’t be on time because you were delayed by traffic, it drive you nuts, and you blame those morons who decided to take to the road at the same time you did. If things do not work at work it is easy to assign the blame to this , or that person, who dropped the ball, just like the idiot who fumbled the football on the last game of your favorite team, and therefor they lost the game. If our love relationship is not working, usually is because our partner it is not doing, this, or that, or because he/she does exactly the opposite of what you expect.

You may be wondering what Copernicus has to do with all this?

Well, his heliocentric model, with the Sun at the center of the universe, demonstrated that the observed motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting Earth at rest in the center of the universe. His work stimulated further scientific investigations, becoming a landmark in the history of science that is often referred to as the Copernican Revolution.

But what interest us here it is not the change from the Ptolemaic system of an Earth centered Universe,  to an Heliocentric, but  far vaster consequences; Not only the Earth was not the center of the Universe, and orbited around the Sun, but the idea of a center, in an Universe constantly in motion lost it’s appeal, from there to believe that Man as subject of knowledge it is no longer the central reference point of what he knows, just like the Earth, and the Stars, it lost the center idea that Man was the measure of all things.

Therefore the Self was relegated to a dustbin in history.

Jean Laplanche, and Freud

Following the introduction of the theory of generalized seduction, French philosopher Jean Laplanche published a collection of essays under the title “The Unfinished Copernican Revolution” which referred specifically to the “object” of psychoanalysis, the unconscious – the generalized seduction theory emphasizing that such a revolution is “incomplete.”

Freud, who repeatedly compared the psychoanalytic discovery to a Copernican revolution, was for Laplanche both “his own Copernicus but also his own Ptolemy.” On the Copernican side, there is the conjoint discovery of the unconscious and the seduction theory, which maintains the sense of “otherness”; on the Ptolemaic side, there is (to Laplanche) the misdirection of the Freudian “return to a theory of self-centering”. Thus ‘what Laplanche calls Freud’s “going astray”, a disastrous shift from a Copernican to a Ptolemaic conception of the psyche…occurred when Freud replaced his early seduction theory…of sexuality as an “alien-ness” decentering the psyche’with one centered upon the individual – ‘the illusion of a universe that Laplanche would characterize as Ptolemaic, where the ego feels it occupies the central position’.

Laplanche wasn’t too happy with Kant, he accused him to revert to a Ptolemaic position, despite his Copernican Revolution.

Immanuel Kant

THE ANTINOMY BETWEEN THE IDEAL OF SCIENCE AND THAT OF PERSONALITY IN THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

Actually KANT’s “Copernican deed”, i.e. his critical reversal of the relation between the knowing subject and empirical reality, his fundamental break with dogmatic metaphysics, in short the whole content of his Critique of Pure Reason, acquires its essential significance only in the light of the new relationship between the ideal of science and that of personality, in the basic structure of his transcendental ground-Idea.

If one isolates KANT’s epistemology from the latter, KANT’s Copernican deed, which is usually considered to be a radical revolution in modern philosophy, is, in itself, in no wise radical.

It is quickly forgotten that since the time of DESCARTES, Humanist philosophical thought had been characterized by the tendency to seek the foundations of reality in the knowing subject only. HUME had with extreme acuteness tried to show that our experience is limited to sense phenomena. In distinction to the “objective” metaphysics of Greek and medieval philosophy, the Cartesian adage “cogito, ergo sum,” signified the very proclamation of the sovereignty of subjective thought. Insofar as the Humanist ideal of science, with its logistic principle of continuity, developed without a real synthesis with medieval or ancient metaphysics, its deepest tendency was the elevation of mathematical-logical thought to the throne of cosmic ordained. If any one doubts this, he may return to the sources of the Humanistic science-ideal and behold once again the cleft which separates modern Humanist thought, with its essentially nominalist concept of substance, from the old objective metaphysics of substantial forms. He may examine once again the experiment of HOBBES, as presented in the preface to his “De Corpore“, according to which the entire given world of experience is theoretically demolished, in order that it may be reconstructed by the creative activity of mathematical thought.

Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Berkeley and Hume.

He stated:

“It always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us … should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof.”

Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that:

“Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but … let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition.”

Western civilization and it’s Copernican Revolution, in is rejection of Metaphysics, and it’s embracing of a Secular non-Religious views find fault with Kant, precipitating Scientific methodology, and abandoning the subjective Self, in my opinion bringing the disastrous materialistic condition we live today at the rejection of Spirit, and the scandalous downfall of the dream of the modern Man in to the  quicksand of Postmodernism pessimism.

Leo Marx holds that the boundless optimism that bolstered the hopes of Americans until the Second World War has dissipated into “widespread social pessimism.” The reasons for this change in attitude, according to Marx, are complex. They are to be found in specific technological disasters (Chernobyl and Three Mile Island), in national traumas (the Vietnam War), and more generally in a loss of faith in technology as “the driving force of progress.” Marx places this change of expectations in historical context by examining the role of the mechanical arts in the progressive world view and showing how “both the character and the representation of ‘technology’ changed in the nineteenth century” from discrete,easily identifiable artifacts (such as steam engines) to abstract, scientific, and seemingly neutral systems of production and control. With its “endless reification” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the newly refurbished conceptof “technology” became invested with a “host of metaphysical properties and potencies” that invited a belief in it as an autonomous agent of social change. By mystifying technology and attributing to it powers that bordered on idolatry, mid­-twentieth­ century Americans set themselves up for a fall that prepared “the way for an increasingly pessimistic sense of the technological determination of history.”

Marx concludes that postmodernist criticism, with its ratification of “the idea of the domination of life by large technological systems,” perpetuates the credibility of technological determinism.

E.F. Schumacher and The Great Chain of Being

For Schumacher one of science’s major mistakes has been rejecting the traditional philosophical and religious view that the universe is a hierarchy of being. Schumacher makes a restatement of the traditional chain of being.

He agrees with the view that there are four kingdoms: Mineral, Plant, Animal, Man. He argues that there are critical differences of kind between each level of being. Between mineral and plant is the phenomenon of life, As Schumacher says though scientists say we should not use the phrase ‘life energy’, the difference still exists and has not been explained by science. Schumacher points out that though we can recognize life and destroy it, we can’t create it. Schumacher notes that the ‘life sciences’ are ‘extraordinary’ because they hardly ever deal with life as such, and instead content themselves with analyzing the “physical-chemical body which is life’s carrier.” Schumacher goes on to say there is nothing in physics or chemistry to explain the phenomenon of life.

For Schumacher, a similar jump in level of being takes place between plant and animal, which is differentiated by the phenomenon of consciousness. We can recognize consciousness, not least because we can knock an animal unconscious, but also because animals exhibit at minimum primitive thought and intelligence.

The next level, according to Schumacher, is between Animal and Man, which are differentiated by the phenomenon of self consciousness or self awareness. Self consciousness is the reflective awareness of one’s consciousness and thoughts.

Schumacher realizes that the terms—life, consciousness and self-consciousness—are subject to misinterpretation so he suggests that the differences can best be expressed as an equation which can be written thus:

• ‘Mineral’ = m

• ‘Plant’ = m + x

• ‘Animal’ = m + x + y

• ‘Man’ = m + x + y + z

In his theory, these three factors (x, y and z) represent ontological discontinuities. He argues that they are differences can be likened to differences in dimension; and from one perspective it could be argued that only humans have ‘real’ existence insofar as they possess the three dimensions of life, consciousness and self consciousness. Schumacher uses this perspective to contrast with the materialistic scientism view, which argues that what is ‘real’ is inanimate matter; denying the realness of life, consciousness and self consciousness, despite the fact each individual can verify those phenomena from their own experience.

He directs our attention to the fact that science has generally avoided seriously discussing these discontinuities, because they present such difficulties for strictly materialistic science, and they largely remain mysteries.

Next he considers the animal model of man which has grown popular in science. Schumacher notes that within the humanities the distinction between consciousness and self consciousness is now seldom drawn. Consequently, people have become increasingly uncertain about whether there is any difference between animal and man. Schumacher notes that a great deal of research about humans has been conducted by studying animals. Schumacher argues that this is analogous to studying physics in the hope of understanding life. Schumacher goes on to say that much can be learned about man by studying minerals, plants and animals because man has inherited those levels of being: all, that is, ‘except that which makes him human.’

Schumacher goes on to say that nothing is ‘more conducive to the brutalization of the modern world’ than calling humans the ‘naked ape’. Schumacher argues that once people begin viewing humans as ‘animal machines’ they soon begin treating them accordingly.

Schumacher argues that what defines man are his greatest achievements, not the common run of the mill things. He argues that human beings are open-ended because of self awareness, which as distinct from life and consciousness has nothing mechanical or automatic about it. For Schumacher “the powers of self awareness are, essentially, a limitless potentiality rather than an actuality. They have to be developed and ‘realized’ by each human individual if he is to become truly human, that is to say, a person.”

The Eastern View

Shvetashvatara Upanishad

1 What is the cause of the cosmos? Is it Brahman?

From where do we come? By what live?

Where shall we find peace at last?

What power governs the duality

Of pleasure and pain by which we are driven?

2 Time, nature, necessity, accident,

Elements, energy, intelligence —

None of these can be the First Cause

They are effects, whose only purpose is

To help the self rise above pleasure and pain.

3 In the depths of meditation, sages

Saw within themselves the Lord of Love,

Who dwells in the heart of every creature.

Deep in the hearts of all he dwells, hidden

Behind the gunas of law, energy,

And inertia. He is One. He it is

Who rules over time, space, and causality.

4 The world is the wheel of God, turning round

And round with all living creatures upon its rim.

5 The world is the river of God,

Flowing from him and flowing back to him.

6 On this ever-revolving wheel of life

The individual self goes round and round

Through life after life, believing itself

To be a separate creature, until

It sees its identity with the Lord of Love

And attains immortality in the indivisible whole.

7 He is the eternal reality, sing

The scriptures, and the ground of existence.

Those who perceive him in every creature

Merge in him and are released from the wheel

Of birth and death.

8 The Lord of Love holds in his hand the world,

Composed of the changing and the changeless,

The manifest and the non manifest.

The separate self, not yet aware of the Lord,

Goes after pleasure, only to become

Bound more and more, When it sees the Lord,

There comes an end to its bondage.

9 Conscious spirit and unconscious matter

Both have existed since the dawn of time,

With maya appearing to connect them,

Misrepresenting joy as outside us.

When all these three are seen as one, the Self

Reveals his universal form and serves

As an instrument of the divine will.

10 All is change in the world of the senses,

But changeless is the supreme Lord of Love.

Meditate on him, be absorbed in him,

Wake up from this dream of separateness.

11 Know God and all fetters will fall away.

No longer identifying yourself

With the body, go beyond birth and death.

All your desires will be fulfilled in him.

Who is One without a second.

12 Know him to be enshrined in your heart always.

Truly there is nothing more in life to know.

Meditate and realize that this world

Is filled with the presence of God.

Even if I got no sympathy for the idea of Reincarnation a common occurrence on Indian thought, for it lacks Ontological soundness, since it gives autonomous reality to the individual self that goes on reincarnating until achieving personal liberation, or Oneness with Brahman, when to begin with the individual self is illusory, and therefor non-existent, so how can have existence even after death? It is rather more simple for Brahman to be the only existent, and the separation illusory. In Advaita philosophy, individual souls are called Jīvātman, and the Highest Brahman is called Paramātman. The Jivatman and the Paramatman are known to be one and the same when the Jivatman attains the true knowledge of the Brahman (Skt. Brahmajñāna) . In the context of Advaita, the word Paramatman is invariably used to refer to Nirguna Brahman, with Ishvara and Bhagavan being terms used to refer to Brahman with qualities, or Saguna Brahman.

However having this in mind, the Shvetashvatara Upanishad is a wonderful example of seeing the Self as One.

GAIA, PANPSYCHISM, NEW MATERIALISM, THE RIGHTS OF NATURE, A NEW ECOLOGY FOR MANKIND, NEOPAGANISM, AND OLD RELIGIONS ON CONTEMPORARY ISSUES.

“Oh all you sentient beings of this threefold world

[i.e. the entire universe, both visible and invisible]!

Because I, the All-Creating Sovereign, have created you,

you are My children and equal to Me.

Because you are not second to Me, I am present in you …

Oh all you sentient beings of this threefold world,

if I were not, you would be non-existent. …

Because all things do not exist outside of Me,

I firmly declare that I am all – the All-Creating One.”

Kulayarāja Tantra

I kind of smile, at looking at contemporary, urgent political, and ecological issues, taking resource at what just some years ago, most of Mankind sneered as a discarded  Old Mythology, or at best ancient dead Religions!

In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view.Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Friedrich Paulsen, Ernst Haeckel, Charles Strong, and partially William James are considered panpsychists.

Panpsychism is related to the more holistic view that the whole Universe is an organism that possesses a mind (see pandeism, pantheism, panentheism and cosmic consciousness). It is claimed to be distinct from animism or hylozoism, which hold that all things have a soul or are alive, respectively. Gustav Theodor Fechner claimed in “Nanna” and “Zend-Avesta” that the Earth is a living organism whose parts are the people, the animals and the plants.

Many Neopagans worship Gaia. Beliefs regarding Gaia vary, ranging from the belief that Gaia is the Earth to the belief that she is the spiritual embodiment of the earth, or the Goddess of the Earth.

Gaia (pron.: /ˈɡeɪ.ə/ or /ˈɡaɪ.ə/; from Ancient Greek Γαῖα, a poetical form of Gē Γῆ, “land” or “earth”; also Gaea, or Ge) was the goddess or personification of Earth in ancient Greek religion, one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia was the great mother of all: the heavenly gods, the Titans and the Giants were born from her union with Uranus (the sky), while the sea-gods were born from her union with Pontus (the sea). Her equivalent in the Roman pantheon was Terra.

The Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. Topics of interest include how the biosphere and the evolution of life forms affect the stability of global temperature, ocean salinity, oxygen in the atmosphere and other environmental variables that affect the habitability of Earth.

The hypothesis was formulated by the scientist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. While early versions of the hypothesis were criticized for being teleological and contradicting principles of natural selection, later refinements have resulted in ideas highlighted by the Gaia Hypothesis being used in disciplines such as geophysiology, Earth system science, biogeochemistry, systems ecology, and climate science. In 2006, the Geological Society of London awarded Lovelock the Wollaston Medal largely for his work on the Gaia theory.

Gaia theory, which views the biosphere as a self-regulating system, that maintains homeostasis in relation to many vital chemical and physical variables, is sometimes interpreted as panpsychism, because some think that any goal-directed behavior qualifies as mental. However, the goal-directed behavior of the biosphere, as explained by the Gaia theory, is an emergent function of organised, living matter, not a quality of any matter. Thus Gaia theory is more properly associated with emergentism than panpsychism.

So-called naive panpsychism, as opposed to philosophical panpsychism, is sometimes used to refer to the idea of inanimate objects as sentient and/or intentional. This is similar to animism. The attitude of labeling this philosophy “naive” could be considered a vestigial Eurocentric belief in the inaccuracy or unimportance of non-Western world views. It could be considered to be a colonial artifact utilized as a tool of domination to discredit the philosophical contributions of the colonized. In addition, it downplays the possible role that indigenous philosophies may have played in the formation of panpsychist ideas in the Western world.

Panpsychism, as a view that the universe has “universal consciousness”, is shared by some forms of religious thought: theosophy, pantheism, cosmotheism and panentheism. The hundredth monkey effect exemplifies the threshold for this applied cosmic consciousness. The Tiantai Buddhist answer is that “when one attains it, all attain it.”

Panpsychism also plays a part in Hindu, Buddhist, Dzogchen and Shinto mysticism, and for that matter in most if not all Animistic Native Religions, and Mother Goddess Cults, like Pachamama, in the Andes, Rhea, for the Greeks, Durga, or Kali for the Hindus, Nerthus, for the Germanics, Dea Matrona, for the Gauls, Ninhursag for the Sumerians, Tuuwaqatsi for the Hopi, Nut, or Isis for the ancient Egyptians, etc. It will be hard to find a place on Earth were the ancient goddess has not being worship.

To many specialist this may strike as oversimplification, syncretism, or whatever they may choose to name it, however in an age of rapid, and expanding communications, and the phenomenon we call Globalization, it is impossible now for people around the world  not to see the same phenomena expressed under a different guise all over the Earth, by those old, native cultures who perennially have lived close to the land, and that colonization, and modernity has not alter the close connection to their roots, in a world hybridized by the seed  of our Western disconnected ways, our lack of awareness, on many Ecological issues, something as simple as were food come from, not from our sterile well provided   markets, packaged in attractive colored containers for us to buy, actually the packages seem to create more garbage volume than the product itself!

In my view Panpsychism  it is a way for the reductionist, mechano-materialist to reconnect with an emergent ecological consciousness, for so long time sleep in our Western culture without give in totally to a Theistic world view of the world, fine, and dandy, if you are too proud to apologizing for your past  mistakes it is beyond you, if backtracking to a Theistic view it is too much to bear, after you unshackled yourself of the heavy yoke of God, ignoring that there is more to God than the Paternalistic Judeo-Christian, chauvinistic male centered views, associated with the  word God, or sin…uhh, scary!

Anyway welcome to fight for your hard won new ecological panpsychic awareness! Now let’s look what those poor, ignorant, undeveloped third world people are doing down South!

Rights of Nature

President Evo Morales of Bolivia, Morales has declared himself Bolivia’s first Aymara president. this may not be true by blood only, since other presidents had some native blood in them, however Evo Morales is the first president of Bolivia who grew as an Indigenous individual, and that by class, and socioeconomic factors belong to the real native people of Bolivia, and do not serve the Criollo’s policies, subservient to an Eurocentric colonial model of economics, and racism, were for centuries the native people has been marginalized from education, and economic opportunities a sort of an apartheid not institutionalized by laws, like in South Africa,  but enforced by custom, and racist behavior from the classes in power. Together with Rafael Correa president of Ecuador in 2010 issued a declaration of Rights of Nature. (See my post on this blog of June 2011, PACHAMAMA; MOTHER EARTH, GODDESSES,THE STRUGGLE OF INDIGENOUS CULTURES, AND THE MESSAGE OF THE MAMA KOGUIS TO YOUNGER BROTHER.)

By comparison native cultures, unlike us a supposedly more advanced culture we lag behind on defense of Ecological issues, muddled in a morass of rampant commercialism, corporatism united to a corrupt government, and media who it’s married to a exploitative plutocracy who despoils Mother Earth at will,  and export our Eurocentric views, and way of life to the poor, and practically defenseless Native Cultures, with our implicit consent, since we do not even object to be labeled “consumers” and passively accept to go out and shop for whatever they advertise to sale us .

 

In contrast  Indigenous cultures still are close to the land and know were food come from, and because their dependence, it is immediate to the source were food come from, and their survival depends on it, their ecological awareness usually it is not clouded by our modern commercialism, and lack of connection to Mother Earth. Many governments in third World countries follow the same obsolete, and harmful policies that big money dictates, and despite their “Independence” from a colonial past, they are still subjects of our Imperial economic policies, and they lack the power to be truly independent, and not subjects to the whims, and caprice, dictated by our corporate plutocrats, and “free market”capitalism, so individuals, and small communities,  have to organize and fight  for their Indigenous rights to have access to their own land, water, and many other resources, that manly foreign capitalist ventures, came to their lands to exploit, despoil, and marginalize this people even more, ignoring their rights to life, clean soil, clean water, and free access to it, in their blind pursuit of wealth, they trample on the natural rights of this poor people who have lived with their ancient ways close to the land, Mother Earth who give sustenance to all of us.

NEOPAGANISM

Because of the principle of separation of church and state, the U.S. government does not formally maintain a list of recognized religions. Both the U.S. and Canada register religious groups as tax-exempt organizations and grant clergy the right to conduct marriage ceremonies.

However, many European federal governments have ecclesiastical affairs ministries which do formally recognize religions. The governments of: Iceland in 1973, Norway in 1996 and 1999, and  Denmark in 2003 have officially recognized Neopagan religions which worship Viking Gods such as Odin and Thor.

HISTORY

The Romantic movement of the 18th century led to the re-discovery of Old Gaelic and Old Norse literature and poetry. Neo-druidism can be taken to have its origins as early as 1717 with the foundation of The Druid Order. The 19th century saw a surge of interest in Germanic paganism with the Viking revival in Victorian Britain and Scandinavia. In Germany the Völkisch movement was in full swing. These pagan currents coincided with Romanticist interest in folklore and occultism, the widespread emergence of pagan themes in popular literature, and the rise of nationalism.

During this resurgence in the United Kingdom, Neo-druidism and various Western occult groups emerged, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis, who attempted to syncretize “exotic” elements like Egyptian cosmology and Kabbalah into their belief systems, although not necessarily for purely religious purposes. Influenced by the anthropologist Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, several prominent writers and artists were involved in these organizations, including William Butler Yeats, Maud Gonne, Arthur Edward Waite, and Aleister Crowley. Along with these early occult organizations, there were other social phenomena such as the interest in mediumship, magic, and other supernatural beliefs which was at an all time high in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Another important influence during this period was the Romantic aesthetic movement, which venerated the natural world and frequently made reference to the deities of antiquity. The Romantic poets, essayists, artists and authors who employed these themes in their work were later associated with socially progressive attitudes towards sexuality, feminism, pacifism and similar issues.

It is the belief of modern Pagans that the religious beliefs of pre-Christian Europe “possess continuing value for us in our own time, even after centuries of suppression and neglect.” Strmiska asserted that contemporary Paganism could be viewed as a part of the “much larger phenomenon” of efforts to revive “traditional, indigenous, or native religions” that were occurring across the globe.

Contemporary Paganism, Modern Paganism, or Neopaganism,

Is an umbrella term referring to a variety of contemporary religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various historical pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe. Although they do share commonalities, contemporary Pagan religious movements are diverse and no single set of beliefs, practices, or texts are shared by them all.

Contemporary Paganism has been characterized as “a synthesis of historical inspiration and present-day creativity”, in this manner drawing influences from pre-Christian, folkloric and ethnographic sources in order to fashion new religious movements. The extent to which contemporary Pagans use these sources differs; many follow a spirituality which they accept is entirely modern, whilst others attempt to reconstruct or revive indigenous, ethnic religions as found in historical and folkloric sources as accurately as possible.

Most modern pagan religions celebrate the cycles and seasons of nature through a festival calendar that honors these changes. The timing of festivals, and the rites celebrated, may vary from climate to climate, and will also vary, sometimes widely depending upon which particular pagan religion the adherent subscribes to.

Some pagans also draw inspiration from modern traditions, including Christianity, Buddhism and others, creating syncretism like “Christian Witchcraft” or “Buddheo-Paganism”. Since many pagan beliefs do not require exclusivity, some pagans practice other faiths in parallel.

Eclectic pagans take an non dogmatic religious stance, and therefore potentially see no one as having authority to deem a source “apocryphal”. Contemporary paganism has therefore been prone to fakelore, especially in recent years as information and misinformation alike have been spread on the Internet and in print media. A number of Wiccan, pagan and even some “Traditionalist” or “Tribalist” groups have a history of “Grandmother Stories” Typically involving initiation by a Grandmother, Grandfather, or other elderly relative who is said to have instructed them in the secret, millennia-old traditions of their ancestors. As this “secret wisdom” can almost always be traced to recent sources, tellers of these stories have often later admitted they made them up.

A number of Wiccan, Neopagan and even some “Traditionalist” or “Tribalist” groups have a history of spurious “Grandmother Stories”  usually involving initiation by a Grandmother, Grandfather, or other elderly (and conveniently dead) relative who is said to have instructed them in the secret, millennia-old traditions of their ancestors. As this “secret wisdom” has almost always been traced to recent sources, or been quite obviously concocted even more recently, most proponents of these stories have eventually admitted they made them up. These “origin myths” are sometimes also referred to as “The Myth of the Wicca.” In these cases, rather than a case of folklorists from outside the community calling the Wiccan stories “fakelore”, phrases such as “Grandmother Stories” and “The Myth of the Wicca” have become synonyms and shorthand for a specific type of fakelore found within the communities in question.

Some claims of continuity between contemporary paganism and older forms of paganism have been shown to be spurious, or outright false, as in the case of Iolo Morganwg’s Druid’s Prayer. Wiccan beliefs of an ancient monotheistic Goddess were inspired by Marija Gimbutas’s description of Neolithic Europe. The factual historical validity of her theories has been disputed by many scholars, including historian Ronald Hutton.

While most pagans draw from old religious traditions, they also adapt them. The mythologies of the ancient traditions are not generally considered to be literally factual by pagans, in the sense that the Bible and other Abrahamic texts are often thought of by their followers. Eclectic pagans in particular are resistant to the concept of scripture or excessive structure, considering personal freedom to be one of the primary goals of their spirituality. In contrast, some Reconstructionist movements, like those who practice Theodism, take a stricter religious approach, and only recognize certain historical texts and sources as being relevant to their belief system, intentionally focusing on one culture to the exclusion of others, and having a general disdain for the eclectic mentality.

In all honesty most Western Neopaganism  are fringe groups not taken very seriously by most, and easy to criticize by serious scholars like The English academic Graham Harvey noted that Pagans “rarely indulge in theology.” And I will add a magnet for people wanting to fulfill personal fantasies, or break the mold that  our current society impose on us as acceptable behavior, and traditional thinking, Neopaganism is a way to liberate the individual from the prevalent  Materialism, and Judeo-Christian mental, and psychological moral straightjackets, the downside of it is that in many cases some individuals embrace Neopaganism as a license for a “anything goes” type of behavior, inspired no doubt, by an oversimplification of historical accounts, and Hollywood portrayal of Arthurian legends.

The Earth Connection

Contemporary paganism emerged as part of the counter-culture, New Age and Hippie movements in the 1960s to 1970s. Reconstructionism rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. The majority of pagans are not committed to a single defined tradition, but understand paganism as encompassing a wide range of non-institutionalized spirituality, as promoted by the Church of All Worlds, the Feri Tradition and other movements. Notably, Wicca in the United States since the 1970s has largely moved away from its Gardnerian roots and diversified into eclectic variants.

Paganism generally emphasizes the sanctity of the Earth and Nature. Pagans often feel a duty to protect the Earth through activism, and support causes such as rainforest protection, organic farming, permaculture, animal rights and so on. Some pagans are influenced by Animist traditions of the indigenous Native Americans and Africans and other indigenous or shamanic traditions.

Eco-paganism and Eco-magic, which are off-shoots of direct action environmental groups, have a strong emphasis on fairy imagery and a belief in the possibility of intercession by the fae (fairies, pixies, gnomes, elves, and other spirits of nature and the Otherworlds).

Some Unitarian Universalists are eclectic pagans. Unitarian Universalists look for spiritual inspiration in a wide variety of religious beliefs. The Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, or CUUPs, encourages their member chapters to “use practices familiar to members who attend for worship services but not to follow only one tradition of paganism.“

In my view this fringe groups are part of a new global consciousness who is trying to correct the disconnection, and ecological blindness brought by industrialism an economic and social system based on the development of large-scale industries and marked by the production of large quantities of inexpensive manufactured goods and the concentration of employment in urban factories, the abandonment of our agrarian past in favor of an urban culture that cuts our connection with Pachamama, our Mother Earth, and that Native, and aboriginal cultures still embrace, preserve, and respect. This inevitable point for a break from our blindness, and the path in to ecological unsustainable living, and a re-encounter of the eternal values  that promote sustainability based in our wise, and respectful use of Nature, a recognition that historically the Western dominant culture went astray with Industrialism, and the values of modernism, that calls for our humility to recognize our failure, and a return to embrace Mother Earth as the sustainer of life, and a return to Her, embracing the ancient values that sustain, and preserve Her.

THE MYSTICAL TALES OF THE 1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS, SYMBOLS OF THE HEART OF SECRETS.

 

“We lay veils upon their hearts lest they understand it…”

Qur’an (17:46)

 

 

Many years ago in my youth when I meet my Spiritual Teacher, I heard someone ask him what were his favorite movies, to my surprise he said:

“I love those movies, about Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba, The thief of Bagdad, and that type of movies.”

I was floored, an avid movie fan at the time I couldn’t figure out a man of his Spiritual realization would care for such cheese B movies made on the fifties, and sixties, with second rate actors like Steve Reeves, and other perhaps more memorable, like Douglas Fairbanks earlier and many others, since Hollywood love for the exotic, an adventures has been a cash cow, and every so many years they bring to the screen the tales of the Arabian Nights in a new form, with little, or any artistic relevance, .

At another occasion  I heard him express the same opinion, fortunately someone asked him why he loved such movies, his answer made me realize he didn’t care too much for the artistic side of the movies as for the stories themselves, without giving too much explanations he said:

“The  spiritual symbolism of those stories is great, like the seven gates, the seven voyages, the magic carpets, lamps, the Genies. etc.  And the trials of the soul has to go through in order to find the treasure.”

It was until many years later that I read The Arabian Nights, and I had to agree with my Teacher.

Brief Official History

One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: كتاب ألف ليلة وليلة‎Kitāb alf laylah wa-laylah) is a collection of West and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English language edition (1706), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment.

The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators and scholars across West, Central, South Asia and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان‎, lit. A Thousand Tales) which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.

What is common throughout all the editions of the Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryār (from Persian: شهريار‎, meaning “king” or “sovereign”) and his wife Scheherazade (from Persian: شهرزاد‎, possibly meaning “of noble lineage”) and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while others begin and end of their own accord. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights, while others include 1,001 or more.

Some of the stories of The Nights, particularly “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp”, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor”, while almost certainly genuine Middle Eastern folk tales, were not part of The Nights in Arabic versions, but were added into the collection by Antoine Galland and other European translators. The innovative and rich poetry and poetic speeches, chants, songs, lamentations, hymns, beseeching, praising, pleading, riddles and annotations provided by Scheherazade or her story characters are unique to the Arabic version of the book. Some are as short as one line, while others go for tens of lines.

The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques and various forms of erotica. Numerous stories depict Jinns, Ghouls, Apes, sorcerers, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography, not always rationally; common protagonists include the historical Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, his Grand Vizier, Jafar al-Barmaki, and his alleged court poet Abu Nuwas, despite the fact that these figures lived some 200 years after the fall of the Sassanid Empire in which the frame tale of Scheherazade is set. Sometimes a character in Scheherazade’s tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, and that story may have another one told within it, resulting in a richly layered narrative texture.

The history of the Nights is extremely complex and modern scholars have made many attempts to untangle the story of how the collection as it currently exists came about. Robert Irwin summarizes their findings: “In the 1880s and 1890s a lot of work was done on the Nights by the scholar Zotenberg and others, in the course of which a consensus view of the history of the text emerged. Most scholars agreed that the Nights was a composite work and that the earliest tales in it came from India and Persia. At some time, probably in the early 8th century, these tales were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla, or ‘The Thousand Nights’. This collection then formed the basis of The Thousand and One Nights. The original core of stories was quite small. Then, in Iraq in the ninth or tenth century, this original core had Arab stories added to it – among them some tales about the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. Also, perhaps from the tenth century onwards, previously independent sagas and story cycles were added to the compilation. Then, from the thirteenth century onwards, a further layer of stories was added in Syria and Egypt, many of these showing a preoccupation with sex, magic or low life. In the early modern period yet more stories were added to the Egyptian collections so as to swell the bulk of the text sufficiently to bring its length up to the full 1,001 nights of storytelling promised by the book’s title.”

The Mystical aspect of some of the Tales

What western writers and Scholars had put little effort  to study, or to show, is the Mystical aspect of some of the tales like Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, and other tales, of the Arabian Nights, not surprising since early in the History of the Western discovery of Oriental texts, and their translation in to Western languages, specially coming from Islamic countries, there was an  emphasis to demystify them, and rendered naked from their true link to Islam, making them profane stories with no connection to their roots in Islam, denying their Mystical origin, and castrating them from their true Symbolic meaning, and the facto making them in a Historical context, children’s  stories, material for movie adventures, or at best medieval Oriental legends, of little interest for the contemporary reader! When they posses a rich vein of Mystic knowledge, that goes beyond a moral tale. A few Western readers had glimpsed beyond the common Western trite characterization, and the materialistic, unimaginative, or biased mind of scholars.

The Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini observed:

“Every tale in The Thousand and One Nights begins with an ‘appearance of destiny’ which manifests itself through an anomaly, and one anomaly always generates another. So a chain of anomalies is set up. And the more logical, tightly knit, essential this chain is, the more beautiful the tale. By ‘beautiful’ I mean vital, absorbing and exhilarating. The chain of anomalies always tends to lead back to normality. The end of every tale in The One Thousand and One Nights consists of a ‘disappearance’ of destiny, which sinks back to the somnolence of daily life … The protagonist of the stories is in fact destiny itself.”

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing is the self-fulfilling prophecy, which dates back to the story of Krishna in ancient Sanskrit literature. A variation of this device is the self-fulfilling dream, which dates back to medieval Arabic literature. Several tales in the One Thousand and One Nights use this device to foreshadow what is going to happen, as a special form of literary prolepsis. A notable example is “The Ruined Man who Became Rich Again through a Dream”, in which a man is told in his dream to leave his native city of Baghdad and travel to Cairo, where he will discover the whereabouts of some hidden treasure. The man travels there and experiences misfortune, ending up in jail, where he tells his dream to a police officer. The officer mocks the idea of foreboding dreams and tells the protagonist that he himself had a dream about a house with a courtyard and fountain in Baghdad where treasure is buried under the fountain. The man recognizes the place as his own house and, after he is released from jail, he returns home and digs up the treasure. In other words, the foreboding dream not only predicted the future, but the dream was the cause of its prediction coming true. To the aware individual it will be useless to explain the rich Spiritual meaning of this story, to those thick of understanding, is easy to point out that there is no need to look for richness outside of us,True richness lays at the heart of our Being, not outside of us.

Story of the Blind Baba-Abdalla, and Ali Baba

The owner of eighty camels runs in to a dervish, who offer him a treasure for his help, but greed consumed his heart, and ended in misfortune. Here I show the always secret place that is full of precious jewels of all kind and plenty of  gold.

“I did what I was bid, and rejoined the dervish, whom I found trying to kindle a fire out of some dry wood. As soon as it was alight, he threw on it a handful of perfumes, and pronounced a few words that I did not understand, and immediately a thick column of smoke rose high into the air. He separated the smoke into two columns, and then I saw a rock, which stood like a pillar between the two mountains, slowly open, and a splendid palace appear within.

But, Commander of the Faithful, the love of gold had taken such possession of my heart, that I could not even stop to examine the riches, but fell upon the first pile of gold within my reach and began to heap it into a sack that I had brought with me.

The dervish likewise set to work, but I soon noticed that he confined himself to collecting precious stones, and I felt I should be wise to follow his example. At length the camels were loaded with as much as they could carry, and nothing remained but to seal up the treasure, and go our ways.

Before, however, this was done, the dervish went up to a great golden vase, beautifully chased, and took from it a small wooden box, which he hid in the bosom of his dress, merely saying that it contained a special kind of ointment. Then he once more kindled the fire, threw on the perfume, and murmured the unknown spell, and the rock closed, and stood whole as before.”

Of course because his bottomless greed and not listening to the warnings, he ended blind not only morally but physically.

“Miserable dervish!” I shrieked, “so it is true after all! Into what a bottomless pit has my lust after gold plunged me. Ah, now that my eyes are closed they are really opened. I know that all my sufferings are caused by myself alone! But, good brother, you, who are so kind and charitable, and know the secrets of such vast learning, have you nothing that will give me back my sight?

 

“Unhappy man,” replied the dervish, “it is not my fault that this has befallen you, but it is a just chastisement. The blindness of your heart has wrought the blindness of your body. Yes, I have secrets; that you have seen in the short time that we have known each other. But I have none that will give you back your sight. You have proved yourself unworthy of the riches that were given you. Now they have passed into my hands, whence they will flow into the hands of others less greedy and ungrateful than you.”

Is this a Spiritual lesson, or what? The usual elements in the story that are so common to the many other stories in the 1001 Arabian Nights, like Ali Baba and the Forty thieves, it is this Secrets Caves, Underground Vaults, Hidden Palaces where it can only by access by special secret words like:

“Open Sesame” (Arabic إفتح يا سمسم iftaḥ ya simsim ‘open, O sesame’) is a magical phrase in the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” in One Thousand and One Nights. It opens the mouth of a cave in which forty thieves have hidden a treasure; “Hemasas Nepo” was the original phrase to re-seal the cave, but in recent stories, it was “Close Sesame.“

This secret caves, rich hidden palaces,or enclosures, were inexhaustible wealth abounds,  are allegories for the Human Heart, but like in Ali baba’s tale forty thieves jealously guarded the cave, ready to kill any intruder, just like the passions of an impure heart are ready to commit mayhem, and guide the person to an unfortunate end. Only those possessing a pure and kind heart can have access.

Surah Yasin 9. And We have put a barrier before them, and a barrier behind them, and We have covered them up, so that they cannot see.

Thus according to the Holy Qur’an, the hearts are:

 

• Alive (to guidance)

 

• Dead (absence of Tawheed)

 

• Hard (obstinate in disbelief)

 

• Soft (in remembrance of Allah)

 

• Pure (free of materialism, empty for Allah)

 

• Impure (polytheism, disbelief)

 

• Diseased (un-Godly)

 

• Sealed (will not receive Truth)

 

• Pious (God conscious)

 

• Veiled (from guidance)

 

• Open (to truth)

 

• Blossom (become enlightened)

 

• United (with the believers)

 

• One heart in each person (it contains either Allah or the world)

 

Ali Baba’s brother whose heart was veiled, and deceased with greed and forgetfulness, is caught in the cave by the forty thieves.

Ali Baba brings the body of his death brother home, where he entrusts Morgiana, a clever slave-girl in Cassim’s household, with the task of making others believe that Cassim has died a natural death. First, Morgiana purchases medicines from an apothecary, telling him that Cassim is gravely ill. Then, she finds an old Tailor known as Baba Mustafa whom she pays, blindfolds, and leads to Cassim’s house. There, overnight, the Tailor stitches the pieces of Cassim’s body back together, so that no one will be suspicious. Ali Baba and his family are able to give Cassim a proper burial without anyone asking awkward questions.

Morgiana keep fooling the thieves with clever ruses so they could not get a hold of Ali Baba, and she finally dispatch the forty thieves, and later the chief of the thieves, that with cunning had found his way in to Ali Baba’s house, and planed to kill him, now why a simple slave girl would take the stage, and be the protagonist of the story, rather than Ali Baba?

The slave girl represent Ali Baba’s soul that is totally at his service, and rejecting the vices that afflict the heart and passions represented by the thieves she triumph over them, and it is rewarded in the end and brought in to the family.

On the necessity of self-control, the Glorious Qur’an says:

وَ أَمَّا مَنْ خافَ مَقامَ رَبِّهِ وَ نَهَى النَّفْسَ عَنِ الْهَوى‏ فَإِنَّ الْجَنَّةَ هِيَ الْمَأْوى‏

And as for him who fears to stand in the presence of his Lordand forbids his own soul from its whims and caprices then surely Paradise is the abode. (79:40 & 41)

يا داوُدُ إِنَّا جَعَلْناكَ خَليفَةً فِي الْأَرْضِ فَاحْكُمْ بَيْنَ النَّاسِ بِالْحَقِّ وَ لا تَتَّبِعِ الْهَوى‏ فَيُضِلَّكَ عَنْ سَبيلِ اللَّهِ إِنَّ الَّذينَ يَضِلُّونَ عَنْ سَبيلِ اللَّهِ لَهُمْ عَذابٌ شَديدٌ بِما نَسُوا يَوْمَ الْحِسابِ

O David! …do not follow the whims of your own soul for they will lead you astray from God’s path. (38:26)

يا أَيُّهَا الَّذينَ آمَنُوا كُونُوا قَوَّامينَ بِالْقِسْطِ شُهَداءَ لِلَّهِ وَ لَوْ عَلى‏ أَنْفُسِكُمْ أَوِ الْوالِدَيْنِ وَ الْأَقْرَبينَ إِنْ يَكُنْ غَنِيًّا أَوْ فَقيراً فَاللَّهُ أَوْلى‏ بِهِما فَلا تَتَّبِعُوا الْهَوى‏ أَنْ تَعْدِلُوا وَ إِنْ تَلْوُوا أَوْ تُعْرِضُوا فَإِنَّ اللَّهَ كانَ بِما تَعْمَلُونَ خَبيراً

O you who have faith! Be maintainers of justice and witnesses for the sake of God, even if it should be against yourselves or [your] parents and near relatives, and whether it be [someone] rich or poor, for God has a greater right over them. So do not follow [your] desires, lest you should be unfair, and if you distort [the testimony] or disregard [it], God is indeed well aware of what you do. (4:135)

وَ الشَّمْسِ وَ ضُحاها وَ الْقَمَرِ إِذا تَلاها وَ النَّهارِ إِذا جَلاَّها وَ اللَّيْلِ إِذا يَغْشاها وَ السَّماءِ وَ ما بَناها وَ الْأَرْضِ وَ ما طَحاها وَ نَفْسٍ وَ ما سَوَّاها فَأَلْهَمَها فُجُورَها وَ تَقْواها قَدْ أَفْلَحَ مَنْ زَكَّاها وَ قَدْ خابَ مَنْ دَسَّاها

I swear by the sun and its brilliance and the moon when it follows the sun and the day when it makes manifest the sun (and her beauty) and the night when it covers the sun and the heaven and Him who made it and the earth and Him who extended it and the soul and Him who made it perfect, then He inspired it to understand what is right and wrong for it. He will indeed be successful who purifies it and he will indeed fail whoever pollutes and corrupts it. (91:1-10)

Purification of the soul is a prerequisite for closeness to God. Indeed, the whole point of morality and spirituality is to purify one’s soul. It is only then that the soul starts shining, receiving and reflecting utmost radiation and light from God. If we want to meet God, Who is the Most Pure, then we need to achieve purity. It is impossible to be polluted and then try to go towards God.

The Seven Voyages of Sinbad

While Burton and other Western translators have grouped the Sinbad stories within the tales of Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights, they apparently originated quite independently from that story-cycle and modern translations by Arab scholars often do not include the stories of Sinbador several other of the Arabian Nights that have become familiar to Western audiences. However this is no doubt an Islamic story. The Persian name Sindbad (“Lord of the Sindh River”) hints at a Persian origin. The oldest texts of the cycle are however in Arabic, and no ancient or medieval Persian version has survived. The story as we have it is specifically set during the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate and particularly highlights the reign of Harun al-Rashid. The name Sindbad indicates the name of the Indus River(Sindhu). The Sindhi Sailors, who became famous due to their skills in navigation, geography and languages may very well have inspired the stories of Sindbad the Sailor. Sindh is actually mentioned in the story of the Third Voyage: (“And thence we fared on to the land of Sind, where also we bought and sold”).

Like the 1001 Nights the Sinbad story-cycle has a frame story, which goes as follows: in the days of Haroun al-Rashid, Caliph of Baghdad, a poor porter (one who carries goods for others in the market and throughout the city) pauses to rest on a bench outside the gate of a rich merchant’s house, where he complains to Allah about the injustice of a world which allows the rich to live in ease while he must toil and yet remain poor. The owner of the house hears, and sends for the porter, and it is found they are both named Sinbad. The rich Sinbad tells the poor Sinbad that he became wealthy, “by Fortune and Fate”, in the course of seven wondrous voyages, which he then proceeds to relate.

It is alleged with some justice that the Seven voyages shares a lot in common with the Odyssey of Homer, the Arabs knew well the Greek antiquity, and no doubt borrowed elements of the Odyssey, since it is also a Symbolic tale of the soul to reach home.

Also the nature of the tales, is repetitive, and Chiasmic in nature, sailors made out to sea were they expect to make a larger fortune of the one they spend on making the trip, they go to unknown regions, were sometimes are shipwrecked by storms and end stranded in a foreign land, or Island, were all kind of vicissitudes are met and deal successfully or that would be the end of it and likely Sinbad would die, but instead, he regains all what he lost, and come back home with more.

Michael Murray writes:

“What is gained by exploration? Knowledge: of market-resources, trading-terrain, of conditions, regions and customs. But also an invaluable network of colleagues and contacts. What is gained is trust, honor and esteem. Wealth is only a metaphor for knowledge: worldly wealth, and spiritual wealth mirror each other in the overall tale.

So what happened to change matters? As you can guess, there is a central voyage where all changes – because, yes, the Seven Voyages of Sinbad, are structured in a ring.Each tale has a repeating pattern of shipwreck, loss, or abandonment; and resolution. This last can come from the restitution of goods/fortune from a previous voyage; or earned honors from the present voyage.Each tale ends as it begins with the merchant safely back home and turning once more to an indulgent lifestyle. Each tale employs a change of circumstances in the middle section – each tale is a complete ring in itself. They all add up to the overall ring of the Seven Voyages.

The changeover, in the fourth tale, is very well marked, and prepared for: it is a death experience. Where before, surviving shipwrecks and other catastrophes had been the case, in the fourth tale he is by custom of the land lowered into the grave pit with his dead wife, and a small supply of food, as well as the grave goods. That he survives is due to his total abasement: he must kill all subsequent burial spouses, and steal their food supplies. He escapes his death-experience by following a carrion-eating animal’s tunnel to a bleak shoreline. He has become that animal almost, crawling on all-fours. He brings out bales of grave goods as loot.

The question being asked here is: what survives when all else is taken away, even one’s life? It is the life of the spirit. The Fourth Voyage sees all shipwrecked, and the survivors drift to an island. Strange wild men take them to their king; he treats them extraordinarily well; Sinbad is wary, however, and soon finds that his fellow men are being fed adulterated food. They lose their wits, eventually grow corpulent on the fare, and are then eaten, by the king and company. Sinbad grows thinner and thinner. They take no interest in him, and he escapes. On the other side of this vast island he meets a gentle people, who take him in. He provides goods for them and becomes very wealthy by making saddles for their horses, for they have none. As written earlier, he marries, is honored by their king, then undergoes the ordeal of the grave pit. The ring here centers around the subject of the bestiality of living solely in the physical body. He must die in the body and mind in order to be reborn as someone worthy of his life: the man must ride the body, and not vice versa.”

The Seven Voyages of Sinbad ultimately represent the travels of the Soul through the seven spheres of Spiritual Knowledge.

In Islam  Sura Al-Fatiha (Arabic :سورة الفاتحة‎), (Sūratul-Fātihah, “The Opener”) is the first chapter of the Qur’an. Its seven verses are a prayer for Allah’s guidance, and stress His Lordship and Mercy.

Arabic: 1.1 بِسْمِ اللّهِ الرَّحْمـَنِ الرَّحِيم

1:2 الْحَمْدُ للّهِ رَبِّ الْعَالَمِين

1:3 الرَّحمـنِ الرَّحِيم

1:4 مَـالِكِ يَوْمِ الدِّين

1:5 إِيَّاك نَعْبُدُ وإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِين

1:6 اهدِنَــــا الصِّرَاطَ المُستَقِيم

1:7 صِرَاطَ الَّذِينَ أَنعَمتَ عَلَيهِمْ غَيرِ المَغضُوبِ عَلَيهِمْ وَلاَ الضَّالِّين

Transliteration:

Al-Fatiha | 7 verses | The Opening | سورة الفاتحة Sura #1 | Makkah

Bismillāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīm

Al ḥamdu lillāhi rabbi l-ʿālamīn

Ar raḥmāni r-raḥīm

Māliki yawmi d-dīn

Iyyāka naʿbudu wa iyyāka nastaʿīn

Ihdinā ṣ-ṣirāṭa al-mustaqīm

Ṣirāṭa al-laḏīna anʿamta ʿalayhim ġayri l-maġḍūbi ʿalayhim walā ḍ-ḍāllīn

Translation: ^{[Quran 1:1]}.

“In the name of Allah, the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Merciful.

All praise and thanks is for to Allah,[The] Creator, Owner, Sustainer of the Worlds.

The Entirely Merciful, The Especially Merciful.

Owner of the Day of Recompense.

You alone do we worship and You alone we seek for help.

Guide us to the Straight Path.

The path of those whom Your blessings are upon, Not of those who You have cursed nor of those who have gone astray.”

Volumes had been wrote about the profound Symbolism of this first Sura.

Ṭawāf (طواف) is one of the Islamic rituals of pilgrimage. During the Hajj and Umrah, Muslims are to circumambulate the Kaaba (most sacred site in Islam) seven times, in a counterclockwise direction. The circling is believed to demonstrate the unity of the believers in the worship of the One God, as they move in harmony together around the Kaaba, while supplicating to Allah.

The Zamzam Well was revealed to Hagar, the second wife of Abraham and mother of Ismail. According to Islamic tradition, she was desperately seeking water for her infant son, but she could not find any, as Mecca is located in a hot dry valley with few sources of water. Muslim traditions say that Hagar ran seven times back and forth in the scorching heat between the two hills of Safa and Marwah, looking for water. Getting thirstier by the second, Ishmael scraped the land with his feet, where suddenly water sprang out. There are other versions of the story involving God sending his Archangel, Gabriel, who kicked the ground with his heel and the water rose.

Stoning of the Devilor stoning of the jamarāt (Arabic: رمي الجمرات‎) is part of the annual Islamic Hajj pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Muslim pilgrims fling pebbles at three walls, called jamarāt, in the city of Mina just east of Mecca.

When he [Abraham] left Mina and was brought down to (the defile called) al-Aqaba, the Devil appeared to him at Stone-Heap of the Defile. Gabriel said to him: “Pelt him!” so Abraham threw seven stones at him so that he disappeared from him. Then he appeared to him at the Middle Stone-Heap. Gabriel said to him: “Pelt him!” so he pelted him with seven stones so that he disappeared from him. Then he appeared to him at the Little Stone-Heap. Gabriel said to him: “Pelt him!” so he pelted him with seven stones like the little stones for throwing with a sling. So the Devil withdrew from him.

The Isra and Mi’raj (Arabic:الإسراء والمعراج‎, al-’Isrā’ wal-Mi‘rāj), are the two parts of a Night Journey that, according to Islamic tradition, the Islamic prophet Muhammad took during a single night around the year 621. It has been described as both a physical and spiritual journey to the Seven Heavens. This is so rich in Symbology, and Wisdom that this article scope will not do justice to it , and will have to address at another time in the future.

The Sages teach that seven are the attributes of physicality:

1. Height

2. Width

3. Depth

4. Top and bottom (limits height)

5. Front and back (limits width)

6. Left and right (limits depth)

7. The connecting of the other six

The Symbology of the number seven is so extend and so well known it will be necessary to dedicate a book to it, let’s just mention the seven days of the week, the seven colors, the seven notes of the music scale, the seven days of creation, the seven seals of Revelations, the seven seas, the seven Spiritual centers in Man, that the Hindus call Chakras, etc.

Other common theme is the Genie Invocation Spells or Jinn Invocation formulas Djinns. Like in the story Aladdin or, the wonderful Lamp.

Aladdin

Aladdin is an impoverished young ne’er-do-well in a Chinese town, who is recruited by a sorcerer from the Maghreb, who passes himself off as the brother of Aladdin’s late father Qaseem, convincing Aladdin and his mother of his goodwill by apparently making arrangements to set up the lad as a wealthy merchant. The sorcerer’s real motive is to persuade young Aladdin to retrieve a wonderful oil lamp from a booby-trapped magic cave of wonder. After the sorcerer attempts to double-cross him, Aladdin finds himself trapped in the cave. Fortunately, Aladdin retains a magic ring lent to him by the sorcerer. When he rubs his hands in despair, he inadvertently rubs the ring, and a jinni, or “genie”, appears, who takes him home to his mother. Aladdin is still carrying the lamp, and when his mother tries to clean it, a second, far more powerful genie appears, who is bound to do the bidding of the person holding the lamp. With the aid of the genie of the lamp, Aladdin becomes rich and powerful and marries Princess  Badroulbadour, the Emperor’s daughter. The genie builds Aladdin a wonderful palace – far more magnificent than that of the Emperor himself.

The sorcerer returns and is able to get his hands on the lamp by tricking Aladdin’s wife, who is unaware of the lamp’s importance, by offering to exchange “new lamps for old”. He orders the genie of the lamp to take the palace to his home in the Maghreb. Fortunately, Aladdin retains the magic ring and is able to summon the lesser genie. Although the genie of the ring cannot directly undo any of the magic of the genie of the lamp, he is able to transport Aladdin to Maghreb, and help him recover his wife and the lamp and defeat the sorcerer.

The sorcerer’s more powerful and evil brother tries to destroy Aladdin for killing his brother by disguising himself as an old woman known for her healing powers. Badroulbadour falls for his disguise, and commands the “woman” to stay in her palace in case of any illnesses. Aladdin is warned of this danger by the genie of the lamp and slays the imposter. Everyone lives happily ever after, Aladdin eventually succeeding to his father-in-law’s throne.

Jinns, Genies are also living beings but they are made of fire. Genie or Jinns can be conquered by human beings by special invocations and if the invocation is done properly then after the completion of the Invocation it is possible to conquer the genie of jinns. But they all are one having the same powers and if this power is conquered by any one that person will be a very powerful human being having any type of power to do any thing and every thing. Looking for Genie Invocation spells or formulas for invocation of genies. Jinn invocation is done to conquer jinns. Invocation of jinn is possible by jinn spells or genie spells with talismans or charms.  Summoning or invocation of genies, jinns etc requires proper concentration and then invocation of genies (jinns) is possible.

Again a simple tale of a humble orphan boy, and his impoverish mother who rise to power defeating an evil sorcerer, with the help of a Magical ring, and a Magical oil lamp were Genies reside, of course there is not such objects in the literal sense, but the fact is that this treasures are hidden in a secret cave, does not take much to discover the cave as a source of richness and treasures with unlimited possibilities, it is no other than the Heart.

The Heart of the Believer is the House of God

 

“So the Prophet’s  migration from Makkah to Madinah was to pass by a cave. According to the life story of the Prophet , that cave was called the cave of Thawr. It is one day’s distance from Makkah. The Prophet  stayed there three days. Why did the Prophet  stay in that cave? Why was he unable to continue? The unfolding of the secrets occurred in that cave.

The Prophet  was ordered to emigrate from Makkah to Madinah for the purpose of going inside the cave of Thawr where God taught him how to “remember God” (dhikr Allah). It was the first time that the Prophet  invoked God in a loud voice. This is a very great Sufi secret indeed.

To emigrate from Makkah to Madinah was very easy for the Prophet. He only had to say, “In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,” and he would have been in Madinah as easily as it had been for him to take sand and throw it at the ignorant people’s eyes preventing them from seeing him as he was leaving his house. Or he could have ridden on his horse or camel and reached Madinah in ten to fifteen days. Why did he go to that cave? The ‘Cave of Silence’ as it has been called? Indeed, it is the ‘Cave of Silent Secrets’. Why was the Prophet ordered by God to go to that cave, which is one day’s travel from Makkah, when he had a distance of fifteen days journeying to go?

When the Prophet went into that cave, a spider and a dove came and made a house over the door in order that no one would know what was inside. This is common knowledge. As for the secret, look to love. When love for someone is pure, God will never forget that person. “

“My earth and my heaven do not encompass me, but the heart of My servant who has faith does encompass me.”

Hadit Qudsi

There are 5 lata’ifs (subtle points of spiritual Energy), or Maqams (spiritual stations), on

 

the human heart.  These five stations are, in an ascending order:

 

Qalb (“External Structure of the Heart”)

 

Sirr (“Secret”)

 

Sirr as Sirr (“Secret of the Secret”)

 

Khafa (“Hidden Akha (“Most Hidden”)

Surah Al-Inshirah

94:1

أَلَمْ نَشْرَحْ لَكَ صَدْرَكَ

Alam nashrah laka sadraka

Have We not expanded thee thy breast?

94:2

وَوَضَعْنَا عَنْكَ وِزْرَكَ

WawadaAAna AAanka wizraka

And removed from thee thy burden

94:3

الَّذِي أَنْقَضَ ظَهْرَكَ

Allathee anqada thahraka

The which did gall thy back?

The Arabian Nights in resume  contain many tales where we can find numerous hidden symbols for the Spiritual wayfarer, not just simple tales of adventures fit for children, but a call to those who have eyes to see.

[22:46] Did they not roam the earth, then use their minds to understand, and use their ears to hear? Indeed, the real blindness is not the blindness of the eyes, but the blindness of the hearts inside the chests.

 

THE AXIS OF THE UNIVERSE, THE OMPHALOS THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, SACRED MOUNTAINS, THE SACRED TREE OF LIFE, A SACRED REALM OF BEING

And I say the sacred hoop of my people

was one of the many hoops that made one circle,

wide as daylight and as starlight,

and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree

to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.

Black Elk

According to Greek mythology, Zeus wanted to locate the exact center of the world. To do this, he released two eagles from opposite ends of the earth. The eagles met at Delphi. Zeus marked the spot with a large, egg-shaped stone called the omphalos, meaning “navel.”

The temple at Delphi once belonged to Gaia, but when the Olympians came into power, Apollo took the temple. The temple was guarded by a great serpent, Pytho. Apollo killed Pytho and excised Gaia. In honor of his heroic deed, the priestess of Delphi was called Pythia. The temple was located at what was believed to be the center of world. And at the center of the temple was the omphalos, the stone Kronos swallowed in place of Zeus.

To consult the oracle, you approached with a question. Asking it of the Pythia, she would breathe in the intoxicating fumes from a fissure in the earth. She would, in this drug-induced state answer your question with what seemed to the patron to be nonsense. The real power laid with the priest who would interpret the Pythia’s words. The outcome often depended on how much tribute the patron had given.

The Pythia  Greek: Πυθία , commonly known as the Oracle of Delphi, was the priestess at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, located on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. The Pythia was widely credited for her prophecies inspired by Apollo.

The Delphic Oracle was the most prestigious and authoritative oracle among the Greeks. The oracle is one of the best-documented religious institutions of the classical Greeks. Authors who mention the oracle include Aeschylus, Aristotle, Clement of Alexandria, Diodorus, Diogenes, Euripides, Herodotus, Julian, Justin, Livy, Lucan, Ovid, Pausanias, Pindar, Plato, Plutarch, Sophocles, Strabo, Thucydides, and Xenophon.

The name ‘Pythia’ derived from Pytho, which in myth was the original name of Delphi. The Greeks derived this place name from the verb, pythein (πύθειν, “to rot”), which refers to the decomposition of the body of the monstrous Python after she was slain by Apollo. The usual theory has been that the Pythia delivered oracles in a frenzied state induced by vapors rising from a chasm in the rock, and that she spoke gibberish which priests interpreted as the enigmatic prophecies preserved in Greek literature.

Consulting the Oracle. No one knows for certain how the process of consulting the Delphic oracle worked. However, over the years, a traditional account has been widely accepted. According to this description, a visitor who wanted to submit a question to the oracle would first make an appropriate offering and sacrifice a goat. Then a priestess known as the Pythia would take the visitor’s question into the inner part of Apollo’s temple, which contained the omphalos and a golden statue of Apollo. Seated on a three-legged stool, the priestess would fall into a trance.

After some time, the priestess would start to writhe around and foam at the mouth. In a frenzy, she would begin to voice strange words and sounds. Priests and interpreters would listen carefully and record her words in verse or in prose. The message was then passed on to the visitor who had posed the question. Some modern scholars believe that the priestess did not become delirious but rather sat quietly as she delivered her divine message.

Anyone could approach the oracle, whether king, public official, or private citizen. At first, a person could consult the oracle only once a year, but this restriction was later changed to once a month.

The ancient Greeks had complete faith in the oracle’s words, even though the meaning of the message was often unclear. As the oracle’s fame spread, people came from all over the Mediterranean region seeking advice. Numerous well-known figures of history and mythology visited Delphi, including Socrates and Oedipus.

Visitors would ask not only about private matters but also about affairs of state. As a result, the oracle at Delphi had great influence on political, economic, and religious events. Moreover, Delphi itself became rich from the gifts sent by many believers.

Axis Mundi

The axis mundi (also cosmic axis, world axis, world pillar, columna cerului, center of the world), in religion or mythology, is the world center and/or the connection between Heaven and Earth. As the celestial pole and geographic pole, it expresses a point of connection between sky and earth where the four compass directions meet. At this point travel and correspondence is made between higher and lower realms.Communication from lower realms may ascend to higher ones and blessings from higher realms may descend to lower ones and be disseminated to all. The spot functions as the omphalos (navel), the world’s point of beginning.

The image is mostly viewed as feminine, as it relates to center of the earth (perhaps like an umbilical providing nourishment). It may have the form of a natural object (a mountain, a tree, a vine, a stalk, a column of smoke or fire) or a product of human manufacture (a staff, a tower, a ladder, a staircase, a maypole, a cross, a steeple, a rope, a totem pole, a pillar, a spire). Its proximity to heaven may carry implications that are chiefly religious (pagoda, temple mount, minaret, church) or secular (obelisk, lighthouse, rocket, skyscraper). The image appears in religious and secular contexts. The axis mundi symbol may be found in cultures utilizing shamanic practices or animist belief systems, in major world religions, and in technologically advanced “urban centers”. In Mircea Eliade’s opinion, “Every Microcosm, every inhabited region, has a Centre; that is to say, a place that is sacred above all.”

SACRED MOUNTAINS

Kailash is a mountain located in Ngari prefecture in Tibet . The mountain is sacred to the four Asian religions, Buddhism , Hinduism , Bön (Local Shamanistic Religion of Tibet before Buddhism) and Jainism . It was here that the god Shiva descended to earth. Manasarovar called a sacred lake just beyond. The four rivers Ganges, Brahmaputra , Sutlej and Indus have their sources around the mountain. Some believe that Kailash is the mountain Meru from where the Aryans came. In Sultejdalen near Kailash low silver palace with Bönpo -religion’s holy kingdom. This was destroyed by the nykonverterade Buddhists in Lhasa as before spared this country in their conquests.

Every year, thousands make a pilgrimage to Kailash, following a tradition going back thousands of years. Pilgrims of several religions believe that circumambulating Mount Kailash on foot is a holy ritual that will bring good fortune. The peregrination is made in a clockwise direction by Hindus and Buddhists. Followers of the Jain and Bönpo religions circumambulate the mountain in a counterclockwise direction. The path around Mount Kailash is 52 km (32 mi) long.

Some pilgrims believe that the entire walk around Kailash should be made in a single day, which is not considered an easy task. A person in good shape walking fast would take perhaps 15 hours to complete the 52 km trek. Some of the devout do accomplish this feat, little daunted by the uneven terrain,altitude sickness and harsh conditions faced in the process. Indeed, other pilgrims venture a much more demanding regimen, performing body-length prostrations over the entire length of the circumambulation: The pilgrim bends down, kneels, prostrates full-length, makes a mark with his fingers, rises to his knees, prays, and then crawls forward on hands and knees to the mark made by his/her fingers before repeating the process. It requires at least four weeks of physical endurance to perform the circumambulation while following this regimen. The mountain is located in a particularly remote and inhospitable area of the Tibetan Himalayas. A few modern amenities, such as benches, resting places and refreshment kiosks, exist to aid the pilgrims in their devotions. According to all religions that revere the mountain, setting foot on its slopes is a dire sin. It is claimed that many people who ventured to defy the taboo have died in the process. It is a popular belief that the stairways on Mount Kailash lead to heaven.

The Tibetan name for the mountain is Gangs Rin-po-che. Gangs or Kang is the Tibetan word for snow peak analogous to alp or himal; rinpoche is an honorific meaning “precious one” so the combined term can be translated “precious jewel of snows”.

“Tibetan Buddhists call it Kangri Rinpoche; ‘Precious Snow Mountain’. Bon texts have many names: Water’s Flower, Mountain of Sea Water, Nine Stacked Swastika Mountain. For Hindus, it is the home of the mountain god Shiva and a symbol of his power symbol om; for Jains it is where their first leader was enlightened; for Buddhists, the navel of the universe; and for adherents of Bon, the abode of the sky goddess Sipaimen.”^[

Another local name for the mountain is Tisé (Tibetan: ཏི་སེ་) mountain, which derives from ti tse in the Zhang-Zhung language, meaning “water peak” or “river peak”, connoting the mountain’s status as the source of the mythical Lion, Horse, Peacock and Elephant Rivers, and in fact the Indus, Yarlung Tsangpo/Dihang/Brahmaputra, Karnali and Sutlej all begin in the Kailash-Lake Manasarovar region.

Bön

The Bön, a religion which predates Buddhism in Tibet, maintain that the entire mystical region and the nine-story Swastika Mountain are the seat of all spiritual power.

Hinduism

According to Hinduism, Lord Shiva, the destroyer of ignorance and illusion, resides at the summit of a legendary mountain named Kailāsa, where he sits in a state of perpetual meditation along with his wife Pārvatī. In the Vishnu Purana of the mountain states that its four faces are made of crystal, ruby, gold, and lapis lazuli. It is a pillar of the world and is located at the heart of six mountain ranges symbolizing a lotus.

Jainism

In Jainism, Kailash is also known as Meru Parvat or Sumeru. Ashtapada, the mountain next to Mt.Kailash is the site where the first Jain Tirthankara, Rishabhadeva, attained Nirvana/moksa (liberation).(The authenticity of Mount Kailash being Mount Ashtapada is highly debated.)

Buddhism

Tantric Buddhists believe that Mount Kailash is the home of the Buddha Demchok (also known as Demchog or Chakrasamvara),who represents supreme bliss.

There are numerous sites in the region associated with Guru Rinpoche (Padmasambhava), whose tantric practices in holy sites around Tibet are credited with finally establishing Buddhism as the main religion of the country in the 7th–8th century CE.

It is said that Milarepa (c. 1052-c. 1135 CE), champion of Tantric Buddhism, arrived in Tibet to challenge Naro Bön-chung, champion of the Bön religion of Tibet. The two magicians engaged in a terrifying sorcerers’ battle, but neither was able to gain a decisive advantage. Finally, it was agreed that whoever could reach the summit of Kailash most rapidly would be the victor. While Naro Bön-chung sat on a magic drum and soared up the slope, Milarepa’s followers were dumbfounded to see him sitting still and meditating. Yet when Naro Bön-chung was nearly at the top, Milarepa suddenly moved into action and overtook him by riding on the rays of the sun, thus winning the contest. He did, however, fling a handful of snow on to the top of a nearby mountain, since known as Bönri, bequeathing it to the Bönpo and thereby ensuring continued Bönpo connections with the region.

Sacred Tree of Life

The concept of a tree of life has been used in science, religion, philosophy, and mythology. A tree of life is a common motif in various world theologies, mythologies, and philosophies. A mystical concept alluding to the interconnection of all life on our planet; and a metaphor for common descent in the evolutionary sense. The term tree of life may also be used as a synonym for sacred tree.

The tree of knowledge, connecting to heaven and the underworld, and the tree of life, connecting all forms of creation, are both forms of the world tree or cosmic tree, and according to some , that are portrayed in various religions and philosophies as the same tree.

The Tree of Life is an important symbol in nearly every culture. In Jewish and Christian mythology, a tree sits at the center of both the Heavenly and Earthly Edens. The Norse cosmic World Ash, Ygdrassil, has its roots in the underworld while its branches support the abode of the Gods. The Egyptian’s Holy Sycamore stood on the threshold of life and death, connecting the worlds. To the Mayas, it is Yaxche, whose branches support the heavens.

The Ceiba Tree was the sacred tree of the Mayans, and it had many representations and significances. “The ancient Maya of Central America believed that a great Ceiba tree stood at the center of the earth, connecting the terrestrial world to the spirit-world above. The long thick vines hanging down from its spreading limbs provided a connection to the heavens for the souls that ascended them.”

The Archetypal Symbolism of Trees Trees have long held a literal and symbolic fascination for humanity. Their source as a deep archetype of absorption begins with the earliest epic in the Western World, the story of Gilgamesh and his quest for the plant of life (a symbolic tree) that is snatched away by a serpent, thus illustrating that the use of the tree as a universal religious symbol is incredibly ancient; such utilization can be dated to at least the third millennium B.C.E. as a symbol of a rich cultural mythos, the major archetype being that of the center, the beginning where sacred powers first originated. The tree is the navel of the world, the “cosmic axis” (Axis mundi) standing at the universe’s center where it passes through the middle and unites the three great cosmic domains: the underworld, earth, and sky.

With its branches reaching into the sky, and roots deep in the earth, the Tree of Life dwells in three worlds—a link between heaven, the earth, and the underworld, uniting above and below. It is both a feminine symbol, bearing sustenance, and a masculine, visibly phallic symbol—another union. The tree has other characteristics which easily lend themselves to symbolism. Many trees take on the appearance of death in the winter—losing their leaves, only to sprout new growth with the return of spring. This aspect makes the tree a symbol of resurrection, and a stylized tree is the symbol of many resurrected gods. Most of these gods are believed to have been crucified on trees as well. A tree also bears seeds or fruits, which contain the essence of the tree, and this continuous regeneration is a potent symbol of immortality. Trees seen as givers of gifts and spiritual wisdom are quite common. It was while meditating under a Bodhi tree that Buddha received his enlightenment; the Norse God Odin received the gift of language while suspended upside down in the World Ash.

In Celtic creation stories, trees were the ancestors of mankind, elder beings of wisdom who provided the alphabet, the calendar, and entrance to the realms of the Gods.Trees were also associated in the Shamanic beliefs of the Druids and other Celtic peoples with the supernatural world. Trees were a connection to the world of the spirits and the ancestors, living entities, and doorways into other worlds. The most sacred tree of all was the Oak tree, which represented the axis mundi, the center of the world. The Celtic name for oak, daur or duir, is the origin of the word door; the root of the oak was literally the doorway to the Otherworld; the realm of Fairy.

The tree of life (Heb. עץ החיים Etz haChayim) in the Book of Genesis is a tree planted by the Abrahamic God in midst of the Garden of Eden (Paradise), whose fruit gives everlasting life, i.e. immortality. Together with the tree of life, God planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:9). According to some scholars, however, these are in fact two names for the same tree.

In the biblical story, the serpent, who is regarded as Satan in Christianity but not in Judaism, tempted Eve into eating a fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve and Adam both ate the fruit, despite God’s warning to Adam that “in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). As a consequence of their transgression, the land, the Serpent, Adam, and Eve were each cursed by God. To prevent them access to the tree of life, God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden:

And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” (Genesis 3:22)

In the Book of Revelation, a Koine Greek phrase xylon (tēs) zōës, ξύλον (τῆς) ζωής, is mentioned three times. This phrase, which is also used for the Genesis tree of life in the Ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, literally means “wood of (the) life”. It is translated in nearly every English Bible version as “tree of life”, see Revelation 2:7, 22:2, and 22:19.

The tree of life is represented in several examples of sacred geometry and is central in particular to the Kabbalah (the mystic study of the Torah), where it is represented as a diagram of ten points.

The Tree of Life, or Etz haChayim (עץ החיים) in Hebrew, is a mystical symbol used in the Kabbalah of esoteric Judaism to describe the path to God (usually referred to as HaShem, or “The Name”, in kabbalistic texts) and the manner in which he created the world ex nihilo. Kabbalists developed this concept into a full model of reality, using the tree to depict a map of Creation.

Some believe the kabbalistic Tree of Life corresponds to the Tree of Life mentioned in Genesis 2:9. This mystical concept was later adopted by some esoterically inclined Christians as well as some Hermeticists. Among the Christian Kabbalists, the sephirot were called Dignities, and were referred to by their Latin names, instead of their Hebrew names. Christian Kabbalah also places emphasis on Christ as Sustainer and Preserver of the Universe, and the Malkuth of Jewish kabbalah is absent, as it is considered of a different order-of-being.

the Tree of Life can potentially be applied to any area of life, especially the inner world of Man, from the subconscious all the way to what Kabbalists call the higher self.

But the Tree of Life does not only speak of the origins of the physical Universe out of the unimaginable, but also of Man’s place in the Universe. Since Man is invested with Mind, consciousness in the Kabbalah is thought of as the fruit of the physical world, through whom the original infinite energy can experience and express itself as a finite entity. After the energy of Creation has condensed into matter, it is thought to reverse its course back up the Tree until it is once again united with its true nature. Thus, the kabbalist seeks to know himself and the Universe as an expression of God, and to make the journey of Return by stages charted by the Sephiroth, until he has come to the realisation he sought.

The Tree of Life bears many similarities to the Christian Gnostic conception of the Pleroma, emanations from the ineffable and self-originating Divine Parent that offer the best possible means of describing God. Each emanation in thepleroma is born from a more complex emanation before it. Most notably between these two allegories is the final sephira on the Tree, Malkuth, and the last emanation in the Pleroma, Sophia, whose fall resulted in the physical world.

In the Bhagavad Gita there is a mention of Asvattha, tree of Life and Being, whose destruction alone leads to immortality, is said in the Bhagavad Gita to grow with its roots above and its branches below. The roots represent the Supreme Being, or First Cause, the LOGOS; but one has to go beyond those roots to unite oneself with Krishna. The Vedas are its leaves. He only who goes beyond the roots shall never return, i.e., shall reincarnate no more during this “age” of Brahma.

In every old culture the Tree of Life is a given, our ancient ancestors understood the interconnectedness of Life the Microcosm being a reflection of the Macrocosm, the Outer, a reflection of the Inner, the bellow from the above, the Spirit residing in our inner Hearts, wherever we are, there is the center of the World, the Sacred Womb of the Mother, the Axis of the Universe, the Sacred Mountain, a Sacred Realm of Being.

THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, POST-POSITIVISM, MYSTICISM, CONTEMPLATION, AND KARL RAHNER’S ABSOLUTE MYSTERY

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• The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.

  Karl Rahner

• There is a science for the subjective study of the Spiritual life, analogous to science that explains the mechanism, and laws  of the physical world, of course this science of the soul can’t be reproduced in a laboratory, since the laboratory it is the Self who is  the subject of investigation to the individual in question, but that if it is a knowledge impossible to reproduce in a physical laboratory, however it is a Knowledge possible to be experienced in the Soul, and transmit, to other individuals by analogies, introspection, meditation, Intuition, symbolism, synchronicity, dreams, through the study of Ontology, and Metaphysics, but before you roll your eyeballs, there are techniques, and spiritual practices conductive to Enlightenment, like Yoga, diverse Meditation methods, Prayer, Ritual and many other spiritual techniques used by a wide range of Mystics; Sufi, Shamans, Magi, Monks, and every individual seriously involved in Religious practice conductive to Enlightenment, or a Communion with God, Spirit, the Atman, the Infinite, the Tao,  or whatever term may apply to the specific method.

  • POST-POSITIVISM AND CRITICAL REALISM

  • If your eyeballs are still rolling up, it is time to update your old fashioned belief in Positivism:

  • “Let’s begin by considering what positivism is. In its broadest sense, positivism is a rejection of metaphysics (I leave it you to look up that term if you’re not familiar with it). It is a position that holds that the goal of knowledge is simply to describe the phenomena that we experience. The purpose of science is simply to stick to what we can observe and measure. Knowledge of anything beyond that, a positivist would hold, is impossible. When I think of positivism (and the related philosophy of logical positivism) I think of the behaviorists in mid-20th Century psychology. These were the mythical ‘rat runners’ who believed that psychology could only study what could be directly observed and measured. Since we can’t directly observe emotions, thoughts, etc. (although we may be able to measure some of the physical and physiological accompaniments), these were not legitimate topics for a scientific psychology. B.F. Skinner argued that psychology needed to concentrate only on the positive and negative reinforces of behavior in order to predict how people will behave — everything else in between (like what the person is thinking) is irrelevant because it can’t be measured.

    In a positivist view of the world, science was seen as the way to get at truth, to understand the world well enough so that we might predict and control it. The world and the universe were deterministic — they operated by laws of cause and effect that we could discern if we applied the unique approach of the scientific method. Science was largely a mechanistic or mechanical affair. We use deductive reasoning to postulate theories that we can test. Based on the results of our studies, we may learn that our theory doesn’t fit the facts well and so we need to revise our theory to better predict reality. The positivist believed in empiricism — the idea that observation and measurement was the core of the scientific endeavor. The key approach of the scientific method is the experiment, the attempt to discern natural laws through direct manipulation and observation.

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  • One of the most common forms of post-positivism is a philosophy called critical realism. A critical realist believes that there is a reality independent of our thinking about it that science can study. (This is in contrast with a subjectivist who would hold that there is no external reality — we’re each making this all up!). Positivists were also realists. The difference is that the post-positivist critical realist recognizes that all observation is fallible and has error and that all theory is revisable. In other words, the critical realist is critical of our ability to know reality with certainty. Where the positivist believed that the goal of science was to uncover the truth, the post-positivist critical realist believes that the goal of science is to hold steadfastly to the goal of getting it right about reality, even though we can never achieve that goal! Because all measurement is fallible, the post-positivist emphasizes the importance of multiple measures and observations, each of which may possess different types of error, and the need to use triangulation across these multiple error full sources to try to get a better bead on what’s happening in reality. The post-positivist also believes that all observations are theory-laden and that scientists (and everyone else, for that matter) are inherently biased by their cultural experiences, world views, and so on. This is not cause to give up in despair, however. Just because I have my world view based on my experiences and you have yours doesn’t mean that we can’t hope to translate from each other’s experiences or understand each other. That is, post-positivism rejects the relativist idea of the incommensurability of different perspectives, the idea that we can never understand each other because we come from different experiences and cultures. Most post-positivists are constructivists who believe that we each construct our view of the world based on our perceptions of it. Because perception and observation is fallible, our constructions must be imperfect. So what is meant by objectivity in a post-positivist world? Positivists believed that objectivity was a characteristic that resided in the individual scientist. Scientists are responsible for putting aside their biases and beliefs and seeing the world as it ‘really’ is. Post-positivists reject the idea that any individual can see the world perfectly as it really is. We are all biased and all of our observations are affected (theory-laden).Trochim, W. (2000). The Research Methods Knowledge Base, 2nd Edition. Atomic Dog Publishing, Cincinnati, OH.”

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  • If post- positivism, and post-modernism in general may not mean for many a return to Metaphysics,  no doubt it had humbled and deflated many scientist egos, and let those interested in the study of Metaphysics and Ontology proceed without the rolling of the eyes, and the dismissive attitudes of hotheaded  materialist, atheist, deterministic and positivistic individuals, who believed to be the torchbearers of Truth, and Reason, after all there is an argument of why we posses a Intuitive, and Subjective right side brain,  think about it!

  • MYSTICISM

  • A Religious experience (sometimes known as a spiritual experience, sacred experience, or mystical experience) is  a subjective experience in which an individual reports contact with a transcendent reality, an encounter or union with the Divine. Such an experience often involves arriving at some knowledge or insight previously unavailable to the subject yet unaccountable or unforeseeable according to the usual conceptual or psychological framework within which the subject has been used to operating. Religious experience generally brings understanding, partial or complete, of issues of a fundamental character that may have been a cause (whether consciously acknowledged or not) of anguish or alienation to the subject for an extended period of time. This may be experienced as a form of healing, enlightenment or conversion. The commonalities and differences between religious experiences across different cultures have enabled scholars to categorize them for academic study.

  • William James’ definition

    Psychologist and Philosopher William James described four characteristics of religious / mystical experience in The Varieties of Religious Experience. According to James, such an experience is:

    • Transient — the experience is temporary; the individual soon returns to a “normal” frame of mind. It is outside our normal perception of space and time.

    • Ineffable — the experience cannot be adequately put into words.

    • Noetic — the individual feels that he or she has learned something valuable from the experience. Gives us knowledge that is normally hidden from human understanding.

    • Passive — the experience happens to the individual, largely without conscious control. Although there are activities, such as meditation (see below), that can make religious experience more likely, it is not something that can be turned on and off at will.

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    • Norman Habel’s definition

      Habel defines religious experiences as the structured way in which a believer enters into a relationship with, or gains an awareness of, the sacred within the context of a particular religious tradition (Habel, O’Donoghue and Maddox: 1993).Religious experiences are by their very nature preternatural; that is, out of the ordinary or beyond the natural order of things. They may be difficult to distinguish observationally from psychopathological states such as psychoses or other forms of altered awareness (Charlesworth: 1988). Not all preternatural experiences are considered to be religious experiences. Following Habel’s definition, psychopathological states or drug-induced states of awareness are not considered to be religious experiences because they are mostly not performed within the context of a particular religious tradition.

      Moore and Habel identify two classes of religious experiences: the immediate and the mediated religious experience (Moore and Habel: 1982).

      • Mediated — In the mediated experience, the believer experiences the sacred through mediators such as rituals, special persons, religious groups, totemic objects or the natural world (Habel et al.: 1993).

      • Immediate — The immediate experience comes to the believer without any intervening agency or mediator. The deity or divine is experienced directly

  • The Numinous RUDOLF OTTO

  • The German thinker Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) argues that there is one common factor to all religious experience, independent of the cultural background. In his book The Idea of the Holy (1923) he identifies this factor as the numinous. The “numinous” experience has two aspects: mysterium tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling; and mysterium fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. The numinous experience also has a personal quality to it, in that the person feels to be in communion with a holy other. Otto sees the numinous as the only possible religious experience. He states: “There is no religion in which it [the numinous] does not live as the real innermost core and without it no religion would be worthy of the name” (Otto: 1972). Otto does not take any other kind of religious experience such as ecstasy and enthusiasm seriously and is of the opinion that they belong to the ‘vestibule of religion’.

  • Otto’s most famous work is The Idea of the Holy, published first in 1917 as Das Heilige – Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (The Holy – On the Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational). It is one of the most successful German theological books of the 20th century, has never gone out of print, and is now available in about 20 languages. The book defines the concept of the holy as that which is numinous. Otto explained the numinous as a “non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self”. He coined this new term based on the Latin numen (deity). (This expression is etymologically unrelated to Immanuel Kant’s noumenon, a Greek term referring to an unknowable reality underlying all things.) The numinous is a mystery (Latin: mysterium) that is both terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans) at the same time. It also sets a paradigm for the study of religion that focuses on the need to realize the religious as a non-reducible, original category in its own right.

KARL RAHNER’S MAN IN THE PRESCENCE OF ABSOLUTE MYSTERY

Mark F. Fisher’s condensed Foundations of Christian Faith: “The title of this chapter does not include the word “God.” Strictly speaking, the title indicates that the chapter is about the human being. That human being, however, is in the presence of absolute mystery. The chapter focuses on this mystery. It asks what it is, why it is absolute, and how it is present.

Chapter II has five parts. The first part is a meditation on the word “God.” The meditation distinguishes between the word and what it represents. Even if the word were to be stricken from the dictionary, says Rahner, the question implicit in the word – the question about the origin and destiny of life – would remain.

After Part 1 has raised the question, the second part discusses whether we can know God. It advances Rahner’s central thesis, namely, that we encounter God in a transcendental experience of God’s Holy Mystery. Whenever we experience our limits, imagining what lies beyond them, we begin to transcend them. In that experience, we recognize the mystery of our existence, whose origin and destiny are not yet clear. To know that mystery, says Rahner, is to know the source of transcendence.

The source of transcendence is not, however, a blind and impersonal force. The third part states that the source is a personal God. We speak of God as a person by way of analogy. God is not a person in the same sense that we human beings are. But God is indeed a person in that God cannot be reduced to a thing. God is the absolute ground of all things, “absolute” because irreducible to anything else.

The human being is related to God as a creature to the source of creation. The fourth part explains how human beings “know” God. We know God by knowing ourselves in relation to the mystery of our lives. This mystery is nothing other than what gives us our place in time and invites us to fulfill the possibilities allotted to us.

In Part Five, Rahner states that the Holy Mystery is present “in” the world as its fundamental ground. It is “holy” because it enables us to be complete. It helps us to be what we are meant to be. Doubtless we find God in historical religion and its holy places, people, and things. But God may not be confined to phenomena. Rather, the phenomena of this world, including the holy symbols, sanctuaries, and deeds of religion, mediate the presence of God and teach us how to discern it. But we already know this God immediately as our transcendent ground.”

In this most challenging part of Chapter II, Rahner begins with the fundamental idea that we know God in our reflection on experience, but not as some entity that we can “prove” independently of experience (A). Before any natural or revealed knowledge of God, we have an encounter with God (B). This encounter is given in the human experience of transcendence. This experience is mysterious, for it is both given to us (subjectively) and is something upon which we can (objectively) reflect (C). The mystery was recognized as early as Greek ontology. Ontology, the “science of being,” showed that one both can express something as a concept and yet not capture everything in the concept (D). So instead of a concept, Rahner uses the phrase “Holy Mystery.” He calls it the “term” of transcendence (E). Term is related to terminus, end, or goal. This term is both present in transcendence and as the way to transcendence. It enables us to know the reality of God, and is our experience of it (F). Finally, Rahner makes a comment on the proofs for the existence of God (G). They are signs that point to the reality, he says, and can enable the listener to reflect on the transcendental knowledge of God that he or she already has.

When Rahner speaks of “transcendental” knowledge of God, he means it is something “a posteriori.” We know it, in other words, “after the fact,” e.g., while reflecting on human experience. Our experience with others, Rahner says, enables us to know ourselves, whom we “see” as we reflect on our experience. So too we know the divine in reflecting on our experience of the world. The experience raises in our minds the question of who we are and what we ought to be.

But this knowledge is no mere reflection after the fact. It is what Rahner calls a “permanent existential,” i.e., a part of who we are. We encounter ourselves whenever we try to speak of our experience of God. It is we who are capable of an encounter with God. In this encounter, we find that we can transcend what we once thought to be our outermost horizon. The discovery of this experience itself is a mystery. The mystery is not reducible to what we can say about our transcendental knowledge.

To be sure, our knowledge of God remains “a posteriori.” We know God “after the fact,” after reflecting on our experience of meeting our limits, of imagining what lies beyond them, and of realizing the possibilities given us to respond to God’s call. Our transcendental experience does not cancel the fact that we know it only afterwards, in the reflection on it. This cautions us to beware that God is not a thing we can “know” beforehand. We cannot indoctrinate another person about God, but only lead him or her to recognize the God whom they in an implicit way already know.

What can we know about God? Our knowledge of God is indirect, like the knowledge of “our subjective freedom, our transcendence, and the infinite openness of the spirit” (p. 53). We know the experience of God, even when we do not consciously reflect on the experience. Moreover, we know God, even when our conceptualization of God is unpersuasive to other people.

So we can finally say: the concept of God is not a concept we can grasp. It is, rather, what grasps us. We do not formulate a concept and ask if it is God. No, it is better to say that both the concept itself, as well as the reality, move us into the unknown.

Traditionally, one speaks of “natural” knowledge of God, and of knowledge through “revelation” (in word and in deed). Rahner says, however, that there is a more “original experience,” an experience upon which both natural and revealed knowledge rely. The more original experience is a transcendental experience. It is not reducible to metaphysics, and it is fully compatible with the theological concept of grace. Transcendental experience is not purely “natural” because it takes place in freedom. We can choose to reflect on it or ignore it. This God-given freedom, the freedom to act responsibly and to make choices, is itself “supernatural.”

Transcendental experience, says Rahner, is “the basic and original way of knowing God” (p. 58). More basic than “natural” and “revealed” knowledge? Yes, says Rahner. Natural and revealed knowledge is mediated. It comes to us through the media of categorical experiences. Transcendental experience, by contrast, is not a neutral power by which to know God. It does not enable us to “master” our experience. Instead, transcendental experience allows us to know ourselves as finite beings – finite beings who can transcend their finitude.

Are human beings united with their transcendence? This is an important and dangerous question. Since God is our transcendence, a “yes” might suggest that we are our own gods. But the unity we experience, says Rahner, is not that. It is rather the unity between the ground and the person who is grounded, between the Word and our response to it. There are two ways, says Rahner, to understand our knowledge of God in transcendence.

1. Subjective knowledge. This transcendental knowledge comes to light in conversation or even in something like Victor Frankl’s “logotherapy.” Subjective knowledge enables us to see that our experiences (experiences of love, of freedom, of joy, etc.) are experiences of transcendence. We bring our experience to light in discourse with another person.

2. Objective knowledge. This transcendental knowledge comes from a direct contemplation of the source of transcendence. We contemplate it and call it “God.” But there is a danger in such objective knowledge. The danger is that, by speaking of God we might lose sight of what we mean. What we mean is the source of the experience of transcendence, the holy mystery. It might be obscured by the concept we use to express it. If we try to describe the source as “absolute being,” we might settle for an abstraction, not the source itself.

So Rahner proposes that we call the source of our original experience of transcendence the “holy mystery” (p. 60). This phrase, this image of God, may not be easily confused with a stereotype, a myth, or a conventional image.

Rahner states that his goal is to express the source of our experience of transcendence without reducing it to a mere object, one topic among others, or a system. What gives him hope is that, whenever he tries to reflect on the meaning of transcendence, “an experience of transcendence takes place” (p. 62). The human being reaches out to or anticipates the “term” of transcendence. This technical word (German: “Woraufhin”; English: “where-to-there”) means goal, end, or terminus. Every person implicitly anticipates an ultimate goal, and in the anticipation of it, grows toward it. The lure of God’s future is the “term” of transcendence.

The transcendental experience (of God) and the categorical objects that mediate it (in the world) are united but different. If they were only united, their relationship would be pantheistic. God would then “be” our experience of the world. If the experience and the categorical objects were only different, their relation would be dualistic. God would be the unknowable “other.” Rahner sees the relation between the two as unity in difference. “God establishes and is the difference” between the world and God (p. 63). Anyone searching for a God “contained in” reality seeks a false God. Those searching for a God wholly other and distant will never know God or themselves.

The earliest Greek philosophies touched upon the mysteries of first principles. Greek ontology saw that human beings cannot measure the first principles, but are themselves to be measured. True, we can have legitimately categorical knowledge of God – knowledge that we can categorize and classify. But we recognize that such categorical knowledge is not the whole. There is more to God than what we can say: that is why we acknowledge that God is infinite, indefinable, and ineffable.

“Holy Mystery” is Rahner’s “term” of transcendence. Since “term” means “way of access to” as well as terminus or goal, “Holy Mystery” indicates the way to transcendence and remains the goal of transcendence. Rahner says that this Holy Mystery possesses absolute freedom. The Holy Mystery, the Term of Transcendence, is our freedom. In it we are free to be present, in whatever way we choose, to other “subjects of transcendence,” other free persons.

Moreover, transcendence moves us toward Holy Mystery, its proper end. The experience of transcendence opens up to us the Holy Mystery. It is a “mystery” because we cannot fully fathom it. It is “holy” because it enables us to be complete. It allows us to be present to other persons in a communion of freedom and love. When we put ourselves “at the disposal of” transcendence, we move beyond ourselves and form relationships with others, above all, with God. Holy Mystery includes the capacity to freely love.

Transcendence, Rahner concludes, does not depend on its “ground” or “term,” that is, on Holy Mystery. Transcendence is not derived from or reducible to it. Rather, Holy Mystery is what we encounter in the experience of transcendence. Transcendence moves us in freedom and love toward its goal.

Transcendence does not create God. Rather, transcendence is “borne by” God, who makes transcendence possible. Rahner calls the term or goal of transcendental experience a “Holy Mystery,” namely, the unity of essence and existence. If it were existence alone, then we could experience it in the same way we experience anything else, like a sunset. If it were only an essence, without any concrete existence, then we could not experience it at all. But as the unity of essence and existence, Holy Mystery has a reality that is grounded for us in the experience of transcendence. That experience is a necessary part of the human being, the one who is created so as to hear God’s Word.

The proofs of God’s existence are, in Rahner’s view, “signs.” They point to God but do not make God graspable or a mere concept. Just as we can only point to our experience of transcendence in words, but cannot reduce the experience to a concept, so we can point to God in “proofs.” These proofs are not “ways” by which a previously unknown object can be known. By means of the proofs, however, one can show another person that they are already involved in the experience of transcendence and of Holy Mystery. The listener, presented with “proofs,” is really being confronted with the light of his or her own spirit. He or she is faced with questions, anxiety, joy, moral obligation, and the anticipation of death – all of which recall the very experience of transcendence.

In the “proofs” of God, there is an element of causality. Causality in this case does not mean, for example, that one sees creation and is moved to belief in a first cause. Rather, causality is a way of indicating that being itself moves our judgment. Absolute being points to the relation between finite creation and its incomprehensible source.”

SPACE EXPLORATION, OR MYTHICAL EXPLOITATION OF YOUR TAXPAYER MONEY? THE SELLING OF A DREAM

The world itself looks cleaner and so much more beautiful. Maybe we can make it that way—the way God intended it to be—by giving everybody that new perspective from out in space.

- Roger B Chaffee

My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.

- Edgar Mitchell

On the morning of Friday 21, of September there was a exciting buzz in the otherwise matter of fact usual fare in the local news, the Space Shuttle Endeavor would make it’s final trip around different points of California from Edwards air force base in California to  LAX  in route to it’s final destination at the Museum of Science in Exposition Park in Downtown Los Angeles.

Cynical me, I was not taken by the supposed grandiosity of the Event, of “being witnessing History”, and all that fanfare, self serving promotion to a failed, and very expensive program, paid by us, the taxpayer, and the lost of life of fourteen people, astronauts, and civilians.

As the morning progressed the enthusiasm of the newscaster and people aligned in San Francisco, Sacramento Santa Monica, Griffith Park, LAX, Pasadena, etc. Grew in excitement and all kind of emotional nonsense, of “once in a lifetime experience”, people cried, and said: “I will be able to tell my children I was there that day, I saw the Endeavour  flight over my roof!” Cynical me thought: “Maybe I will be able to tell my grandchildren how Grandpa saw how our Government allied to private capital, invested our tax money to enrich the few, meanwhile the homeless were cheering in awe at looking the shuttle flying through their full time home, the streets and the sidewalks!”

As it happens I got a little share of my taxpayer money in the form of entertainment, and mild awe, as the shuttle on piggyback ride on top of a  giant Jumbo Jet with great noise and escorted  by two jet fighters flew in front of my window who face the Griffith observatory, so low you could see clearly many details if your eye was fast enough to catch it. It was a big production, not unlike a Hollywood  movie. Of course our local politicians were there at the airport to cash on the event, and present the shuttle like “our achievement” making us part of it, and therefore proud for it, like if we had any say in the matter, and to reassure us what a great honor was for our city to be the retirement home of the old shuttle, however not an undeserved honor, since we in California and in Los Angeles, contributed a great deal to the space program, and the shuttle in particular, of course nothing was said how much the honor cost us up to the present, or in the future.

Here is an article in The Guardian UK Thursday 21 July 2011, you may find enlightening:

“With Atlantis’s touchdown on Thursday bringing down the final curtain on the space shuttle program, there is much hand-wringing over the end of an era. For the first time in 30 years Nasa has no immediate program  for human space travel in place. While many are mourning this loss, the last flight of the space shuttle instead provides an opportunity to rethink space exploration and a time to cut our losses from a failed program that has been a colossal waste of resources, time and creative energy.

The space shuttle failed to live up to its primary goal of providing relatively cheap and efficient human space travel. There is a good reason for this. As the engineers made it clear to the physicist Richard Feynman when he was investigating the cause of the Challenger explosion, human space travel is risky. While Nasa managers had estimated the odds of a shuttle disaster to be microscopic, engineers estimated the loss rate at about 1 in 100 flights, which is close to the actual disaster rate.

Not only has the shuttle program been costly, it has been boring. A generation that grew up with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had hoped that by the dawn of the new millennium we would be regularly vacationing in space, and routinely sending astronauts to boldly go where no man or woman had gone before.

Instead we were treated to regular images of the shuttle visiting a $100 billion boondoggle orbiting in space closer to Earth than Washington DC is to New York. No one except a billionaire or two has ever vacationed in space, and their “hotel” was a cramped, stuffy and at times smelly white elephant.

Either aboard the shuttle or the International Space Station, astronauts have explicitly demonstrated that what we learn from sending people into space is not much more than how people can survive in space. The lion’s share of costs associated with sending humans into space is devoted, as it should be, to making sure they survive the voyage. No other significant science has been learned by a generation’s worth of round trips in near-earth orbit.

Yes, there have been highlights, such as the Hubble Space Telescope launch and repair missions, which were not only exciting but useful. However, the real question is whether they were necessary to achieve the science goals. The initial HST repair mission was required because of poor engineering on the ground, which may even have resulted from the daunting requirement of creating a device that had to be designed to be deployed from the space shuttle.

And given the $5 billion or so price tag per year associated with the shuttle (leading to cost estimates ranging between $500 millions and $1.3 billions per launch) compared with the total cost of, say $5-7 billions over more than a decade for the James Webb Space Telescope, one wonders – as my colleague Robert Parks has mused – whether it would have cost less and been more efficient to merely send up another Hubble (on an unmanned rocket) instead of sending an expensive crew ship to repair the old one.

Helping construct the International Space Station has been no serious justification for the shuttle program. A largely useless international make-work project that was criticized by every major science organization in the US, all that can be said for its scientific justification is that it now houses a $2 billions particle physics experiment (the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer) that managed to avoid serious scientific peer review during its development, otherwise it certainly would not have been recommended for funding.

The real science done by Nasa has not involved humans. We have sent robots to places humans could never have survived and peered into the far depths of the cosmos, back to the early moments of the big bang, with instruments far more capable than our human senses, all for a fraction of what it costs to send a living, breathing person into Earth’s orbit. The first rovers went to Mars for what it would cost to make a movie about sending Bruce Willis to Mars.

But science is not the real goal of human space travel. As I argued over a decade ago to the House Science Committee when Buzz Aldrin and I were asked to testify before their subcommittee on space exploration, we send humans into space for adventure. Astronauts inspire us by their courage and skill, and not least by the fact that they risk death every time they step into a spacecraft.

I personally have no problems with this fact. I believe the future of the human species will eventually be in space, and that we will one day colonize other planets. But we have to be honest about this goal.

I have been on stage with astronauts and watched how they inspire kids to dream big dreams. Indeed, I myself stayed home from school during every Apollo moon mission, and dreamed of one day walking on the moon myself.

Did those missions encourage me to become a scientist, or was I interested in them because of a pre-existing fascination with the cosmos? It is hard to say. But the inspiration associated with tackling problems as immense as those associated with sending humans away from their natural environment into the hostile reaches of space has ultimately produced a host of scientists and engineers who might otherwise have pursued other careers.

If we are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on human space travel, however, we need to have a rational plan, and one that can excite the imagination of the next generation of would-be scientists and explorers. The space shuttle did not provide such a plan.

As Richard Feynman himself said in his final report on the Challenger disaster: “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

Lawrence M Krauss  is foundation professor and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and the author of books including The Physics of Star Trek. His most recent book, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science, was published in March

Unlike Mr. Krauss I do not share his enthusiasm for space exploration, neither I believe the future is in space colonization, when as Mr. Krauss admit, we do not posses even a rational plan for it. I believe our future is here, on Earth, our home, here now, not in a distant pay in the sky dream, we need solutions for our planet, Earth it is not a celestial body made to exploit, and rip off, discarding at our convenience, so we can go and exploit other planets and discard them on the recycle bin once we have enjoyed the usefulness of it like a soda can. Earth is our Mother, and our Home, and will be for our foreseeable future, so let start caring about it, and invest our money on conservation, and environmental ecology, and stop putting escapist dreams in the tender minds of our children, romanticizing space travel,  better let’s cultivate in them a love for our Earth, so they can continue to live in it with wisdom and happiness for all, and not only for an elite of corporate oriented profiteers who using science, and technology as tools, at the expense of our taxpayer money, dream to despoil other planets, like they are doing to Earth, so they can accumulate more wealth  at our expense, and that of of our Mother Earth, with little benefit for the common man, who unwillingly pays the bill, and receive in exchange a cheap thrill, like watching the shuttle on piggyback parade all over California, at the cost of hundred of billions of dollars, and to add insult to injury the death of 400 trees, in Inglewood and South Los Angeles, to make way for the shuttle in to the museum, ironically trough one of the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles… A cynical friend of mine paraphrasing Neil Armstrong  said: “A small chump change of money for our government,  a giant long 274 years, at 10,000 dollars a day for a man to spend just a single billion!”

JESUS CHANGING FACE, MYTH VS A HISTORICIZED LIFE OF JESUS, AND A NEW SPIRITUALITY, GNOSTICISM.

¹⁴ Not until halfway through the festival did Jesus go up to the temple courts and begin to teach.

¹⁵ The Jews there were amazed and asked, “How did this man get such learning without having been taught?”

¹⁶ Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own. It comes from the one who sent me.

¹⁷ Anyone who chooses to do the will of God will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.

¹⁸ Whoever speaks on their own does so to gain personal glory, but he who seeks the glory of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false about him.

¹⁹ Has not Moses given you the law? Yet not one of you keeps the law. Why are you trying to kill me?”

John 7

One of the biggest problems of the study of religion now days, specially with our intellectual elites in scholarly circles, than rather than throwing light, and better understanding on the area of the history of Jesus, and Christianity in general, on the contrary the issue of Jesus it is even more obscure, and muddled by  the  division in sectarian groups with diverse, and contradicting ideas, that unfortunately are not the product of honest study, and research, but of partisan ideology.

It will be difficult to explain the current state of scholarship today, however I will do as briefly as possible, using public known summary records, without citing, do not pretend to encompass every detail, since it will be impossible on this brief account, too many names, accusations, and recriminations go back, and forth to require many volumes. Basically it is divided not between so much different Christian denominations, despite those divisions remain pretty much unchanged today, as in the past, but between  traditional Christian scholars, and non traditional Atheist, Agnostics, some of them not even Bible scholars, in the Theological Divinity school fashion, but nevertheless people who contend that the whole story of Jesus, has no basis since the historical Jesus has never being proven, and the New Testament, specially the Gospels are based in Mythological allegories borrowed from different sources at the time the Gospels were written, Hellenistic, Roman, Egyptian, etc.

“Philosopher George Walsh argues that Christianity can be seen as originating in a myth dressed up as history, or with a historical being mythologized into a supernatural one: he calls the former the Christ myth theory, and the latter the historical Jesus theory.Biblical scholars Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd break the spectrum of opinion into four positions; they call the first three the “legendary-Jesus thesis,” namely that the picture of Jesus in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke is mostly or entirely historically inaccurate.

The Return of Persephone by Frederic Leighton (1891). Robert Price writes that a central plank of the Jesus myth theory is that Jesus is one of a number of dying-and-rising gods.

1. The Jesus myth theory: the gospels describe a virtually, and perhaps entirely, fictitious person. There are no grounds for supposing that any aspect of the Jesus narrative is rooted in history. This view is represented to varying degrees by Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews, G.A. Wells, and Robert Price. Mythicists do not agree on a single theory of the actual origins of Christianity.

2. There is enough evidence to conclude that Jesus existed, but the reports are so unreliable that very little can be said about him with confidence. This view is represented by Rudolf Bultmann and Burton Mack.

3. Historical research can reveal a core of historical facts about Jesus, but he is very different from the Jesus of the New Testament. His sayings and miracles are myths. Robert Funk and Crossan represent this view, one that Eddy and Boyd write is increasingly common among New Testament scholars, particularly those associated with the Westar Institute’s Jesus Seminar and Jewish New Testament scholars such as Paula Fredriksen or Amy Jill-Levine.

   Within this camp there remains a significant gulf between those who hold Schweitzer’s view that Jesus had apocalyptic end-time beliefs such as Bart Ehrman and Paula Fredriksen, and those who do not hold this such as Marcus Borg.

4. The gospels are reliable historical sources, and critical historiography should not rule out the possibility of supernatural occurrence, a view represented by John P. Meier and N.T. Wright.

Three pillars of the theory

New Testament scholar Robert Price, who argues it is quite likely there never was a historical Jesus, writes that the Jesus myth theory is based on three pillars:

• There is no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources.

• The Pauline epistles, earlier than the gospels, do not provide evidence of a recent historical Jesus.

• The story of Jesus shows strong parallels to Middle Eastern religions about dying and rising gods, symbolizing the rebirth of the individual as a rite of passage. He writes that Christian apologists have tried to minimize these parallels.

Pauline epistles

The composition of the letters of Paul of Tarsus is generally dated between 49 and 64 CE,some two to three decades after the conventional date given for Jesus’s death. Paul did not know the historical Jesus. He only claims he had known him, ‘as of one born out of due time’, i.e., as the ‘risen’ Jesus.

Many biblical scholars turn to Paul’s letters (epistles) to support their arguments for a historical Jesus.Theologian James D.G. Dunn argues that Robert Price ignores what everyone else in the field regards as primary data. Biblical scholar F. F. Bruce (1910–1990) writes that, according to Paul’s letters, Jesus was an Israelite, descended from Abraham (Gal 3:16) and David (Rom. 1:3); who lived under Jewish law (Gal. 4:4); who was betrayed, and on the night of his betrayal instituted a memorial meal of bread and wine (I Cor. 11:23ff); who endured the Roman penalty of crucifixion (I Cor. 1:23; Gal. 3:1, 13, 6:14, etc.), although Jewish authorities were somehow involved in his death (I Thess. 2:15); who was buried, rose the third day and was thereafter seen alive, including on one occasion by over 500, of whom the majority were alive 25 years later (I Cor. 15:4ff). The letters say that Paul knew of and had met important figures in Jesus’s ministry, including the apostles Peter and John, as well as James the brother of Jesus, who is also allegedly mentioned in Josephus. In the letters, Paul on occasion alludes to and quotes the teachings of Jesus, and in 1 Corinthians 11 recounts the Last Supper.”

In an article on the Huffington Post’s Web site,  Bart Ehrman insists:

“Apart from the most rabid fundamentalists among us, nearly everyone admits that the Bible might contain errors—a faulty creation story here, a historical mistake there, a contradiction or two in some other place. But is it possible that the problem is worse than that—that the Bible actually contains lies?

Most people wouldn’t put it that way, since the Bible is, after all, sacred Scripture for millions on our planet. But good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle—Peter, Paul or James—knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery (2011b).

Why is this alleged consensus of scholarship not forthcoming about the “truth” of these lies, mistakes, and contradictions? According to Ehrman, many scholars are ministers and professors who have to serve the needs of their clientele (see Ehrman, 2009, pp. 13-14). Ministers don’t want to be honest because either it conflicts with their personal faith, or they fear being fired by their elderships. Professors really do know the truth, Ehrman claims, but they cannot be honest about it, because they largely teach in colleges, seminaries, and divinity schools. They cannot denigrate the very texts they are teaching to Christian students without suffering repercussions from their constituency. Simply put, Ehrman implies Christian scholars are dishonest, if not duplicitous, and have engineered a conspiracy to keep the populace from learning the “truth.” Conspiracy theories like this have no place in any serious discussion of these issues.”

However Ehrman suggest, and personally do not find far fetch, that the business of studying Jesus, for this scholars it is no different than that of a worker of a particular brand of manufacture, who it is forced to be loyal to the company name, regardless if in private would prefer to choose his own choice of soap, car, shoes, bottled drink, etc..

It is not necessary to say Bart Ehrman become a pariah in scholarly circles after this outburst!

In other words, are you accusing me of toeing the party line and saying what they wish me to say, and therefor you doubt the integrity of my public opinions?

Well, yes!

When you belong to a church religious denomination, and you get butter for your bread from, but privately can hold an agnostic position, or even an atheist one. Or play both sides, holding Faith but pretending not to with other scholars of a different ilk!

Not that there is any crime on it, in this world with a increasingly Secular majority, but still is intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise, it is plainly speaking spiritual bankruptcy.

Neither I believe Theology, and the study of scriptures should be the exclusive domain of the believer, since you can study Theology just to prove it is nonsense, or the study of scriptures that can be fascinating, from an anthropological, and archeological historical point. But who are we kidding, if you are getting paid by your church institution, it is threading a fine line between the two sides I find objectionable, and morally troublesome, you cease to believe, why to keep on pretending otherwise?

But what I find excusable perhaps, but hypocritical to say the least, is the ambivalence of it, because you become disappointed with your previous beliefs, and you find yourselves middle aged, maybe old, and cynical, and invested too much effort, and years in to it, and now you lack the courage of proclaiming your new beliefs, the dishearten realization your life has being a waste of your time…or the opposite, saying you agree with the skeptics, but  then decided, it is better to lie low, avoid the flak and keep your faith to  yourself. Does not this two positions are clearly ambivalent, and dishonest? Or in the better cases a compromise?

At least the position of the mythicist is clear, if not their end result thesis, but those who vouch for the historical Jesus, who instead of having a living spirit in their heart,  cling to official agendas regardless of their private beliefs, and keep arguing who was, or was not, the man who was the inspiration of the legendary story of Jesus…well it is sad, and dishonest.

^“15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! ¹⁶ So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” Revelations

Have you guys seen the outpour of movies about King Arthur, Camelot, Excalibur, where the new theme is to explain to our common late Twenty, and early Twenty-One century rationality how a man no different than any of us, but gifted with courage battled invaders, barbarians, thieves, etc. And somehow for the lack of accurate historical records of the times it rose in to a legend, and  a few historians, or pseudo historians misguidedly search for proofs of a similar character during that age, with no Magicians of the likes of Merlin, or villains the likes of Morgana, and all that mythological nonsense. I wonder sometimes at the rolling of the eyes of Medieval scholars!

“The legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table is the most powerful and enduring in the western world. King Arthur, Guinevere, and Sir Lancelot did not really exist, but their names conjure up a romantic image of gallant knights in shining armor, elegant ladies in medieval castles, heroic quests for the Holy Grail in a world of honor and romance, and the court of Camelot at the center of a royal and mystical Britain.

The Arthurian legend has existed for over a thousand years and is just as compelling today as it was in the faraway days of its early creators – Geoffrey of Monmouth, Robert de Boron, Chrétien de Troyes, and most majestically: Sir Thomas Malory in his epic work, Le Morte d’Arthur. Countless writers, poets, and artists (not to mention film-makers and now, webmasters) have been inspired by the life and times of King Arthur.”

However if there is an argument between Medieval scholars for the historical Arthur this, it seems, does not make the noise that an  historical Jesus do.

If we have no  issue believing  Geoffrey of Monmouth, Robert de Boron, Chrétien de Troyes, and Sir Thomas Mallory as responsible of our knowledge of the Arthurian legends, why we have such trouble with this other writers; Paul, Mark, Mathew, Luke, and John?

I frankly find this rationalistic new movies about the Arthurian legend, boring, and not near as exciting as John Boorman’s  Excalibur, based on Sir Thomas Malory’s book, not only that what they portray it is not accurate historically, since we all agree to be a myth, but in their eagerness to rationalize Myth, they had lost the point of such story! Which of course is not to appeal to our objective left side brain, but to our subjective right side brain, our Hearts…

I do not have a problem with a non historical Jesus to see the greatness of the New Testament, neither I care if the position of the mythicist is true, as a matter of fact, I believe to be so in a general sense, if not in the details, or the particular twist they choose to give to the Jesus story, I agree that the Gospels are Myth, but since they come with so much bogus ideas, in their zeal to discredit belief, God, Jesus, and Religion, they lack depth, and suffer of the modern malady of lacking the use of their right brain, if only they will refrain of speculating wildly about what kind of man was Jesus:

Bandit, political agitator, Doomsday Prophet, Magician, etc. At least a not existent Jesus is an allegory, and a Symbolic entity deserving of imitation. Period!

After all Religions are not isolated phenomena, they thrive on the social historical period of the people who produce them, and they inherit myths, from older Religions and adapt them to their new understanding of their religious experience, after all we shouldn’t forget Christianity despite it’s Jewish, and Hellenistic origins, become the official Religion of Rome:

In the early 4th century, Constantine I became the first emperor to convert to Christianity, launching the era of Christian hegemony. The emperor Julian made a short-lived attempt to revive traditional and Hellenistic religion and to affirm the special status of Judaism, but in 391 under Theodosius I Christianity became the official state religion of Rome, to the exclusion of all others. Pleas for religious tolerance from traditionalists such as the senator Symmachus (d. 402) were rejected, and Christian monotheism became a feature of Imperial domination. Heretics as well as non-Christians were subject to exclusion from public life or persecution, but Rome’s original religious hierarchy and many aspects of its ritual influenced Christian forms, and many pre-Christian beliefs and practices survived in Christian festivals and local traditions.

What it is difficult for me from mythicist, to accept is their believe that the analogies of myths  made their religious experience a borrowed copy, and therefor a lie , sort like declaring our constitution a phony, and unoriginal because it is based on previous English experience with constitutional representative government. Expedient perhaps, but a social common phenomenon, they obviously do not understand religious experience, and lack right brain side sensitivity to understand, and realize so.

 

On the other side for those who uphold dear the historical Jesus, even the existence of a man that was crucified, maybe the leader of a small group of Jewish dissenters from the orthodoxy of the Sanhedrim, and it is my understanding that they may have been many, this does not make one of them the historical Jesus, the one the Gospels of Mark, Luke, Mathew or John were talking about, who to my understanding is the allegory of the Ecce Homo the ideal man every human being should aspire to be, Christ like at the pinnacle of his life, despite the incoming crucifixion. 

In my opinion the story of Jesus probably has more to do with small, syncretism Jewish religious groups, who borrowed freely from different traditions, how to explain the Wise men from the East of Mathew?

Syncretism is the combining of different (often contradictory) beliefs, often while melding practices of various schools of thought. Syncretism may involve the merger and analogizing of several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, thus asserting an underlying unity and allowing for an inclusive  approach to other faiths.

The Gospel of Matthew, the only one of the four Canonical gospels to mention the Magi, states that they came “from the east” to worship the Christ, “born King of the Jews.” Although the account does not tell how many they were, the three gifts led to a widespread assumption that they were three as well. In the East, the magi traditionally number twelve.

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’” Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another path.

Excuse to say this gifts are highly Symbolic some speculate they belong to three different Esoteric schools, of Knowledge, represented by the Gold; Alchemy, Frankincense; Astrology, and Myrrh; Theurgy. The fact is the wise man story of Mathew taken as a mere  pastoral anecdote, stick as bad as a sore thumb, in a work that is eminently allegorical, and symbolic and syncretic in nature, to deny influences beyond traditional Judaism at the time, it is well known the discontent of orthodox Jewish groups with King Herod he is described as “a madman who murdered his own family and a great many rabbis.” He is also known for his colossal building projects in Jerusalem and elsewhere, including his expansion of the Second Temple in Jerusalem sometimes referred to as Herod’s Temple, and the construction of the port at Caesarea Maritima. Important details of his biography are gleaned from the works of the 1st century CE Roman-Jewish historian Josephus Flavius. Many Jewish groups like the Essenes, believed that the high priest of the Jerusalem Temple was elected on false pretenses, which invalidated the whole Temple cult. Judging by this passage, and many others, it is hard to believe the Gospels were anything but the work of a “New Age” type of Jews, probably looked with contempt, if not with total animosity by the orthodox groups. Paul the clear example of a Hellenistic Jew who basically become the pillar of Christian belief.

No Orthodox Jewish will dare to be as bold as to incorporate Hellenistic, Zoroastrian, or Egyptian symbolism in to the Gospels, it is quite shocking to read the Old Testament virulent rejection of anything foreign to Israel, and the Prophetic tradition, except for obscure passage in Genesis.

And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine: and he was [is] the priest of the most high God. And he blessed him, and said, “Blessed be Abram to the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth, And blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand”. And he gave him tithe from all.

—Genesis 14:18-20

In the New Testament, references to Melchizedek appear only in the Letter to the Hebrews (later 1st century AD), though these are extensive (Hebrews 5: 6, 10; 6: 20; 7: 1, 10, 11, 15, 17, 21). Jesus Christ  is there identified as a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek quoting from Ps. 110:4.And so Jesus assumes the role of High Priest once and for all. Abraham’s transfer of goods to Melchizedek is seen to imply that Melchizedek is superior to Abraham, in that Abraham is tithing to him. Thus, Melchizedek’s (Jesus’) priesthood is superior to the Aaronic priesthood, and the Temple in Jerusalem is now unnecessary.

A collection of early Gnostic scripts dating on or before the 4th-century, discovered in 1945 and known as the Nag Hammadi Library, contains a tractate pertaining to Melchizedek. Here it is proposed that Melchizedek is Jesus Christ.Melchizedek, as Jesus Christ, lives, preaches, dies and is resurrected, in a gnostic perspective. The Coming of the Son of God Melchizedek speaks of his return to bring peace, supported by the gods, and he is a priest-king who dispenses justice. (Check my Post: The Grail) Little effort it is needed to link Melchizedek to Jesus, since he falls in the category of a Universal Priesthood, not from Aaron, or Levite, or even  of the house of Israel, but of a Divine Celestial origin.

The Divinity of Jesus

It is the posterior decrees of the Christian church who in Divinizing the man Jesus created the problem of a historical Jesus.

Following the Apostolic Age, from the second century onwards, a number of controversies developed about how the human and divine are related within the person of Jesus. As of the second century, a number of different and opposing approaches developed among various groups. For example, Arianism did not endorse divinity, Ebionism (See my post Via Positiva, Via Negativa) argued Jesus was an ordinary mortal, while Gnosticism held docetic views which argued Christ was a spiritual being who only appeared to have a physical body. The resulting tensions lead to schisms within the church in the second and third centuries, and ecumenical councils were convened in the fourth and fifth centuries to deal with the issues. Eventually, by the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Hypostatic union was decreed—the proposition that Christ has one human nature [physis] and one divine nature [physis], united with neither confusion nor division—making this part of the creed of orthodox Christianity. Although some of the debates seemed to be over a theological iota, they took place in controversial political circumstances and resulted in a schism that formed the Church of the East

In 325, the First Council of Nicaea defined the persons of the Godhead and their relationship with one another – decisions which were again ratified at the First Council of Constantinople in 381. The language used was that the one God exists in three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit); in particular, it was affirmed that the Son was homoousios (of same substance) as the Father. The Nicene Creed declared the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus.

In 431, the First Council of Ephesus was initially called to address the views of Nestorius on Mariology, but the problems soon extended to Christology, and schisms followed. The 431 council was called because in defense of his loyal priest Anastasius, Nestorius had denied the Theotokos title for Mary and later contradicted Proclus during a sermon in Constantinople. Pope Celestine I (who was already upset with Nestorius due to other matters) wrote about this to Cyril of Alexandria, who orchestrated the council. During the council, Nestorius defended his position by arguing there must be two persons of Christ, one human, the other divine, and Mary had given birth only to a human, hence could not be called the Theotokos, i.e. “the one who gives birth to God”. The debate about the single or dual nature of Christ ensued in Ephesus.

The Council of Ephesus debated hypostasis(coexisting natures) versus monophysitism (only one nature) versus miaphysitism (two natures united as one) versus Nestorianism (disunion of two natures). From the Christological viewpoint, the council adopted hypostasis, i.e. coexisting natures, but its language was less definitive than the 451 Council of Chalcedon. The Oriental Orthodox rejected this and subsequent councils and to date consider themselves to be miaphysite. By contrast, Roman Catholics to date believe in the hypostatic union and the Trinity. The council also confirmed the Theotokos title and excommunicated Nestorius.

The 451 Council of Chalcedon was highly influential and marked a key turning point in the Christological debates that broke apart the church of the Eastern Roman Empire in the fifth century.It is the last council which many Anglicans and most Protestants consider ecumenical. It fully promulgated the hypostatic union, stating the human and divine natures of Christ coexist, yet each is distinct and complete. Although, the Chalcedon Creed did not put an end to all Christological debate, it did clarify the terms used and became a point of reference for many future Christology’s. Most of the major branches of Christianity — Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and Reformed — subscribe to the Chalcedon Christological formulation, while many branches of Eastern Christianity – Syrian Orthodoxy, Assyrian Church, Coptic Orthodoxy, Ethiopian Orthodoxy, and Armenian Apostolicism  reject it.

It is easy to see how that by that time the politics of the Roman Empire had a lot to do with the standardization of Christianity, in what become the official Religion; The Roman Apostolic Catholic Church, and their Eastern counterparts, also it is easy to understand the reluctance of non believers to accept  men hands in to the making of Religion, when supposedly should be a Divine affair, well you can hold to your unbelief, but it is naïve to believe man is not  part of the Sacred, therefore the Sacred manifest in man, the actor, and creator of Religion in good faith,  or in bad faith, it is all part of the Human condition, that at the same time can manifest in sublime spurts of the spirit, like the Gospels, or in weak, and flawed choices in Religious, or Secular affairs as well! Errare humanum est…

In my view,  I posit little faith on a literal Jesus, if the historical Jesus existed, it was a man, like any of us, more virtuous no doubt, if it really existed, he had a Symbolic, rather than a literal resemblance to the allegorical Jesus of the Gospels, who is perfect, more an Archetype, than a real man, I will go as far as giving him the mantle of Prophecy as even not Christians do, like the Moslems who recognize him to be born of a virgin, and a Prophet, but totally human, a servant, not the son of God, as for the Jews they believe will be a man with no special powers to be the Messiah.  Nachmanides argued that the central issue separating Christianity and Judaism was not the issue of Jesus’ Messiahship, but whether or not Jesus was divine.  There was no basis in Judaism, Nachmanides said, for believing in the divinity of the Messiah or, indeed, of any man.  To Nachmanides, it seemed most strange “that the Creator of heaven and earth resorted to the womb of a certain Jewess and grew there for nine months and was born as an infant, and afterwards grew up and was betrayed into the hands of his enemies who sentenced him to death and executed him, and that afterwards… he came to life and returned to his original place.  The mind of a Jew, or any other person, cannot tolerate this.”  Nachmanides told the Spanish monarch, “You have listened all your life to priests who have filled your brain and the marrow of your bones with this doctrine, and it has settled with you because of that accustomed habit.”  Had King James heard these ideas propounded for the first time when he was already an adult, Nachmanides implied, he never would have accepted them.

Perhaps what made Christianity an Institution for the many, and no longer a living experience, but for those fewer who hold Faith as a way of life, is the idea of the Incarnation of God exclusively to Jesus, that excluded Theosis for all Human beings, it is not following the  objective of the Way of Jesus to become Christ like?

The Jesus of our Modern and Postmodern age it is tainted by our current  Worldview of Rationalism, Science, and Secular ideas, in other words contaminated by our revisionism, and almost a total ignorance of the Worldview of the writers of the books of the New Testament, and I am afraid even many scholars of today are incapable to understand the Religious fervor, and individual Heart enlightenment of this  diverse early Christians communities. As I walk through my humble neighborhood, full of new immigrants to this nation, there is so many small churches, sometimes but a little hole in the wall church, where no more than a dozen people sing, cry, jump, and speak in tongues, who possible resembled the fervor of the early Christians at the time of the Gospels, than any of the  old ossified Church Institutions were the Spirit is gone, and the parishioner is just a social spectator who may even hold agnostic views of his own, no different than the Priest, Minister, Pastor, or the Scholar of this Institutions, who regard this issues as intellectual ideological positions, not rivers of living water. What is the use of scholarly studies, the many petty debates over a simple word, if there is no longer those rivers flowing?

KOINONIA

In my view the old Religious Institutions will have to transform themselves to the point they wouldn’t be recognized  by a Christian of the beginning of the Twenty Century, in order to survive and thrive, if listing to the point of sinking would be avoided, their leaders would have to respond to change, and to a revival of Faith in their own life, to produce the enthusiasm Evangelization requires in the souls of their parishioners, small churches with small congregations, will continue to prosper, as long as they not become too big, and fall in to the error of carelessness, and apathy, that had plagued big established churches, too big to care for one individual, and lost their sense of being one with their congregation, the sense of KOINONIA is the Anglicization of a Greek word (κοινωνία) that means communion by intimate participation. The word is used frequently in the New Testament of the Bible to describe the relationship within the Early Christian church as well as the act of breaking bread in the manner which Christ prescribed during the Passover meal [John 6:48-69, Matthew 26:26-28, 1 Corinthians 10:16, 1 Corinthians 11:24]. As a result the word is used within the Christian Church to participate, as Paul says, in the Communion of Christ, in this manner it identifies the idealized state of fellowship and community that should exist in Communion.

In the New Testament, the basis of communion begins with a joining of Jesus with the community of the faithful. This union is also experienced in practical daily life. The same bonds that link the individual to Jesus also link him or her with other faithful. The New Testament letters describe those bonds as so vital and genuine that a deep level of intimacy can be experienced among the members of a local church.

The first usage of koinonia in the Greek New Testament is found in Acts 2:42-47, where we read a striking description of the common life shared by the early Christian believers in Jerusalem:

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the communion, to the breaking of bread and to prayer…All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need…They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people.”

Ultimately the failure of the big  Religious Institutions, it was to be expected, they may survive, or not, but if you are a militant Atheist, and you believe Christianity or any other Religion will eventually disappear for the good of mankind, as remnant of a dark past, and Science will be the new torchbearer of Mankind well, don’t hold your breath, you will be disappointed, nothing against Science, on the contrary it is a great tool to deal with the material world, unfortunately has little to offer to the maladies afflicting our subjective self, unless you go along with drugs, and genetic induced paradise ideas, I am afraid despite the triumphs of technology, we have being witness to too much medical malpractice, the side effects of drugs, ecological disasters, and the many ills brought by the use of technologies derived from science discoveries, maybe they will come with a new drug to make people wiser, and avoid lack of judgment! Sorry I am an skeptic when it come to technological Utopias who try to change the exterior circumstances of Man, ignoring the basic premise that at the bottom of it, is just a Philistine desire for making money, not the welfare of Humanity. Meanwhile all this scientific, and technological advances do  but little to look within Man to his subjective nature to find “the peace that defies all understanding”…like in antiquity a new wind is blowing and bringing with it a new Spirit:

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the farthest parts of the earth.”   Acts 1:8

And Jesus words will be fulfilled:

“For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”Mathew 18:20

THE NEGATION OF THE SELF

The failure of Religious scholars in my view it is that they do not recognize the value of the Symbolic, and the Self, under the constant attack of those Materialist, and the unfortunately common trend of many scientist in denying the Self, , in favor of a mechanized, and reductionist view of Man were everything it is reduced to a biological imperative, and there is no room for the  Subjective, but as a biochemical synapsis at cellular level, were everything can be conveniently explained as a process of cause, and effect, ignoring that there is no way to replicate such synapsis in individuals who apparently similar may differ subjectively in experience, and therefore in conclusions, like if two individuals reading the same book they must  arrive to the same understanding, when we know this is not the case, simply because the variances are practically infinite to be able  come to the same understanding, therefor the axiom “if all factors would be identical” or “if we could track back every cause, we will be able to predict the effect”. This “if” it is groundless, and totally a fiction, and therefore of no value to explain actions, and ideas in Man. This is the realm of the Self, and the Subjective. Many Scholars the product of a Scientific education, and the modern age,  coward to oppose this materialistic, and reductionist views, or really believe in them, and a lot of them are divided between Faith, and Reason, they are “crucified” in this dichotomy of making sense of an academic construction of facts, based in dates of manuscripts, brought by the pressure of a materialistic understanding of History, in what is clearly a different realm; allegory, and myth in a search for an “Historical Jesus” or the the last bastion of a new trench, for the literal belief of a mythical character, the new term: Historicity of Jesus Christ. I would said rather pointless if the value of your belief hangs precariously on this tenuous hinge, since as we saw previously they do not give proper value to the Self, and the Symbolic, what would be the purpose of the material existence of a Jesus, that has little to do with the Gospels? And what the meaning when  Jesus said: “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.” John 18: 36-37

THE GNOSTICS

The word gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “knowledge”, which is often used in Greek philosophy in a manner more consistent with the English “enlightenment”. Some scholars continue to maintain traditional dating for the emergence of Gnostic philosophy and religious movements. It is now generally believed that the evidence suggests that Gnosticism was a Jewish movement which subsequently reacted to Christianity or that Gnosticism emerged directly in reaction to Christianity. The name “Christian Gnostics” came to represent a segment of the Early Christian community that believed that salvation lay not in merely worshipping Christ, but in psychic or pneumatic souls learning to free themselves from the material world via the revelation. According to this tradition, the answers to spiritual questions are to be found within, not without.Furthermore, the gnostic path does not require the intermediation of a church for salvation. Some scholars, such as Edward Conze and Elaine Pagels, have suggested that Gnosticism blends teachings like those attributed to Jesus Christ with teachings found in Eastern traditions.

The Nag Hammadi library is a collection of early Christian Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945. Twelve leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local peasant named Mohammed Ali Samman. The writings in these codices comprised fifty-two mostly Gnostic treatises, but they also include three works belonging to the Corpus Hermeticum and a partial translation/alteration of Plato’s Republic. In his “Introduction” to The Nag Hammadi Library in English, James Robinson suggests that these codices may have belonged to a nearby Pachomian monastery, and were buried after Bishop Athanasius condemned the use of non-canonical books in his Festal Letter of 367 AD.

The contents of the codices were written in the Coptic language, though the works were probably all translations from Greek. The best-known of these works is probably the Gospel of Thomas, of which the Nag Hammadi codices contain the only complete text. After the discovery it was recognized that fragments of these sayings attributed to Jesus appeared in manuscripts discovered at Oxyrhynchus in 1898 (P. Oxy. 1), and matching quotations were recognized in other early Christian sources. Subsequently, a 1st or 2nd century date of composition circa 80 AD has been proposed for the lost Greek originals of the Gospel of Thomas. The buried manuscripts themselves date from the third and forth centuries.

But those who wrote and circulated these texts did not regard themselves as “heretics. Most of the writings use Christian terminology, unmistakable related to a Jewish heritage. Many claim to offer traditions about Jesus that are secret, hidden from “the many” who constitute what, in the second century, came to be called the “catholic church.” These Christians are now called Gnostics, from the Greek word gnosis, usually translated as “knowledge.” For as those who claim to know nothing about ultimate reality are called agnostic (literally, “not knowing”), the person who does claim to know such things is called gnostic (“knowing”). But gnosis is not primarily rational knowledge. The Greek language distinguishes between scientific or reflective knowledge (“He knows mathematics”) and knowing through observation or experience (“He knows me”), which is gnosis. As the Gnostics use the term, we could translate it as “insight,” for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. And to know oneself, they claimed, is to know human nature and human destiny. According to the gnostic teacher Theodotus, writing in Asia Minor (c. 140-160), the gnostic is one has come to understand who we were, and what we have become; where we were… whither we are hastening; from what we are being released; what birth is, and what is rebirth.

Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis. Another gnostic teacher, Monoimus, says:

Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, “My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body.” Learn the sources of sorrow:, joy, love, hate . . . If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in yourself.

Orthodox Jews and Christians insist that a chasm separates humanity from Its creator: God is wholly other. But some of the Gnostics who wrote these gospels contradict this: self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.

Second, the “living Jesus” of these texts speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance, like the Jesus ofthe New Testament. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal–even identical.

Third, orthodox Christians believe that Jesus is Lord and Son of God in a unique way: he remains forever distinct from the rest of humanity whom he came to save. Yet the gnostic Gospel of Thomas relates that as soon as Thomas recognizes him, Jesus says to Thomas that they have both received their being from the same source:

Jesus said, “I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have measured out…. He who will drink from my mouth will become as I am: I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be revealed to him.”

³⁷ On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.

³⁸ Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”

John 7

SPECIALIZATION, AND GENERALIZATION, A SHORSIGHTED VIEW OF KNOWLEDGE, AND LIFE, THE POLITICS OF WENDELL BERRY

There was a time when the world was a simpler place, or we may like to believe so on this days of tremendous advances on the field of science, of technological progress that would make our early twenty century forefathers heads spin! At the same time the complexity of the issues this progress has brought; overpopulation, ecological devastation, pollution, the over exploitation of our precious limited resources, of a world getting too small for our Human insatiable needs, the unequal distribution of resources and wealth, and the disparity of access to  those resources, the creation not of a world government, but a world ruled by plutocrats, in the form of corporations, with no accountability, and in bed with our dysfunctional, and obsolete, now archaic, and sclerotic form of government, who still pretends to be a Democracy, and determined to keep in control the axis of power for personal profit, despite the urgent need of a new approach to our world problems, were disinterested and selfless cooperation should be the rule to oversight, and give a guideline to the solving of this problems without the interference of special interests who thwart Real Progress, and the Common Good.

It seem we the world has been a victim of our general lack of capacity to be virtuous, overcoming our Human nature, and selfish desires in order to allow a just, and wise solutions to the undoubtedly  worldwide crisis that as we speak would engulf us before we can come to an organized, and well run program of actions, in order if not to solve totally, at least to ameliorate the damage, our lack of consciousness has brought us to this zero hour crisis for our world. It seem we have become victims of our own so much vaunted progress!

The extremes of specialization on one side, and of generalization, and reductionism on the other side combines to the common adage of : ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ failure of vision on our postmodern age. Our individual actions due to our specialization, lack the depth of understanding of the whole picture, our combined resources of our individual specializations have reached a point were nobody cares about the result of the whole, a sort of cleaver but Dr. Frankenstein creation that will end haunting us for the lack of wisdom, in the end too much specialization is leading to a loss of ethics, and integrity. Generalization on the other hand prevent the large interests to make proper managerial decisions fit to individuals, providing at best one size fit all, specially when the individual well being confronts  the interest of the corporation, usually their bottom line, profit.

This not only affects society as a whole, but directly harms and minimize the individual:

“The fact is, however, that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstance and the power of other people. From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride. For all his leisure and recreation, he feels bad, he looks bad, he is overweight, his health is poor. His air, water, and food are all known to contain poisons. There is a fair chance that he will die of suffocation. He suspects that his love life is not as fulfilling as other people’s. He wishes that he had been born sooner, or later. He does not know why his children are the way they are. He does not understand what they say. He does not care much and does not know why he does not care. He does not know what his wife wants or what he wants. Certain advertisements and pictures in magazines make him suspect that he is basically unattractive. He feels that all his possessions are under threat of pillage. He does not know what he would do if he lost his job, if the economy failed, if the utility companies failed, if the police went on strike, if the truckers went on strike, if his wife left him, if his children ran away, if he should be found to be incurably ill. And for these anxieties, of course, he consults certified experts, who in turn consult certified experts about their anxieties.

It is rarely considered that this average citizen is anxious because he ought to be—because he still has some gumption that he has not yet given up in deference to the experts. He ought to be anxious, because he his helpless. That he is dependent upon so many specialists, the beneficiary of so much expert help, can only mean that he is a captive, a potential victim.”

Wendell Berry

BOOMERS AND STICKERS

“Quoting his former teacher, the late writer Wallace Stegner, Berry said Americans have always tended to fall into two camps: boomers and stickers. “The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property and therefore power,” Berry said. “Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.”

Boomer ideals dominate America’s economy and culture now, he said. Almost everything has been reduced to statistics. Like corporate ownership, as compared to individual ownership, big numbers distance us from the consequences of our actions.

“Now the two great aims of industrialism — replacement of people by technology and concentration of wealth in the hands of a small plutocracy — seem close to fulfillment,” Berry said. “At the same time the failures of industrialism have become too great and too dangerous to deny.”

Even the term economy has lost its original meaning, which had to do with household management and husbandry, he said. Most economists now “never ask, in their professional oblivion, why we are willing to do permanent ecological and cultural damage ‘to strengthen the economy.’”

Corporate industrialism, he said, “has failed to sustain the health and stability of human society. Among its characteristic signs are destroyed communities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses and small farms. It has failed just as conspicuously and more dangerously to conserve the wealth and health of nature.”

Industrialism’s effects are often defended as the “price of progress” or “creative destruction,” Berry noted.

“But land abuse cannot brighten the human prospect,” he said. “There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers. The penalties may come quickly to a farmer who destroys perennial cover on a sloping field. They will come sooner or later to a land-destroying civilization such as ours.”

Who is to blame? “We are all implicated,” Berry said. “By economic proxies thoughtlessly given, by thoughtless consumption of goods ignorantly purchased, now we are all boomers.”

How can it be changed? By having more respect for our fellow humans and the land, Berry said. By focusing on long-term sustainability — things like local food, soil conservation and renewable energy. And by rediscovering the importance of affection.

“Knowledge without affection leads us astray every time,” he said. “Affection leads, by way of good work, to authentic hope. … And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind and conserving economy. … We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong.”

Since Berry began making these arguments in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America, critics have dismissed him as unrealistic, nostalgic, even anachronistic. But more people are listening. Indeed, this seems to be Wendell Berry’s time.

As “local food” and “buy local” movements have sprung up everywhere in recent years, Berry’s books have attracted an international following. His lectures are packed, often by young people.

Can America change before it is too late? It can, Berry told me, if sustainability becomes a bigger part of the public conversation. “The only way to do that,” he said, “is to make as much sense as you possibly can.”

We can clearly see that what is required for a better future, it is a clear consciousness of the individual to be responsible of his actions, and stop to be a brainwash sleeper who obediently consumes whatever is advertised to him, by those who want to profit from this general state of hypnotic behavior the complicit media has impose like a gospel of consumerism!

Here is a clear example of how they sell you what you want to believe you are:

“In the real world, a fast car is no faster than a slow car.

In the real world, what’s inside your Macbook doesn’t matter.

In the real world, you don’t wear a watch so you can tell the time.

In the real world, you don’t buy a product, you buy a story.

Owning a Porsche tells a story about you. It tells people that you’re cultured, that you’re a sucker for details, that you are a great connoisseur of precision and efficiency. Your Macbook Pro tells people that you’re creative, sophisticated, and individualistic. The Patek Phillipe on your wrist tells people that you have aristocratic tastes, and that you’re into authenticity and heritage. The Pink Floyd playing on your car stereo tells people that you’re into the modern classics, that you are refined and sophisticated, and that today’s world is much too crude for your tastes.

Our urge to buy and wear these stories overshadow the utilitarian relationship we once shared with products. Everybody who buys a Porsche knows that its not going to get them to the airport any faster than a blah-colored Toyota Corolla.

They don’t care though, because when they drove off the dealership, they didn’t buy a sports car.

On the contrary, they bought a 600 horsepower twin-turbo storytelling machine.”

Umair Kazi

DO NOT VOTE AT THE BALLOT, VOTE WITH YOUR WALLET!

We do not need to buy stories, to believe we are what we are not, unless you are a total fool, we do not need to buy what we do not really need, or what is harmful to Mother Earth, or to others. The only way to take control of the current state of the World politics, economics, environment, etc. Is to take control of our own lives, and realize we need to bring the change in to our own sphere of life  thinking globally , but acting locally.

“The moral order by which we use machine-derived energy is comparatively simple. Whatever uses this sort of energy works simply as a conduit that carries it beyond use: the energy goes in as “fuel” and comes out as “waste.” This principle sustains a highly simplified economy having only two functions: production and consumption.

The moral order appropriate to the use of biological energy, on the other hand, requires the addition of a third term: production, consumption, and return. It is the principle of return that complicates matters, for it requires responsibility, care, of a different and higher order than that required by production and consumption alone, and it calls for methods and economies of a different kind. In an energy economy appropriate to the use of biological energy, all bodies, plant and animal and human, are joined in a kind of energy community. They are not divided from each other by greedy, “individualistic” efforts to produce and consume large quantities of energy, much less to store large quantities of it. They are indissolubly linked in complex patterns of energy exchange. They die into each other’s life, live unto each other’s death. They do not consume in the sense of using up. They do not produce waste. What they take in they change, but they change it always into a form necessary for its use by a living body of another kind. And this exchange goes on and on, round and round, the Wheel of Life rising out of the soil, descending into it, through the bodies of creatures.

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrected, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”

“Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is highest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.”

Wendell Berry.