Egodeath Yahoo Group – Digest 40: 2003-06-30

Covering:

Jesus Symbolic Representation of Complete Repudiation of Freewill Delusion

Lesson and Representation of Complete Experience and Comprehension of the
Overpowering of the Personal Will

How Thinking of a Symbol of Willing Violent Death and Timeless Affixion to the
Physical World Restabilizes the Psyche during Self-Control Seizure



An ancient king might have reasoned, I will completely cancel and overcome and
repudiate my freewill delusion and ego sense, to the most extreme degree
possible, to get the fullest benefits and favor from the gods for my kingdom.
If a little sacrifice of egoic freewill delusion by repudiating freewill and
kneeling to the gods gives the spiritual benefit of divinization and calming
the psyche storm, then a more perfect, more complete sacrifice will magically
correlate with even better favors from the gods for my kingdom.

If the uncontrollable transcendent controller has full power over the will of
a local locus of control — a personal control agent — then logically, the
personal control agent must admit that its will power is completely vulnerable
to be made to turn against the full strength of the greatest will of the
personal control agent, even the will to preserve the bodily health.

This logical insight is the experience of personal power being completely
overwhelmed — crying uncle, the logic when seen is experienced as a
stranglehold, a noose. The uncontrollable transcendent controller shows this
to the mind, and makes the mind fully acknowledge and reflect the fact, and
concede the logical good sense of the archetypal idea of a person being made
willing to prove this.

This logical concession isn’t a matter of action, but of comprehending action.
Zen: “I have no real personal desire. Then why do I act? If there is a
reason for it, may my head be cut off.” There is something to this logic
of — rather, about — sacrificial violence. Our modern era is strange: we
say we are against violence, and yet the media and entertainment industry is
all violence, all the time, it seems — one reason I never want to watch it.

Are we not a blood-soaked society, claiming that it doesn’t count because it’s
just amusing video games? Some of the highest insights are elucidated by
thinking of force, violence, coercion of will, concession, and release — and
relief! And deification. Part of the challenge of investigating the subject
of enlightenment and of the history of world religion is that we want all the
uplifting parts of religion, without the shocking history of transcendent
violence, force, and power.

Historically, mysticism commonly is a matter of experiencing being overpowered
by the transcendent saying “Admit it — I can and could and might force you to
even will your own violent demise, even if that’s the thing you, as control
agent, least want to do. That’s the power I have as uncontrollable
transcendent controller, over your will.

I could make you either fight against me and lose, whatever that might mean,
or I could show you the truth about the nothingness and absolute dependence of
your power with respect to mine, and then return stable virtual power to you,
now informed by the truth. Now go, you shall run your kingdom, knowing the
relationship between my power, the uncontrollable transcendent controller, and
your power, as a puppet, a merely secondary, local locus of control.”

By this extreme and logically perfected view, the godman is a logical
representation of the ability of the higher power to absolutely bend and take
over the will of the secondary controller, demonstrating to the extreme, this
relative power relationship.

This representation of extreme overpowering of personal will keeps mental
harmony and transforms the mind’s mental worldmodel as the assumed power is
completely taken away from egoic thinking, ego’s arm is twisted and instructed
in a kind of absolute overpowering of personal will power from betrayal by
one’s Achilles’ heel: the betraying spring of one’s own control-thoughts.

I do anything I want, as secondary controller — but the catch is, what I want
is controlled entirely by the mysterious uncontrollable transcendent
controller, who taught me an instructive lesson by putting in my head the
willingness to do that which I, as personal control locus, would never want to
do: bodily self-destruction. What is the goal in this present analysis? To
understand truth, and to understand the history of religion.

Let us change the subject to harmless Buddhism. Levy’s book Buddhism: a
‘Mystery Religion’? describes Buddhist monks who willingly burning themselves
alive just to earn the community divine favor — a somewhat convincing
demonstration of transcendence of the personal will, but I prefer to merely
give the nod to a willingly violently sacrificed mythic godman figure such as
Attis: it seems more to the point and less superstitious.

Buddhism: a ‘Mystery Religion’? Paul Levy. NY: Schocken Books, 1968.
Hardcover – 111 pages. Six lectures on aspects of Buddhism. Subjects include:
Ordination and the Buddhist Hierarchy in Theravadin Communities; ‘The March
Toward the Light’ Among the Northern Buddhists; The First Council, The Corpus
of the Law, and Ananda, Prototype of the Candidate for Ordination; Saints’
Lives or Initiation Themes; and Primitive Buddhism and ‘Mystery Religions’.

To be enlightened, you must in some sense become (be made) willing to endure
bodily suffering and death. It is not at all necessary to harm the body; in
fact the actuality of harming the body is utterly irrelevant, and doing so is
arguably a failure of comprehension, a misunderstanding.

________________________________

Self-Control Cybernetics of the Experience of Being Ransomed and Suddenly
Released from Doomed Loss of Control by the Godman’s Willing Captivity and
Complete Suffering and Death

Chapter: “Esoteric Christianity: The Greek Mystery Religions and Their Impact
on Christianity”
From Andrew Benson’s book The Origins of Christianity and the Bible.
http://www.egodeath.com/bensonmysteryrels.htm — “According to another
version, Baal was arrested (like Jesus). He was sentenced, chastised, and was
sent away to die with a criminal (Jesus was crucified with two robbers), while
another criminal was freed (Barabbas was freed in place of Jesus). According
to this version, a woman cleansed away the blood that was oozing from the
heart of Baal , which had apparently been pierced by a spear or a javelin.
Afterward, Baal was found in a mountain, where he was being watched over. The
goddess Anath prepared a nest for him and cared for him. (Women went to the
grave of Jesus to care for his body.) Finally, Baal, or Bel-Marduk, came back
alive and well from the mountain. Such myths circulated before the birth of
Christianity.”


What are the cognitive dynamics of the idea “Jesus (or equivalent mythic
godman) gave up his life to redeem us?”, and the “ransom 1 to release many”
idea? Always remember that myths are first of all a report of mystic-state
*experiencing*. The strategy in asking what the “ransom sacrifice of Jesus”
legitimately and coherently means, is to first ask “How does entheogenic
enlightenment, as an experience, match the dynamic pattern of “releasing many
people when capturing one person”?

During self-control seizure and the feeling of being trapped and frozen into
the frozen timeless spacetime block, when the mind grasps and comprehends the
meaning of the sacrificed-and-ascended mythic godman, as indicating
no-free-will and being mysteriously granted practical self-control again (a
new lease on life with a new understanding), the mind suddenly is released
from self-control struggle and made stable again.

That this happens is a universally reported phenomenon. The single archetypal
notion — being given the comprehension of the godman figure as representing
the discovery of no-free-will and as representing that egoically-died godman
being brought back to a higher mode of life — is given to many minds, under
many godman-names. By this one universal Idea, Concept, Logos, Word, or
Archetype, many minds are transformed into the transcendent mental worldmodel.

When this transformation happens, it is a sudden homeostatic state shift from
the experience of a freewill agent desperately struggling to retain
self-control power, to the experience of being mysterious injected with the
comprehension of the godman’s dying and being injected with confident reliance
on the godhead, the uncontrollable transcendent controller. The saving idea
is given to many minds. The saving idea is that of an Archetype.

The moment the mind is made to picture and comprehend this archetype of a
chained and ego-dead godman, the mind experiences a type of release from a
closing-in prison. This is the good sense of “God sacrificed his son as a
ransom sacrifice to set us free.” The godman idea helps the mind make the
move that is represented by the godman idea. This dynamic could happen
without the godman.

First some minds experienced the core experience of “release-upon-repudiating
freewill thinking”, then to represent this dynamic, they invented the
archetypal idea and told others. After that point, to think of the idea and
comprehend it was to immediately follow the same pattern as the idea, and thus
it became experienced as “the willing spacetime-fastening death of the mythic
godman *caused* my experience of release and enlightenment.”

The willing self-sacrifice of the mythic archetypal godman’s lower, freewill
mode of thinking, serves as a way-showing conceptual pattern to guide one’s
own willing self-sacrifice of the lower, freewill mode of thinking, and
thereby experience the same kind of release and new mode of life that is
described in the story of the archetypal godman figure.

Not the literal ransom sacrifice of Jesus sets us free from the jaws of hell
and death, but rather, *comprehending the idea* of the egoic-thinking
sacrificing figure and his being given faith and reliance on the
uncontrollable transcendent controller, causes that same dynamic to happen in
the reflecting mind during control-instability escalation.

The vividness of the picture of the godman and his receiving faith and new
life upon sacrificing his freewill thinking, enables the mind to most easily
grasp the idea of repudiating freewill thinking, being given faith and
reliance on the utterly mysterious controllable transcendent controller, and
thereby regaining practical control stability combined with knowledge of the
secondary-only nature of our control agency.

What about the blood and violence? What dynamic function does it fulfill? It
is key that these mythic heroes and warriors willingly sacrificed their
freewill thinking; they were made to will that which most emphatically and
extremely and absolutely contradicted their egoic accustomed desire. What is
the strongest egoic desire? To avoid pain and mayhem and preserve one’s
bodily well-being.

There is a religious connection between the idea of bloody violence and
calming — look at Kali, look at Jesus’ death, look at the Iliad heroes,
Caesar’s 23 stabbing wounds, the story of the Passover skipping the houses
that were marked with the blood of the lamb. Here is where the entheogen
researchers haven’t ventured near. Yes, blood is the entheogenic wine, but
violence and blood figures in all myth, at least in all the godman myths and
suchlike in world religion.

How does spilling the victim’s blood on the priest purify the priest — is it
just the notion of ingesting the entheogen? No, the victim represents the
desire, the self-protecting controllership of the sacrificer. The heart of
egoic will power is the drive to first of all, avoid bodily harm to oneself.
When the mind is brought to a state in which *even this most fundamental
personal desire* is cancelled and suspended, the mind is ready to be made to
sacrifice the freewill delusion.

However, the key thing is the cancellation of self-will and freewill
thinking — not of physical harm. The mind is reformed by mentally
repudiating freewill thinking, not by causing harm to oneself. The godman
idea, as a symbolic embodiment of these self-will dynamics, includes the
portrayal of being made willing even to allow harm — the loose cognition
state suspends all accustomed mental construct structures, even including the
will to avoid bodily harm to oneself.

The mind can gain full understanding of these relationships by merely thinking
of the idea of a single mythic figure who willingly accepts bodily harm. The
lightweight pop Buddhists yammer emptily about needing to abandon all desires.
They don’t realize that such sanity is close to psychotic bodily harm to
oneself.

Trendoids get piercings, the radicals get scarification as body art — but
real religion is a matter of being made willing, against all the most
fundamental egoic mental structures of self-preservation and personal
controllership, to accept bodily harm as a way of crossing out egoic freewill
thinking.

The main basis of mental-model transformation is not at all any harmful
physical action such as against one’s accustomed bodily self-preservation
drive, but rather, to bypass that and get to the real point, which is more
abstract: repudiating the notion of freewill agency. Willing and permitting
physical violence against oneself to the point of bodily death is merely a
*metaphor* or the most extremely clear theoretical example of cancellation of
freewill personal power.

The godhead could very well turn the mind’s will in *any* direction, even the
direction of harming oneself against one’s deepest desire — this idea is the
idea of being overpowered in the extreme by the godhead.

One’s sense of personal power is most extremely exemplified by one’s power to
avoid willing bodily harm, but one’s vulnerable spot is that one cannot, as a
merely secondary locus of control, control what one wills; theoretically, the
godhead could inject one with the desire to demonstrate overcoming one’s own
egoic natural inclination to avoid bodily harm.

The mystic said “I wish I could give up all desire.” May you get your wish.
“I don’t like where this train of thought is being directed… I really,
really don’t like where this is going.” Do rational Buddhists believe in Mara
the tempting devil, causer of stormy lightning? Buddha’s touching the ground,
perhaps with other hand out in gesture of divine mysterious gratuitous
compassion and calm and no-fear, may be functionally equivalent to the calming
effect of the idea of the violent willing sacrifice of the Hellenistic godmen.

“If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now, it’s just a
spring clean for the May queen; there are two paths you can go by; there’s
still time to change the road you’re on.”

To change away from the road (deadly unstable train of thought) of extreme
turmoil and practical loss of control of the will, when the devil is
fascinating the mind with deadly tempting questions and tests about control
power, rebuke the devil by understanding the godman sacrifice as symbol of
complete repudiation of freewill delusion and mysteriously receive trusting
dependence on the godhead.

Picturing the “pleasing to god” idea of the willing complete sacrificed godman
as representing no-free-will sets the thinker free from control instability.
The idea is the saving thing.

God gave his son, a meaningful mythic figure representing a cybernetic
self-control relationship, encountered high in the air at the end of time,
judgment day, and second coming, descending on a cloud, as a ransom sacrifice
to release the trembling mystic from the jaws of hell, delusion, confused
thinking, and practical control instability. Satan falls from heaven like
lightning and the mind’s spirit is ascended to rule with God as adopted son.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Part I is somewhat interesting. How I wish they’d portray entheogenic wine
and mystery initiations.

I did some much-needed organizing of the home page, and properly broke up the
“main theory” pages into shorter pages. Most material at the site is years
behind my postings in this discussion group, but it is somewhat organized and
centered around the main theory outline. Even years ago, I wanted to discard
those pages and start fresh.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

Is understanding the Christian myth-religion necessary for enlightenment?

What is the relation between minimal, “straightforward” Zen enlightenment, the
Core Theory of cybernetic enlightenment, and decoding the Christian
myth-religion?

Must cybernetic religionists study and understand the cross? Must they study
Attis, Dionysus, Jesus, Osiris?

Can one be said to be enlightened without understanding that type of religious
myth — understanding that category of conceptual language — even if one
wants to have myth-free enlightenment?

What can we modern cyberneticists do to symbolically represent and model the
release and complete repudiation of the freewill delusion, comparably to the
Cross myth?

One can have enlightenment without understanding how the Hellenistic godman
myth works during mystery-religion initiation, so why study the latter, when
straightforward and efficient enlightenment itself is the main thing desired?


Any Core Theory of enlightenment worth its salt simply *must* be capable of
explaining, and include a fully compelling explanation of, world religions, or
world myth-religion, particularly Christianity — which means explaining how
the typical Hellenistic godman myth works during mystery-religion initiation.

Before the cybernetic theory of enlightenment was applied to explaining how
the Hellenistic godman myth works during mystery-religion initiation, we had
no effective understanding. Today’s books on Christianity and gnosticism and
mystery-religions don’t come very close to grasping how mystery-religion
initiation works in the psyche to effect transformation of the mental
worldmodel.

Even the entheogen scholars reach a dead end upon recognizing how the myths
point to entheogens themselves — they are merely standing at the entrance,
the opening act, and have not yet penetrated into the main act.

We are at odds in our goals — they are intent on exposing the entheogenic
foundation of mystery-religion, while I have never considered entheogens to be
an end in themselves — I have always had a much more looming goal, an
exclusive goal, of gaining enlightenment (per Watts’ Zen) about self-control
power and then decoding how that same enlightenment is present in Christian
mystery-religion.

My goal during the 1990s was to decode how my existing core theory of
cybernetic enlightenment is present in the Christian mystery-religion — not
first of all to discover the entheogenic basis of religions. Entheogens have
always been just one of several foundation stones, toward the real goal of
understanding how enlightenment (per my Core Theory) is reflected in world
religions. I was always reluctant to include entheogens in the Core Theory,
because loose cognition, not entheogens, is important.

However, because they are by far the most ergonomic method, and because they
are the historical basis for the major religions, it is logically justified to
include entheogens in the Core Theory — as long as loose cognition remains
the highlight, with entheogens as merely the most classic and effective
trigger of loose cognition. That is the approach I took in the
Introduction/Summary posted at the website, at the Principia Cybernetica site,
and the newsgroups.

My first goal was enlightenment as a coherent mental model about self, time,
world, will, control, and change — the Core Theory. By the mid-1990s I
basically accomplished that, and then continued to study the mental dynamics
of the Cross — at that time, I still assumed the historicity of Jesus, and
knew nothing about mystery-religions or world myth-religion-mysticism.

I was certain that the New Testament and overall Christian Bible contained the
same meaning as the Core Theory, like my understanding of Zen as portrayed by
Alan Watts (a cybernetic state-shift of understanding about personal
controllership). I could very well have stopped there and correctly said that
my Core Theory is closed and complete.

But I was determined to enter the conceptual world of Christian myth-religion
(while still considering Jesus to be historical) and put the Core Theory to
the test, and bolster the Core Theory by using it to successfully understand
and explain Christianity in terms of a cybernetic state-shift of understanding
about personal controllership. Originally, I didn’t particularly think much
at all about Christianity, any more than any self-help and typical New Age
person does.

I used Watts’ Zen, not Christianity, to discover the heart of the Core
Theory — no-free-will on Dec. 12, 1997 and then block-universe determinism on
Jan. 11, 1988. At that point, I immediately had the ability, for the first
time, to write a compact summary of cybernetic enlightenment, and it was then
natural to attempt, for the first time, to explain Christian concepts in terms
of the Core Theory and include them to a limited extent in the basic summary.

You can see this minor coverage of Christian concepts reflected in the Jan. 2,
1997 summary at the Principia Cybernetica website:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Annotations/PHILOSI.0.html. But as the 1990s
progressed, although satisfied with the Core Theory in itself and my progress
in fleshing it out, the balance of attention shifted away from refining a
clarified Wattsian cybernetics explanation of Zen enlightenment toward
explanation of the cybernetics of Christianity.

My historical strategy was: first I clarified Watts’ cybernetics explanation
of Zen, to form the Core Theory, and then I used that Core Theory to similarly
decode and explain the cybernetics of the Christian myth-religion — a much
harder task, especially when starting with the assumption of a historical
Jesus as opposed to focusing on the mental dynamics of the *idea* of a
dying/rising godman (as an idea that rescues/restabilizes controllership at
the same time as enlightening about controllership).

As I recall, I read Hofstadter’s Godel Escher Bach and The Mind’s I *after*
formulating the Core Theory based on Watts’ Zen. These Hofstadter books were
helpful stylistically, but I never felt dependent on them — more like they
resonated *with* my thinking and generally strengthened it, rather than giving
me new insight and new knowledge.

What books *did* I lean on when applying the Core Theory to figure out how the
Bible reflects the Core Theory? Here, no one book leaps to mind, and none of
them seem all that close as Way of Zen was — because almost all the books
assume a historical Jesus, weakening their conceptual grasp of the symbolic
mystical mythic meaning of the Cross, and they failed to recognize the
entheogenic foundation and obsession of the Greco-Roman world.

Wine was the be-all and end-all, the universal touch-point for all topics in
the Greco-Roman world; the Romans were absolutely serious in saying “in vino
veritas”, In Wine Is Truth — of course the wine they meant by that was
actually “visionary plant beverage”, so the *real* statement was “in visionary
plants is truth”. Every time you read “wine” in Greco-Roman culture, always
translate that to “visionary plants”.

“The king drank wine and died and was miraculously brought back from the dead,
and was divinized, and sacrificed to the gods in gratitude for protection and
enlightenment” means “the egoic initiate ingested visionary plants,
experienced self-control cancellation and cybernetic ego death, and was given
the semblance of controllership again, now conceptually corrected to account
for the secondary-only nature of the power wielded by personal control
agency.”

The greatest irony is that my father gave me the book Way of Zen as a gift,
but I was so not into books and intellect, I wanted to give it back to him —
I believe he said to keep it anyway. Later that year, I was inspired to look
to that book because of a quest for control, and it was the main book I
studied during 1996 and 1997.

I adhered to studying that book because it framed enlightenment in terms of
personal self-control cybernetics and sudden change of understanding, which is
what I wanted and battled for and pursued with all my ability for two full
years.

In effect, I used Watts’ cybernetics explanation of Zen enlightenment to
decode the Christian myth-religion’s salvation, regeneration, and conversion.
The moment I secured a clarified understanding, the Core Theory, from Watts’
system, I immediately turned toward using that Core Theory to similarly decode
the Christian system. It was natural to assume that surely Christianity must
be a garbled expression of the Core Theory, just as Zen Buddhism is a
different garbled expression of the Core Theory.

I did read other Watts books, and bought the Watts library, largely out of the
principle of gratitude, because he was my enlightener, garbled and ill-focused
as he was. I didn’t actually read his coverage of Christianity, though, until
around when I was completing my theory-development of Christian myth-religion,
2001-2003.

Watts’ view of Christian has many valuable insights, helpful for
world-religion perspective. However, like Wilber, he has little feel for
Hellenistic mythic thinking; his style is conventional official Christianity
and especially Indian metaphysics.

A theory of enlightenment that fails to reveal the essential meaning and
operation of the major world religions is worth much less and has not been
proven and demonstrated as a sound theory.

A theory of enlightenment that is successful in revealing the essential
meaning and operation of the major world religions is worth much more, having
been tested and proven and demonstrated as a sound theory. The ability to
fully reveal the mystical meaning and dynamic operation of the major world
religions is the greatest proof of the soundness and relevance of the theory.

I am not committed to an in-depth study of Islam and Sufism, but I have a
solid grasp of Christianity, and a good grasp of Zen, Buddhism, and world
myth-religion in terms of the core theory.

No theory of enlightenment is worth enough if it fails to fully and clearly
reveal the mystical meaning and dynamic operation of the major world
religions. If one has to look to the core theory to clearly and coherently
see meaning in the world religions, that theory is well-supported and is the
best and most adequate and effective theory available.

The work of defining a core theory cannot be complete until the core theory is
integrated into a whole theory that includes the peripheral application of the
theory to explain and reveal clearly the meaning of the major world religions.
In this sense, a person can’t be enlightened if they lack understanding of how
enlightenment is reflected, in a distorted and garbled and obscured manner, in
the world religions.


References:

The Way of Zen
Alan Watts
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375705104

Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion
Alan Watts
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394717619

Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship
Alan Watts
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394719239

Myth and Ritual in Christianity
Alan Watts
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807013757


Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Douglas Hofstadter
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465026567

The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul
Douglas Hofstadter (Editor), Daniel C. Dennett (Editor)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465030912


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

>I used Watts’ Zen, not Christianity, to discover the heart of the Core
>Theory — no-free-will on Dec. 12, 1997 and then block-universe
>determinism on
>Jan. 11, 1988.

Correction: no-free-will on Dec. 12, 1987

>The greatest irony is that my father gave me the book Way of Zen as a gift,
>but I was so not into books and intellect, I wanted to give it back to him —
>I believe he said to keep it anyway. Later that year, I was inspired to look
>to that book because of a quest for control, and it was the main book I
>studied during 1996 and 1997.

Correction: Watts’ The Way of Zen was the main book I studied during *1986 and
1987*.


— Michael

Jesus-myth related ideas to consider from perspective of Roman culture:

Paid the costly ransom price to set many prisoners/hostages free.

Exchange negotiated: if you do X, we’ll free Y individuals and release the
captives and permit them to live.

How did the idea of the cross and ransom of prisoners develop?

God/Fate/Ground of Being puts you as self-control agent in a self-control
bind, where extreme doom is a vivid serious threat, and then makes a deal and
releases you. This is the type of thinking needed to comprehend the mystical
meaning of the Cross and similar godman saviors and divine sacrifices.

Who and when rejected pure no-fw and insisted on genuine simple moral
responsibility?


Power-coercion dealing: I have the power to kill you or let you live. I will
let you live if you do X. Coercively forcing someone’s will.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Myth-religion-mysticism themes in the current Caesar 2-part TV miniseries

According to part 1 of the , around 50 BC, Julius Caesar’s daughter’s teacher,
Appolonius, a slave knowing all about philosophy, was released by the daughter
from prison and from pending crucifixion. But he explained to her that he
wanted to be crucified, because that was the way to his dignity. This was
well before Christianity, and the logic is explained to some extent by Riley’s
book. Slaves and many crucified men are shown in the movie.

Crucifixion and ransomed release was portrayed. Julius and fellow travellers
were tied to crosses in the rising sea by pirates. Breathing challenges and
the slow unavoidable, inevitable, predestined, fatal necessity of death would
be similar to that of regular crucifixion. After the prisoners were put in
this situation of fatal destiny, they bargained a ransom/release price with
the pirates.

A main theme was that the pirate empire/kingdom cut off Rome’s Egyptian grain
supply and the city was destined to run out of grain.

The goths are walled in and the men have to decide whether to eat each other
to survive, or release their women and children like a sacrifice to the gods
to keep their gods alive.


Cupbearing pretty dolled-up boys are shown. (Cupbearers are supposed to drink
the king’s wine to test it for poison. The dictator is poisoned to death.

Distrust of kings (dictators) is portrayed vividly, and the fear that Julius
would be made king — part of the basis for the Jesus lifestory. The senate
is terrified of themselves, of each other, with complete paranoia, fearing
that giving too much power to one of them will surely corrupt the leader,
forming a tyrannical dictatorship that discards all civilized laws and
rampantly murders many enemies. The problem of enmity and trust dominates,
and allies switching sides, and complete inability to trust anyone.

Power-coercion deals are shown several times. I have the power to kill you or
let you live. I will let you live if you do X (that benefits me).

When standing up to the dictator, Julius claims descent from the gods, and has
a (coat of arms?) to prove it.

Coercively forcing someone’s will: unlike Julius, (Proclus?) caved into the
dictator and let his will be coercively forced: the dictator permitted him to
live, and P. divorced his wife in return.


One Jesus, Many Christs: The Truth About Christian Origins
Gregory Riley
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060667990/qid=1057004340/sr=1-1
/ref=sr_1_1/103-0050335-6858258?v=glance&s=books
Jesus as Greco-Roman hero. Myth and divinisation in hero stories of the day.

Heroism as a mystical metaphor is opening up to my Core Theory. Being a hero
means to choose death and personal integrity (and perfect willingness even to
suffer) over life and non-integrity. Always read “death” first as “ego
death”, not bodily death.


When the dictator said to bring the heart of Julius, a pig’s heart was passed
off as that of Julius. This would explain sacrifice of pigs: their hearts
look just like a human heart. A pig’s heart is given to represent you giving
up your own heart.

A pierced heart in Greco-Roman myth symbolizes “inevitable, unavoidable, fated
death” — death by realizing fatedness.


A tragic mask, perhaps a gorgon death-mask (like a decaying head) was shown,
used by a childrens’ entertainer. The subject is Alexander cutting the
gordion knot prior to world conquest. I think the god Apollo was shown
whispering the solution to Alexander.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

The concept of Fated Necessity ties into the Cross symbol in two ways: pierced
heart means inevitable death, and being hung from the cross is a “death by
eventual inevitability”.

The ideas ‘fatal’ and ‘fated’ are closely related. Fatal necessity and fated
necessity are synomyns, and ‘fate’ and ‘death’ may be closely related. You
abandon an infant “to its fate”, which we would say “to its death”. Death
(bodily death) is the fate in store for all of us; we merely lack knowledge of
its time (something like this was said to gladiators in the movie Gladiator).

A fatal wound, often by poisoned blade, especially means that one is still
alive and in command of oneself, but inevitably fated to soon die. A recovery
would be a miracle in a classic sense.

Recovery from the state of powerless ego death is a classic kind of miracle;
stable personal control is returned to the mystic for no comprehensible
(logical, tangible) reason; stable controllership is now experienced as a pure
generous gift descending upon the mind from the transcendent realm. This idea
is reflected in the idea of compassionate generous protector deities
throughout world religion, including taking refuge in the Buddha.

If the mythic godman idea restores stability and new, lasting integrity to the
psyche during ego death, so may we allegorically say through parallelling ego
death and bodily death, that the godman gives us new, lasting integrity and
eternal life after bodily death. Also, heros are divinized and perpetually
remembered and thereby made immortal after bodily death — living in memory as
divinized.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Consider how ransom works in a Roman battle, where the war is between our
power as personal (perhaps “egoic”) control agents and God’s power.

Who can pay an infinite ransom price to God? What person do we have that is
so valued by God, he’ll gladly release us in exchange? As “leader of the
enemy army”, God doesn’t really want to kill us; he wants to *use* us as
ransomed hostages, using the threat of killing us, to coerce the collective
will of our people, or our leaders, to hand over our most valuable leader, our
king.

So we are made to want to have a king that we can hand over to God in order to
set all of us (members of that king’s kingdom and army) free.

A battle of us against God: he has us in his grip; he has captured us and is
holding us ransom. His deal is that if our side gives over our most valuable
person on our side — our king & military leader — God will permit us to live
and release us. How can we have such a valuable king? God gives his son as
the king for us to give to God to fulfill God’s high ransom price to release
us and set us free.

There was some debate over whether the ransom price was paid to the Devil
(personification of egoic deluded freewill controllership) or paid by God to
himself.

Within this framework of thinking, the moment the spacetime-affixed,
fate-threatened captive mystic calls out “ok, we will hand over our king
(Jesus) if you release us”, God sets the mystics free and there is peace
between the military force of God and the control-power of our side. The
military enemy leader, God, demands a high ransom price to release us — an
extremely valuable king. We do not have, of ourselves, such an extremely or
infinitely valuable king. Then how can we be set free?

God the hostile military commander holding us captive with a death threat, out
of infinite undeserved generosity, provides us with such a valuable king —
his own son. Because it is his own son, provided now as our own military
leader and king, God thereby effectively brings us over to his side, away from
the Devil’s armies. We are released and now owned by God, and have been —
switching the ideas around symmetrically — ransomed from being held by the
Devil.

This is the general type of analysis to use in making sense out of the idea of
Jesus as ransom sacrifice to set us free — it makes sense if viewed from the
proper context of Roman warfare conventions. This does not mean that
enlightenment, mystic ego death and release into new reconciled and
enlightened freedom is “the” way to understand transcendent knowledge or the
Jesus figure or mythic godmen.

This is one of many allegories describing the experience of spacetime fixity,
coercion of the mystic’s will by the uncontrollable transcendent controller,
and the homeostatic state shift from one stable controllership state (egoic
thinking) to another (transcendent thinking).

Unfortunately for me as intellectual laborer pressed for time, this means that
there is no single reading of the Cross as allegory, or Christian myth. I’m
still forced to spend time doing a separate analysis of Abraham’s willingness
to sacrifice Isaac, and the idea of the sacrificial lamb — even explaining
two such close things as Abraham’s lamb sacrifice and the Passover lamb
sacrifice require two distinct explanations in terms of the cybernetic
self-control model of mystic experiencing and insight.

The Christian myth-system is complex, not a single meaning or a single puzzle.
It is a complex, large set of mythic-mystic-experiencing puzzles to solve.
However, the idea of “ransom” is one of the main descriptions of the main myth
(the Cross) of the main religion (Christianity). I have justified why a
cybernetics theory of enlightenment must explain Christianity, but I have yet
to select which of the Christian mythic episodes or aspects are most
important.

I have yet to pin down exactly who and why, the Jesus version of the
Hellenistic mystery-religion & myth took off. Who actually “pushed” it, who
actually initially created it, who so loved the later idea of adding the Jesus
lifestory to the totally abstract “Jesus’ cross” Pauline idea?

Who created, promoted, and embraced the gospel story (with the Romans, last
supper, trial, betrayal, crucifixion, removal, and ascension), when, and why?
Who liked it at the very start, and why — and who liked it later, and why?
When did the “ransom” notion become prominent: is it “original”, starting when
the gospel storyline was created, or is it earlier, in the Pauline letters?

Does the ransom idea appear in the other mythic mystery-religions, such as
Attis and Osiris and Dionysus? Was the Jesus myth embraced because the
military ransom and political theme was so relevant and moving to people of
various classes, while Attis, Osisis, and Dionysus seemed too fantastic and
not the most worthy allegorical framework to lay over the standard Hellenistic
core entheogenic initiation technology?

A strong candidate I’m proposing lately is that everyone understood the
mythic-mystic-state meaning of all the myths and recognized the brilliant
relevance of this particular story, which was set among “the Jews” as a
fictional backdrop because the Jews generally represented the idea of loathing
and resisting the domination system of Caesar. Maybe everyone was rooting for
the Jews and loved them because they dared resist the Romans so much and chose
death with integrity over honoring the system of Caesar.

Maybe people didn’t give a damn about the Jews themselves, but *loved* the
*idea* of choosing death with integrity over honoring the system of Caesar,
and the Jews served well to represent that idea. The mythmakers and initiates
were idea-people — moderns don’t grasp that, and assume that people had
simple political and racial and religious divisions like we do.

Perhaps the idea of “Jew” became synonymous with the idea of refusal to the
death of honoring the system of Caesar; maybe “Jew” meant “one who refuses to
honor the system of Caesar”. We can suppose with some confidence that the
idea was hugely popular, of refusing to honor the system of Caesar, and this
was the main reason why people loved the Jewish-extracted version of the
Hellenistic godman.

“I sure don’t want to literally be a Jew, but I’m all for the idea of refusing
to honor the system of Caesar.” This would explain the rapidly growing
popularity of the Jesus religion after the gospel storyline was created and
prior to its takeover by the power hierarchy. Phases to analyze are then:

1 CE — Gnostic godman, no Roman crucifixion storyline yet; Jesus is abstract
wisdom personification per Paul.

150 CE — Gospel storyline created: the Romans, last supper, trial, betrayal,
crucifixion, removal, and ascension. Becomes popular in lower and middle
classes. Starts becoming an independent State within the State.

313 CE — Christianity co-opted and taken over by the power-hierarchy that it
was designed to resist and repudiate.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Fixed hyperlink:

One Jesus, Many Christs: The Truth About Christian Origins
Gregory Riley
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060667990
Jesus as Greco-Roman hero

>>reminisences about my days at a two-bit Canadian university, during

1973-1976, where the students and faculty were light years ahead of any I’ve
ever encountered down south

>>Peart .. likely knew more about Greek myths, and Western culture in general,

than the entire graduating class of NYU or Brown today.



“In Germany … When you are 10 years old, you have to learn Latin and you
translate Julius Caesar when you are 11″



http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-tv-coverstory29jun29,0,7073199.story?coll=cl
-tvent — “‘Caesar’: A look at the man behind the icon — The makers of a new
four-hour miniseries wanted to explore the ancient Roman leader’s early years
and his rise to power.

>>”On the set we did the ‘Monty Python’ test,” says director Uli Edel (“The

Mists of Avalon”), referring to the genre spoofs performed by the famed
British comedy troupe, particularly “Life of Brian,” set in biblical times.
“Did it look like something from ‘Monty Python’? If it did then something must
be wrong.”

>>”I tried to be as truthful as possible and also find something new to say

about Julius Caesar,” says Edel … “What do we know about Caesar? We know
about Caesar and Cleopatra — the world-famous love story. But that is the old
Caesar. He was over 50 when he met Cleopatra, and nobody has done anything
about how he became that person. How did this man come from obscurity and
become the most powerful man in the known world at the time?”

>>Edel, who grew up in Germany, had long been a fan of Caesar. “I had nine

years of Latin,” he says. “When you are 10 years old, you have to learn Latin
and you translate Julius Caesar when you are 11. So he is around with you in
your early age, torturing you! Actually he wrote very clear, very simple. I
felt I was the right guy to do this. You can call it a dream project.”

Various important elements to construct the Jesus story were taken from the
Julius Caesar story, but that the Jesus figure drew from many other sources as
well — myths, legends, heroes, Jewish figures, Hellenistic literature,
mystery religions, and so on.

The simple story in the forthcoming books is that surprise, there was no
Jesus, he is the Julius Caesar legend with some adjustments. Or some other
single figure. But truth is more complex and compound and nuanced than that.

The Jesus figure is essentially a composite figure drawing from all possible
sources, spurred on by the drive to assimilate as much meaning and worth and
glory onto a single figure as possible, in an arms race of extreme
hyper-apotheosis. Why would those who are invested in him pass by a chance?

They slapped on any and all additions they could possibly think of, to make a
universal top dog figure. Even military victory is his, when he returns to
set things straight. Scholars have to get it through their heads how
mythmaking and literature of the day worked. The right frame of mind is
suggested by thinking of it as deadly serious war of ink. Watch how
desperately the Church Fathers scramble to force the Old Testament to support
the legitimacy of their New Testament.

It’s like the huge cover-up of what the War on Drugs is about: there are
millions of dollars hanging on the propaganda and spin. Who profits from each
addition to the Jesus figure; what are the motives? This is the only way to
have a chance of unravelling the buried actuality behind the construction and
development of the Jesus figure over time.

Don’t underestimate the Greco-Romans: they were *geniuses* at this kind of
syncretic mythmaking. Modern thinking doesn’t stand a chance until we can
also mentally become those Greco-Romans. Even though I have my own candidate
for the key source of meaning for constructing the Jesus figure — that wine
is the touchpoint and key to all aspects of Greco-Roman culture — the wine
theme must also be relegated to just one domain of *many* that were drawn
from.

Which theme or which man or which domain was the *real* source for
constructing the Jesus figure? The entirety of Greco-Roman culture. To
fathom the history of constructing the Jesus figure, firmly grasp all aspects
of Greco-Roman culture and mentally exist in it.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Michael wrote:

>>Jesus is an entirely mythic representation of the specific metaphysical

experience and conceptual realization which Hellenistic mystery-religion
initiates and Jewish mystics underwent subsequent to ingesting the sacred food
and mixed wine of the ritual meals that were standard and ubiquitous in the
Hellenistic world.

>>Clark Heinrich conceded that, in contrast to the new edition of Strange

Fruit (Magic Mushrooms), which takes for granted the literal existence of a
historical Jesus.


Correction: Heinrich’s 2nd edition, and his current view, is agnostic about
the historicity of Jesus.

Page 107: “That Jesus even existed is a matter of some debate, but whether or
not he ever lived is unimportant for the purpose of our hypothesis, because
even if he did, many events of his life could have been invented and ordered
in such a way that the unwritten secrets of his cult were hidden within the
story… There may well have been a real Jesus… who performed the duties of
hierophant … It is also possible that Jesus… was a cultic title
designating the position of Initiator within the cult… We also know that
the name “Jesus,” the Greek version of Yeshua, was considered to have magical
properties of its own… My intention was not to prove whether or not Jesus
existed but rather to look for correspondences between the Jesus *story* and
the life cycle of the fly agaric mushroom.”


Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy
Clark Heinrich
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0892819979


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

This is my book review — or rather recommendation — posted today. There is
already plenty of description of the content of the book at Amazon. Although
some of my reviews have been detailed, I instead want to be more forcefully
persuasive in getting people to actually buy and read these books. Merkur’s
books are an invaluable contribution to a field that urgently needs more
books, to provide a new paradigm strong and broad enough to convert people
from the old paradigm of puzzlement.


The Mystery of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible
Dan Merkur
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0892817720
Jan. 2000

5 stars

Anyone interested in the entheogen theory of religion should definitely read
this book. It is well-written and scholarly. The field is inherently
speculative at this early point. This is a much-needed valuable contribution
to religion studies.

Today’s situation is a perfect example of a paradigm shift: if you examine
each hypothesis separately and each book on the subject separately, and assume
the dominant paradigm or non-theory of “those crazy and primitive ancients are
simply unfathomable and alien to our way of thinking,” you’ll be able to
easily dismiss each hypothesis and each book.

But when you consider the still-small set of all books and articles about the
entheogen theory of religion, a viable alternative paradigm is coming into
view. This new paradigm, within which Merkur is only one of a growing number
of researchers, is readily yielding specific plausible hypotheses, while the
official dominant view has no hypotheses other than “the ancients’ minds
operated differently than ours, and we simple can’t comprehend them, and they
were remarkably excitable by wine — lightweights, unlike us.”

Therefore, any one book in this field cannot be reasonably evaluated in
isolation; instead, read Merkur’s book Psychedelic Sacrament, Clark Heinrich’s
1995 book Strange Fruit, which also has coverage of ergot in the Old
Testament, and several other books in the field of the entheogen theory of
religion. Only then are you reasonably equipped to assess how much this book
contributes to our understanding of the history of religion and the nature of
religious experiencing.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Here is my updated Amazon review, posted today. I’ve updated my phrasing and
expressions, and switched from a paradigm of “entheogens are rare and
suppressed” to a paradigm of “entheogens are ubiquitous, standard, and
somewhat suppressed”.


The Psychedelic Sacrament: Manna, Meditation, and Mystical Experience
Dan Merkur
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/089281862X
http://www.parkstpress.com/titles/psysac.htm
http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?isbn=089281862X


Entheogenic, rational, short-session mysticism
5 stars

Merkur shows the existence of a more or less continuous tradition of
psychoactive Western religion. Various separate threads of mystic techniques
have sometimes come together to form an approach to the mystic altered state
that is based on rational reflection, together with short-session use of
visionary plants, rather than continuous long-term meditation.

This book associates a seemingly overlooked tradition of short-session
meditation with the use of psychoactive, visionary plants. The use of
psychoactives enables a more rationality-oriented approach and obviates the
need to constantly meditate for long-term periods. This entheogen-using,
short-session, rational form of mysticism is being increasingly recognized
throughout Western history. Meditation, psychoactives, and rational thinking
can be and historically have been brought together to augment each other.

Merkur helps entheogen researchers focus not only on revealing the presence of
particular plants in mystic-state practices, but also on the traditions of
using the plants in a shared religious framework and reflecting on the
experiences produced by the visionary plants. The field of mysticism greatly
needs such coverage of the important and challenging semi-secret tradition of
not only entheogen use, but entheogen use combined with rational mysticism and
short-session meditation.

I don’t think Merkur is claiming that the mystics who combine these approaches
claim that every aspect of mystic experiencing is entirely rationally
explainable and conceptually tangible; the vision of the transcendent cosmic
throne may still include a certain aspect that is, in a way, beyond the reach
of complete, direct conceptualization.

Despite the seemingly entrenched assumptions that mysticism is inherently slow
and laborious, drug-free, and non-rational, rational short-session meditation
forms an effective alternative tradition or alternative view of what approach
makes sense. This proposal contradicts the dominant assumptions about the
techniques and conventions of mysticism: the assumption, perhaps misguided,
that mysticism ideally should not use psychoactives, is not
rationality-oriented, and must be conducted for extended, endlessly long
meditation periods. In some semi-obscured traditions that are recently coming
to light, these approaches have come together naturally and effectively.

This seems similar to the “lightning-bolt” short-path variety of Buddhist
meditation technique as portrayed by James Arthur in Mushrooms and Mankind,
which points out that Vajrayana was created by combining Tantric Buddhism and
the native Bon shamanism of Tibet. The approach Merkur describes also seems
equivalent to the evident visionary-state experiencing on tap in the
Hellenistic mystery-religions, in which a person commonly undergoes a moderate
number of limited-duration initiations to achieve spiritual purification and
mental transformation, reshaping the mind’s conception of the self by the
encounter with transcendent experiencing.

Merkur, as psychologist, contrasts the experience of loss of the sense of
personal freedom, which he portrays as being conventional mysticism, with a
supposedly different experience of a psychoactive rational mysticism that
involves panic attacks. However, I’d point out that the loss of the sense of
being a metaphysically free agent is integral to a mystic-state panic attack.
When the psychoactive perspective and self-sense, combined with rational
analysis about our assumption of personal sovereign agency, suspends the sense
of wielding metaphysically free power, that is the very cause and central
vortex of the panic attack. The self-commanding part of the mind panics
because the mind perceives the lack of metaphysical freedom and self-control,
and sees the mind’s vulnerable dependence on the mysterious uncontrollable
arising of personal control-thoughts, like discovering that one’s
controllership is dependent on whatever happens to come up from an underground
spring in a cave.

Merkur uses the Psychology interpretive paradigm, but that would be
strengthened by a stronger Philosophy of Metaphysics background, including the
philosophy of time and responsible control agents. The book doesn’t really
explain what the union with God experience, or the vision of the invisible
transcendent controller on the cosmic throne above one’s personal
controllership level, would be like for a modern entheogenic rational mystic.

Merkur reveals the occasional conjunction of Western religion and
psychoactives, and also a kind of rationality which I would call, with Ken
Wilber, “vision-logic” or visionary rationality.

Fortunately, this book does not depend on identifying mystic sacraments as any
one visionary plant. There is consensus in the field of the entheogen theory
of religion that it is more important to identify scriptural allusions to
psychoactives, and find how psychoactives were combined with meditation and
visionary rationality, than to identify the main and minor entheogens used.
The important point is to recognize the terms “sacrament” or “manna” as
meaning visionary plants.

Subsections include The Necessity of Vision; Philo’s Meditative Practices;
Other Varieties of Ecstasy in Philo; The Contemplative Practice of Aristotle;
Discursive Meditations in Islam; Bernard on Intellectualist Mysticism; Bernard
on Trance-Based Mysticism; Death and Resurrection at Sinai; Maimonides on
Meditation, and others.

Merkur provides essential coverage of primary religious experiencing at the
origin and heart of Judeo-Christianity, providing highly valuable
contributions that help to discovering the semi-suppressed tradition and
history of entheogens in Western religion, as well as expanding our
expectations about the nature of mystic experiencing. This book is a step
toward covering entheogens casually as just one part, not especially novel or
controversial, of a system of philosophy and religion.

This scholarly book is clear, organized, and presents a focused and
well-supported thesis — an excellent source for researchers to cite. Merkur
is a clear writer who states where he’s headed, states why he’s covering
subjects, and summarizes what he has established.

An invaluable, much needed, must-have contribution to research in the history
of mysticism, theory of mystic-state insight and experiencing, and the
entheogen theory of religion.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

Most of the Entheogen-Theory of Religion books are only available in
English. The German market on books of these types seems to be
nonexistant. In fact “Chemische Ekstase. Drogen und Religion. “,
1971, by Walter Houston Clark ist the only title i found at
Amazon.de. It’s out of print.

I imagine that the other major European languages are no different
(except English itself of course). No wonder people have not heard
anything of these new ways of conceiving of Religion.

This resource (the yahoo group) esp. your postings are very valuable
because they offer highly interesting new facts/theories which serve
as a basis (the blockuniverse theory of egodeath) as well as means
of further exploration of the field.

As i see it, this seems to be a quite singular group.
Other groups with similar topics (determinism)(religions &
entheogens) seem very uninspired to this one.

So what i was getting at is: I’m wondering why this stuff still
hasn’t found its way to more people. But i guess that will take
care of itself once a critical mass has heard of this.

regards,
merker

Amazon does not list your review.
review count: 2
latest from 2001.

The significance for entheogen research is immense and near-total. This
paradigm changes nearly everything. The entheogen scholars are far more
correct than they have ever imagined, to the point that they no longer even
know their own field.

I am concerned that freewill consciousness and the official type of religion
that supported it might collapse because of my work and others’ subsequent
work in this area. Wilber has always agreed with the Hegelian notion of
progress of consciousness through prehistoric, ancient, classic, medieval,
modern, and postmodern eras.

I’ve always felt there is some sort of consciousness development over Western
history, but that Wilber is misreading key aspects of the heart of this
consciousness development: I have always read it as a movement from
no-free-will, to freewill thinking during the Christianity-dominated era, to
eventual no-free-will thinking again, perhaps in the 21st Century.

Recently I wondered if Wilber was completely wrong — that the supposed
Hegelian history of consciousness is a sheer delusion of the scholars — I
said this based on the theory that the Greeks were not mysteriously different
in their psychology, but that they merely used entheogens.

My ideas today are the same as those I formerly held, but now, I realize just
how sweeping and extensive the use of entheogenic “wine” was: imagine a
society that has the same brains as moderns, and basically the same mental
models through adolescence, but then everyone uses entheogenic “wine” all the
time — not just in 1-time or occasional initiations, not just in religion,
but all the time, in all activities, practically every day.

I previously imagined, like the entheogen scholars, that the Greeks had just a
tiny bit of entheogen use, completely lost later during the Christian era.

The true essence of historical development of psychology may be from
ubiquitous use of entheogens, entirely eliminating freewill thinking from the
adult world, resulting in an entire society based on no-free-will thinking,
among other such societies. During the Christian era, entheogens were common,
but were semi-suppressed, and the Church officially insisted on freewill
thinking, even while always insisting on God’s sovereignty and even cosmic
determinism. That lasted through the modern era.

The fate of postmodernity may well be a return to no-free-will thinking
combined with entheogen use, perhaps while retaining modern, ordinary
state-of-consciousness, adult egoic thinking and the social structures founded
on such thinking. I propose using entheogens in moderation and adopting
no-free-will thinking in moderation, and instead of mourning for freewill
deluded thinking, take it fairly seriously: value it, protect and preserve it.

When an individual in the modern era, in the 1960s through 1980s, was brought
to realization of no-free-will, it was apocalyptic: a revelation of the actual
nearness of the end of the dominance of modern egoic societal consciousness.

“Jump Into The Fire”
Harry Nilsson, 1971

You can climb a mountain
You can swim the sea
You can jump into the fire
But you’ll never be free, no no

On a 1997 radio show “The History of Classic Rock”, I heard the apocalypse of
the early 1970s, the day the music died; some 26 years earlier, freewill
thinking took a fatal spearing of the heart, leading inevitably to its death.
Through bubbling audio distortion, the full album Led Zeppelin IV played, time
stopped, this passing age had been speared and the end was inevitably near for
collective freewill thinking.

Led Zeppelin IV
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=Ace8m968o3ep1
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000002J09

This is the secret apocalypse of early 1970s Rock (but now we look back and
even more strongly realize the scale of this change when we realize that the
foundation of our culture, the Greeks, used entheogens constantly, not rarely,
and thereby didn’t based their culture on freewill thinking, but rather, on
no-free-will thinking. The fact that they thought in that mode, makes for a
much more awesome effect than if we had just discovered no-free-will like some
modern technological discovery.

The realization and recognition that the ancients used entheogens infinitely
more than we could have imagined, and that they, as a result, considered
freewill thinking only fit for ignorant children and beasts, when added to the
purely modern discovery of no-free-will, adds up to a massive, compelling
effect.

Our first move should be to affirm the priceless preciousness of building a
culture based on freewill thinking, and retain all the value and goodness of
such a culture of freewill thinking, a culture that produced many mental and
cultural structures that are valuable. Then we should seek to *integrate* the
new/old no-free-will thinking with the modern freewill thinking, and then we
should seek to better grasp no-free-will thinking.

Did I ever want to be the chosen one to break the news? I was injected with
desire to discover transcendent knowledge and spread it; like so many
self-help writers and thinkers, that has been my purpose ever since halfway
through my struggle toward experientially discovering no-free-will and the
block universe.

Many have wanted to break the spell and bring enlightenment, but the
enlightenment I found is not the one most are looking for, except Ramesh
Balsekar – but he has no entheogen theory or historical revelations of that
surprising root of Greek culture.

I don’t want to be the chosen one, of the real end of modern consciousness, to
fully and clearly break such powerful and potentially dangerous news, like
Einstein pointing to the possibility of the bomb, with all its dangerous
ambiguity and chilling neutrality: it’s just a tool, a tool that could be used
for good or not. No one can say what will happen, only that they
possibilities are alien and superhuman, like Hofmann’s discovery of LSD on the
white bicycle, or Leary’s discovery of the effects of psilocybin by the pool.

To strive for what I now know I’m striving for is like flying the
bomb-dropping airplane and then having second thoughts while following orders,
just before arriving at the target. I can only suppose that if I don’t
deliver this surprising, unexpected, ambiguous and not necessarily
well-received news, there are many more people waiting in the wings to do the
job.

The highly ambiguous news I bring is: no-free-will, entheogens reveal
no-free-will, Jesus figure means entheogens & no-free-will, all ancient
“wine”/”mead” was effectively psilocybin beverage and their culture was, as a
result, based on no-free-will.

If I don’t break this news, someone else will, and the world could do worse
than to have me as the messenger. I advocate simple reasonable freewill
moral-agency ethics even though freewill is largely a conventional illusion.
Convention is priceless and the greatest collective gift and treasure.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Ken Wilber and other scholars have subtle speculative theories about how
ancient man’s consciousness was different — for example, in ancient Greece.
But more than anything, it comes down to two closely related things:

1. They didn’t believe in freewill; they saw right through that delusion and
ego death was common, standard and integrated into their worldmodel.

2. They used entheogens all the time. We are not far from understanding anew,
if we consider that whenever they say “wine” or “mead”, they mean powdered
psilocybin mushroom beverage or another visionary plant, such as henbane.

Both of these are enormous paradigm shifts in our understanding of religion
and sociopolitical consciousness — particularly when considered together as
one. The constant, very frequent use of entheogenic “wine” prevented an
egoic-thinking based sociopolitical consciousness and psychology from
developing.

We can be grateful to the official Christian church for suppressing entheogens
and repudiating Augustine’s weak acceptance of freewill, and its insistence on
taking freewill seriously even while attempting to retain transcendent
determinism. The Church did, through force of power and suppression of
entheogens, what is logically impossible: in effect, insisting on both genuine
metaphysical freewill moral agency and transcendent determinism.

We’ve been a society mainly of what the ancients would say is deluded and
psychically dirty, impure children — a society dominated by the uninitiated
consciousness. You know that feeling of being an independent modern freewill
agent — modern consciousness? That’s the result of taking freewill seriously
even into adulthood, and eliminating genuine initiation which is initiation
into the consciousness of no-free-will, which reshapes the mental worldmodel.
We are a global society of minds that are, for the most part, unshaped by
contact with transcendent mental dynamics.

These individual points I have posted before, but today when continuing to
read Burkert’s book Greek Religion, it struck me with full force as an
enormous paradigm shift, a kind of major breakthrough. I previously read
books that either treated “Greek myths”, or treated “Hellenistic
mystery-religions”. Even Luther Martin’s book “Hellenistic Religion” omits
too much myth and omits all the rest of culture though every aspect of Greek
culture was directly linked to religion. Our modern mistake is to consider
Hellenistic “religion” as something isolated from other areas.

Greek Religion
Walter Burkert
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674362810

The book has many entheogenic egodeath metaphors — “wine” is everywhere, and
mythic metaphors are everywhere. For example: The two girls in the sacred
mountain sanctuary opened the basket lid, and what they saw so frightened
them, they fell over the edge to their death.

Even if the “wine” was only entheogenic a minority of the time, it was clearly
thought of as entheogenic all the time, and the whole culture was based on the
idea and influence of entheogenic wine, which is to say, based on
no-free-will.

Now that I have studied mystery-religions, myth, religious experiencing
separately, I picked up Burkert’s book for the second time and this time, it
all makes sense, based on the key assumptions: that “wine” means effectively
“psilocybin beverage” (and they always were drinking “wine”), and that they —
the adults — didn’t believe in freewill.

First I asked entheogen scholars to try discarding the historical Jesus
assumption and framework of thinking and try the benefits and potentials of a
no-literal-Jesus framework of thinking. They have made that step. Next, I
have a less moderate proposal that is far more than they ever signed on for:
not only did they use entheogens secretly in some mystery-religion initiations
once in a lifetime, but rather, they used entheogens more like constantly, all
the time, every day.

Entheogens were totally integrated and not only that, but were the very
foundation of not just mystery initiation, not just religion, but every aspect
of war, sacrifice, religion, psychology, philosophy, literature, marriage,
banquets, festivals, travel, sports, politics, and every other aspect of
culture. Just as modern atheist sobriety and the ordinary state of
consciousness is our touchpoint and reality basis, their touchpoint and
reality basis was entheogenic “wine”.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Heinrich published the same view back in the 1995 edition of the book, Strange
Fruit.

This means Heinrich is an author I read (cover to cover) shortly before I
started reading the mythic-only Jesus books. I was trying to remember the
details of when my view changed and why. That is, I credit Heinrich as one
person who sparked my serious consideration of the question.

The first time I heard of no-Jesus was when searching on “jesus and mushroom”
in the univ. library, and found the Christian rebuttal of Allegro. Then I
read Allegro, then Strange Fruit, and then, probably after, read Doherty’s
Jesus Puzzle, then the other no-Jesus books.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

>Most of the Entheogen-Theory of Religion books are only available in
>English. The German market on books of these types seems to be
>nonexistant. In fact “Chemische Ekstase. Drogen und Religion. “,
>1971, by Walter Houston Clark ist the only title i found at
>Amazon.de. It’s out of print.


>I imagine that the other major European languages are no different
>(except English itself of course). No wonder people have not heard
>anything of these new ways of conceiving of Religion.

German-language scholarship about the roots of Christianty seems to be decades
ahead of the English-speaking scholarship, which gave itself a lobotomy in
fear of what it was discovering in the early 20th Century.

http://www.hermann-detering.de

>This resource (the yahoo group) esp. your postings are very valuable
>because they offer highly interesting new facts/theories which serve
>as a basis (the blockuniverse theory of egodeath) as well as means
>of further exploration of the field.


>As i see it, this seems to be a quite singular group.
>Other groups with similar topics (determinism)(religions &
>entheogens) seem very uninspired to this one.

I’m trying to get all the elephant, not just stopping upon feeling one leg of
it or just the trunk or tail.

>I’m wondering why this stuff still
>hasn’t found its way to more people. But i guess that will take
>care of itself once a critical mass has heard of this.

By working with no-free-will, entheogen theory of religion, and mythic-only
Jesus together, this has formed the right, effective key to leap years ahead
of those who retain conventional paradigm and try to only change one of these
at a time. This theory sits atop the other theories but also greatly modifies
them; this theory is possible by combining a potently modified version of each
of the other more bounded theories.

For example, I really shake my head at those who show there was no Jesus, and
think their work is done — and same with those who find mythic allusion to
visionary plants themselves and think they are done. The atheist no-Jesus
scholars don’t even know their own area of research, because they lack the key
context, the bigger framework that as much revolutionizes seemingly unrelated
domains. Similarly, most entheogen researchers have no more familiarity with
no-free-will than any educated person.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

>Amazon does not list your review.
>review count: 2
>latest from 2001.

Check in a week.

Explanation of the wide appeal of the early, anti-Jewish Jesus — essentially
a moral-resistance version of the idea of a hero/godman


Why was there such a widespread appeal of the “Jewish” version of the godman
savior hero figure Jesus? The following portrayal is incorrect in various
points — but is a fitting solution to the problem. The basic strategy is
two-phase:

Phase 1, diverse schools and very diverse versions of Jesus — most with a
Cross, some without — varying degrees of Jewishness. That becomes popular,
and shouldn’t be thought of as an emphatically *Jewish* crucified figure yet.
When figuring out the main mystical functioning of “the” Jesus figure and
“the” Cross, *this* is the Jesus — or set of Jesuses to abstract from — to
figure out and decode mystically. In this phase, people liked this flexible
Jesus figure as an effective moral resistance figurehead, and there was no
oppressively Jewish element yet, and no Old Testament welded in that one had
to read and consider.

Phase 2, forced joining of these Jesuses and these groups into the appearance
of a single religion, with Old Testament stolen away from the Jews, to use as
a ready-made source of ancient authorization for the new religion. Inject OT
elements and more Jewish elements into the earlier Jesus lifestory, eventually
add Acts, Revelation, and pastoral epistles.


Reading Acharya S’ book Christ Conspiracy,
http://www.egodeath.com/ChristConspiracyTableOfContents.htm
together with other research, the Jesus figure seems to have been constructed
in phases such as the following. Marcion’s gnostic-Pauline Jesus figure
wasn’t originally oppressively Jewish to an alienating extent; he was made
into an emphatically Jewish figure, with lots of desperately “discovered” Old
Testament connections, around 170 CE.

http://www.webcom.com/~gnosis/library/marcion.htm – The Gospel of the Lord


1. The diversity-of-prototypes phase. Marcion (Asia Minor & Alexandria)
writes prototypes of the Pauline epistles ~140 – these epistles have little
Jewish content, no Jesus lifestory, abstract Cross per canonical “genuine”
Paulines. Then Marcion writes “Gospel of the Lord” – a Jesus lifestory
without an oppressive amount of alienating Jewish elements (this Jesus
lifestory doesn’t assume that it is packaged together with the Jewish, “Old
Testament” scriptures — it’s more standalone).

The Marcion bible is the first version of New Testament — and Marcion rejects
the Old Testament; wants an NT that stands on its own, packaged without the
OT, and making little reference to the OT. Imagine today’s Bible minus the OT
and minus the Jewish features, Acts, and Revelation. Just one proto-gospel
with a merely mildly Jewish Jesus, and some ten proto-Pauline epistles with
little Jewish content — that’s it, that’s the first version of a Bible and
presents the first version of the Jesus lifestory.

Marcion’s reconstructed proto-epistles and proto-gospel may be online. At
this point, there is a gnostic, merely mildly Jewish lifestory of Jesus, the
crucified godman — set in Israel, perhaps based partly on the Julius Caesar
story, but drawing from many other sources as well. This figure, a divinized
hero figure alluding to slave resistance to the overall domination system,
becomes popular as a gnostic mystery-religion and social support network.

The motive of the Marcionites is to have a religion (including
mystery-religion initiation) that is also an effective and relevant resistance
movement and social support network. At this point, popularity of joining
synagogues may be a separate equivalent movement. In addition to Marcionite
groups, many other equivalent groups form, holding in common some sort of not
particularly Jewish Jesus figure. This is the era of many diverse prototypes
of Jesus-based schools, with many very different Jesuses and quasi-Jesus
figures.


2. The “make-uniform, forcibly gather together” phase.

~170, power-mongering bishops co-opt Marcion’s non-Jewish minimalist NT-only
Bible from Marcion, co-opt the Jewish scriptures as the Old Testament to give
a highly valuable “ancient lineage” (required, to appear authoritative), and
insert Jewish elements in the Jesus lifestory and various references to the
OT. At this point, there is now a specifically Jewish lifestory of Jesus, the
crucified godman.

The motive of these text manipulating mythmakers is to sweep together the
synagogue social support networks, convert them to functionally equivalent
Christian social support networks, increase their own control as bishops of
these developing organizations. Sweep together the various gnostic schools.

Gain full benefit of ancient Jewish heritage, but completely neuter the
Jewishness of it, do away with all the following of the law — though if some
schools exist that want to follow law, try to sweep them in, too — don’t be
too rigid; be vague and lenient and universal. Sweep together as many
schools, sects, groups as possible — use the appeal of the popular
resistance-shaped mystery-religion and social support networks, to rope and
coerce in as many of the diverse, various groups possible.


So this two-phase analysis would largely explain the puzzling widespread
appeal of a *Jewish* crucified figure as the basis for a mystery-religion and
support network — the trick is, he *wasn’t* a very oppressively *Jewish*
crucified godman figure, but just a more general crucified godman figure, who
happened to be loosely a Jew, but more strongly set against Judaism — an
anti-Jewish Jew.

Therefore, I don’t think it makes much sense to ask what the earliest
Christians saw of value in a *Jewish* crucified godman figure. The real
situation to analyze is what the earliest Christians saw of value in a general
crucified godman figure, or an anti-Jewish Jewish crucified godman figure.

Forgetting about the Jewish aspect, except to note that Jews resisted Rome and
were crucified, the question is, what did the earliest Christians see of value
in a crucified godman figure, who had a lifestory like in Marcion’s Gospel of
the Lord?

This also might help solve the problem of how the earliest Christians could be
associated with synagogues and claim the Jewish exemptions. Their Jesus
figure was the least-Jewish possible — as anti-Jewish as possible while still
remaining within the general Jewish religion.

Later, when ripping the OT away from the Jews, to utilize it for authority and
for the semblance of antiquity, at that time the Christians would have to make
a firm break with the synagogues, forming their own equivalent support
networks, the burgeoning state within a state. Strangely, as the official
Jewishness of Jesus and presence of the OT in Christianity was artificially,
strategically, officially increased (around 170), the actual Jews were booted
out and defamed.

The power-mongering hierarchy-building bishops had to wrest the pseudo-ancient
“Old Testament” and the authoritative *claim* of Jewishness away from the
actual Jews, both at the same time. The power-driven bishops took the
attitude of “We Christians are the real, true, blessed Jews, the real
inheritors of the value in Judaism. You guys are the false, bad, cursed type
of Jews.”


What did the earliest Christians see of value in an anti-Jewish Jewish
crucified godman figure that originally made this figure so popular to so many
diverse groups? Such a figure resisted his own society’s domination system,
representing by parallel Romans’ desire to resist their own society’s
domination system. The key appealing point wasn’t Jewishness, but rather,
moral resistance. Jesus was the *moral resistance* version of the generalized
idea of the mystery-religion godman — understandably appealing to many within
that era of the Roman Empire.

*Because* the Jesus figure started out in such extreme diversity, drawing from
and drawing together many diverse groups, the Jesus figure was well-suited to
take on attributes of an amazingly broad array of figures, so that the
power-mongering hierarchy-building bishops were, in phase 2, able to
coercively sweep together an enormous, broad assortment of groups.


Why was the Jewish Jesus crucified godman figure (like in the canonical Bible)
so popular in earliest Christianity, as soon as his lifestory was constructed?
Because the Jesus figure’s original lifestyle and packaging *didn’t*
forcefully include the OT. With the original early versions of the Jesus
lifestory and Jesus religion, the least appealing, most-Jewish aspects were
not included.

According to the first Jesus lifestories, before the hierarchy-builders
co-opted it all, Jesus was portrayed and packaged almost as an anti-Jewish
Jewish figure, chastising the Jewish domination system in a way that suggested
to the early Christians a parallel moral resistance movement against the Roman
domination system.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

In Greco-Roman context, always read “wine” first as “entheogenic beverage” or
“visionary plant beverage”.


Added these book lists to Egodeath website:

Ancient wine as visionary plant beverage
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/286BVZYFN78Z9

Ancient wine as visionary plant beverage (2)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/YBPI1UHQSVIN


Locally, I should at least keep a log of the ISBN numbers in case Amazon lists
are losts.

Some of these books have bibliographies, to find other related books. For
interpreting myth and religion, I simply assume “wine” means “entheogen”.
However, this should be proven.

This is the Star Wars-like “Death Star vulnerability”: if we can show that
“wine” in Greco-Roman times means, refers to, and symbolizes “entheogenic
beverage”, suddenly all existing scholarship that mentions “wine” — including
countless books about early Christianity, and Jewish religion — is
transformed to support the entheogen theory and the extreme entheogen paradigm
of what ancient religion was about.

This is a paradigm shift even for entheogen scholars, changing from an
assumption of rare usage such as 1 time during 1 initiation at Eleusis, to
potentially ubiquitous usage all throughout Greco-Roman culture. And then, if
entheogens and visionary plants were that ubuiquitous, we need to rethink
concepts about ancient consciousness and initiation and modern notions about
enlightenment.

If everyone was very familiar with the altered state, if the culture was
founded on and thoroughly saturated with the visionary altered state, we
should consider whether the modern idea of “enlightenment through entheogens”
has to be heavily revised — if the overall ancient world qualifies as what we
call “enlightened” or “mystically illuminated”, our dichotomy
“unenlightened/enlightened” needs to be revised, and the notion of
“enlightenment” as something rare and a glorified panacea needs to be sobered
up and taken off its pedestal.

For the ancient Greeks, it was so natural that all adults are what we’d call
“metaphysically and spiritually enlightened”, being “enlightened” was such the
universal norm, it was merely ordinary, normal adult consciousness. War,
politics, sports, and all areas of culture were based on what moderns would
label as “metaphysically enlightened consciousness”, because the whole culture
was based on everyday use of entheogens.

Discard the notion of rarity of entheogens, rarity of metaphysical or psyche
enlightenment, and automatic panacea of metaphysical enlightenment and
entheogens. This is a paradigm shift in contrast to current entheogen
religion scholarship, and in contrast to modern-era notions about the
difficulty and promise of metaphysical enlightenment and entheogens.

All that Huxley was amazed to find, and more, was routinely present as the
norm or basis for the norm in Greco-Roman times. Every “banquet”, all “wine”,
every “symposium”, every “feast” and “agape meal” was normally or ideally
about entheogenic or visionary plant usage, with myth, philosophy, literature,
politics, war, and other fields using the phenomena of the what we moderns
think of as the “mystic altered state” — what Greco-Romans thought of as
common, everyday divine inebriation.

The Romans were talking about entheogen mixtures, not alcohol alone, when they
said “In Vino Veritas” — In Wine Is Truth.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

> The Romans were talking about entheogen mixtures, not alcohol

alone, when they

> said “In Vino Veritas” — In Wine Is Truth.

Funny enough , just an hour ago i read that saying at
a news website and was annoyed by exactly this extremely off-base
conception of Vino as mere stupifying alcohol. It’s just
such a great joke. How deep the entheogenic mysteries are
entwined even in the reality of those who have no clue bout it.
Sometimes it’s only funny how stupid modern man is.
He thinks he is the most clever ever and in truth he’s
just incredibly ignorant of the truth.


This is not the first time that i thougth about something
regarding something ontopic here just to read about the exact
same line of thought here some hours afterwards.

It would be quite a blast if it developed like this.
Looking at the current environment there’s actually no way
the big no-free-will revelation can be kept out much longer.
With today’s internet it’s just a matter of time.
What would happen to the Christian Churches?
Will they deliver the real body & blood ?
At some point they can’t be taken serious anymore by
the average person.

Imagine a picture of a Entheogen like Vine drinking society.
In some way it seems a logical necessity yet such a picture
seems so far-off of current culture.

I guess like most natural processes it will not be a linear phenomenon
but rather an exponential one. So the big change will _not_ occur
over decades but rather in quite a short time like a few years.

How far is this BIG change ahead?
5 years? 10 years? 20 years?

20 years seems a very long time considering how developed the
entheogenic position already is right now.
Take that and the compared to past times incredible fast information
spread it seems rather like ca. 10 years.

2012 anyone? I think there *is* more to than most think of…

“By 2012 we will have reached a total collapse of time as we know it
and an entry of humanity into post history.
Part of the Mayan prophecy was the Harmonic Convergence Prophecy
which said the Age of Materialism must end at this time and we must
return to Nature to save ourselves and the planet, our biosphere.”

http://www.bluehoney.org/MayaNotes.htm

Perhaps most people got the Mayans wrong? What about reading these
descriptions as experiences of the mystic state?

We *have* gone as far as is good for us with our current culture,
we *have* to change if escalation is to be avoided.

The collapse of time is of course the *experience* of time
stopping /fading away during the intense altered state. It’s not
actually meant as a real physical world phenomenon.

Entry into post history: It’s already here. With the revelations of
the dramatic shift from freewill/realJesus/noEntheogens to
nofreewill/nohistoricalJesus/EntheogensEverywhere (etc, See
HOW deep the rabbit hole goes…) a new Age is about to begin.

2012… if it’s not exact, it seems real close
2012 is not only about planet shifting cycles … or is it?

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=Abmev97edkrat
Album info: Fallen


I haven’t heard this album, so couldn’t do the best analysis. The following
lyrics seem most clearly related to the mystic altered state phenomena. I
should post analysis notes here, but you should be able to easily spot the
thematic patterns I’ve covered in previous postings about Rock lyrics alluding
to the phenomena of the mystic altered state.

I have covered these themes thoroughly and will not write much more on the
subject, though I will continue to draw vocabulary from lyrics; it’s part of
how I think, and altered-state Rock lyrics remain the closest the modern era
has come to ancient myth-religion poetry and literature, acting as the best
and surest bridge between the modern and ancient world.

The line “You must be sacrificed” alludes to ideas of human/divine mediation,
conflict of power realms, and ego-sacrifice.


Bring Me To Life

How can you see into my eyes like open doors?
Leading you down into my core
Where I’ve become so numb

Without a soul
My spirit’s sleeping somewhere cold
Until you find it there and lead it back home

[Chorus]
(wake me up) Wake me up inside
(I can’t wake up) Wake me up inside
(Save me) Call my name and save me from the dark
(Wake me up) Bid my blood to run
(I can’t wake up) Before I come undone
(Save me) Save me from the nothing I’ve become

Now that I know what I’m without
You can’t just leave me
Breathe into me and (make me real)
Bring me
To life

[Repeat Chorus]

(Bring me to life)
(Ive been living a lie…Theres nothing inside)
(Bring me to life)

Frozen inside without your touch
Without your love, darling
Only you are the life among the dead

(All of this I, I can’t believe I couldn’t see
Kept in the dark, but you were there in front of me)

Ive been sleeping a thousand years it seems
Got to open my eyes to everything

(Without a thought, without a voice, without a soul)
(Dont let me die here)(You must be sacrificed)
Bring me to life

[Repeat Chorus]

Bring me to life
(I’ve been living a lie… There’s nothing inside)
Bring me to life

_________________________

From the middle of “Going Under”:

blurring and stirring the truth and the lies
so I don’t know what’s real and what’s not
always confusing the thoughts in my head
so I can’t trust myself anymore
I’m dying again

I’m going under
drowning in you
I’m falling forever
I’ve got to break through

>Sometimes it’s only funny how stupid modern man is.
>He thinks he is the most clever ever and in truth he’s
>just incredibly ignorant of the truth.

Modern man uses only the lower half of the mind, and fully develops that in
isolation from the upper half, and produces an entire civilization with its
so-called “religion” and “sprirituality” that is all confined within and
informed by just the lower half of the mind. Thus we end up with the clueless
egoic version of “higher knowledge” and “enlightenment” and “transcendence” —
a civilization of mental children, adult-age children, spiritual retards.

Modern adults consider enlightenment “advanced”, but really, today’s adulthood
is retarded and hardly has a right to call itself “mature” or “adult”. These
“adults” have never been through a real initiation; they are still spiritual
virgins, have never had a mystical climax — unlike the normal adults of the
Greco-Roman era.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Within the context of Greco-Roman culture (religion, philosophy, myth,
initiation, cult, literature), how does the crucified Jesus figure work? Are
there “main” threads of meaning? The challenge is that so many threads were
woven into the figure from so many sources — an uncanny number of threads, as
time passed. What were the main meanings of the earliest versions of the
Jesus figure, perhaps 120-170 CE? I consider that to be the period of most
greatest development of the Jesus figure. When he was first available as a
figure with a lifestory, why did that figure appeal to people?

Identify the appeal and meaning of the Jesus figure in 3 periods:
1. Abstract Pauline died-and-risen figure with no lifestory.
2. Earliest, barebones lifestory (perhaps Marcion’s “Gospel of the Lord”).
3. Elaborated lifestory with heavy Old Testament connections.


Phase 1: To members of the diverse Greco-Roman culture, what was the appeal
and meaning of the Jesus figure when conceived of as an abstract Pauline
died-and-risen figure with no lifestory? (Perhaps the proto-Jesus figure of
100 BCE to 140 CE.) Certain kinds of people voluntarily joined this type of
group or movement — why? (“Stupid gullible belief in literal incarnation”
isn’t a possible explanation, since the notion of literal incarnation didn’t
happen until late in this period.) In this phase, I suppose there are various
non-integrated versions of the Jesus figure: the Pauline abstract dying/rising
cross-based version, and the wisdom teacher version.


Phase 2: To members of the diverse Greco-Roman culture, what was the appeal
and meaning of the Jesus figure when conceived of with an earliest, barebones
lifestory (perhaps Marcion’s “Gospel of the Lord”)? (Perhaps 140 to 170 CE.)
Certain kinds of people voluntarily joined this type of group or movement —
why? (Surely not because of gullible literalism — that hadn’t really gotten
started yet.

Most likely, in this phase, the Jesus figure was still considered to be
essentially like the many other legendary, mythic, or allegorical figures —
he’s still essentially viewed as a mystical personification and ethics
teacher.) This is the first phase in which a single Jesus figure *integrates*
and brings together elements including ethics/wisdom teacher, lifestory, and
cross-based dying-rising. These elements are not brought together in a way
that is optimized for an authoritarian hierarchy.


Phase 3a: To members of the diverse Greco-Roman culture, what was the appeal
and meaning of the Jesus figure when conceived of as having an elaborated
lifestory with heavy Old Testament connections? (Perhaps 170 CE to 313 CE and
later.) Certain kinds of people voluntarily joined this type of group or
movement — why? (Stupid gullible belief in Jesus’ literal existence and
miraculous resurrection is probably not the best explanation.) In this phase
is heavy, evenly balanced competition between free-form Jesus technicians and
the hierarchy-builders who ultimately seek larger-scale uniformity.

Phase 3b: 313 (Constantine/Eusebius) to 393(?) when Christianity becomes the
mandatory state religion. To members of the diverse Greco-Roman culture, what
was the appeal and meaning of the Jesus figure when conceived of as having a
fixed and orthodox lifestory with heavy Old Testament connections? Certain
kinds of people voluntarily joined this type of group or movement — why?
(Stupid gullible belief in Jesus’ literal existence and miraculous
resurrection is probably not the best explanation.)


The hierarchy-building *bishops* talked about voluntary martyrdom and
supernaturalist literalism, but did the people who voluntarily joined join for
those reasons? Some pagans criticized the stupidity and gullibility of
Christians, but were those the real reasons for joining, and were those
actually the beliefs of those who joined?

“Gullibility” is probably a bluff, a smokescreen created by the
power-mongering bishops, to cover the actual socio-political and ethical and
mystical motives and dynamic conflicts throughout the Christian groups and
between the Christian groups and the rest of the culture. Given that there
was a competitive groups-takeover war, especially instigated by power-hungry
bishops, it’s a state of war and thus a state of propaganda in which reported
circumstances and the supposed nature of group disagreements are not to be
believed.


I simply want to comprehend what the Jesus figure really meant to the real
people when he became available — but the problem is, the Jesus figure
developed over a long period, and the Greco-Roman context and competitive
philosophical systems, religious systems, and ideas developed over this period
as well.

Understanding the “creation of the Jesus figure in cultural context” sounds
simple and static, but it’s actually a moving target set within a broader
cultural moving target. I’m not used to such dynamic historical thinking and
puzzle-solving. This degree of dynamic change, intertwined with the challenge
of penetrating the mystical and sociopolitical meaning of mystery-religions is
all the more challenging.

It’s like a puzzle within a puzzle, both changing over time. And the whole
interpretive paradigm is uncertain and variable. A study of ancient Greek
religion of Dionysus and other myth-religion around 500 BCE can only
contribute a limited explanation of what the Jesus figure meant to the
Greco-Romans around 120-180 CE, when the recognizable Jesus figure was born
and voluntarily embraced.



Mithras seems not to be a mediator: he seems not to himself be a sacrifice.
How many Greco-Roman godmen are specifically *sacrificial* godmen? Consider
Prometheus as well. How many are sacrificially given from the divine to
itself? Prometheus seems to be set up in opposition to Zeus, whereas Jesus
is set up as aligned with God, proceeding from God.

As a mediator, the Jesus figure seems more perfect and symmetrically balanced.
Prometheus is like a man set up against the divine. The *idea* of a perfect
mediator who is all in one sacrament, sacrifice, priestly sacrificer,
monotheistic god, and generalized man, and representative of the initiate, is
highly developed in the Jesus figure.

The idea of “godman” may be too narrow to grasp the dynamic of
mystery-religion-type ideas. Something is amiss if Prometheus and Mithras are
omitted because they fail a stringent “godman” qualification test. The Jewish
or Neoplatonic mediator-logos idea may also need to be considered.


The Cults of the Roman Empire
Robert Turcan
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0631200479

Reviewer — “…offers psychological explanations for the victory of
Christianity over the cults … but I think he glossed over the
socio-political explanation: episcopal Christianity alone provided the
strongest social cohesiveness enforced by ecclesiastical sanctions. It was
this strength that moved Constantine to attempt to co-opt the episcopal church
rather than throw the future of his empire in with Mithras or Isis.”


Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100-400)
Ramsay MacMullen
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300036426

This is supposedly an objective book (as opposed to Peter Brown’s
committed-Christian platform), yet the author apparently includes “miracles”,
the day of Pentecost (read as a literal event), and mass conversions in his
explanation for the appeal of Christianity. Sounds as untrustworthy as any
book operating within the received paradigm; he’s not really outside the
dominant paradigm.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Interesting info below regarding the group, Evanescence. It looks like
literal christianity is having a difficult time with ‘higer’ lyrics….


http://littlerock.about.com/cs/localmusic/a/aaevanescence.htm

Local Group Gone Big Time


If you’ve seen the hit movie “<A HREF=”http://clk.about.com/?zi=7/5d&sdn=littlerock&zms=%252Fmsrch%252Findex.jhtml%253Fc%253Dmusic%2526artist%253D%2526format%253DCD%2526pgid%253Dshop%2526ps%253Dt%2526song%253D%2526title%253Ddaredevil%2526_ttag%253Dmsrch%2526_ttag%253Dmsrch%2526label%253D%2526kw%253Dfallen%2526v%253D1%2526pid%253D476856%2526pg%253D1%2526key%253DUC_20030408_192139_0984690322″>Daredevil</A>,” you’ve heard a Little Rock band
that is making it’s way up the Billboard Charts! That’s right, the group
Evanescence is actually from Little Rock, AR! Their song, “Bring Me To Life” off their
album “<A HREF=”http://clk.about.com/?zi=7/5d&sdn=littlerock&zms=%252Fmsrch%252Findex.jhtml%253Fc%253Dmusic%2526artist%253DEvanescence%252B%2526format%253DCD%2526pgid%253Dshop%2526ps%253Dt%2526song%253D%2526title%253DFallen%2526_ttag%253Dmsrch%2526_ttag%253Dmsrch%2526label%253D%2526kw%253Dfallen%2526v%253D1%2526pid%253D475041%2526pg%253D1%2526key%253DUC_20030408_191854_0618461093″>Fallen</A>,” was chosen to be featured on the soundtrack of the latest Ben
Affleck

Ben Moody and Amy Lee, the founders of the group, actually met at a church
youth camp when they were teenagers. Moody was playing with a praise and
worship group and Lee was a camper. According to Moody, he heard Lee playing the
piano and later heard her singing. He was blown away and they have been together
ever since. The actual band was started in the late 1990s in Little Rock.
They’ve had a large local following since the beginning. Their song
“Understanding” got radio play before the two ever did any live performances. Their latest
single, “Bring Me To Life,” is a “piano ballad-turned-riff-driven barnburner.”
Amy Lee’s voice is like something I’ve never heard before. The song is
definitely worth a listen and perfect for the movie “Daredevil”. The song “My
Immortal” is also featured on the “<A HREF=”http://clk.about.com/?zi=7/5d&sdn=littlerock&zms=%252Fmsrch%252Findex.jhtml%253Fc%253Dmusic%2526artist%253D%2526format%253DCD%2526pgid%253Dshop%2526ps%253Dt%2526song%253D%2526title%253Ddaredevil%2526_ttag%253Dmsrch%2526_ttag%253Dmsrch%2526label%253D%2526kw%253Dfallen%2526v%253D1%2526pid%253D476856%2526pg%253D1%2526key%253DUC_20030408_192139_0984690322″>Daredevil</A>” soundtrack. I imagine we’ll hear more
from Evanescence in the coming months. Interestingly enough, even though the
group started out as Christian Rock, their new album has gotten some criticism
from Christian groups. Some groups even went as far as to suggest Christian
stores and radio stations pull the cds. The group also seems to be trying to
distance itself from the Christian genre and go into the more lucrative secular
market. Perhaps “Fallen” is the perfect name for the album! Rounding out the duo
of Lee and Moody are John LeCompt on guitar and Rocky Gray on drums. Moody
says, “As a four-piece, we are able to carry out the intricate harmonies and
orchestrations of the memorable material on Fallen.”







[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

“God’s repentance” is the biblical story pattern: God says “I’m going to
destroy idolaters.” The idolaters repent. As a result, God repents and says
ok, I won’t destroy them.

Freewill or open-future theologians think that God’s repentance throughout the
Old Testament indicates that he doesn’t know the future; the future is open
(not yet established or visible) to God. That is incorrect. In reading
religious texts, remember to always consider each idea first as a description
of an intense mystic-altered state phenomenon.


1. When the mystic starts to discover that control-thoughts are mysteriously
given to the mind timelessly, and are frozen into the timeless spacetime
block, there is commonly a sense of increasing doom; a felt pull inward toward
a control vortex; a dimly remembered (so it feels) terrible holy transgression
awaiting ahead on the worldline; self-reinforcing out-of-control feedback
buildup of some virtually remembered fatal doom, a tragic future lying in
store like a monster poised over a railroad track — a monster that draws you
toward it through controlling your memories and control-thoughts, a devouring
strange attractor steering the mind’s train of thought towards it.

The mind virtually remembers that it is to be coerced into willing the
cancellation of the will, a dreadful sense of coerced will and the forceful
truth of having to “must” do something tremendous, some essential generalized
transcendent crime that breaks law itself, tears the very legal fabric of
society itself, some type of fearsome sacrifice. This state is metaphorically
described as “God has decided to destroy you as an idolater.”


2. As soon as the mind coherently realizes its situation and control dynamics
correctly, that conceptual grasp is the logos given to the mind — the divine
reasoning about personal controllership and then about having to receive
transcendent resetting of the personal controllership delusion, now qualified
and purified. It may take some seven “purification” sessions to gradually
conform the mind’s mental worldmodel to this dynamic relationship about
control agency.

When the mind is finally brought into the holy of holies, brought to an
understanding of its vulnerable dependence on a completely mysterious
uncontrollable transcendent controller, this is “repenting” and
“converting” — that is, the mind is made to acknowledge or credit or praise
God.


3. When the mind is brought to credit the critical role of the mysterious
uncontrollable transcendent controller as the very source of the mind’s
control-thoughts, normally or formerly completely hidden, God repents, and the
risk of being forced to do some horrible coerced willful crime against the
moral fabric itself vanishes. One has been brought into the true Israel and
into the promised land.


The above frightening realization and insight is premised on a no-free-will,
preexisting future model of spacetime and control. The fact of being given a
new mental model and being reprieved from what you could have been made to do
through coercion of your will by the transcendent mysterious will, in no way
implies an open future, or metaphysically free will.

One can spiritually be caught up into the mysterious transcendent controller
outside the spacetime block, but the spacetime block remains the foundation
for this mystic experience.

Official theologians who have no experience with the mystic altered state can
hardly contribute much of any great insight regarding the nature of personal
responsible agency and its relation to God’s sovereignty.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

I don’t know why the literalist Christians are objecting to this music.

In Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) fashion, it is best described as
acid-oriented Rock, which has a strong connection to genuine mystical
Christianity, which has always been at odds with official Christianity since
about the year 313, when official Christianity was invented.

It is certain that some number of Christian Rock songs are LSD-inspired. The
only question is, how many?

The category of Christian Rock is largely fake and artificial, a sham, an
illusory construct, a pretense. A veritable genre of rock songs by so-called
“secular” groups is acid-inspired songs about Christ’s saving effect. Such
“secular” groups are higher than so-called “believing” Christian groups. A
true Christian Rock song is Believer, by Ozzy Osbourne: “I’m a believer, I
ain’t no deceiver… destiny planned out… speculation of the wise.”

Believe the tomb is empty, and you shall be saved. The body is a tomb; the
soma is a sema.

Many Holy Spirit-inspired Rock groups want to have songs about mystical
salvation through Jesus Christ but ditch the shallow moralism that the lowbrow
Christian literalists mistake for the essential ethical aspect of
Christianity.

This modified URL shows all 81 retablos currently available for sale at this
site.
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-table=c
opy&-response=%2fpages%2f..%2fpages%2fgallery.lasso&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-skipR
ecords=0&-maxRecords=81&-search

I assume the Mexicans or Central American Catholocized Indians used a variety
of entheogens in conjunction with Catholicism, inspiring these “icons” or
rather, symbol-filled religious picture-diagrams. I don’t even have a word
for these — they are not the same as Eastern orthodox icons or European
religious paintings — they are more explicitly symbolic, such as a cross
containing various objects, almost an alchemical or Masonic explicit
symbolism.


Standard pictures (arrangements/groupings of elements), and elements in
retablos include the following. What is the origin of the “originals” of these
pictorial symbol-arrangements? European paintings or icons?


I’m nearly certain the following URLs will quickly go out of sync. The best
bet to see the correct pictures is to use the comprehensive URL above, then
Find the picture name or inventory number in the page. Note to self: use Sent
copy of this post, so URLs don’t have carriage return in the middle.


Common combination: Rose & lily (lily = datura per Entheos mag v1#2).
Revelation idea is “washing white robes in the red blood of the lamb”.

Consider similarity:
rose = crown of thorns around pierced heart
white roses = lily-datura
white roses and red roses = lily-datura and crown of thorns around pierced
heart

____________________________________


Baby Jesus is handing a flaming heart to a sinner who Virgin Mary/Queen of
Heaven is lifting up from the flaming beastly jaws of hell. Jesus’ left hand
hands the heart; Jesus’ right hand holds another heart, in front of his chest.
The mouth and teeth of hell are like a gorgon (decaying death head grimace).
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=57&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“N.S. de la Luz” by Augustin Barajas
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#L 0041


Empty skull in front of chest, holding crucifix with small literal body of
Jesus on it
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=36&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“San Francisco de Asis”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
5×7
Inventory#M 0370


Cross, Jesus, crown of thorns, INRI sign, pierced side, blood from side caught
in one tiny cup — from left hand into another — from right into another —
from feet blood flows up to another tiny cup. Candle on either side — seems
to be equivalent to two crucified rebels, or sun and moon, or leg-crossed
small guys next to Mithras.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=31&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“El Cristo de Saucito” by the “Saucito Master”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
5×7
Inventory#M 0609


Empty skull on bible, holding crucifix with small literal body of Jesus on it,
w/ INRI sign, holding lily/datura aimed like swords to heart
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=32&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“San Luis Gonzaga” in original wood frame
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#M 0558


Sword piercing virgin’s heart (per Homer, punctured heart = inevitable death,
means the type of death given by encounter with unavoidable
inevitability/Necessity/heimarmene)
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opy&-response=%2fpages%2fdetail.lasso&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-skipRecords=61&-max
Records=1&-token=Retablo&-search


Jesus on cross, pierced heart, crown of thorns, INRI sign, 3 women: Virgin
with sword-pierced heart, woman embracing cross, and Mary Magdalene
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opy&-response=%2fpages%2fdetail.lasso&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-skipRecords=61&-max
Records=1&-token=Retablo&-search
“El Calvario con Maria Magdalena”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
6×8.5
Inventory#K 1046


Sheep emerging unscathed from furnace (perhaps picture is called “San
Francisco de Paula”) (the incorruptable “remnant” after the purgatorial
purifying fires; compare Demeter’s burning away the queen’s son’s mortality
over a series of nights. Ruck & Heinrich’s interpretation system could
suggest this as the amanita cap heated to increase potency some sixfold times.
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opy&-response=%2fpages%2fdetail.lasso&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-skipRecords=74&-max
Records=1&-token=Retablo&-search
San Francisco de Paula”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
7×10
Inventory#J 0229

This copy also has two red flames on chest, and several other pictures have
red areas near shoulders.
Apparently the two flames on chest theme is a symbol of the similar two
flaming wings labeled “caridad” (charity, = gratuitous kindness, transcendent
love) — this might relate to the two candlesticks bracketing virgin Mary in
some pictures.
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opy&-response=%2fpages%2fdetail.lasso&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-skipRecords=70&-max
Records=1&-token=Retablo&-search
“San Francisco Paula”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#J 1202


Skull at foot of cross.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=49&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“San Bonifacio Martir” (rare)
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
7×10
Inventory#L 0353


Queen releasing the wrist-chained prisoner from prison.
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=48&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“Santa Eduviges” by Augustin Barajas
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#L 0414


Wrist-chained souls in purgatory.
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opy&-response=%2fpages%2fdetail.lasso&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-skipRecords=62&-max
Records=1&-token=Retablo&-search
“Animas en Purgatorio”
Mexico
oil on wood
19th century
8×11.5
Inventory#K 0936


Flaming heart, holding literalized crucifix
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=67&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“San Juan de Dios” (rare)
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#K 0048



Crown with cross atop, object-like spreading gown, resting on moon crescent,
female, rayed halo, roses on garment, standing on pedestal, bracketed by two
flaming candlesticks. Curtains above, with 0, 2, or 4 tassles.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=6&-s
earch&-Token=Retablo
“N.S. de San Juan de los Lagos”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
7×10
Inventory#N 0563

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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=18&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“N.S. de San Juan de los Lagos”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#N 0338

http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=73&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“La Virgen de San Juan de los Lagos”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#J 0548

This copy is different – monstrance, lily-daturas instead of flaming
candlesticks, possible purple&gold grape&grain theme.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=43&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“N.S. de San Juan de los Lagos” double-sided
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
7×10
Inventory#M 0327


Similar to “N.S. de San Juan de los Lagos” is the praying head-topped cloaked
body with crescent base, holding seemingly a combined rose/lily plant, holding
crowned baby Jesus who also holds combined rose-lily, both hold a bead-chain.
Bracked by rose vases. No curtain.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=46&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“N.S. del Rosario” by the “Saucito Master”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
9×13
Inventory#L 0706


San Jose is male equiv. of “refugio”, with lily holding baby Jesus who has
cosmic globe w/ X. In this copy, like theotokos he is crowned (not sitting
like theotokos though)
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=34&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“San José” Bolivia
Bolivia
oil on metal
19th century
10×14
Inventory#M 0457

In this copy of San Jose, holds full-length thriasus pole — top is like rose
w/ lily-like leaves (combined lily-rose symbol), and only has ring halo.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=54&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“San Jose & Guadalupe” by “Left-Handed Ptr”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×8.5
Inventory#L 0096

In this copy, San Jose has ring halo (not crown). Odd red/white splotches in
thriassus, gives impression of amanitas against pine tree.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=71&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“San José y la Virgen” by the “Halloween Skull ptr.”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×10
Inventory#J 1145


Flaming heart — pierced, flames coming out pierce, crowned around with
thorns, cross on top, flaming top.
I don’t like this copy (it is like Ken Wilber’s bunk denatured Christ-heart in
the book Up From Eden — like a thornless rose [aha, rose = crown of thorns
around pierced heart]), because it omits the crown of thorns from the heart
and omits the pierced side of the heart: (in this copy, he points at the
heart, and he has nimbus halo)
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=37&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“El Sagrado Corazon de Jesus”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#M 0365

I like this copy — pierced heart, crown of thorns around heart, lamb licking
blood (compare dog licking Mithra’s bull), and also — extra bonus points —
the heart is against an amanita-cap backdrop (golden inner flames, orange-red
outer flames). (in this copy, he points up.) Nimbus halo.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=20&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“El Sagrado Corazon de Jesus”
“Saucito Master”, Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#N 0249

In this copy, ring halo. Heart has crown of thorns and pierce.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=75&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“El Sgdo Corazon de Cristo” by Concepcion Avila
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
7×10
Inventory#G 0926


Picture “La Cruz de Animas” is particularly dense with symbols. Usually
includes: cross containing or surrounded by instruments of torture including
nails, rod with sponge, spear (latter two as tall X behind Jesus), love-dove,
ladder, bag of 30 silver coins, slave whipping post, cock, a couple tong-like
devices (hammer?, pliers?), dice, scourge; praying souls in purgatory under
the arms of the cross, adam/tree/snake/eve, sun & moon, INRI sign, God atop
lifting arm and hand on heart, monstrance (Amanita-cap stand), crowned
skeleton piercing heart of tightly wrapped corpse, Virgin Mary w/
sword-pierced heart, grail cup, Michael archangel with scales of judgment &
sword.

In this copy, there is no Michael archangel, God has 1 hand up, 1 hand on
heart, cosmic globe in front of heart, no triangle.
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opy&-response=%2fpages%2fdetail.lasso&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-skipRecords=77&-max
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“La Cruz de Animas”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
5.5×6.5
Inventory#J 0372

In this copy, Michael archangel is above the monstrance, God has both hands
up, triangle behind head, no cosmic globe.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=42&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“La Cruz de Animas”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#M 0341

In this copy, Michael is below the monstrance, God has 1 hand up, 1 hand on
heart, cosmic globe in front of heart, triangle behind head.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=15&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“Cruz de Animas” d.1930
Mexico
oil on tin
dated 1 930
10×14
Inventory#N 0405


Similar to the “La Cruz de Animas”, “La Alegoria de la Redención” has
sun/moon, Jesus on cross, INRI, piercings, God above raising his hands,
love-dove descending, Virgin Mary with sword-pierced heart on left, Michael
archangel w/ sword & scales of judgment on right, skull at base of cross,
rod-sponge-vinegar and spear crossed behind cross, torture implements,
adam/eve below cross, souls in purgatory under the arms of the cross.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=5&-s
earch&-Token=Retablo
“La Alegoria de la Redención”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
7×10
Inventory#N 0573


Baby Jesus leapt into arms of queen of heaven, his left foot often hidden, or
sandal missing. Jesus’ halo overlaps with and unites with Virgin Mary’s halo.
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search&-Token=Retablo
“N.S. de Refugio” by Bruno Sanches
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#L 0476

In “N.S. de Refugio”, baby Jesus doesn’t hold the cosmic globe w/ X.


This “Santa Ana” shows the lilies positioned the same as the multiple swords
piercing Virgin Mary’s heart in another picture.
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e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=7&-s
earch&-Token=Retablo
“Santa Ana”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
7×10
Inventory#N 0562


Virgin Mary holding cross-removed adult body of Jesus, her heart
sword-pierced, cock, some of the standard set of torture implements (implying
the entire set) – here are shown 3 nails, hammer(?), pliers(?), removed crown
of thorns, 11 stars around her head, cross on either side of her. No crescent
at her feet. No cosmic globe with X in his hand.
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=10&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“La Piedad” by Concepcion Avila
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
7×10
Inventory#N 0433


Queen of Heaven standing on crescent, angel holding up, 2-star bible, golden
rays & red ring (almost amanita cap theme), crown, praying hands, roses.
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=19&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“N.S. de Guadalupe”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
5×7
Inventory#N 0255


Hand of Christ from clouds, pierced palm, blood into grail cup, 7 lambs drink
from blood, 7 letters at bottom “drink” from base of grail, 5 figures above
hand touching it, each have 1 foot visible.
Figure 1: 3 lilies pointed to heart like swords sometimes are. Circle halo.
Hands crossed over heart. Woman w/ covered head.
Figure 2: Praying hands. Ray halo. Woman w/ uncovered head.
Figure 3: Left hand on heart, right hand two fingers up and two down, ray
halo, stand on cosmic globe w/ +, young unbearded male.
Figure 4: Man w/ split beard, brown long parted hair, hands crossed over
heart, olds “thriasus” like Dionysian pine cone on a pole — pole w/ 4 roses
against green ray leaves. Rayed halo.
Figure 5: Ring halo, man w/ beard, balding, long pole w/ handle, hands crossed
over heart. light flame(?) on head.
Spear, pole w/ vinegar sponge, 1 other pole(?) Gender = FFmMM here.
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=22&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“La Mano Poderosa” by the “Master of the Refugio”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#N 0176

Interesting to compare this different Poderosa. The hand comes not from
clouds, but from blood-filled grail-fountain w/ lambs drinking from the cup.
Grain on left, grape vines on right (no lilies here). God is up in clouds,
love-dove between. All 5 main “finger figures” appear to have ring halos
here. Various other differences. Gender = MFmFM here. On the 4 adults,
clothing color combinations is generally the same; easy to correlate between
the two pictures. Only 4 lambs here.
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=27&-
search&-Token=Retablo

Who are the five figures? (Research could probably nail these down easily.)
Could be father Joseph & virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, Peter, John evangelist
or John baptist, John’s parents Elizabeth & Zacharias, Moses & Zipporah,
Abraham & Sarah, Elijah. Possibly James, Paul; Adam & Eve. Out of these,
perhaps the set is


Trumpet spitting blood from clouds, holding literalized crucifix, armband w/
blood (?), flagellant scourge, red robe w/ gold plusses and white inside —
like amanita cap, lion looking at him w/ rayed mane, 1 foot showing,
scriptures in front of him, on knees, ring halo.
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=53&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“San Geronimo” by the “Chunky Ptr.”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
7×10
Inventory#L 0097


Holding literalized crucifix, looking at it, cradling empty skull near heart
(in position of theotokos’ infant).
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=29&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“Santa Rita”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
7×10
Inventory#M 0868


Almost gives impression of Amanita — 1-leg table, gold leg, red tabletop,
gold crowns like veil remnants. Pointing at tabletop. The 3 crowns seem to
remotely imply Jesus on the cross bracketed by two lower crosses. Compare the
sword with flaming tip to the flaming candlestick shown in many other of these
pictures — this suggests that these are synonymous symbols:
flaming candlestick
flame-tipped sword
spear in heart
sword-pierced heart
lily-datura pointing to heart
finger pointing to pierced heart
roses in vase?
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=68&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“San Elias” (rare)
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#K 0047


Lamb in front of person’s chest/heart. Apparently left figure with lamb on
chest & piercings is Jesus, middle w/ heart & pointing up at his own head is
God, right with dove(?) & hands crossed on heart is Holy Spirit. They stand
on cosmic globe with +, but Jesus has one foot in space. Each person has
triangle “halo”.
http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=78&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“La Santisima Trinidad”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×14
Inventory#P 0034


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

I began listening to Rush back in the early 1980’s and really
enjoyed the music as well as the message. However, my listening
only got as far as the Signals album, which was about the time
the style of music changed somewhat. I have not actively listened
to Grace Under Pressure, Power Windows nor the albums that followed.
Today I purchased Vapor Trails to try to become an active listener
again.

My question is what have I missed? From what I can surmise from
the Signals album, the music takes a rather drastic turn from nature
themes (The Trees, Natural Science, etc.) to the cyberage (Digital
Man, The Analog Kid, New World Man, etc.) I get the feeling that
the music contains clues about how to return to nature and experience
egodeath, yet still thrive in the modern world which requires
nurturing the ego.

I uploaded the previous posting as http://www.egodeath.com/retablos.htm so the
links work — but use the page quickly before the links go out of sync.

(added to the uploaded page http://www.egodeath.com/retablos.htm):


…suggests that these are synonymous symbols for “being made to spear one’s
own cybernetic heart with the flaming sword of Necessity/Heimarmene (timeless
block-universe determinism)”:
flaming candlestick
flame-tipped sword
spear in heart
sword-pierced heart
lily-datura pointing to heart
finger pointing to pierced heart
roses in vase?


I would say that the Virgin Mary (right side of below picture) has just been
made to spear her own cybernetic heart with the flaming sword of
Necessity/Heimarmene (timeless block-universe determinism).

http://www.historia-antiques.com/pages/Action.Lasso?-database=JCH_Web&-respons
e=detail.lasso&-table=copy&-op=bw&type=Retablo&-maxRecords=1&-skipRecords=71&-
search&-Token=Retablo
“San José y la Virgen” by the “Halloween Skull ptr.”
Mexico
oil on tin
19th century
10×10
Inventory#J 1145

You and I probably aren’t the only ones who treat Rush like a band that broke
up after the 1982 album Signals. I sincerely tried, as much as I could stand,
but of what I heard after that, neither the music nor the lyrics happen to
appeal to me; I had to conclude that they were no longer inspired, but were
going by rote, and became too old to rock and roll (dose with lysergic acid)
and to young to die. I maintain that the 1984 album Grace Under Pressure fits
with early Rush, not late Rush.

Grace Under Pressure has many altered-state songs, and innovative style, even
if generally bleak and obsessed with paranoia and modern doom and alienation.
It’s a kind of low point, as far as mood — nuclear war, concentration camps,
and paranoia — their answer to Pink Floyd’s angst album, The Wall?

Reviews of Rush albums (just 1 unreliable data point among many that are
needed):
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=By690s35ba3ng
They propose that you and I listen to the 1989 album Presto.


Presto does have some good philosophy lyrics, that don’t fail to have much
about Dionysus in them. The Pass is good lyrically. Presto, the title track,
says
If I could wave my magic wand
I’d set everybody free
This implies that the biggest point of the album is that we’re not
metaphysically free.

In “Superconductor” that must be God.
Watch his every move
SUPERCONDUCTOR
Orchestrate illusions
SUPERCONDUCTOR
Watch his every move
SUPERCONDUCTOR
Hoping you’ll believe
Designing to deceive
That’s entertainment

They use a phrase Ozzy used in Over the Mountain: “disappear into the crowd”.
The album has thick allusions to mystic altered state phenomena — don’t know
if I could stand the music though. I don’t think I’ve ever heard any of the
songs on this album.



At http://www.egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm see the songs listed below Signals,
which are currently:

Album: Grace Under Pressure
Distant Early Warning
Afterimage
The Enemy Within (Part I of Fear)
The Body Electric
Red Lenses
Between the Wheels

Album: Counterparts
Stick It Out

Album: Test for Echo
Driven
Virtuality


One of the top philosophically important Rush songs is The Body Electric
(100-100-1, SOS, android egodeath). It’s a key song for the cybernetic theory
of ego death — it neither uses fantasy nor myth.

The Enemy Within is fairly important.

Between the Wheels is dense with allusions to ego death and mystical
phenomena — I should complete the analysis; for example, these refer to the
ascension of egoic thinking up to heaven, only to meet the angel with the
flaming sword, who casts out the demonic freewill agency delusion and ego goes
falling way down to the depths, leading often to desperate dependence on the
gratuitous goodness of the uncontrollable transcendent controller — where
rational Heavy Rock guys like Peart are brought to pray and beg and depend on
God:

We can go from boom to bust
From dreams to a bowl of dust
We can fall from rockets’ red glare
Down to “Brother can you spare –“

I read the last as Peart reporting that after falling upon attaining a high
ecstatic state — “stumbling” — he had to beg and depend on the One that is
outside and prior to Peart’s control-thoughts.


The song “Distant Early Warning” ends with a lament of Absolom, king David’s
son in the Bible, and is a reference to mystical ego death. See:
Tue 4/30/2002 11:00 AM
RE: [egodeath] Labyrinth, Balaam’s donkey, Golden Ass, Damascus
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath/message/789


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

In a message dated 7/4/2003 12:38:35 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
mhoffman@… writes:

> appeal to me; I had to conclude that they were no longer inspired, but were
> going by rote, and became too old to rock and roll

It’s an interesting statement…..especially when the word inspiration is
carried into the breath….for then there is always inspiration as well as
expiration until there is no one left to notice…

When the word, ‘inspired,’ remains as a metaphor for the
term,’enlightenment,’ only, it leans toward the act of doing, through the awareness of what
is…And truly, all acts of doing, whether through awareness or not, are
inspired…..I don’t see an end to inspiration, but rather only it transforming
itself….




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

I just purchased Grace Under Pressure and Power Windows yesterday.
Grace Under Pressure sounds like Signals. Vapor Trails will takes
some getting used to. I will have to make up for lost time. At
least I am back on track again. I hope I don’t discover that Rush
is taking their own lyrics way too seriously, but I guess a lot of
the art rock bands of the 70’s are guilty of that. Ozzy Osbourne
definitely is not guilty of that.

I am having difficulty expressing my knowledge about this
subject. The terminology used in this newsgroup is very
technical and academic whereas I come from another reference
point or orientation. I relate better to music rather than
words, so I can only feel what you are describing with all
this terminology when I listen to the Beatles, Rush, or other
acid rock.

I do recognize certain themes in the older Rush music that
deal with Greek mythology and even The Lord of the Rings trilogy
(Rivendell, The Trees).

Another theme I noticed is that of making distinctions and recognizing
differences. (Different Strings, Entre Nous <“the differences we
sometimes feared to show”>, Vital Signs<“everybody got to deviate
from the norm”>, Subdivisions).

That is really the extent of my knowledge or interpretation of this
topic. I tend to shy away from the religious, or Christian themes
because I feel that acid rock mysticism and modern day Christianity
do not mix. The key is to recognize this as a false dichotomy and
to transcend it. This may be what is keeping me stuck in ego death
and preventing me from achieving transcendence.

>>I hope I don’t discover that Rush is taking their own lyrics way too

seriously, but I guess a lot of the art rock bands of the 70’s are guilty of
that.


Criticizing “taking lyrics too seriously” gives a feeling of superioriority,
but that’s often a sign of incomprehension of the meaning in lyrics. Do
people really want to limit Rock to the mindless Boogie Rock of the
self-titled Rush album, or the Ramones as the ideal scope of Punk thematic
materials?


It’s not immediately clear what “taking their own lyrics too seriously” means.
Generally, the most standard single theme or motive of Classic Rock (1960s and
70s Rock from Freakbeat to Psychedelic Rock, Acid Rock, Heavy Rock, Heavy
Metal, then Metal) is to reflect the phenomena of the LSD altered state.
Consider Heavy Rock, such as Queen’s song Bohemian Rhapsody or Rush’s song No
One at the Bridge.

Punk Rock is “guilty” of the same supposed crime. For all of its *talk* about
offering a “less pretentious and serious” approach to Rock, Punk treated
politics every bit as seriously as Classic Rock treated the LSD altered state
and its phenomena.

>>Ozzy Osbourne definitely is not guilty of that.

No album takes its lyrics more seriously than Ozzy Osbourne’s album Diary of a
Madman. Similarly, Sabotage is also insanely serious and grandiose.

http://www.egodeath.com/sablyrics.htm


Listen as well to Osbourne’s song Revelation (Mother Earth):

Mother please forgive them
For they know not what they do
Looking back in history’s books
It seems it’s nothing new
Oh! Let my mother live

Heaven is for heroes
And hell is full of fools
Stupidity, no will to live
They’re breaking God’s own rules
Please let my mother live

Father, of all creation
I think we’re all going wrong
The course they’re taking
Seems to be breaking
And it won’t take too long

Children of the future
Watching empires fall
Madness the cup they drink from
Self destruction the toll

I had a vision, l saw the world burn
And the seas had turned red
The sun had fallen, the final curtain
In the land of the dead

Mother, please show the children
Before it’s too late
To fight each other, there’s no-one winning
We must fight all the hate


Rock doesn’t get any more serious and grandiose and cosmic than that. So much
for “taking their own lyrics … seriously … Ozzy Osbourne definitely is not
guilty of that.”


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

Based on the article in the Salvia Divinorum issue #1, Doc Kunda adheres
either to the paradigm “Jesus as entheogenic hierophant” or “Jesus as teacher
of Christhood”, a teaching also accessible through entheogens.”

http://www.dockunda.com — I didn’t find relevant articles.

Entheogen scholars have a fairly even spread of views:

o Jesus as entheogenic hierophant
o Jesus as teacher of Christhood, a teaching also accessible through
entheogens.
o Jesus as entheogenic hierophant, though Jesus might possibly not exist
o Jesus as mythic-only metaphor for the entheogen, like Dionysus
o Jesus as mythic-only complex composite figure based on many themes
including the entheogen and the experiences and insights it produces.

Many mythic-only Jesus researchers are favorably interested in the “Jesus as
entheogen” theme. Many entheogen scholars are interested in “Jesus as
mythic-only metaphor for the entheogen”. The day is past when entheogen
scholars could take it for granted that there was a historical Jesus. All
entheogen scholars are now more or less aware of the existence, seriousness,
and relevance of the mythic-only Jesus theory.

Entheogen scholars may be tempted to enlist the historical Jesus as ally for
drug policy reform, but they have increasingly become aware that to do so is
to build a house on a foundation of sand. Yes, Jesus per the scriptures is
against prohibition of visionary plants, but Jesus is just a synthetic figure
expressing, among other things, the use of so-called “wine” in Greco-Roman
culture to produce ecstatic experiences and insight into the nature of
personal agency.

Instead of saying that Mr. Jesus personally endorsed drug policy reform, a
more relevant and enduring line of research is to establish that *all*
Greco-Roman religion was based on the use of visionary plants in wine,
including all the cultic banquets and mystery-religions, including Judaism and
Christianity.

Strategically, it may be best for drug policy reformers to argue and win both
scenarios: that if there was a historical Jesus, he was against drug
prohibition, and even if there wasn’t a historical Jesus, Christianity, like
Judaism and all the Greco-Roman religions and philosophy schools, was based on
the use of visionary plants in wine.

Few if any prohibitionists today put forth an explicit, reasoned argument that
Jesus forbade drugs, or that the New Testament is prohibitionist. The moment
they try, they find that the scriptures offer much better support for
legalization. If the New Testament provides a basis for deciding on
prohibition, it supports legalization, not prohibition.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

>>[In thinking about the meaning of Classic Rock lyrics,] I tend to shy away

from the religious, or Christian themes because I feel that acid rock
mysticism and modern day Christianity do not mix.


To clarify what you mean by “modern day Christianity”, we need to somehow
mention esoteric or mystic Christianity, which *is* close to Acid Rock
mysticism. There is and always has been a minority interest, yet a strong and
important interest, in esoteric or mystic Christianity — less common, but
more significant than the official version of Christianity that the masses
know of.

>The key is to recognize this as a false dichotomy and to transcend it. This

may be what is keeping me stuck in ego death and preventing me from achieving
transcendence.


There are numerous key false dichotomies:

You are either a Believer or not. (Implies that the only kind of Christianity
that has ever been held by anyone is my version of Christianity — that only
kind of which I am aware; the one type of Christianity of which I’m not
totally oblivious.)

People should use Christian mysticism techniques, rather than drug-based
mysticism. (Actually, there is evidence that real Christian mysticism *was*
drug-based mysticism.)

Christianity is set against science. (Actually, bunk Christianity is set
against bunk Science; authentic Christianity accords with authentic Science.)

Old Testament god vs. New Testament god. (Actually, both contain significant
amounts of “wrathful justice” and “generous loving mercy” — two universal
standard attributes of mystically experienced divinity.)

the IronMaiden Powerslave album is excellent.
the sound production is amazing.

4. Flash Of The Blade

[Dickinson]

As a young boy chasing Dragons [understood as “drunk boy”=entheogenic
drunkeness]
with your wooden sword so mightly, [compare “clenching plastic fist”]
You’re St. George you’re David and you always
killed the beast
Times change very quickly
And you had to grow up early
A house in smoking ruins and the bodies
at your feet

[Chorus:]
You’ll die as you lived
In a flash of the blade
In a corner forgotten by no-one [everyone has to face ego-death]
You lived for the touch
For the feel of the steel
One man, and his Honour. [understood as “and his Owner”]

The smell of resined leather
The steely iron mask
As you cut and thrust and parried at the
fencing master’s call [you act to his call, to His command]
He taught you all he ever knew
To fear no mortal man
And now you’ll wreak your vengeance in the
Screams of evil man.

[Chorus:]
[Repeat chorus]

the follow-up song “the duelists” has the following chorus
[Chorus:]
OH…OH… Fight for the Honour
Fight for the Splendour
Fight for the Pleasure
OH…OH… Fight for the Honour
Fight for the Splendour
Fight for your Life!

In the mystic state substitut again “Honour” with “Owner”. A clever
play of words.
The ego which helds itself real fights for its Honour.
In the mystic state, where one’s own reliance upon Him (Your Owner)
is revealed one must *fight* for the Owner.

I added some book links and some possibly more stable links to images,
including grail images, Christ in fountain of blood flagellating himself with
grape vine.

Noticed similarity between lone soul in purgatory, sometimes shown almost like
an egg in a cup or nest of flames, and the “Jesus in cup of blood” symbol in
Grail art.

http://www.egodeath.com/retablos.htm

>
>
> >>Ozzy Osbourne definitely is not guilty of that.
> No album takes its lyrics more seriously than Ozzy Osbourne’s album

Diary of a

> Madman. Similarly, Sabotage is also insanely serious and grandiose.
>

Let me clarify my earlier remark about Ozzy Osbourne. I meant
that the phenomenon of “The Osbournes” TV show shows that Ozzy
the man has a sense of humour about himself. I actually know
very little about his music.

I started on this journey by listening to and researching the Beatles
who tried to capture the feeling one gets from transcendental
meditation and eastern religion in their music. Of course, the acid
experience is a huge part of that experience.

Perhaps my critique of “seriousness” in Rock comes from the technical
and academic nature of the posts on this newsgroup. I recently
dropped out of a Master’s Program, so I am in an anti-academic frame
of mind at the moment. I have more faith in my own intuition and
intellectual efforts than in institutional knowledge, much to my own
detriment.

I have relied heavily on the works of Joseph Campbell for a roadmap
of my journey. As you may or may not know, Campbell has become
popular through his populist approach to mythology and Jungian
psychology. I am trying to reconcile my familiarity with Campbell
to “modern day Christianity”, which I define the Christian Church
as an institution, which deems salvation is achieved primarily
through works rather than faith.

>>I started on this journey by listening to and researching the Beatles who

tried to capture the feeling one gets from transcendental meditation and
eastern religion in their music. Of course, the acid experience is a huge
part of that experience.


The music of Ozzy and Beatles has much in common — playful taboo crossing and
the mystic altered state, mystery-religion, cosmic gnostic footloose
profundity, ultimate concerns transcendently freely mixed with British wacky
absurd humor.

Metal such as Iron Maiden and Metallica can cover only half the themes or mood
of the intense mystic altered state; that genre as an expressive medium is
restricted. Mainstream acid-oriented Rock can cover more ground in exploring
the world of the intense mystic altered state, because it does not have to
restrict itself to constant heaviness.

Ozzy/Sabbath is ultimately superior to Metallica as an expressive style
because Ozzy/Sabbath has always had full room for humor and light beauty,
unlike the Metal genre. Much of the Iron Maiden lyrics seem to have their
inspired quality handicapped by a rigid rule of always having to be dark,
negative, hardcore.

>>Perhaps my critique of “seriousness” in Rock comes from the technical and

academic nature of the posts on this newsgroup.

http://www.egodeath.com/#AlteredStateLyrics
It doesn’t get any more straightforward than this set of Web pages. An
explanation of allusions to the mystic altered state is potentially as
straightforward and explicit than this. Where can people find a less
“technical and academic” explanation of Rock mysticism than this? The present
posting would as well, and as absurdly, be called “technical and academic”.

This discussion group is technical and academic compared to postings saying
just “Dude, too much tripping and my soul’s worn thin.” One step simpler than
this discussion group will land you in the public newsgroups.

If you hate academic bluster, you’ll love to hate the existing books that fail
to even see the presence of primary religious experiencing in Heavy Rock. The
allusions go right over their heads, so we end up with the familiar
combination of sophisticated-sounding blustery explanation, that completely
misses the essence, producing a study that pretends to be about certain Rock
lyrics, but really ends up being about the ideas embraced by Academia.

I would like to search more of the books about Rock for real insight — not
just saying that bands used LSD, not just saying that Lucy… is about LSD,
but spelling out the allusions to altered-state phenomena in songs far and
wide. The books I’ve seen have nothing even remotely like that.


Book lists:

Rock as philosophical mystery-religion
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/2PTKEDT3LYDKZ/
Some of these books on Heavy Rock *might* provide insight. I wouldn’t count
on it, but look up “acid”, “mystic”, “lsd”, “psychedelics”, and “drugs” in the
indexes.

Rush books (Rock group)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/2RLOST1ROMDCA

>>I recently dropped out of a Master’s Program, so I am in an anti-academic

frame of mind at the moment. I have more faith in my own intuition and
intellectual efforts than in institutional knowledge, much to my own
detriment.


Reading today’s quarter-baked scholarship is a necessary evil. I have to do a
major mental transformation to extract value out of most books.

The biggest mistake of so-called “higher education” is modern ignorance of the
use of visionary plants throughout human history. That fault may be laid on
academia rather than outside it.

>>I have relied heavily on the works of Joseph Campbell for a roadmap of my

journey.


From what I’ve read so far, Campbell seems more insightful than Jung. The
problem is the whole modern Psychology paradigm, which distorts its own field
as much as shining light on it. Both of them are grounded in the era before
the late 1960s, and therefore they are almost wholly ignorant of the
explanatory solution provided by visionary plants.

Scholarship in psychology and symbols will eventually be divided into before
and after the era of the rediscovery of entheogens, which had a turning point
around 1972. By 1972, any scholar of myth-religion-mysticism who was not
aware of the entheogen theory of religion is guilty of professional
incompetence and inexcusable oblivious ignorance. Prior to around 1972,
theories of myth-religion-mysticism can be excused for ignorance of the
entheogen solution to their questions — not so after about 1972.


Jung on Christianity
Murray Stein (Introduction), Carl Gustav Jung
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691006970

>>Campbell has become popular through his populist approach to mythology and

Jungian psychology. I am trying to reconcile my familiarity with Campbell to
“modern day Christianity”, which I define the Christian Church as an
institution, which deems salvation is achieved primarily through works rather
than faith.


Official Christianity is a system of salvation through works, with a veneer of
salvation through faith and regeneration through the Holy Spirit laid on top.
Because the official Church in fact lacks the Holy Spirit, the masses fall
back onto striving for salvation through works.

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor (covers Christian
myth-religion, fine content)
Joseph Campbell
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1577312023
Oct. 2001


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

In Rime of the ancient mariner(Powerslave album) there is a passage
of appegio harmonies played with accoustic guitar (beginning at 5’07)
which seem to have some strange evocative quality in the mystic
altered state.
They seem to evoke the egodeath quarrel. The harmonies create a
certain sphere which is created not only of sound but also colours
and it feels like some distinct remembering. There is a sound of a
cracking door layed underneath which additionaly seems relevant in
the mystic state. It sounds like something is short of bursting, like
a ballon just about to burst apart any moment.

regs
,merker

It’s sheer amazing how much better music can sound in the altered
state.
The sound becomes wider sounds crystal clear and it seems one can
perceive any instrument simultaneously and yet very distinctly.
Sounds which are nearly impossible to hear when not mystified are
impossible to ignore when heard in the mystical state.

Only thing is one should not dose too high in order to be still able
to understand the lyrics.
Also the time-stretching is sometimes sheer amazing. It seems like
one 4minute song goes on for eternity.

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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath — describes
in-scope discussion topics, as follows.

This discussion group covers the cybernetic theory of ego death and
ego transcendence, including:

o Nonreductionistic block-universe determinism/Fatedness, the closed
and preexisting future, tenseless time, free will as illusory, the
holographic universe, and predestination and Reformed theology.

o Cognitive science, mental construct processing, mental models,
ontological idealism, contemporary metaphysics of the continuant
self, cybernetic self-control, personal control agency, moral agency,
and self-government.

o Zen satori, short-path enlightenment, and Alan Watts;
transpersonal psychology, Ken Wilber, and integral theory.

o Entheogens and psychedelic drugs, the Eleusinian mysteries and
cracking the allegorical code of the mystery religions, mythic
metaphor and allegorical encoding, the mystic altered state, mystic
and religious experiencing, visionary states, religious rapture, and
Acid Rock mysticism.

o Loss of control, self-control seizure, cognitive instability, and
psychosis and schizophrenia.