Egodeath Yahoo Group – Digest 70: 2004-08-16

Modern hubris based on the assumption of evolutionary progress leading up to
wonderful *us* leads us to sell short and underestimate the ancients. We say
the ancients “could not” tell the difference between two categories we put to
them, but in fact we don’t know what the ancients *could* think; we fail even
to understand what they *did* think; we treat our hazy distorted view of them
as a clear picture and presume to administer intelligence tests to them based
on our own off-base assumptions about what the ancients were up to, what they
were about.

We ought to say the ancients “did not” distinguish between the various modes
of the Jesus figure — at least they did not distinguish between the modes *in
the way we expect*; they were not, like us, all-concerned about neatly keeping
track of the gospel mundane narrative storyline mode of the Jesus figure vs.
the mystery mystic mythic-realm Christ. Neither were they so concerned as we
dictate they ought to have been, to neatly keep track of the mundane Caesar
vs. the divinized heavenly Caesar.

Given that we hardly have a clue about what the ideas meant to the ancients,
we are about as poorly positioned as can be imagined, to cast judgment about
the mental abilities of the ancients who compiled and reworked the various
Jesus themes into the canon. First we ought to understand their goals and
their mode of thought, before presuming to judge their capabilities. Our own
capabilities are subject to such judgment as well, by the same token that we
presume — on the shakiest of foundations — to assess the capabilities of the
canon compilers.


— Michael Hoffman

From Part 2 of the Main Articles “WHO WAS CHRIST JESUS?”
http://pages.ca.inter.net/~oblio/parttwo.htm

Christ’s promise of salvation was real to the believer even though Christ’s
death did not take place on earth.

>>”… savior gods had in some way overcome death, or performed some act whose

effects guaranteed for the initiate a happy afterlife. Christianity’s savior
god, Christ Jesus, had undergone death and been resurrected as a redeeming act
(1 Corinthians 15:3-4), giving promises of resurrection and eternal life to
the believer. This guarantee involved another feature of ancient world
thinking, closely related to Platonism: the idea that things and events on
earth had their parallels in heaven; this included divine figures who served
as paradigms for earthly human counterparts. What the former underwent in the
spiritual realm reflected the experiences and determined the destinies of
those who were linked to them on earth. For example, the original “one like a
son of man” in Daniel’s vision (7:13-14) received power and dominion over the
earth from God, and this guaranteed that his human counterpart, the saints or
elect of Israel, were destined to receive these things when God’s Kingdom was
established on earth. Christianity’s Son, too, was a paradigm: Christ’s
experiences of suffering and death mirrored those of humans, but his
exaltation would similarly be paralleled by their own exaltation. As Romans
6:5 declares: “We shall be united with Christ in a resurrection like his.”


It’s important to keep in mind the emphatic contrast between these savior gods
and Ruler Cult.

Ruler Cult was limited by mundane reality so in a competitive escalation
between myth-religion savior figures and Ruler Cult, myth-religion could
always offer bigger claims than Ruler Cult, though Ruler Cult could claim more
tangible, practical benefits in the mundane realm, as long as things went well
for the emperor, which they often didn’t, what with “emperor of the week”
making a perverse joke and laughingstock out of the overinflated claims for
the emperor’s eternal omnipotent benevolent power and benefits.

With the claims of Ruler Cult so limited and compromised by tangible reality,
this left the field open by default to the myth-religion mystery-cults to
escalate their claims infinitely, and more persuasively even if more
etherially. The difference is not so clear cut, however, what with the
awaited return of the dead but perhaps not dead Caesar. To understand
Christian themes, we must read them as compared against the Ruler Cult
backdrop: “Caesar this, but, in contrast, Jesus that.”


In the book Drudgery Divine, Jonathan Z. Smith advocates thinking of parallel
*developing* themes in the Christian, Jewish, and Pagan religions: it was not
the case that Mystery Religions had always been about mystical death then
afterlife — that was a development that came about during certain centuries.
So right away when we say “The mystery-religions were about X”, we introduce
the fallacy of static thematic content of the mystery cults.

The Christian religions were changing and multiple; same with the Jewish
religions and the Pagan religions (including Ruler Cult and its Christian
reactive revision). We have not 3 static religions, but rather, some misty,
changing, morphing, and interpenetrating clouds.


— Michael Hoffman

>>a book “History of Art” volume 1, by H.W. Janson.

History of Art
H.W. Janson, Anthony F. Janson
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0810934469

History of Art: Study Guide
Janson
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0138884471
Cover shows a mushroom table in lower left.

History of Art, Revised (Trade Version) (6th Ed.)
Anthony F. Janson
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0131828959

>History of Art: Study Guide
>Janson
>http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0138884471
>Cover shows a mushroom table in lower left.

Here is a quick crop and mask of the mushroom table.

http://www.egodeath.com/images/mushroomtable.jpg

Jesse Jones wrote:

>>About the mushroom garden from the Carmina Burana, Janson says:

“The trees, vines, and flowers remain so abstract that
we cannot identify a single species…. Yet they have
an uncanny vitality of their own that makes them seem
to sprout and unfold as if the growth of an entire
season were compressed into a few frantic moments.
These giant seedlings convey the exuberance of early
summer, of stored energy suddenly released, far more
intensely than any normal vegetation could. Our
artist has created a fairytale landscape, but his
enchanted world nevertheless evokes and essential
underlying reality.”

>>Janson seems to know a great deal about art, but he

seems not to know about the visionary plant component
of a significant portion of the art in his book, which
isn’t surprising.


The art is at
http://www.egodeath.com/images/CarminaBuranaMushroomGarden.jpg
with colors auto-balanced.

The diversity of types of Jesus figure in the New Testament reflects an effort
to extend and sweep outwards and then reel in everyone back into the
officially controlled fold.

So there is both expansive outreach to integrate *diverse* and wide-ranging
themes from the Hellenistic era, and, the attempt to bring all that diversity
*together* into a single officially controlled all-inclusive, top-down
controlled religion: all-inclusive, and yet also all-else-exclusive; the
Constantine-era officials wanted to reel in everyone, in such a way that they
had everyone under their control, and if anyone didn’t submit to that control,
then the rebels were held to be outside the all-inclusive broad tent, outside
the one universal religion.

Just calling this top-down controlled, canonical brand of religion “broad” or
“narrow” doesn’t capture this key dynamic, motive, and strategy. The orthodox
version of the Christian religion was “broad” in a particular way, in
conjunction with being “narrow” in a certain sense.

Logically, the higher uncontrollable transcendent controller — the level of
primary control standing over our secondary personal control agency — may be
coldly uncaring or antagonistic like an actual parent. We don’t need a parent
metaphorical figure perhaps, but we do need, in the peak mystic window, a
*benevolent* figure.

Don’t get the cart before the horse: the purpose of bringing in the metaphor
of ‘parent’ is because ‘parent’ is a symbol of what prayer is actually
concerned with, which is transcendent benevolence that is coupled with radical
transcendent power over the deterministic cosmos. If actual parents don’t
meet the ideal, that’s a flaw of the actual parents, not the ideal.

The ideal of a nurturing benevolent creator, which is represented
metaphorically by ‘parent’ or ‘ideal parent’, is created in the mystic mind as
a specific solution to a specific overpowering problem, a problem which is our
birthright to discover and grapple with and solve transcendently, whether or
not we choose to metaphorize the solution as ‘parent’.

We don’t need a “parent” so much as we need, more precisely, transcendent
powerful benevolence in the higher, primary level of control; we need the
uncontrollable transcendent controller to be benevolent, whether or not it is
in fact benevolent, and having an attitude toward it as benevolent turns out
to be, in practice, the urgently needed restabilizing solution to the fatal
problem of alarming control-breakdown emergency.

When the mystic comes across the emergency of self-control seizure, the
solution is transrationally postulating that there is benevolence that is
outside our personal control center, benevolence which transcends cosmic
machine-determinism. Such benevolence is well metaphorized by the figure of
‘ideal parent’, even if it is also metaphorizable — more complexly and less
clearly — as one’s own higher, transcendent, divine part of oneself, one’s
other half, one’s higher spouse or holy guardian angel.

‘Guardian’ and ‘spouse’ here both aim to convey the core important idea which
is the real payload, the idea of benevolence of powerful controllership over
one’s thoughts and movements of will, a benevolence that is not subject to
machine-determinism even while machine-determinism is fully believed and
compellingly experienced. ‘Parent’ is not the payload; it is merely the
metaphor, the symbol, the shell, the symbolic vehicle to efficiently deliver
the payload.

Similarly, mystic embracing also serves not to focus on sex so much as
benevolence; in this metaphor, wrath is associated with rape/rapture, while
benevolence is associated with consensual union.

We don’t need a parent-type person, except that we do need a benevolent
rescuer, and benevolence is often best conceived as the essence of personhood;
to be benevolent is to be a person; what the mystic fears is machine-like
uncaring, and, less so, personal wrath on the part of the primary
control-level. The latter two are closely associated: the personal wrath of
the prisonkeeper demiurge is pretty much functionally the same thing as a
machine-like uncaring block-universe that would just as soon the peak-mystic
go psychotic and lose viable stable control.

When mystics talk of hoping fervently in a benevolent controller, typically
envisioned as a nurturing parent-figure, what is the problem they are solving
by introducing this hope? They are solving, transrationally, the problem of
personal control seizure, which is envisioned as a heartless uncaring
deterministic machine-prison *and* as a fittingly evil, negative personal
prison-guard associated with this deterministic prison.

Against that aspect of divine and transcendent experiencing and conception,
stands the *non* deterministic, *non* machine-like, *benevolent* figure that
is therefore a *personal* figure. What is the best shorthand to mentally
represent a benevolent, powerful, personal figure? A nurturing parent — and
also, a king, or queen, who were conceived as bestowing divine-type acts of
exemption, reprieve, release, and rescue upon condemned prisoners. Another
similar figuration is one’s own holy guardian angel, conceived as the
divinely-associated higher part of oneself.

One function/role of dualistic religion is to attribute negative aspects to
demiurge and/or wrathful nature of an uncontrollable higher controller, and
attribute positive/benevolent aspects to radically/entirely transcendent god.

This positive benevolent faith-targeted role, on which one can pray for
transcendently powerful benevolent rescue and mercy and assistance, is a
function/role of the figure of the holy guardian angel, one’s genius, that is
a higher part of oneself, despite its being an uncontrollable controller (a
primary level control center separated from our secondary-level, personal
locus of control-agency).

There are aspects of transcendent wrath and transcendent benevolence as a
standard in world mysticism; the actual point at issue is how we choose to
metaphorically relate, unite, or separate these two aspects.

Given that our own personal locus of control is enchantingly liable and
fascinatingly susceptible to self-control failure, instability, locking up,
seizure, and breakdown (essentially connected with ‘divine wrath’), we can
leap out of rationality, as an emergency rescue move, the only possible viable
strategy being to move away from pure reason and the deterministic problem it
brings, and rely on (transrationally) an *ideal* of the benevolent figure.

Isis/Virgin Mary (the positive nurturing aspect of the Great Goddess/Great
Mother) is inherently a superior figure to God/Zeus/Jupiter, because the
mother is more likely to be nurturing than the father. The mother is more
closely associated with nurture than the father is.

The lesser importance of the ‘parent’ theme itself than benevolence also
applies to the ‘person’ theme; the main driving point is not that the
desperate mystic prays to a *personal* God, but rather, the real point is that
the mystic prays to a *benevolent* (and power-wielding) God — a God who is
first of all *benevolent*, long before he is a *person*. If mystic prayer is
to a person, that is only because such prayer is first of all to a *locus of
benevolence*, which is *later* used to define a characteristic of a ‘person’.

God is only thought of as a person because he is, first of all and most
importantly, thought of as benevolent, while benevolence is starkly contrasted
with uncaring, heartless, cold block-universe determinism. Praying to an
emphatically personal God misses the real point a bit; the real driving nature
of mystic prayer is originally first of all, praying to an emphatically
*benevolent* God, a life-sustaining, life-returning locus of control-power.

God is thought of as “personal” as a result of him first being thought of as
*benevolent*, a “first thought” which is a particular fitting solution to a
particular core problem lurking inside the mind’s labyrinth: the problem of
retaining and recovering self-control stability in the midst of full
comprehension of the experiential idea of block-universe determinism, an idea
that kills personal control stability and the claim to personal autonomy of
controllership or confidence of the personal agent’s holding and possessing
control-power.

The Jesus Mysteries is the best book, particularly when its sequel Jesus and
the Goddess is included, because it not only presents the standard case
against the historicity of Jesus, but proposes a fairly detailed plausible
positive explanation of what the Jesus figure actually did mean to its
audience especially prior to Constantine.

This book does not commit the standard common fallacy of dissolving-away Jesus
entirely upon refuting the historicity of Jesus, nor the mistake of reducing
the Jesus figure to the literal material sun or other natural physical
entities such as vegetative fertility cycles. Instead the book portrays Jesus
within a mystic-state experiential initiation framework.

This combination of a fairly good case against Jesus’ historicity, combined
with a fairly good case for Jesus’ mystic-experiential meaning (not merely an
ordinary-state “symbolic” interpretation such as Acharya S and Alvin Boyd
Kuhn), by certain standards, makes this book the best overall book about the
historicity of Jesus, by not only providing the negative argument, but
providing the most richly compelling positive argument for what the Jesus
figure really meant within its cultural context.


Earl Doherty’s book The Jesus Puzzle is the 2nd-best book, focusing entirely
and exclusively on the negative half of the puzzle, doing an excellent job of
that, while remaining silent on the positive, alternative explanation of what
the Jesus figure did mean and what the actual origin of Christianity was.


— Michael Hoffman

>>mercy
>>benevolence

Add ‘compassionate’; against an uncaring deterministic machine-universe in
which one experiences being helplessly trapped and threatened by with harmful
loss of control, the advanced initiate in the peak window transcendently is
brought to pray hopefully, while lacking all rational basis, for an attitude
of compassion rather than being coerced and sucked into doing harm against
one’s usual values, just in order to permanently prove a point about the
illusory aspect of personal control power.

Ken Wilber in his first book The Spectrum of Consciousness (the one that
starts by omitting the Nitrous Oxide lead-in of William James’ famous passage)
originally spoke in terms similar to an original enlightened/paradisical state
from which we fell, to which we must return. But he quickly turned to
repudiate that classic idea to obsess with the pre/trans fallacy, saying we
can’t *return* to paradise since we were never there as babies — here his
mystic-metaphorical ignorance shows; here his mythic illiteracy is
highlighted.

The theme of return to an original enlightened state is not merely symbolic or
metaphysical abstract theoretical philosophy, it’s an overpowering
mystic-altered-state expeirence of remembering — a timeless type of
remembering that has nothing to do with temporal, in-time progress from
literally infantile consciousness to fully mature adult consciousness.

This *experience* of return to the paradisical garden is well represented by
the prominent popular theme of the angel of the lord guarding the gate of
paradise with a flaming sword. To get back into paradise, to remember the way
back into it, the advanced initiate must pass through the angel of death with
whirling sword, losing the egoic deluded self-concept of autonomous personal
controllership agency.

If we could accurately understand exactly what Constantine assigned Eusebius
to do, what the real essence, motive, and strategy of Eusebius’
task-assignment was, we’d understand so much about the actual origins and
original spirit of Christianity. Eusebius had to do a lot of goal-driven
work, strategically planned and orchestrated, to achieve what he did.

He had to round up, reach out, and take over all sorts of variants on
Hellenistic-era religious groups or continually developing traditions and
recombinations of traditions, to try to freeze this flux in order to control
and commandeer it. Reading the spirit of motives is essential; we must beware
of misreading the situation and the character of the motives. Eusebius was a
successful goal-driven man who successfully carried out a viable “literary
warfare” strategy to achieve certain powerful, specific ends and end-results.


— Michael Hoffman

>>mercy
>>benevolence
>>compassionate

‘leniency’ would also fit in as a peak mystic-state experience of need and
hope. After that concept is securely pinned down, then analyzing the theme of
‘forgiveness’ might be interesting. Soliciting leniency as from a powerful
and hopefully benevolent king/ruler — like experiencing oneself in the mystic
state, as a merely secondary controller, as being a puppet controlled by
strings with some mysterious uncontrollable primary controller beyond a veil.

Rulers were venerated because they were like this mystic, indirectly yet
vividly experienced hidden primary controller to which one is revealed to be a
subject. Egoic controllership, personal autonomous agency and the power it
wields, is at the full mercy of that which controls it and secretly gives rise
to it. Is the higher controller personal, is it powerful, is it benevolent?

When egoic autonomous personal control breaks down at the end of its rope and
its apparent control power vanishes, logically and experientially cancelled
out by premises including timeless block-universe fixity, it’s easy to see how
the *need* for a personal, powerful, benevolent transcendent controller arises
as a hoped-for and urgently required entity at the other end of one’s
control-ropes, to lift up and restore helpless personal power.

The hope is an intelligible hope that corresponds with, as a solution, a
particular experiential, practical problem: the problem of control evaporation
and instability in the light of the experiential comprehension of
block-universe determinism and related mystic conceptual and intellectual
constructs.

Analyze the problem side-by-side with the solution, and how the solution fits
with the problem:

o How is it that a person without God runs into a fatal problem regarding
controllership?

o How is it that this results in a need and hope for a personal benevolent
powerful primary control entity that is wholly outside the familiar locus of
one’s control power, and resides outside the system of the world (outside of
the fated cosmos)?

Jesus says: “Your faith has healed you.”

This is, rationally unjustified (in a way) faith in the trustworthiness and
life-sustaining nature of that weird alien thing, [that upon which you as
secondary-level control agent are dependent]; given the insight that I’m a
secondary-only controller (locus of control), this entails something else that
is the primary-level controller; this is as though directly logically implied
and logically perceived, and conceptualized — seen indirectly as in a mirror
by implication and by experience.

Is the primary controller a heartless randomizer machine that would as soon
destroy as preserve you? Or is the primary controller trustworthy? We have
no firm basis rationally and logically upon which to conclude that the primary
controller is life-sustaining and thus benevolent, but Buddha touching the
ground when confronted by the demon Mara can be read as the divine attitude:
the salvific divine transcendent and transrational attitude of reasonless
trust in the benevolence of whatever it is that is the primary controller —
and this trust has to be in place as a necessity-for-life continuance, even
when all the things that happen to the person are terrible (the story of Job).

We can wonder whether we’re placing trust in the essential goodness
(life-sustaining, non-harmful) of the ground of being, or of a personal
controller-god residing outside the ground of being, but really it is
functionally equivalent either way; the contrast is not between worshipping
the universe a la Buddhism is often said to do (Budda touching the ground) vs.
worshipping personal God; the real, actually important contrast is between not
being able to put trust in that-which-is-primary-controller, vs. being able to
put trust in that-which-is-primary-controller.

The actual essential idea is that of the secondary-level control agent having
(as a matter of life or death, viability or insane control-seizure, divine
harmful psychosis) to put trust in an alien, primary-level, remote primary
controller, in a level of controllership that is fundamentally separated from
the level of secondary-level personal control agency (the egoic personal locus
of control).

The personal locus of control *has to* be brought to put trust in the remote,
that is, *separate*, primary level of control — whether the primary level of
control is pictured as the “nonpersonal” Ground of Being, or as a “personal”
god; either object of hope still revolves around the same thing: an attitude
of dependent trust, hope, faith. You faith has saved you from harmful
control-destruction on the stormy sea of controllership instability.

We’d really be best with some apophatic or combined notion of Ground/God as
the thing “worshipped” — the thing trusted in as the primary-level locus of
control. Making real progress explanatory progress here, we must not run
first to the concept of “person”, but rather, run directly to the concepts
comprised by the concept of “person”. Before debating whether or not to
worship a personal god, vs. Ground, we must first picture the “person” idea as
being a shorthand for certain attributes: what are those attributes that we
call, for short, a divine or transcendent “person”?

Those attributes are: trustworthiness, reliability (not in the sense of
‘consistency’, but ability to be seriously relied on in a fatally urgent
life-and-death situation), being an object of hope and dependence. Can I take
an attitude of trust that [that-which-controls-me as primary-level locus of
control] is a foundation I can depend on in the mystic peak-state window of
spiritual emergency? Can the primary control level be firmly, gravely, and
seriously trusted (profoundly relied upon) during one’s moment of spiritual
emergency?

How can I, as secondary-level locus of controllership, possibly scrape
together the hope that that-which-controls me (the primary-level controller)
can be trusted when my well-being (my not-being-harmed) most urgently depends
on it?

The loosecog state enables, as a pair, both falling down (falling apart) and
repair/restructuring (the divine attitude of prayerful, arighting,
repositioning of oneself as one respectfully subservient to and *dependent
upon* the goodness, mercy, life-sustaining, non-harming nature of a newly
intuited higher control level (a level which, being a *level*, inherently is
held to be outside the secondary agent’s realm of control and command).

Deep mental restructuring both produces the problem, and the solution; the
dangerous and threatening control-seizure and the pious salvific restorative
dependent and reverent attitude that is the only hope for recovery from the
danger on the stormy sea of madness.

The loosecog state which most enables discovering the untrustworthiness and
powerlessness of personal control — discovering it to be a nothing, a merely
secondary-level control *not* the always formerly presumed primary-level,
autonomous type of controllership — also enables suddenly deeply and broadly
shifting into the alternate whole-system restructuring, of a person who has
the right, divine, life-sustaining, pious attitude.

Attitude is everything in this dire straights state of loose cog; attitude
regarding one’s now-revealed-as-secondary-only controllership to the now
revealed primary level of controllership, regarding whether one can place (and
rest) hope (and trust) upon the hidden primary locus of control, is
everything; one’s not-being-harmed fully depends wholly upon one’s attitude
toward the primary now that one has fully comprehended that one is not primary
but only secondary and now must get right in one’s attitude toward primary
controllership.

The Jesus mystery-cult has no idol except the reified figure of Jesus himself,
as the multi-level aid being of service to most easily project one’s attitude
of dependent Hope upon. The figure of a divinity such as a semiphysical Jesus
is useful to beginning mystics for certain reasons, and is useful to advanced
mystics for other reasons, even if it is possible to have divine trusting
reverential dependence without involving an idea that appears like Jesus or a
personal god.

We could divinize the Ground and treat it as the object of reverential
transcendent trusting dependence, as opposed to thinking of the Ground as
Mara-like (a demonic heartless uncaring or hostile deterministic
prison-machine). So transcendent trust in the primary level is the real
object and concern of reverential worship — neither the Ground nor personal
god is the essence of what one must reverence.

To reverence the Ground of Being (as Buddha touching the ground when
threatened by Mara) is merely a symbol, or representation, of what is actually
being reverenced: the primary level of control, to which one is now aware of
being subject. Regardless of whether the primary control level is thought of
as Ground or personal god, the real point is to summon, despite lack of
rational basis, the attitude of faith, trusting dependence and reliance upon
it.

This attitude is only possible in the mystic loosecog state and is only needed
in that state. The problem and its solution — the ability to have the
problem and the ability to manifest the solution to that problem — are both
state-specific, having really nothing to do with ordinary-state events that
one undergoes in day-to-day life. Applicability of this divine attitude of
trusting dependence can be applied to daily life, but this use of it is feeble
and a shadow of its primary usage or dynamic, which is firmly based in the
intense altered loosecog state.


‘Faith’ in a ‘personal’ god, goddess (Isis/V. Mary) or godman (Jesus) means
just such attitude of placing dependent Hope and reliance upon something that
is conceived of as higher-level primary control locus: the divinely granted
attitude of faithful trusting dependence and reliance upon a fundamentally
separate, uncontrollable (or fully discretionary and not bound) realm or locus
of control, of string-pulling to which you are consciously aware of being
subject to.

When the puppet awakens to its nature of total dependence, what attitude is
injected into it by the puppetmaster? The puppetmaster could demolish the
marionette, could make it go against its familiar desires as control-agent,
could harm it precisely through the fact that the puppetmaster has full
control over the wellspring of thoughts in the puppet’s mind.

Thus arises the idea of hope for exchange, the idea that God thrives on being
reverenced, or thrives especially on the burning smoke of sacrificed ego: I’ll
incinerate my ego delusion as food for you (worthless fat and hair,
ironically, not meat of the real me), god, in return for my keeping the
worship of you alive: I will continue to worship you, god, if you in return
don’t harm or kill me; here is the essence of the idea of negotiating with
god.

The idea there is: Our god’s goal is to keep alive by continuing to be
worshipped by us; he can’t be worshipped by us if he fails to preserve us
without harm, so we are situated to negotiate: we have something god wants
(our ego-smoke and reverential worship and glorification), and god has
something we want (the power to help rather than coerce our thoughts into
doing actions that harm ourselves).

‘Grace’ in standard theology refers to the mechanism by which the right
transcendent attitude is injected into the person, into the dead power of
personal controllership which has become impotnently seized. Grace is the
mechanism through which one is given faith (this is the standard concept that
defines the essential idea of Reformed theology).

The now-helpless personal agent needs a trusting attitude, but as hard as he
digs around in his resource kit, nothing coming from within his realm of
control power can possibly summon this kind of rationally baseless trusting
attitude that can restore control stability and heal the paralysis of control,
casting out the demons and resisting temptation to prove the mayhem, the
singularity-point of control which is the tomb, the death of the egoic false
king. Thinking of ‘grace’ as an *attitude* might have more of a place in
Catholic Virgin-Mary worship than patriarchal or Reformed theology.


If the mystic state is harmful, so hjarmful we must stoop so low as resorting
to prayerful non-rational reliance on a miraculously powerful alien divinity
to rescue us from our pathetic helpless needy state, why don’t we simply avoid
it? Because we seek to increase our personal control-power. The more you
increase yoru hunt for personal control-power, the more inevitably you’ll be
drawn toward the fatal attractor, the tractor beam, the maelstrom, until the
black hole gains control.

We are power-seeking controller-agents by nature; when we amplify this nature
utilzing the msytic altered state, we are bound to reach a surprising object
of our desire: total control is total control-instability, total self-control
seizure. Because we seek and pursue power, we harness the most powerful
metaprogramming toolkits, and thereby, we eventually reach the state of
psychotic unstable divine-madness control-seizure (our birthright, this
ability to climax as control-agent), and then we are divinized, made
transcendent (the second half of our religious birthright).

Different breakthroughs while developing a theory have difference character.
I may be onto something amounting to a distinct kind of breakthrough, since it
has always been the hardest, most ultimate challenge to write about peak
control-seizure and how it fits with causing the self-reliant rationalist to
pray and say “aha, the Jesus figure descending to my mind, now I acknowledge
prayerfully as making full sense!”

A lot of conceptual vocabulary development is needed in this late-modern era
to be adequately equipped to discuss the ins-and-outs of this dynamic, this
ultimate experience, the exact logic and cognitive dynamics behind the peak
moment of divinization and spiritual regeneration. This is a problem I’ve
been struggling with for years, and often have felt I’ve had to postpone and
merely hint at.

It’s been tough to find *viable* ways of talking about these matters — of
communicating them to other people, of putting my finger on the essence for
myself, of articulating it to any standard of intelligibility. What beautiful
horror, specifically, does one see — what beautiful horrific Medusa-Gorgon
*exactly*? Don’t mumble, don’t be evasive; be specific and explicit; don’t
beat around the bush. (1/7/04 post/thread: Circular vague exhortations to
mystic consciousness)

And, as part 2, how does prayer and divine transcendent thinking relate to
that strange problem one encounters — this must be explained in a way that
any programme rcan understand. Explain it to the rationalist self-reliant
advocates of (conventional) determinism; explain it to the no-nonsense
down-to-earth hardheads in Missouri. Explain it just like the engineering
textbooks (never mind the Copenhagenist propaganda in the Quantum Physics
textbook, ever since science has been co-opted and has turned to pimping for
egoic freewill and magical mind-over-matter).

How exactly does ego death work, and how — clearly and exactly, in plain
English — does transcendent leaping-out-of-the-system work? What is it
really all about, and don’t launch into an airy free-floating circularity: be
specific, be grounded, and really, actually explain it in comprehensible,
summarizable terms. I am at last becoming able to do this, but if this is a
breakthrough, it has been the slowest, the least instantaneous.

How have I switched from not being able to articulate and explain this
dynamic, to being able? Can a point in time be reasonably identified? Yes,
look for the moment when I fully grasped the world-religion importance of the
theme of “the wrathful and the compassionate deities”, and Kali as the killer
and revered goddess, and the wrath and mercy of God such as in Jewish
mysticism — only at this point did I also recall earlier thoughts, shocking
to Protestant readers of Dave Hunt, about Virgin Mary being worshipped as
merciful protector and intercessor and advocate against the wrathful harsh
judgment of Jesus sitting on the judgment throne at the last trumpet.

Only after I recognized the generalized theme of “wrathful vs. compassionate”
and thought of the coupling deities, did I then *put together* the many times
I had come across that theme expressed in disparate locations and
stylizations; this is a matter of pattern recognition, and there was
definitely a fairly focused point in time recently when I first perceived this
pattern of the standard pair of wrathful/compassionate, and in conjunction,
connected that to The Problem and The Solution which I had been struggling to
explain.

I knew about The Problem (of dangerous self-control instability and seizure)
and The Solution (reverent acknowledgement of the primary control level, as
one awakened to one’s secondary not primary controllership — and then, more
so, the necessity of nonrational reliance and *trust* in the alien primary
control level).

Key ideas needed along the way prior to putting the pieces together included
the uncontrollable transcendent controller, and Douglas Hofstadter’s
jumping-outside-=the-system, which naturally fit with the longer-familiar
ideas of Alan Watts regarding too-tight cybernetic feedback coupling. Also
key was Neville Drury on Giger’s paintings of machine-embeddedness, plus heavy
confirmation of various ideas (perhaps somewhat peripheral to the present
problem) while studying recently Western esotericism — that astrology’s
central idea was grappling with fatedness.

Probably the key central enabling idea and turning point was that of
wrathful-then-compassionate (as in the radio preaching in Helios Creed’s song
“Acid Rain”).


Earliest recent posts about divine wrath and compassion:


Powerfully relevant:
1/2/04 Metaphor: calming the turbulent sea


1/6/04 Love, heart, compassion, nurturing, and mercy — the words “wrath” and
“compassion” are placed near each other.

6/27/04 Why praying returns control stability

7/14/04 Cybernetics of pleading for mercy from compass t’t controller

8/2/04 Helios Creed sermon: The Bad News and The Wrath of God

8/2/04 Appease divine wrath by divine-provided infin. sacrifice, gain love

8/7/04 Wrath, trembling, modern flattening of myth-religion

8/16/04 – present thread started and sustained powerfully


It’s a real coin toss here that shows how fake, false, and unrealistic the
idea of “sudden breakthrough” often is, like the book ___ which disproves
sudden genius invention and discovery in science and technology; he shows
there is never identifiable moment of “non-normal thinking” during what’s
called a breakthrough-discovery period.

When you look at the thinking used by discoverers, at any point it is always
normal thinking; there is never a special, “creative” type of alternative type
of thinking; just merely normal problem solving, effectively sustained and
directed, including false starts that are discarded along the way; the feeling
or sense of revelation is even also productive of lots of incorrect ideas that
are soon discarded (a recent study of early modern alchemy and science makes
that point too).

However, there has been some thinking too about melancholy and genius, such as
in the Renaissance period. We do know that loose cog certainly and provably
does support non-normal, special, creative mode of thinking — even though
many modern discoveries didn’t depend on that mode of cognition.

The archives prove that I now and then for years posted on themes about
control seizure, but that recently, I built up more momentum on the subject,
an upward accelerating curve recently, and you could argue for 1/6/04 or
6/27/04 or the later points along this curve. What are the earliest and most
recent dates one could possibly pick to assert that “recently I had a
breakthrough on this topic of wrath/compassion”? Perhaps 1/6/04 and 8/18/04
are the outer dates. I think the most powerful and impactful subject title
would be

7/14/04 Cybernetics of pleading for mercy from compass t’t controller

although I still had to work out that theme over the next month.

I almost need some sort of graph to track the upward curve, to try to pin some
date (artificially) as most meaningful or representative of a “breakthrough
day”. It seems like I not only want lots of progress, I seek *sudden*,
instantaneous leaps; that is, progress concentrated into isolated moments.
Perhaps I desire that because it’s associated with satori, system-wide deep
system shift, yet these days I’m beyond such a high degree of systemic shift.

Yes, a sort of sudden pattern recognition happened with the particular theme
of “wrath/compassion”, and you could easily determine which posting had those
two words close — such as … not the lone posting 1/6/04, but rather, the
first posting that was close to the postings where I regularly spoke of
wrath/compassion aspects of deity, which is probably 8/7/04, a commentary on
‘wrath’ spurred by my denunciation of Versluis’ lame treatment of wrath in the
book I recently studied, Wisdom’s Children.

So I pick 8/7/04, I suppose, as a representative date for a breakthrough
regarding recognizing the essentially mystic-experiential meaning of
‘wrath-compassion’ deities.

I then straightaway went on to really build something substantial on this
basis starting 8/16/04, by equating, with sustained elaboration, ‘wrath’ with
‘control instability seizure’ and ‘compassion’ with the trans-rational
solution to the problem, bringing rescue and recovery of viable
controllership, as divinized and justified king who does not any longer pose
as an autonomous primary controller. I could say that my thinking or
intellectual work finally came to fruition in mid-August 2004 on this subject.

I can finally talk easily and at length about self-control seizure and
transcendent divine rescue through receiving salvific ‘faith’, that is,
trans-rational and truly, essentially religious trust in the non-harming
nature of the mysterious primary control level. Only after having posted
within the thread

8/16/04 – Divine wrath, machine dualism, prayer is to benevolent person/agency

can I at last do what I felt I had been held back on for so long, freely and
coherently discuss and explain this subject, routinely and straightforwardly
while talking directly to the essential dynamics involved. I’ve explained
many things before, but never until now have felt that I had actually, truly,
really explained the main problem of control breakdown and divine recovery,
what’s actually involved in this dynamic, in plain and direct terms.

I’m reposting the next post
with typos fixed.

— Michael Hoffman

‘Grace’ in standard theology refers to the mechanism by which the right
transcendent attitude is injected into the person, into the dead power of
personal controllership which has become impotently seized. Grace is the
mechanism through which one is given faith (this is the standard concept that
defines the essential idea of Reformed theology).

The now-helpless personal agent needs a trusting attitude, but as hard as he
digs around in his resource kit, nothing coming from within his realm of
control power can possibly summon this kind of rationally baseless trusting
attitude that can restore control stability and heal the paralysis of control,
casting out the demons and resisting temptation to prove the mayhem, the
singularity-point of control which is the tomb, the death of the egoic false
king. Thinking of ‘grace’ as an *attitude* might have more of a place in
Catholic Virgin-Mary worship than patriarchal or Reformed theology.


If the mystic state is harmful, so harmful we must stoop so low as resorting
to prayerful non-rational reliance on a miraculously powerful alien divinity
to rescue us from our pathetic helpless needy state, why don’t we simply avoid
it? Because we seek to increase our personal control-power. The more you
increase your hunt for personal control-power, the more inevitably you’ll be
drawn toward the fatal attractor, the tractor beam, the maelstrom, until the
black hole gains control.

We are power-seeking controller-agents by nature; when we amplify this nature
utilizing the mystic altered state, we are bound to reach a surprising object
of our desire: total control is total control-instability, total self-control
seizure. Because we seek and pursue power, we harness the most powerful
metaprogramming toolkits, and thereby, we eventually reach the state of
psychotic unstable divine-madness control-seizure (our birthright, this
ability to climax as control-agent), and then we are divinized, made
transcendent (the second half of our religious birthright).

I did a so-so job of not posting before; I ended up posting certain
discoveries I wanted to provably date, and posted in another group and in my
weblog. I vow not to post through September.

I have written enough; just follow through on that line of analysis.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience. The essence, paradigm, origin, and fountainhead of religion is
the use of visionary plants to routinely trigger the intense mystic altered
state, producing loose cognitive association binding, which then produces an
experience of frozen block-universe determinism with a single, pre-existing,
ever-existing future. The return of the ordinary state of consciousness is
allegorized as a transcendence of Necessity or cosmic determinism. Myth
describes this mystic-state experience. Initiation is classically a series of
some 8 visionary-plant sessions, interspersed with study of perennial
philosophy. Most religion is a distortion, corruption, literalization, and
cooptation of this standard initiation system.

This text file is automatically posted to the Egodeath Yahoo group every two
weeks.

The Egodeath Yahoo group is a newsletter or Weblog sent out by Michael Hoffman.


This Yahoo 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.


To post on these subjects, you can join the group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeathunmoderated
and then send email to:
egodeathunmoderated@yahoogroups.com


— Michael Hoffman
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath
http://www.egodeath.com

Whenever I refrain from posting, I wonder what the Yahoo policies are on
removing dead groups. If I want to keep christconunmod alive, I have to post
or someone has to.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/christconunmod/


—–Original Message—–
From: notify@yahoogroups.com [mailto:notify@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2004 3:38 AM
To: christconunmod-owner@yahoogroups.com
Subject: First warning: your group christconunmod will soon be deleted


Dear Yahoo! Groups Moderator,

IMPORTANT NOTICE:

Your group, christconunmod, has been marked as inactive, because it has
had no message activity in the last 90 days or currently has fewer
than 2 members. If the group remains inactive for another 30 days, we
will delete the group.

REACTIVATE YOUR GROUP NOW:
If you would like to keep your group, choose one of the following options:

1) Use the group now. All you have to do is post a message
and make sure there are at least 2 people in the group.

2) Request an extension

To do either, or for more information please visit:
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IF YOU DO NOTHING, YOUR GROUP WILL BE DELETED IN 30
DAYS AND ALL OF YOUR GROUP’S DATA WILL BE PERMANENTLY DELETED.

Sincerely,

The Yahoo! Groups Team

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Discusssion group community death and rebirth experience



From: notify@yahoogroups.com [mailto:notify@yahoogroups.com]
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2004 3:21 AM
To: christconunmod-owner@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Congratulations! Your group christconunmod has been
reactivated.

Dear Yahoo! Groups group Owner/Moderator,

Due to recent activity, your group christconunmod has been removed
from inactive status and will no longer be deleted. Welcome back!
After 90 days, we’ll check your group again. Until then,
enjoy the group.

Thanks for using the Yahoo! Groups service.

Sincerely,

The Yahoo! Groups Team

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

This text file is automatically posted to the Egodeath Yahoo group every two
weeks.

The Egodeath Yahoo group is a newsletter or Weblog sent out by Michael Hoffman.


This Yahoo 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.


To post on these subjects, you can join the group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeathunmoderated
and then send email to:
egodeathunmoderated@yahoogroups.com


— Michael Hoffman
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath
http://www.egodeath.com

This text file is automatically posted to the Egodeath Yahoo group every two
weeks.

The Egodeath Yahoo group is a newsletter or Weblog sent out by Michael Hoffman.


This Yahoo 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.


To post on these subjects, you can join the group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeathunmoderated
and then send email to:
egodeathunmoderated@yahoogroups.com


— Michael Hoffman
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath
http://www.egodeath.com

This text file is automatically posted to the Egodeath Yahoo group every two
weeks.

The Egodeath Yahoo group is a newsletter or Weblog sent out by Michael Hoffman.


This Yahoo 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.


To post on these subjects, you can join the group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeathunmoderated
and then send email to:
egodeathunmoderated@yahoogroups.com


— Michael Hoffman
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/egodeath
http://www.egodeath.com

Whenever I order a lecture course from http://teachco.com, an envelope arrives
soon after receiving the lectures, containing a coupon. This is probably a
routine marketing strategy of giving an incentive to buy, because these are
time-limited coupons, only good for a couple months or so.

Barnes & Noble has a new lecture course series — I’d like to know what
TeachCo says about this, regarding their legally protected and defended
patent/copyright.

Nine Inch Nails as Head Music. The Cross as an elegant efficient
representation of no-free-will and no-separate-self.


Someone wrote:

>>I am trying to locate on your website what you have to say about Nine Inch

Nails. I am interested in ego death. I have schizoaffective disorder and have
experienced aspects of this. I often have a strong feeling of having no free
will and being controlled by God. I also derive deep spiritual meanings from
rock lyrics, including Nine Inch Nails. I am interested in nondualistic
perspectives. I’m trying to figure out if God really exists and if God is
communicating with me.


Much of Nine Inch Nails, including the live concert experience, is Head
Music” — a broadly useful music genre term. That is, much of NIN is about
the phenomena experienced in the LSD-induced mystic altered state. The lyrics
are worth analyzing and I have analyzed the lyrics but I don’t know if I have
written and posted about NIN specifically (I’d have to do a couple searches —
perhaps I posted about it prior to starting the discussion group). I’m not
into 60s psych or Metal or Heavy Rock or Prog or Goth — rather, I’m into head
music, which is actual Acid Rock in the broad sense.

Rock has an ongoing perennial esoteric tradition that transcends genres, of
head music, which is acid-inspired, above all.

Real Rock (valuable Rock) is mystic Rock; non-mystic Rock is disposable, of
little real worth. Genres are not the essential factor; the intense mystic
state is the essential factor and is most typically, for most people, accessed
through ingesting external visionary chemicals.


I value additional confirmation that no-free-will is an important
mystic-religious theme. Too many writers put all emphasis on the feeling of
mystic unity (the no-separate-self experiential insight), so that the main
missing link, the real key to religious revelation, is the experiential
insight of no-free-will, which is exactly the core meaning of the cross of
Christ, which is, first of all, a *king-claimant* on a cross; that is, a
would-be king helplessly fastened to the material realm.

What does the cross show, plainly? It shows a kingly figure fastened to wood,
so we have to ask, what is the profound transcendent meaning of the symbol of
“a kingly figure fastened helplessly to wood”? There is more; this figure
goes into a cave-like tomb, then ascends to heaven to rule as high king — but
even without those mystic themes, just look at the simple plain symbol of the
kingly figure fastened helplessly to wood: what does it mean; how does it
connect to schizophrenic loose-cognition intense mystic insight and
revelation?

What does the figure of king helplessly attached to cross indicate and say
regarding mystic insight and religious revelation? First of all, it says “the
no-free-will experiential insight”, really it combines both the revelation of
no-separate-self (the fastening to the material wood or “tree”, shown in many
equivalent mythemes) *and* the revelation of no-free-will (the arrested and
seized *king* figure).

‘Helpless king claimant’ means the no-free-will experiential insight, and
‘fastened to tree-like cross’ means the no-separate-self experience. So the
cross, when correctly classically and canonically portrayed with a kingly
figure fastened to it, is a particularly efficient, direct, and
straightforward symbol that almost directly portrays both the no-free-will and
no-separate-self experiential insights.


It’s simple: the schizophrenic mind produces excessive DMT in the pineal
gland, causing involuntary tripping (some fluctuating degree of loose
cognition, loosening of mental construct association binding), and this
tripping produces the standard range of intense mystic altered state
experiences and insights that are classically induced by religious use of
visionary plants.

The cure for schizophrenia is some chemical that effectively counteracts the
excess DMT or DMT-like chemical overproduced by the schizophrenic brain.
People ought to understand mystic experiential insight and ought to recognize
that visionary plants have always been by far the main wellspring of religion.
With this understanding, religious experiencing and schizophrenia are both
much less mysterious, much more comprehensible and straightforward, and
cogently summarizable.






God exists. ‘God’ refers to [that which controls us], that which is secretly
revealed to have been controlling us this whole time — the term refers to the
higher level of control — the uncontrollable transcendent (higher-level)
controller with respect to our personal control level.

As a control agent, I am a kingly sovereign controller of a certain realm; I
have a certain kind of control over a certain restricted personal realm. I,
as the controller of that realm (controller over that realm), do not have an
ultimate kind of control; instead, I (defined as the personal controller over
that little personal realm) am subject to (I am a puppet controlled by) the
higher level of control. The lower control agent cannot control the
higher-level control agent.

The tricky semantic problem is that the term ‘I’ could be defined to refer to
the lower, personal control level (or control realm), so that ‘I’ refers to a
small, localized locus of control, or the term ‘I’ could be defined to refer
to the transcendent level (or realm) of control.

The whole important point is that there are two separate levels of control:
the lower level, which we are accustomed to governing at, which we are
accustomed to being the governor of; and the higher level of control and
controllership, which our familiar sense of governing-power or control-power
does *not* have control over. To discover God is to discover that one’s
familiar realm of controllership is not absolutely sovereign, but is merely
secondary, a puppet level of control.

To discover that God exists is to discover that one (as a familiar locus of
control) is helplessly controlled by some invisible,
uncontrollable-by-the-lower, higher-order controller. Is that higher-order
controller *personal* and compassionate and well-meaning, life-sustaining, or
is it a heartless, senseless, blind machine circuit, a terrible heartless
random machine-monster?

To survive in the face of this question, we must be given, out of nowhere,
faith: faith that after being smashed down and rendered into a helpless puppet
secretly controlled by an alien overpowering mysterious force, we may be
picket back up again out of paralysis, helplessness, and control-death
(control-seizure). That faith that the mysterious higher-order controller
lifts us back up on our feet after having shown the servitude of our
personal-level control power, has been metaphorized as “faith that Jesus has
been risen after death”.

To have faith in Jesus being risen from the dead, really means having faith
that the higher-level control power picks us up again and sets us on our feet
again as local personal locus-of-control agents after smashing down our power
and revealing the nullity of our power.

After terrifyingly taking the scepter of sovereign power out of our hands
during ego death control-seizure, faith is the magical (transcendent,
trans-rational) giving of *rationally unjustified* confidence, transcendent
miraculous returning of the scepter of personal control power (virtual, as-if
power) back to the local personal controller (the conventional individual
personal ‘I’ agent)..

I can redefine ‘I’ to mean the higher level of controllership that secretly
stands over the familiar localized realm of control agency; I can redefine the
term ‘I’ to refer to God, but that does not change the basic relationship
between separate lower and higher levels of control. The lower remains a mere
puppet king subject to the mysterious invisible higher level of control.

If I am God, the terrible question remains, am I a good God; is God aware and
compassionate and life-preserving, preserving my well-being (that is, in
conventional terms, is God “personal”)? Or is God — meaning simply the
higher hidden level of control — merely a blind, non-conscious, random,
unresponsive, uncompassionate machine, so that I — whether defined as a lower
local control agent *or* the higher hidden controller — am frozen into a
terrible nightmarish prison of arbitrary chaos, where God is revealed to be a
blind and heartless chaos-monster? To survive this, faith must come into the
person’s mind from out of nowhere — rational thinking cannot justify this
necessary vital *confidence* that God (the secret invisible higher controller)
is good and preserves our personal well-being.

That terrible problem remains even when, perhaps especially when, the mind
redefines ‘I’ to mean the higher-level control-locus (God). Even if I am God,
the horrific problem still remains: how can I trust, with urgently needed
confidence, that I (God) am good, compassionate, so as to preserve and sustain
my personal individual well-being?

When I consider myself to be God, does that mean that my personal individual
controller-self is violently destroyed and annihilated like the Jesus figure
torn and nailed to the cross as the final ending? Or is there more, after the
lower personal-agency control-seizure disproves the ultimacy of individual
personal power? Does the sacrificed self spell the tragic end of the story,
or is there a new life after the psychotic control-seizure disproof of
personal power?

If rational thinking is helplessly limited, how can we create and produce
confidence that fate has given us a good future, or that I as higher
controller (God) preserve the well-being and practical sustainability of my
usual individual personal life and livelihood? We cannot rationally create
and produce such a non-rational faith and hope in the goodness and compassion
and well-being-preserving nature of the invisible mysterious alien higher
controller (God).

I may identify with the higher controller (God), yet I as a localized
lower-level personal agent remain ignorant of God’s goodness and remain
ignorant of whether the higher controller (God) is going to preserve the
well-being of the local, conventional, personal me. I can become aware I’m
God, but I remain ignorant of whether God preserves the life and well-being of
the localized, personal me.

This theorizing is actually frighteningly concrete and urgent to the
mysticized mind, the mind during the advanced loose-cognition state: the
lower-level control agent discovers the experiential insight of its helpless
puppethood with respect to the hidden higher level of control.

Will the higher level of control, which is not even known to be aware or
personal or preserving of the lower person’s well-being, move to destroy and
ruin one’s life by forcing chaotic destructive control-thoughts into the
person’s mind? That is the question that produces control-seizure, terrified
trembling, the storm at sea that brings about trans-rational prayer as the
only possible hope, a hope beyond hope. This shows exactly how theology
derives from peak mystic-state experiencing (advanced loose cognition coupled
with controllership theorizing).

The mysticized mind’s strange sense of things being charged with transcendent
meaningfulness, the feeling that special meaning-messages are packed and
concentrated into candy wrappers and apparently features of daily life, is our
built-in capacity for pattern recognition — not just any pattern recognition,
but the ultimate pattern recognition, which is the ability of the mind to
piece together the ultimate puzzle: the relation between lower and higher
control levels, which is the central problem of religion, ego death, and ego
transcendence.

Transcendent knowledge is thereby born and reconstructed in the individual
mind, through this transcendent pattern recognition and attractive foreboding
sense of charged

Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled
Acharya S
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1931882312
Sep. 2004
Proposes that many ancient saviour deities or god’s sons are personifications
of the astronomical sun, which is the ultimate concern of the myths and
rites/feasts.

J. Z. Smith’s book Drudgery Divine has a short good passage and citation
arguing that nature themes were the *means* to express mystic points, they
were not the end meaning in themselves. The seasons, fertility, the sun are
not the point; they are merely the metaphor.

Actually, ultimately, the sun is venerated because of the bright light
experience in the advanced mystic altered state of cognition. This has been
metaphorized as the timeless eternal flames beyond the sphere of the
determinism-controlled fixed stars — the supernal flames outside the limits
of the mundane cosmos.

Article:
Mithras and the Hypercosmic Sun
David Ulansey
http://www.well.com/user/davidu/hypercosmic.html

Some people provide evidence and demonstration that they actually have read
the egodeath site, from their first lines onward. The theory isn’t actually
difficult, so it’s not uncommon for individuals to fully understand my
theoretical model.

Not that I demand people agree with anything, but rather, when people presume
to discuss my writings, it’s best if they actually know what my writings say.
Often people proclaim upon the theory without having read it; they project pop
notions onto it, importing their own confusions and projecting that onto
(reading it into) what I have wrote, so that they praise me for things I never
said, or criticize me for things I never said.

A glossary remains a main leverage point. I even think Alan Watts’ weak point
was semantic crudeness or unsophistication, falling into vague and weak poetic
usage unnecessarily, instead of utilizing clear and direct language to its
full capacity and capability.

His too-ready falling back on poetic sloppiness and unskilled, non-masterful
overloading of terms implied that language had less capability for precision
than it really does. He also censored himself — if I may guess about his
motives — such as relegating no-free-will to a few footnotes scattered across
his books, when I suddenly figured out how to make sense of his book The Way
of Zen by the key idea of no-free-will, my main feeling was “Why in the hell
didn’t you simply, clearly, and explicitly say so, that there’s no free will?”

At that moment I became particularly displeased with Watts’ sloppy and
unworthy usage of language, his too-ready reversion to poetic vague slop,
which is the opposite of the Hellenistic and mythic mastery of
double-entendre. He doesn’t grasp the tragic-comic joke of skillful,
masterful double-meaning in myth.

I do think loops, circles, spinning, spirals, and feedback-buildup are
important in mystic realization, and have not fully investigated how this is
so.

Most writings on the subject of Christian origins are a lot of fantasy,
cartoonish nonsense, and implausible, unrealistic ultra-distortion of the
situation, completely misreading the situation and motivations and even the
nature of religion of the time, with no feel for the cultural climate and
situation of the time. We need more scenario-brainstorming with quite a
different set of assumptions about context, players, and motivations.

Constantine’s goal was stable political control, and the method was to enforce
aspects of uniformity. Christianity combined all-inclusive syncretism with
Jewish-like exclusivism. It effectively co-opted Jewish-type anti-emperor
rebellion. It was possible to form a type of Christianity that combined this
syncretism with exclusivism, producing uniformity across the broad populace,
thereby supporting increased top-down political and sociopolitical control and
stability.

These are goal-driven people; to understand their actions and writings, we
must understand the real goals motivating them. They were motivated by
practical political strategy, not idle theological musings. People battled in
the street in the name of idle and nebulous theological musings, a veneer over
actual sociopolitical power struggles. It was not the case that people just
cared so much and so fondly about abstract theology that they’d kill and
fight; the abstract theology was an excuse to kill and fight, killing and
fighting that was actually driven by sociopolitical struggles.

There was abundant intense mystical religious experiencing available to
everyone on tap, but this genuine religious experiencing was not the motivator
behind the theologically styled street violence.

This genuine primary religious experiencing was instead, just one more theme
to get caught up into the street violence and utilized to justify that
violence, which included competing bishops fighting over dioceses in order to
capture their financially valuable property and income from mandatory
tithing — a turf war over an up-and-coming profitable and power-promising
franchise opportunity.

Piety was not the motivator, but merely the abused club to threaten and coopt
others with.

See Michael Conley’s website and Joseph McCabe’s book’s article How the Church
“Triumphed”.


There is so much cartoonish grotesque misrepresentation of the historical
realities. Everyone talks so casually and confidently about Constantine’s
“cross”, falsely implying that it was a tau cross, when it was actually the
non-Christian and pre-Christian Chi Rho X cross. Similarly, for a later
example, everyone talks so casually and confidently about Luther “nailing his
theses to the church door”, when the reality was a matter of him essentially
push-pinning just another debate proposal to the routinely used
debate-proposal bulletin board.

Such unrealistic, grotesque distortions have vanishingly little to do with the
actual spirit and dynamics motivating the actual actions of the players, and
serve to obscure rather than clarify what the situation was, and what actually
happened and why, toward what strategic goals.

Esoteric Classic Rock lyrics are about drug experiences/insights, not
centrally about the drugs themselves.

The lyrics in the 1976 Rush album 2112 are intended to refer primarily to
experiences, insights, and phenomena that are experienced in the intense
mystic state of consciousness, which is understood rightly by the lyricist as
being most effectively induced by drugs. It is somewhat justifiable to refer
to these intense mystic-state experiences as “drugs” only as a gross
misleading shorthand.

The emphasis is on the experiences, or experiential insights, rather than on
the drugs which are the most ergonomic trigger for the experiences. For
example, the opening statement “the meek shall inherit the earth” and the
closing statement “we have assumed control” both tie into the theme of the
fearsome experience of no-free-will — the deep meaning in these lines, the
deep referent, really is not drugs, but the experience accessed through
drugs — or, through the intense mystic state, which is triggered most
effectively by drugs.

The lyrics are not about drugs, nor about the mystic state itself which is
caused by drugs, but one level further: the experiential insights which are a
result of the intense mystic state which is a result of drugs. The lyrics are
about a realm that is two layers removed from drugs. “Use the key, unlock the
door, see what your fate might have in store” expresses this chain well: drugs
are the initial key, to unlock the door, which leads to a realm in which the
omnipotence of fate is intensely experienced. This chain of concerns can be
clearly drawn as:

key – drugs
door – mystic state
fate – experiential insight regarding no-free-will

Thus the lyric
Use the key, unlock the door, see what your fate might have in store
can be spelled out explicitly as
Use visionary drugs, access the intense mystic altered state, experience
no-free-will/no-separate-self.
and mapped to that perennial mystic pattern or trajectory.

Passage to Bangkok is a throwaway song but it does help establish a
drug-compatible interpretive context for the Western esoteric experiential
mysticism such as in the songs Twilight Zone and Lessons.

It is possible to have mystic experiences without drugs but possibility is a
matter of degree and ergonomics. It is more rare, fleeting, mild, and
difficult to have mystic experiences without drugs. The easiest explanation
for widespread experience of the Holy Spirit is drugs, particularly when
drug-supporting themes are present in abundance, such as receiving salvation
and the spirit through eating and drinking of real food and drink which is
Christ’s flesh and blood.

If the Eucharistic meal is drugs, that is a coherent explanation of the
relation between eating the Eucharistic meal and experiencing salvation
through the holy spirit. If the holy spirit is mainly had through poetry or
through fasting that’s not used to potentiate visionary plants, this leaves
the Eucharistic meal dangling and explanatorily unconnected to receiving the
holy spirit.

Drugs provide a better, stronger, clearer explanation than drug-free dancing
and poetry as a routine trigger for the intense mystic altered state, because
drugs better incorporate and integrate with highly drug-compatible themes such
as the Eucharist. Consider ergonomics and statistical frequency of efficacy
of various methods of inducing a compellingly intense altered state. Consider
that drugs reliably have a strong tendency to normally induce religious
experiencing, repeatably and provably during any era including the mystically
near-illiterate modern era.

The origin of the other techniques is drugs; those techniques such as dancing
were originated as methods of augmenting and potentiating what was by far the
main method of inducing the intense mystic state, visionary plants. Fasting
is positioned before religious feasting because fasting potentiates drugs and
the religious meal is visionary plants.

Repeated baptism is required because baptism refers to the visionary
distortion induced by visionary plants, and multiple plant sessions are
required in order to experience a system-wide change of mental worldmodel.

Non-drug techniques “can” work — “can” is a vague, open-ended word, like
sheer and mere possibility, sometimes used to hide problems of degree of
likelihood and plausibility, as though “can” means 50%-100% possible. But
non-drug techniques cannot work anywhere near as ergonomically, efficiently,
reliably, and statistically successfully as drug-based techniques, which is
why the predominant motifs in Hellenistic-era religion so centrally include
and emphasize sacred eating and drinking of sacred food and drink.

The question is not only whether psychedelic chemicals were *necessary* or
other methods were *possible*, but rather, the question is, what methods were
in fact used, and what does the evidence suggest more strongly versus less
strongly? Is there more evidence, more plausibility, that the intense mystic
altered state was induced through drugs alone, through drugs augmented with
other techniques, or through non-drug techniques alone?

The evidence best supports that visionary plants were used as the main
technique and were augmented with other, auxiliary techniques such as fasting
and sensory deprivation.

The Jesus figure came soon after the divinized Caesar figure. Scholars have
drawn the dots but balked at connecting them: Jesus was invented as a rebuttal
revision of the divinized Caesar figure. Creativity in literature, which is
to say mystic literature, was typically expressed through creative
modifications or twists of existing stories and motifs. Jesus had to be held
as fleshly to compete against Caesar, and there was a Jewish tradition of
pseudo historical-stylization of their mystic motifs.

The Old Testament is recognizable and most naturally readable as
historical-styled mystic-state metaphor, if it is read without modern
filtering and with a mystic-state theory of mythic metaphor, rather than the
modern dreaming-and-waking state, Jungian and Campbellian theories of what
myth is about and what myth is essentially concerned with.

A third incentive for historicizing the Jesus figure was to create an
artificial scarcity and concentration of authority like an orb that could be
held by one pope at a time and passed to the next, forming a top-down
power/control hierarchy, as opposed to the pre-Constantine, practically
egalitarian house-church Christianity — Eucharistic meal gatherings with
prayer and wine just like reclining at table with prayer and rounds of mixed
wine at symposium drinking parties.

Pre-Constantinian Christianity was primarily egalitarian. These early
Christians, which we can call ‘gnostics’ per Freke and Gandy’s usage, or
experiential-esoteric, used metaphor-based meaning-games relying on and
deliberately playing with quasi-elitist or deliberately misleading use of
elitist-sounding themes such as “only we are the predestined and god-chosen
‘race’ of the saved”.

Constantine’s ilk held Jesus to have existed for a limited time in a limited
place, but holding all authority, so that they could postulate that Jesus
passed his orb of authority on to one and only one person and it ended up
passed onto the topmost clergy — as opposed to religious authority being
available to all Christians or to all the gnostic, mystically
chosen/predestined group.

Michael Conley provides distinctive, essential insights about the political
strategizing aspects about Christian origins in his articles:
http://www.thecosmiccontext.de/christianity.html

Conley does not provide the entire integrated picture including a grasp of
mystic-state metaphor. He grasps what was more crucial and distinctive than
mystic-state experiential metaphor for enabling the rise-to-power of
Christianity. Top-down socio-political strategizing, almost in opposition to
the mystic religious/spiritual dimension of early Christianity, was most
crucial for enabling the rulers to co-opt Christianity and change it from a
rebuttal to the world’s government into a tool to support the world’s
government.

Conley does not understand the meaning of early Christian mythemes, but he
does contribute the most crucial missing understanding of the socio-political
strategizing that, unlike the mystic meaning and religious-spiritual aspect,
lay behind the rise-to-power of Christianity. He doesn’t understand what
early Christianity meant, but he does understand most of the essence of how it
rose to power.

Christianity was first a cooptation of Caesar cult and top-down government,
then was changed by Constantine into a counter-cooptation of that grassroots
anti-Caesar or anti-government resistance movement — Conley partially
perceives this trajectory of change, though his comprehension of
pre-Constantine political themes in Christianity is limited by his lack of
grasping the mystic-state metaphor, spiritual-religious dimension per se.

There was an especially close interpenetration of the two distinct aspects in
pre-Constantine Christianity, which was a meshing of counter-government themes
and mystic-state metaphor. Early Christianity freely drew from evolving
Jewish political-styled and historical-styled mysticism as well as drawing
from evolving Hellenistic/pagan trajectories.

Christianity was multiple prior to its forced normalization by Constantine,
but the most essential themes to trace and study in early Christianities are
the confluence and weaving together of socio-political government themes and
mystic-state experiential insights. Both aspects of early Christianity —
socio-political government themes and mystic-state religious-experiencing
themes — were well-preserved in the canon, and we need to recognize both of
these more than Freke and Gandy (mystic-state only) or Michael Conley and
Richard Horsley (socio-political only) have done.

Some varieties of Christianity before Constantine were predominantly
mystic-state centered, with little concern for expressing and utilizing
counter-government or alternative-government themes, but that fades away into
generic Hellenistic esotericism/mysticism and is thus not specifically
Christianity but is merely an input to Christianity. To trace anything worth
considering Christianity, to stay relevant to a study of early Christianity,
we have to hang onto both, interpenetrating themes while travelling backwards
through time past Constantine.

While studying each variety of pre-Constantine Christianity, we have to query
each variety for its use of socio-political themes and for its incorporation
of mystic-state religious-experiential themes, or else we’re not actually
studying the origins of Christianity, but instead are fading into studying the
separate political and mystic-state contexts of Christianity.

The surest way to trace Christian origins is to trace the interpenetration of
both of these thematic realms and concerns — socio-political and mystic-state
experiential; to define what it is we are attempting to trace the origins of
(“Christianity”) we need to define Christianity as first of all, the
combination of political and mystic themes, which was not the first time these
themes were combined (it’s normal to have both), but was the most explicit
combination of these two themes.

Never before had mystic-state experiencing been expressed in such an
elaborated alternative-government, political-resistance thematic framework
before or since Christianity around 250.

The Roman combination of political and mystic-state themes begat the
opposition in the early Christian combinations of political and mystic-state
themes, and that rebuttal or grassroots co-optation was then counter-co-opted
by the state-religious system that it was designed to resist and provide an
alternative to, just as 1960s counterculture rebellion was co-opted and
commoditized by the establishment.

Anti-establishment politicized mystic religion was taken over by the
establishment: what better way to deal with rebellion and alternative culture
than by co-opting, commandeering, taking it over, strategically incorporating
themes of resistance and the desire for an alternative, right into the
top-down establishment system of government.

Pre-Christianity Hellenistic-era government had its integration with
mystery-religion mystic-state concerns, and so did pre-Constantine and
post-Constantine Christianity: if we are to study Christianity, we need to
explicitly and concertedly study both aspects — socio-political and
mystic-state concerns — and their trajectory and how the two were integrated
in pre-Christian, early, and post-Constantine Christianity.

More than the other Hellenistic-era mystery-religions, Christianity was
explicitly and emphatically political-styled, even more so than Ruler Cult
which it was a creative modification and co-optation of.

o Jewish religion was not only sociopolitical; it was heavily mystic-state
experiential.

o Pre-Constantine Christianity was religious/mystical, but it was also
essentially socio-political, if we are tracing the origins of something
rightly labelled as ‘Christianity’ in any meaningful and relevant sense.

o Post-Constantine Christianity was politicized, but remained significantly
religious/mystical — the most viable strategy was not to attempt to eliminate
mystic-state religious experiencing, but to corral and secure control of it in
support of the top-down rulership system.

o Roman government was political, but it was also religious/mystical as is
admitted through the too-few, deliberately not-integrated peeks the modern
scholars permit at Ruler Cult as precursor to Christianity.

Jewish, pagan, and Christian systems, all through the Hellenistic era, were
typically combinations of, first of all, political and mystic-experiential
concerns and themes. Political themes are widespread and clearly present in
Hellenistic-era myth, if you look for them, and mystic-state experiential
themes are also widespread and clearly present in Hellenistic-era political
expressions, if you look for them.

Christianity was by no means the first combination of sociopolitical and
mystic-state experiential themes, but it was the most vital combination of
them, and if we are ever to claim to comprehend and trace the origins of
something rightly called ‘Christianity’, we must put the first emphasis on
recognizing and systematically tracing these two themes and studying the
history of how these two areas of concern were interrelated in various ways in
the Jewish systems, pagan systems, and Christian systems throughout the
Hellenistic era.

Jesus was not simply equated with the sun; more to the point, both Mithraism
and Christianity incorporated astral ascent mysticism, which included
Neoplatonist-type ascent-to-the-sunlight themes as well. The surest reference
point is astral ascent mysticism, with Neoplatonism, Mithraism, Sol Invictus,
Ruler Cult, and Christianity all incorporating and drawing upon themes from
astral ascent mysticism.

The Jewish religions of the era sometimes incorporated astral ascent mysticism
themes as well, such as the zodiac and the cosmic sphere of the fixed stars,
and the idea of a divine powerful entity transcendently moving and thus
surpassing that sphere. As Hellenistic mystery religion evolved through 100
BCE-400 CE, astral ascent mysticism became, especially during the rise of
Roman Mithraism, the hottest, most influential source of mystic/religious
themes.

Mithraism was interconnected with Roman government. Per J. Z. Smith in
Drudgery Divine, each variety of religion was changing and evolving throughout
the Hellenistic era, not static.

The pagan system included evolving systems of religious and political
expression, including incorporating astrological mysticism or astrotheology in
both political expression and in religious expression. Astrotheology was also
present in changing ways during the evolution of Jewish systems and Christian
systems during the Hellenistic era. For example, the sphere of the fixed
stars is penetrated at Jesus’ baptism and ascension, and Jesus in Revelation
is the new star that destroys or transcends the cosmic-determinism sphere of
the fixed stars.

Against Ulansey, religion such as Mithraism was not stimulated by the
discovery of the precession of the equinoxes; rather, merely, the precession
of the equinoxes was found to be a clever expression of the idea of
transcending the power of cosmic determinism, fate, or heimarmene; in astral
ascent mysticism, the idea of penetrating the sphere of fixed stars —
representing the harsh omnipotent rule of cosmic determinism — is well
expressed by the idea of spiritual forces so powerful and transcendent as to
be able to move the sphere of fixed stars from its fixed status.

People weren’t so much blown away by the precession that they were inspired to
make a religion out of it; more like the other way around: people as they
always had, were blown away by religious initiation including the grappling to
transcend the power of cosmic determinism.

They found in precession, as an addition to astral ascent mysticism, a
metaphor to tangibly and elegantly express, particularly within the astral
ascent mystic/cosmological system, the idea of transcending the sphere of the
fixed stars, so both in Mithraism and in Christianity we find the idea of
penetrating outside the sphere of fixed stars (like exiting the cave/womb)
joined with the idea of the representative godman/ruler moving the sphere of
fixed stars.

This is standard elementary astral ascent mysticism — this is simply the
standard pre-Enlightenment cosmology itself — themes of which were woven into
Mithraism and Christianity. Did Christianity co-opt these themes from
Mithraism or from the cult of Sol Invictus? It may have been, in line with J.
Z. Smith, more a matter of a competitive race between evolving and changing
varieties of Jewish, Christian, and pagan systems.

The details do need study, but also the general dynamic needs to be
identified, that various astrotheology — or better, astral ascent
mysticism — themes were incorporated into various religions and political
systems during the Hellenistic era. Against Mithraism, Ruler Cult, and the
other state-friendly mystery cults, there came to stand Christianity, which,
like the Jews were held to do, rejected the Roman religious-political systems
even while including the full range of mystic-state experiential insights and
themes.

The Roman official system before Constantine had its Sol Invictus cult,
Mithras cult, Ruler Cult, and evolving State-friendly mystery cults, but
against that, using an evolving combination of political and mystic and
astral-ascent themes, stood systems of Christianity which, to the extent they
aligned with socio-politically exclusivist types of Jewish religion, also were
set against the Roman system in a competitive rebuttal form.

Jewish-like hardline exclusivism against the Roman system, minus the
too-Jewish aspects, was apparently an effective popular theme both for the
grassroots resisters and for the top-down strategists who took over the
nascent Christian alternative to the Roman system.

No-separate-self is the most commonplace idea that predominates in American
stripped-down Buddhism — one might say Protestantized Buddhism, particularly
in the sense of the early Protestants seeking to destroy Catholic art and
symbols, even the symbol of the cross on American churches up to around 1875.
Because symbols were abused by the state/church system, such a Protestant-type
strategy attempts to emancipate from politically abused religion by stamping
out symbols.

No-separate-self has become all-dominant in today’s American Buddhist
conception of mysticism. No-separate-self is one of the main standard
components of mystic experiencing and schizophrenia according to mainstream
researchers. This is described as the feeling of being conjoined in oneness
with people and with the universe. “There is no separate self” is the main
leading popular, utterly common idea in the American conception of Buddhist
mystic insight.

Mystic experiential insights has been reduced to only the no-separate-self
insight, losing all sight of the crucial idea and experience of no-free-will;
thus the main *missing* insight in today’s popular published conception of
mystic insight is the insight into no-free-will, in which topic I also include
*transcendence of* no-free-will. We are thoroughly inundated and saturated
with the overfamiliar assertion and platitude that there is no separate self,
that the separate ego is unreal, but that emphasis has shut out any thought
and insight regarding no-free-will.

The Cross elegantly represents both of these main insights, so is stronger
than the American post-1960s conception of Buddhism which only contributes the
no-separate-self insight. People value the idea and experience of merging
into the cosmos, but inherently paired with that experience is the experience
of no-free-will, which is the part people in post-1960s mainstream American
mysticism don’t anticipate and have not integrated.

The cross has traditionally been considered as a tree paired with the tree in
the garden of Eden.
http://www.egodeath.com/CrossMetaphor.htm — Fastening to the Spacetime
Block — lists varieties of fastening the body to the physical realm in
Hellenistic-era myth-religion.

Fastening the representative deity to a tree or rock or throne, or encasing
the deity, or hanging them from a tree, are expressions of *experience*. Myth
is, first of all, metaphorical descriptive tangible expressions and reports of
intense mystic-state experiences. The king fastened to the tree-like cross
represents the mystic-state experience no-free-will.

The king, considered as governing steersman, is helplessly fastened to the
frozen timeless spacetime block. This remains the case whether considering
the cross as a pair of beams or as a tree. Fastening to a tree, being encased
in wood, or becoming a tree, were common mythemes because the tree is stuck
with roots in the material realm, and has high branches up in the air above
our normal consciousness — the mystic experience is one of being up high at
the same time as being stuck helplessly in the material spacetime block.

The *fastening to the physical* aptly expresses and represents the
no-separate-self aspect of the intense mystic-state experiential insight.

The fastening of the *helpless king* aptly expresses and represents the
no-free-will aspect of the intense mystic-state experiential insight.

I created these lists of 60s Psychedelic compilation CDs recently. I hope to
upload some interesting lyrics from a few of the most outstanding songs I’ve
come across. I hope to come up with a list of my picks for the best of the
best in terms of both psychedelic-styled musical technique and mystic-state
lyrics.

A hard decision is whether to cover the excellent but obvious and overfamiliar
mainstream songs such as Journey to the Center of the Mind, Too Much to Dream
Last Night, or Legend of a Mind. I favor hard-psych studio effects typifying
1967 psychedelic, showcased well in the 1985 albums by Dukes of Stratosphear
(XTC).

Considering posting:
Devil Rides Out
You Make Me High — clearest example of pop-love themes utilized really as
metaphor for intense mystic-state experiences
99th Floor (1975 song ’67-styled except with solid-state deep phasing giving
away the non-period sound)

Posted already:
Mother Nature
Brink of Death
Cathy, Come Home
Train to Disaster
http://www.egodeath.com/MysticStateAllusionsPsychedelicLyrics.htm —
The Society: “High & Mighty”
Kenny & The Kasuals: “Journey to Tyme”
Warm Sounds: “Night Is a’ Comin'” – Selfhood fading fast
Dennis Dahlquist/Del-Vetts: “Last Time Around”

Hard-psych studio effects:
Backwards instruments
Runaway echo feedback
Reverb achieved via Echoplex
Farfisa Compact Combo organ followed by Hammond B3 era
Fuzz guitar distortion
Exotic instrumentation
Tape flanging/phasing
Tremolo
Backwards echo fade-in
Sped-up/slowed-down effects
Guitar direct-inject into tube-preamp mixer board channel
12-string electric guitar
Harmony singing
Creative, unpredictable songwriting and production
Patching clips and sounds into the mix

List of lists:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/cm/member-fil/-/A1YFCQT60M4XAJ?start-at=5
1
Psychedelic compilations – series and box sets
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/CA6CKRPPIHO3
Psychedelic compilations – non-series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/8SHAN3HK2O0L
Psychedelic Pstones psych comp series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/NOP7XDF1IKPH
Green Crystal Ties – Psych Compil. Series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/32QQNVBC2MMWL
Love, Peace & Poetry – Psych compil. series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/38EL03DZTG54L
Nuggets compilation series and box sets
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/34UM7C9DOGSAQ
Psychedelic States – Psych compilation series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/PL6HG0EEAPBX
Fuzz, Flaykes, & Shakes – Psych. compil. series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/15ALZURRKHV8R
Circus Days – Psych. compil. series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/1ALBAVH7Q4TO7
A Dose of Psych & Calico Wall – Psych. compil. series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/2UST3VMLX4YB6
We Can Fly – Psych. compil. series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/334SPQEOPUCOV
Endless Journey – Psych. compilation series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/170G3I6UTZH1M
Psychedelic Microdots – Psych. compilation series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/1DR22BX48XUX4
The Psychedelic Experience – Psych. compil. series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/12CCA1716MQE9
Perfumed Garden – Psych. compil. series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/239RP9R1N2UW9
Rubble – Psych comp series
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/2BH87FFI7D9H4

Steve wrote (edited):

>>Is all this effort to rightly understand Christian origins and original

meaning and the sordid story of how the power-seekers took over and ruined
Christianity really necessary, for explaining how to eliminate ego?

>>Of course much of religion has been fableized through such a process of

deliberate distortion, abuse, and vulgar strategic literalization for base
ends. To build up religious insight into tangible worth as something that
appears more to matter, the myth-religion stories must have verve and
excitement and must be made to assume mythological proportions. Ancients were
much like people today, naturally wanting to distort the truth to gain power
and polity support.

>>Almost all legitimate world-transformative and life-transformative

ideologies have been abused and prostituted in this vulgar way: Christianity,
Islam, the Levant, and Hindu caste systems all have been misused to condone
slavery, imprisonment, torture, and death. Ideas are like dangerous bombs;
they can mutate and spread with virulence among those hungry for experience
and purpose.

>>It was typical that self-serving maniacs have peppered history with a tangle

of a mess that leads any serious seeker for wisdom running in the opposite
direction; it is understandable and justifiable for thinking people to avoid
and shun the official abused ideologies and conceptualizations of religion.

>>Those who study wisdom itself ought to be focusing on discussing not the

history of the misuse of transcendent knowledge for base purposes, but rather,
how freedom from the ego is the answer to beating such dysfunctional misuse of
religion, because losing ego reveals that ego is not needed in the first
place. Losing ego also reveals that death is meaningless. Losing ego
heightens the level of sensitivity to the heart, increasing sensitivity to
other souls, who are seen to glow and who the enlightened and wise person
loves.

>>The lover of wisdom perceives how other souls are bound in chains — when

other people try to argue against the wisdom-centered spiritual person, the
spiritual person doesn’t have any points to defend, and this befuddles the
pseudo-religious person who is confused by the corrupted form and misused
travesty of religion.

>>The spiritually wise person can care for the pseudo-religious person even

though the pseudo-religious person doesn’t understand why, but most
pseudo-religious people want to care for other souls too, and want the
spiritually wise person to help give them that caring for souls. The
spiritually wise person knows that in the end, the peace, happiness and love
for all creatures is apodictically, necessarily, demonstrably,
incontrovertibly certain and true.

>>The spiritually wise person knows that there is no need to go out and fight

and die for a version of religion that has been corrupted and reduced to a
literalist metaphor such as literalized exclusivist Christianity or
literalized exclusivist Islam. So the spiritually wise person doesn’t need to
focus on comprehending and explaining the way in which particular religions
have been derailed and corrupted from wisdom expression systems into vulgar
exclusivist literalism.

>>It is acceptable to study how Christianity was derailed and corrupted from a

wisdom expression system into vulgar exclusivist literalism, but that story is
a sad and tragic story — let’s focus more on happier stories, such as direct
spiritual wisdom and its great positive potential, and focus on the benefits
of freedom from the ego.

>>The revelations from the negative study of how Christianity was ruined by

Constantine and the top-down power mongers is like getting rid of a receptor
on a cell wall that a virus can hook onto to infect you. Yes, those viruses
and receptors are out there and need to be defended against by revealing the
truth about the sordid story of how the Christian wisdom expression was ruined
by Constantine and other authoritarian power-seekers. But we must focus more
on the positive work of explaining how to eliminate ego.


Given the context and inescapable reality of today’s world, it is impossible
and hopeless to attempt to present a system of ego transcendence without also
explaining the original meaning of Christianity in the house-church era and
explain how Christianity was ruined and corrupted historically. If the modern
Western world fails to understand the true meaning behind Christianity and how
that meaning fell, it will fail to grasp and hold onto transcendent knowledge.

It is practically impossible in the modern Western world to have transcendent
knowledge without comprehending the meaning of the Christian symbol-system,
comprehending how transcendent knowledge is expressed in the meaning system;
how the two map together. To have an adequate comprehension of transcendent
knowledge in today’s world, the thinker must recognize how transcendent
knowledge maps to and is expressed in various symbol-systems, various
myth-religion systems.

You can’t adequately have transcendent knowledge without understanding and
recognizing the general symbolic language of how transcendent knowledge is
expressed in various myth-religion systems such as magic, alchemy, astrology,
Christianity, and Buddhism — particularly with a focus on how Christianity is
an expression of transcendent knowledge. It is impractical, idealistic, and
futile to think that we can ignore Christianity and fabricate a viable and
relevant system of transcendent knowledge.

Dealing with and resolving Christianity is the only possible way to succeed at
securing a viable system of understanding transcendent knowledge.
Understanding how Christianity expresses transcendent knowledge, and
afterwards the other symbolic myth-religion systematizations, is essential for
having a full and adequate grasp of transcendent knowledge.

Transcendent knowledge, pragmatically today, strongly requires comprehension
of how transcendent knowledge is expressed in Christianity first and foremost
(the other symbol systems follow trivially easily after that), and
comprehension of how transcendent knowledge is expressed in Christianity
practically demands that everyone understand the sordid story of how the
profound truth in Christianity has been ruined, corrupted, and abused into a
debased travesty, resulting in exclusivist literalist religion.

It is an unavoidable practical necessity: to understand transcendent knowledge
we must recognize transcendent knowledge in Christianity, and to comprehend
transcendent knowledge in Christianity, we must understand how Christianity
has been corrupted from transcendent knowledge to exclusivist literalism and
reduced to socio-political utility and debased into a mere conduct-of-life,
non-religious ethical system.

Converting the world from literalist religion to actual religion cannot happen
without a thorough, maximum, adequate, full, detailed, and complete
explanation of how we went from actual religion to debased pseudo-religion in
the first place. Why exactly does understanding transcendent knowledge, for a
modern Westerner, demand and require and necessitate a full understanding of
how transcendent knowledge is encoded in the Christian symbol-system?

Why exactly does understanding how transcendent knowledge is encoded in
Christianity, and securing transcendent knowledge, necessitate understanding
how Christianity was debased from an expression of transcendent knowledge into
vulgar pseudo-religious literalism? These are detailed explanations yet to be
expanded, but it is easy to generally see and imagine how it is folly and
futility for the modern world to attempt to possess transcendent knowledge
without comprehending how Christianity is an expression of that transcendent
knowledge.

It is also easy to generally see and imagine how, for the modern world to
attempt to possess transcendent knowledge, it is a practical necessity to
comprehend how Christianity was corrupted from such an expression into base
exclusivist literalism. All these idealistic people who wish to study
transcendent knowledge and ignore and turn their back on the world of
Christianity have no hope of success at changing the world.

It is certainly hopeless and futile to fantasize that we can change the
religious world, the actual world we have today, by merely offering an
alternative system of transcendent knowledge, without including in that system
a specific module and full study of how transcendent knowledge maps to
Christianity in particular, and to all myth-religion systems in general. That
practically necessary mapping is a highly necessary mapping — you cannot
simply ignore the dragon of literalist Christianity, which is fully
predominant and influential; we have no choice but to confront it and destroy
it.

It is completely hopeless to attempt to just ignore it: literalist
Christianity has far too much influence to be ignored, and far too much value
to provide when converted from an impediment and firmly blocking enemy to a
helper, illustration, and ally. How can people think that they can just
ignore Christianity and it will fade away? They are living in an idealistic,
unrealistic fantasy of wishful thinking, and, there are too many reasons why
it is infinitely better to convert to the truth of Christianity rather than
wishing and trying to simply ignore and delete Christianity.

For many practical reasons, we *have to* show how transcendent knowledge is
mapped to Christianity, and we *have to* explain how Christianity was
corrupted from an expression of transcendent knowledge to debased exclusivist
literalism. Christianity is not just some minor backwoods cult that can be
ignored.

Literalist Christianity is the most influential religion in today’s world, it
is firmly and thoroughly entrenched, it is positioned to prevent and impede
transcendent knowledge, you can ignore it but it won’t ignore you, and the
easiest way to convert the world from pseudo-religion to actual religious
wisdom is to leverage, not to try to ignore, Christianity. To try to ignore
Christianity would be to miss out on the most powerful lever.

Christianity cannot be ignored, but the good news is, it can be leveraged —
and it *must be* leveraged. The only way to convert the world from
pseudo-religion to actual religious wisdom is by first of all, leveraging
Christianity, which means explaining how transcendent knowledge is encoded in
it, and explaining how it was corrupted into literalist pseudo-religion.

A strategy of focusing on transcendent knowledge and ignoring Christianity is
guaranteed to utterly fail, just as running away to Americanized Buddhism is a
failed strategy that is bound to keep failing, and I condemn the post-1960s
Western efforts to look to stripped-down demythologized Buddhism as escapist,
irrelevant, impotent, distorting, even corrupting of Buddhist wisdom itself.
A strategy of leveraging Christianity is essentially guaranteed to succeed.

Roll-your-own Buddhism is a foolish, clueless lie and a sham, it is a failure,
falsely claiming some success and viability: how is telling ourselves lies
about Buddhism going to give us transcendent truth or provide a true
alternative to debased Christianity? People ought to hate sham attempts at
spirituality more than Christianity; here I’m spiritually aligned with Gnosis
magazine.

Running away to exotic or abstract and purified systems of transcendent
knowledge, without dealing with, confronting, and solving the concrete
problems of entrenched religion — Christianity — is just a wishful evasion
and postponement of the necessary, required work of solving the problem rather
than running away from it.

The wish to avoid Christianity is ignorant and foolish because anyone who can
perceive how Christianity certainly and adeptly encodes transcendent knowledge
can see that obviously, leveraging Christianity is a vastly more sound,
useful, realistic, practical strategy than attempting to avoid and ignore
Christianity.

It’s stupid — I have to explain exactly why — to even think for a moment
that we can do an end-run around Christianity, when obviously, Christianity
stands as such a huge ally. It’s as illogical as an unarmed troop, who wants
to kill the enemy, finding an enemy’s cache of guns and then destroying the
cache of guns instead of taking them up. Obviously, the most effective weapon
against debased Christianity is authentic Christianity, not ignoring
Christianity.

Anyone who values transcendent knowledge and comprehends it and intends to
make major religious changes to the world, will recognize their work and their
given labor, and the way to victorious success, as necessarily happening
through *engaging* with the religious world through the world’s existing
religions, by reawakening the authentic version of each religion to battle
against the bogus version of each religion.

To fail to pick up this strategy of harnessing the authentic variety of a
religion against the bogus variety of a religion is to shirk and fail engaging
with the problem at hand, which is that the world is thoroughly taken over by
literalist Christianity.

Perhaps I am more alarmed and serious about the problem of literalist
Christianity than most spiritualists; in this respect I am aligned with the
mood of Acharya S: I take very seriously the extent to which bogus literalist
Christianity has taken over the world; if you think spirituality has any
chance by ignoring Christianity, that’s foolish and you have no idea just how
powerful Christianity is, such that no idealistic fantasy of offering a
positive free-floating new spirituality system, such as Americanized Buddhism,
has any chance of success.

The attempt to put forth a spirituality system while ignoring Christianity,
the attempt to avoid engaging Christianity, is instantly and completely
doomed, and it’s a crazy strategy given the no-brainer obvious potent strategy
of destroying bogus Christianity through revivifying and revealing authentic
Christianity.

The dragon of literalist Christianity is far too powerful and active of an
impediment to permit the real success of transcendent knowledge, and, it is
just crazy, foolish, and ignorant to fail to recognize authentic Christianity
as the most obvious and natural weapon against bogus Christianity.

Only a terrible lack of comprehension of how transcendent knowledge maps to
Christianity would permit anyone to think for even a moment that the smart
thing to do is ignore Christianity and the dynamic of how authentic
Christianity has been debased into bogus Christianity.

Obviously, to anyone who comprehends transcendent knowledge and
metaphorization of it, the only thinkable strategy even worth considering is
to blow the lid open on the true meaning of Christianity, not to let the lid
stay on and thus preserve evil bogus Christianity while attempting to offer a
stripped-down attractive alternative.

Those who attempt to provide authentic religion through a strategy of staying
positive and ignoring Christianity or ignoring bogus Christianity, are part of
the problem: in effect, in practice, they are inadvertently helping to
preserve the evil status quo; Gnosis magazine essentially warns about this
deep, catastrophic strategic mistake. If you fail to repair Christianity, you
are in effect helping to support broken Christianity.

To personally attain gnosis and to improve the world and make gnosis available
to the general populace, we urgently have to repair and fix Christianity; the
last thing we should be doing is ignoring Christianity. A strategy of
ignoring broken Christianity and offering a pure non-symbolic system of
transcendent knowledge, is obviously guaranteed to fail catastrophically and
result in the continuation of ignorance, delusion, and bogus terribly harmful
religion.

It needs to be clear to anyone who comprehends transcendent knowledge and
metaphorization of it, that the only possible strategy for success, the only
strategy that has any merit of pursuing, is the strategy of offering the core
pure non-symbolic system of transcendent knowledge *together with* a full and
complete explanation of how that core system maps to the Christian system,
pitting as an ally authentic Christianity — dug out this terrifically
powerful thing from the pit it’s been hidden in — against the active,
blocking, entrenched, firmly predominant bogus Christianity.

Bogus Christianity is vastly more powerful, entrenched, and an active
impediment to transcendent knowledge than any puny and feeble systematization
of transcendent knowledge has any hope in hell of surviving in the face of;
and, together with that, also, authentic Christianity is the no-brainer
natural superpower, the only possible super-weapon that is fitted exactly to
kill the monster of bogus Christianity. We have to engage the actual enemy
and we have to use the right weapons.

This powerful monster of bogus religion is the main impediment to gnosis being
available to the general populace. Bogus religion is bad because it is
harmful and its ultimate harm is that it impedes the availability of gnosis.

The attempt to offer an attractive positive system of transcendent knowledge
while ignoring Christianity is foolish, ignorant, clueless, and certain to
fail; it has no chance of any success or real influence, and the people who
think it is working are merely deluding themselves and remaining irrelevant
while bogus Christianity, together with bogus spirituality in general, remains
all-powerful.

The goal is primary religious experience, intense mystic-state experiential
insight, metaphysical enlightenment about personal moral control agency. The
effort to form transcendent knowledge without reference to Christianity is an
understandable but misguided attempt to get to core transcendent knowledge,
but fails to realize how practically necessary the outer layer is, of
interfacing/mapping to entrenched religious systems.

The right strategy is to distinctly define *core* transcendent knowledge and
the *mapping* of that core to existing symbolic-systems of myth-religion that
express that knowledge.

Trying to do the core part without the mapping will fail to engage with the
world to change it, and just as bad, failing to attain that mapping amounts to
a failure to comprehend the actual world we have on our hands, failure to
understand transcendent knowledge well enough to usefully perceive how it is
expressed in the actual predominant religions that make up the real actual
world we have had to live in. Only valuing the core can only be done by
failing even to understand the core.

Anyone who understands the core of spiritual wisdom must therefore also
understand how the actual religious systems of the world embody and map to
that core; anyone who claims to have the core without having that mapping
necessarily has a poor and feeble grasp of the core; in practice, one’s grasp
of core transcendent knowledge depends on one’s grasp of metaphorizations of
the core (or, mappings of the core to myth-religious systems, or, how the core
is embodied in existing myth-religion systems).

Anyone who claims that core transcendent knowledge is practical, viable, and
desirable without also mapping core transcendent knowledge to existing
myth-religion merely demonstrates their own failure to grasp core transcendent
knowledge. The effort to seek and value the core without also mastering the
mapping to myth-religion reveals merely ignorance of the core and reveals
irrelevant, impractical, shirking to engage with the real problems of changing
the actual world.

Protestant religion tried to destroy the symbolic myth-religion layer of
Catholic Christianity but only ended up burying and hiding the truth. The
effort to strip away and eliminate myth-religion symbol-systematizing is
motivated by the admirable desire to attain core transcendent knowledge, but
in practice in the real world, you cannot have core transcendent knowledge
without having and valuing the mapping of that core to existing myth-religion
symbol systems.

Anyone who actually has the core transcendent knowledge will be delighted to
study and understand and comprehend, recognize, explorer, and excitedly
explain how that core is expressed, like elatedly discovering the solution to
a meaning-puzzle that converts a dragon into an ally, in various myth-religion
symbol-systems.

Shunning colorful myth-religion symbol-systems merely proves that a person is
pursuing wisdom without yet possessing it — because they lack comprehension
of transcendent knowledge, they loath and are alienated from all myth-religion
symbol systems, so they become wishfully enamored with stripped-down
non-symbolic minimalist religion such as demythologized liberal Christianity
or Americanized pseudo-spiritual Buddhism — they loath mythic metaphor
because it is not the core transcendent knowledge they wish to attain.

But the person who has attained core transcendent knowledge is excited to
explore and explain how the metaphorical myth-religion symbol-systems such as
magic, alchemy, astrology, Christianity, and Islam are actually fascinating
and wonderful encoded, embodied expressions of the core transcendent
knowledge.

And naturally this tremendous discovery of what core transcendent knowledge is
and how it has been mapped into the existing myth-religion systems leads to a
serious interest into the question of how, exactly and historically, those
myth-religion symbol systems came to be debased from authentic expressions of
religious experiential insight to bogus and harmful literalism.

Anyone interested in the core, who understands the core, will be naturally
interested in metaphorizations of the core, whereas today’s would-be
spiritualists shun metaphor in their as-yet-unattained pursuit of the core.
Thus we see the dynamic I wrote about some months ago, that there is a classic
trajectory from debased literalist supernaturalist thinking (low religion) to
awkward stripped-down metaphor-loathing mid-level religion, finally arriving
home to delight now in magical metaphorization of the core experiential
insight.

If metaphor study is not fun for you, you have not yet attained core
transcendent knowledge, and therefore foolishly think that stripped-down,
demythologized core transcendent knowledge can and should go it alone without
pairing up with the strategy of mapping to existing myth-religion
symbol-systems to rightly explain them.

The effort to have a strategy of only putting forth core transcendent
knowledge, without also putting forth a mapping of it to existing
myth-religion symbol-systems, is only half a viable strategy, and is
guaranteed to fail twice over: it will fail to change the world, and it will
fail to even attain the one half it claims to: it will fail to even attain to
the core transcendent knowledge.

In practice, it is impossible to attain core transcendent knowledge without
also attaining a mapping of that core to the existing myth-religion symbol
systems — and also, once you possess a mapping of that core to the existing
myth-religion symbol systems, that and only that is what stands to kill the
hegemony of bogus literalist religion.

This all has always been obvious to me as the only strategy worth even
thinking about, and it is exasperating to have to waste time spelling out the
obvious to so many people around me who simply loath bogus myth-religion, who
loath religion in a crude across-the-board way because they are ignorant of
the existence of profound transcendent meaning in religion and of the relation
between bogus literalist religion and profound mythic-metaphorical religion.

They fail to appreciate systems of myth-religion because they fail to
understand myth-religion. People ought to understand core transcendent
knowledge, including access to intense mystic-state climax of controllership
breakdown and transformation, and they ought to, by necessarily the same
token, interlinked, comprehend and appreciate the cleaver profundity of mythic
metaphor in existing myth-religion systems.

Only then can people be said to understand transcendent knowledge. Anything
short of possessing and valuing both the core and the metaphor-mapping is a
woefully incomplete state, not spiritual enlightenment, and indicates merely
vague wishful thinking about what spiritual knowledge is, and indicates merely
the basic lack of understanding mystic experiential insight and transcendent
knowledge.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience. The essence, paradigm, origin, and fountainhead of religion is
the use of visionary plants to routinely trigger the intense mystic altered
state, producing loose cognitive association binding, which then produces an
experience of frozen block-universe determinism with a single, pre-existing,
ever-existing future. The return of the ordinary state of consciousness is
allegorized as a transcendence of Necessity or cosmic determinism. Myth
describes this mystic-state experience. Initiation is classically a series of
some 8 visionary-plant sessions, interspersed with study of perennial
philosophy. Most religion is a distortion, corruption, literalization, and
cooptation of this standard initiation system.

Steve wrote (edited):

>>I would like a discussion group that acquaints us as a community of people

who have experienced the egoless state of blissful now — the mystical
gratuitous grace bestowed on us. I want to further explore where I have gone
and what it’s about and be around and talk to others who know about the gift
and realize that everything is going to be OK.

>>I would like to meet other people like myself who had had this life-changing

experience. You don’t meet them every day. If you could that easily, I would
just go to the mall and strike up a conversation with any person and talk
about it. But it’s not likely to occur.


This is a scholarly idea-development and debate forum, as stated in the home
page and charter. That includes theorizing about the effects of ego
suspension and ego transcendence. The emphasis is on ideas rather than
individuals. The unmoderated discussion group supports that, and I expect it
to have such an emphasis.

I am skeptical about the purported benefits of ego transcendence; am testing
the assertions to see whether they hold water or are merely unrealistic
wishful thinking.

>>I don’t want to strip away the original metaphorical reference from any of

these original religions especially the Christian one. I love some of the
wonderful complexity that these metaphors achieve. It is artful and a beauty
to behold.

>>These experiences do differ and some are more intellectual than others. For

some people, the intellectual answers that fell into place are the most
intriguing. For some, righting the wrongs regarding historical distortion and
debasing of the meaning is the best way to apply one’s energies. The
populations of masses were abused for power by distorting the purest of
wonders that mankind can potentially know. The intellectual explanation about
what happened will reach the elite in breaking this tangle apart, but it won’t
reach the common man. The common man doesn’t understand the difference
between a metaphor and metaphysical reality, which is why these distortions
worked as they did throughout Christian history.


The intellectual approach is worthwhile, influential, and crucially necessary.
This approach might be less immediately popular, but stands actually to be
much more influential than merely yet another spiritual community. There are
lots of such communities, with little effect on the status quo regarding the
official history of Christian origins and original meaning.

>>The quest and pursuit of such an aim is courageous, but I don’t want

fighting. Damn these devils yes, But I’ll let you be the Vampire slayer, as a
division of labor. I can help in that fight, but to me it is a game to be
played as all things are.


I don’t write these days about the common basic ideas that everyone knows —
such as what is ego, what are benefits of ego elimination, what does ego
elimination mean. I’ve already written about that.

I’m lately working on the problems of mystic theory and history. I ought to
work on those problems of how Christianity went bad and instead of writing
about the effects of eliminating ego. I defend my recent focus on the
problems of meaning-debasement in Christian history, and cannot always focus
on benefits of ego elimination. I criticize the strategy of focusing on the
effects of ego elimination as a lone approach without also connecting it to
history of religions.

Some criticize the focus on the history of distortion about mystic knowledge,
and ask for core work on the effects of egolessness. I am skeptical about the
need to focus more on core egolessness study including benefits of
egolessness. They underestimate the extent to which Christianity has fallen
from a height and the crucial need to repair it. People can discuss core
egolessness in the unmoderated discussion group or many other groups.

One can be partly enlightened or transcendent even without full understanding
of the historical lies/distortions that impede and distract people from the
gnostic core. How well a person grasps the core of enlightenment is limited
by how well metaphor and religious history is understood.

At issue is the appropriate balance of writing about core gnosis, how that is
encoded in historical religions, and the history of how religions start with
core gnosis and became debased into abused literalism.


Regarding my recent postings on the history of literalization and debasement
of religious meaning, Steve wrote:

>>We know this already. Not to belittle the historical accuracy of your

points, but is this study really necessary? Yes these self-serving
power-mongers have peppered history
with a tangle of mess than would lead any serious seeker for wisdom running
the other way. But on this group we are supposed to be discussing how freedom
from the ego is the answer to beating all of this.


Corrections about Christian history are key and necessary. Scholars do not
understand the original meaning and how it was debased, and to keep their jobs
within the status quo establishment paradigm, they suppress glimmerings of it,
and an adequate study of it is urgently and crucially necessary.

Is freedom from the ego the solution for stopping the harms of debased
religion? Setting the historical record straight is a key part of the
solution, the goal being to stop the harms of debased religion, particularly,
to make gnosis available by debunking the debased version of Christianity and
setting the historical record straight to show that Christianity originally
was metaphorical description of core mystic-state experiential insight, and
was then debased and literalized for reasons of sociopolitical control.

In setting the historical record straight about Christianity, that involves
study of mythic/mystic metaphor, the question being, how did or does mythic
metaphor become literalized, debased, and abused? As soon as we say here is
core transcendent knowledge, and Christianity is really a metaphorical
expression of that core knowelddge, the historical question pops up
necessitating an adequate explanation: “I am skeptical, how could Christianity
really be about that, given that we’ve been told such a different story about
Christian meaning and origins?”

The 3 questions are deeply interlocked and one’s comprehension of one of these
questions is significantly limited by the degree of comprehension of the
others:
o What is core transcenndent knowledge?
o How is Christianity a metaphorical expression of that core?
o How historically did Christianity fall from being understood as a
metaphorical expression of core gnosis to being merely debased and abused
literalism?

How historically did Christianity fall from being understood as a metaphorical
expression of core gnosis to being merely debased and abused literalism?

Jesus was invented as a rebuttal revision of the divinized Caesar figure.
Jesus had to be held as fleshly to compete against Caesar.

The gnostic-type assertion of Jesus’ fleshliness in Gospel of John supported
the double-entendre of mushroom flesh and infusion, which is real food to
really eat and drink.

Pre-Constantine Christianity relied heavily on two-layer meaning-switching,
double-entendre; the hide-then-reveal pattern which is found in the mind
itself during the ripening and revolutionary overthrow of the egoic mental
worldmodel. Valentinian Gnosticism per Pagels in The Gnostic Paul used
systematic switching from one set of meanings to another; the pre-initiation
or non-initiated set of meanings included more of a literalized Jesus, while
the initiated set of meanings had a more spiritual Jesus. However, their
literalized Jesus was not nearly as literalized as the modern,
Enlightenment-era conception of Jesus.

Constantine and his ilk literalized Christianity because the Jews had a
literal-history styled mysticism, and because literalizing Jesus enabled
exclusivist concentration of authority given to the organized power-mongering
top-down clerics.

Middle Ages pagan-Catholicism was fairly metaphor-savvy; we must not project
modern-era hyper-literalism across the board onto European Catholic history.
We must not assume that people in the middle ages had our modern
hyper-literalized Jesus conception in mind.

Protestantism literalized Christianity as a strategy to overthrow the Catholic
power.

The Enlightenment literalized Christianity partly as a strategy to overthrow
Christian sociopolitical power, and partly because they continued the
Protestant direction — this marked the complete and final debasement and
literalization of Christianity.

The industrial revolution caused people to move away from the land, losing
touch with visionary plants which had provided essential esoteric
understanding of mystic metaphor to the pagan-Catholic masses.

>>literalizing Jesus enabled exclusivist concentration of authority given to

the organized power-mongering top-down clerics.

“Jesus existed in the world only for a short time, and possessed all
authority, exclusively, then handed that authority on only to Peter, who
handed it on only to us.” Literalization created artificial scarcity of
authority, and limitation of who possesses authority.

>—–Original Message—–
>From: Michael Hoffman
>Sent: Thursday, August 19, 2004 10:23 PM
>To: Egodeath Group
>Subject: [egodeath] Six-week break from posting

>I did a so-so job of not posting before; I ended up posting certain
>discoveries I wanted to provably date, and posted in another group and in my
>weblog. I vow not to post through September.

>I have written enough; just follow through on that line of analysis.

I will probably need to do such a break again.

Merker wrote (edited):

>>How often do people report the altered-state experience of perceiving one’s

life like on a movie reel which is seen standing apart from it? The
perception of one’s lifetime rushing by; one’s lifetime is seen rushing by.
This movie reel can be perceived as a huge loop where the end meets the
beginning.

>>This perception is rarely found in trip reports, yet in Rock lyrics it is a

fairly common theme. Even the more advanced trippers typically don’t seem to
be truly advanced: they uphold the common view of reality rather than having a
remodeled worldview. Rock artists seem to be the only visible group who
appear to have adopted a truly changed mental worldmodel regarding space,
time, self, freedom, control, and perception.

>>Rush lyrics about this include:

>>A dizzying lifetime
>>Reeling by on celluloid

>>He plays fast forward just as long as he can

>>You know how that rabbit feels
>>Going under your speeding wheels
>>Bright images flashing by
>>Like windshields towards a fly
>>Frozen in the fatal climb
>>But the wheels of time
>>Just pass you by

I’ve read about perceiving a rapid series of individual time-frames in studies
of tripping in books. Rock mystics are advanced trippers who work to express
and portray their advanced experiences, and work to have experiences in a way
that translates to expression. They trip artistically.

The following are related Rush lyrics about imagination, memory, perception,
rapid images, solipsistic meta-perception:

We’ve taken care of everything [passive subject of fate]
The words you hear the songs you sing
The pictures that give pleasure to your eyes.
… Our great computers fill the hallowed halls.
… All the gifts of life are held within our walls.

I used to think I had a pretty good life here, just plugging into my machine
for the day, then watching Templevision or reading a Temple Paper in the
evening.

Come explore your dreams’ creation
Enter this world of imagination
… Here where Time and Space collide

Sweet memories
Flashing very quickly by
… You’ll be there
When you know what I know

I have memory and awareness,
But I have no shape or form.
As a disembodied spirit,
I am dead and yet unborn.

I walk down vanity fair
Memory lane ev’rywhere
Wall Street shuffles there

Though it’s just a memory, some memories last forever.

Crimson, misty mem’ry,
hazy glimpse of me.

Art as expression,
… Will still capture our imaginations.

Living on a lighted stage
Approaches the unreal
For those who think and feel
In touch with some reality
Beyond the gilded cage.

Cast in this unlikely role,
Ill-equipped to act,

Living in the Limelight,
The universal dream

Wide-angle watcher
On life’s ancient tales,
Steeped in the history of London

Process information at half speed
Pause, rewind, replay,
Warm memory chip,
Random sample …

Things crawl in the darkness
That imagination spins

Memory banks unloading
… A struggle to exist
… It replays each of the days
A hundred years of routines

Let’s fly tonight
On our virtual wings
Press this key
To see amazing things

An unpagan godman was ultimately chosen as the standard godman for the Roman
empire around 350 — he was popular precisely because he was painted as a
complete alternative to the Roman rulership system, as being completely
different, as coming completely and purely from outside the Roman system.
Thus we still see the denials that Jesus was a product of Hellenism “because
he could very well have been derived purely from Jewish sources”.

Jesus was so derived entirely from Jewish, anti-Roman sources, but
*deliberately*, in contrived fashion — first by anti-Rome early Christians
wanting a practical supplement and alternative to the Roman system, and then
later by the Roman governors when they were co-opting the growing Christian
movement and commandeering the troublesome rebellious Jewish legacy.

The Jesus godman figure didn’t “come from” Jewish religion; he was
deliberately patched together from there in order to create a superficially
Jewish styled version of the Hellenistic-type godman. The Jesus godman was
not a product created by Jewish stories independently of Hellenistic
influence: he was more like a figure that, inspired by mystery-religion
models, was deliberately fabricated from deliberately allowing only Jewish
thematic inputs on the surface.

On the deep, substantial level, the Jesus figure came from Hellenistic godman,
but for the surface level, deliberately only Jewish elements were selected, so
later the claim could be made that Jesus’ origin was fully independent from
the Hellenistic godman figures.

The separateness of the Jewish religion, the lack of influence from Pagan
religion, is largely a put-on, a pretence. The scribes worked hard at
appearing to only draw upon Jewish inputs, but non-Jewish inputs were present
under the Jewish-styled surface veneer that was overlaid to hide the
non-Jewish inputs. This is especially true for the origins of the Jesus
figure.

Early Christians portrayed Jesus as Jewish on the surface to represent an
alternative to the Roman system. The Roman governors portrayed Jesus as
Jewish and scripture-derived, to enable them to take over the Jewish
scriptures, to commandeer the growing alternative to the Roman system.


Caesar was crucified by pirates, and he was rescued and ransomed, then
crucified the pirates.


John Baptist’ enmity with Jesus in DaVinci — Jesus may have stood for
Rome-based rulers, ‘Jewish’ represented being against the rulers. Jesus
sometimes represented anti-Caesar; anti-State; anti-Rome. Ancient
anti-Romanism was expressed as Jewish-styled religion vs. Caesar cult and
other state-aligned cults. Later anti-Romeism was Jewish or John Baptist
being pitted against Catholic church — there, the Jesus figure may represent
top-down power, while John the Baptist represents egalitarian truth.

The Jewish-styled godman cult support network wasn’t so much a threat
competing head-to-head against Ruler Cult — more like, here was a popular
supplemental religious and social support system, ripe for takeover and
cooptation by the power mongers who already were in control and in charge.

The Jewish, anti-Rome system (at least thematically anti-Rome) was
successfully growing, increasing its numbers by offering the social-support
network that the honor/shame hierarchy system didn’t provide. Christianity
was a selective compromise, demanding the social-support benefits of the
Jewish network, without the needless additional Jewish requirements.

Christians wanted to extract from the Jewish system the alternative-to-Rome
surface themes and the anti-hierarchy social attitudes and the practical
benefits of the social support network. “Can’t we do like the Jewish network
system, but without the objectionable parts?”

To co-opt the Jewish alternative-to-Rome, the Roman governors had to fully
co-opt the Jewish scriptures, claiming the Rome-controlled Jesus figure is the
ultimate lead-up of the Jewish religion.

The Jesus figure connoted the wish for an alternative to Roman top-down
control. The Roman controllers took over the Jesus figure, thus taking over
and controlling the wish for an alternative to their control. DaVinci’s John
Baptizer figure would then be wagging the finger at the Jesus figure in order
to wag it at the Rome-based governors whether we call those Caesar or Pope.

Virgin Mary also shifts similarly in alignment: she is Isis renamed, was
embraced typically by the masses against the top-down controlled Catholic
orders, thus being somewhat anti-Rome, and was identified by Protestants with
Rome when Protestants were intent on stripping Rome’s power by stripping
Christianity of all mystery-religion, iconography, images, mystic
experiencing, and symbols, leaving only literalist supernaturalism,
conduct-of-life ethics, and Calvinist determinism as opposed to salvation
through Catholic ritual.

My response to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JesusMysteries/message/19915 .


When Jesus & The Goddess was published, around Sep. 2001, I asked Freke &
Gandy point blank whether Paul existed, and they said they don’t know, hard to
say. However, for this matrix, I’d consider “Freke & Gandy” to refer to the
published writings in the pair of books, The Jesus Mysteries and Jesus & The
Goddess, where the working assumption is that Paul existed.

Scholars tend to pick similar rather than dissimilar answers to the questions
about HJ and PA. It’s easy to find difference-by-1 combinations (12, 43, 45),
but there are few difference-by-2, or greater, combinations (13, 14, 15, 51,
52, 53). Answers/positions 1-5 on each question naturally map together. When
you plot all scholars, it visually shows a trend of predominance of adherence
to combinations 1&1, 2&2, 3&3, 4&4, 5&5, with fewer scholars holding
mismatches such as 1&5, 5&1, 2&4, 4&2.

Klaus asks, are combinations 1&2, 1&3, 1&4, 1&5, 4&1, and 5&1 unconceivable?
They are conceivable, but the natural fitting of ideas together makes certain
position-combinations natural and common, and certain other
position-combinations unnatural and rare. A visible band appears, naturally
pairing like combinations (11, 22, 33, 44, and 55), with steady falloff as you
move away from that central band into the disjointed combinations.

# scholars per position, as identified by Klaus
1 2 3 4 5 (< response to PA question)
1 4 0 0 0 0
2 2 5 1 0 0
3 1 5 4 1 0
4 0 3 4 1 0
5 0 5 3 2 5
^– response to HJ question

The curve sags toward the lower left by a factor of 25 vs. 2; more scholars
downgrade Jesus’ historicity than Paul’s; the scenario [Jesus existed but Paul
didn’t] is highly inconceivable, while [Jesus didn’t exist but Paul did] seems
more plausible. Scholars question Jesus’ historicity before Paul’s, so
today’s positions are biased in the direction of doubting Jesus’ historicity
while uncritically assuming Paul’s historicity, since we simply haven’t gotten
around to asking the question of Paul’s historicity yet.

Combinations 11, 33, and 55 graphically define the main band of natural
position-combinations. That’s [11] (Conservative), [22, 33, 23, 32]
(Liberal), and [44, 55, 45, 54] (Radical). These are the Conservative,
Liberal, and Radical paradigms as manifested by the answers to the Historical
Jesus question with a set of answers provided and the Pauline-Authenticity
question with a set of answers provided.

The taxonomy matrix is powerful for opening up combinatorial possibilities in
a useful, organized way. Klaus posed a 5×5 position matrix, producing 25
answer-sets. He effectively defined two questions, with 5 multiple-choice
answers, put them to scholars, and got back potentially 25
answer-combinations. Had he defined 3 questions, each with 5 multiple-choice
answers, there would be 125 answer-combinations — requiring a representation
with a 3-d answer-space collapsed into 2-d.

For example, add the question “Did Justin Martyr exist?” and offer 5
multiple-choice answers. I expect the 5&5 scholars Klauss identified —
ahistorical Jesus and Paul — would naturally say that Justin Martyr was a
fabricated, back-projected figure invented by the Tertullian/Eusebius-type
crowd.

My view is 5&5 or 5&4; there is a challenge regarding terminology, about what
it means for Paul to have existed. If there were several Paul-like figures,
one observer might point to one and say ‘see, Paul existed’, while another
person might look upon the same reality and declare ‘see, Paul didn’t exist’.
When you ask people “Did Paul exist”, you really need to expand at length and
even argue about what justifiably qualifies as “Paul having existed”.

Perfect agreement is difficult to reach, because of what combinations of
word-senses people feel are justified. Different people might never come to
an agreement about the right way to define the taxonomy matrix positions and
assign scholars to each combinatorial possibility.

A good way to create an n*n matrix is to define a set of multiple-choice
questions. But different people might never come to an agreement about the
most useful, justified way to frame a set of questions to address to each
scholar. The position or theory the matrix-maker holds is likely to result in
a typical version of the resulting matrix. On the other hand, many
researchers in practice try out many positions and are not a priori committed,
or they move through a sequence of positions over the years and thus have
first-hand familiarity with each paradigm.

Worldviews regarding the nature of myth, Christian origins, historicity of
Jesus, historicity of Paul, and the nature of the mystic state can be grouped
into three position-combinations or general master paradigms: Conservative,
Liberal, and Radical, such that believing there was no Jesus naturally tends
to fit together with believing that all the gospel and NT cast of characters
were ahistorical. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JesusMysteries/message/18172

You can perform a generalization zoom-out transformation or a detail zoom-in
transformation on the HJ-PA taxonomy: instead of 5 positions, you could define
a 3×3 position matrix — or a 7×7 position matrix. These would be equivalent
to asking two questions, each with 3 or 5 or 7 multiple-choice answers to pick
from. 5×5 is the most generally useful; 3×3 and 7×7 are both boldly
ambitious: 3×3 requires a daring amount of generalization to try to uphold,
and 7×7 requires a superhuman amount of research and theorizing.

Look at Klaus’ high-level position labels for the multiple-choice answers for
his two questions:

Historical Jesus? Pick an answer/position:
1. Evangelical (Conservative)
2. Secular/liberal (Liberal)
3. Minimal (Liberal)
4. Cryptic (Radical)
5. Mythical (Radical)

Pauline-Authenticity? Pick an answer/position:
1. Traditional (Conservative)
2. Standard (Liberal)
3. Modified (Liberal)
4. Ghostwrite (Radical)
5. Ahistorical (Radical)

Now zoom out, simplify, combine the terms, and reduce the number of
answers/positions to pick from. Collapse 2 and 3 together, and collapse 4 and
5 together. The result is:
1. Conservative
2. Liberal
3. Radical

Each question, such as “which theory of myth do you hold, out of these 3
options”, has a Conservative, Liberal, and Radical answer — and all the
Conservative answers to the various questions all fit together as a natural
set. If you hold theory C of the nature of myth, you are naturally inclined
to hold theory C about Jesus’ historicity and hold theory C about Paul’s
historicity. If you hold the R-type theory about Jesus’ historicity, you are
naturally inclined to hold the matching R-type theory about Paul’s
historicity.


— Michael Hoffman

Regarding the previous posting,

HJ = the question of whether Historical Jesus existed

PA = the question of Pauline Authenticity; whether any of the Pauline epistles
in the New Testament were authentically written by St. Paul the Apostle — if
none, this is tantamount to denying Paul’s historicity, at least to some
Radical scholars, though other Radical scholars seem unconcerned with
questioning Paul’s historicity even while they assert that all Paulines were
falsely attributed to Paul.

Life is easy and pleasant focusing on one thing at a time. I am taking a
two-month break from posting and from reading Philosophy.


Regarding Philosophy, it is time to switch emphasis to writing formal
articles; I’m now in the polishing and details phase of theorizing about
transcendent knowledge. From here on out, everything to read and write is
essentially just more of the same kind of connect-the-dots. I don’t really
want or need any more insights, that would imply that the basic theory is not
complete, but it is complete, adequate, basically seaworthy; it flies, the
structure is finished and just needs polishing/details like the labor of
writing up a glossary. The theory has a certain balance now.

Always these days I respond with “See what I already wrote, but for your
particular question or point, use a simple combination of these four postings
and the answer or perspective is immediately obvious, it falls out readily.”
I’m lately just rehashing the same material in slightly different
configurations.

I don’t need free-form posting now so much as work on formal articles. The
more I post even about the same essential material, the better my command of
the terminology usage and presentation, but I’ve crossed the point of
diminishing returns and am ready to pour the words into a more lasting,
formal, organized structure. My focus of late always seems a matter of
critiquing cluelessness and fallacies in the books and magazines; I identified
the cliched paradigms and their typical signature fallacies.

The history of cluelessness and enlightenment and transcendence is complex,
tricky, and subtle, but not endlessly so; after awhile, there are only so many
forms of metaphorizing primary religious experiencing. I only have an
outline, but it is an adequate outline; the rest will be details and polishing
and decoration. Lately I approach the books not for revolutionary insight any
more, but merely for additional details to further, yet further, prove and
support and illustrate my points I’ve already written about at some length.

Yet only recently did I pull in and explicitly connect my previous thought to
some major areas such as apophatic theology and Western estoericism. I value
additional supporting evidence such as for visionary plants as the main
wellspring of religion, but that is more of the same; there is enough evidence
already, all things considered, to prove beyond a reasonable doubt this theory
of transcendent knowledge and its mapping to myth-religion-philosophy.

I wouldn’t mind learning more; it’s enjoyable and helpful, but not absolutely
required — this is like “normal science” as opposed to a “revolutionary
science” phase; I’ve entered recently into my “normal science” phase of
research.

I particularly mark when my eyes were opened to just how entrenched the
predominant cluelessness was in the theory of myth — “those idiots, modern
scholars, are all completely misreading the nature of myth and the role of
entheogens; they are operating all within the broken, Liberal paradigm, such
as Campbellian waking-consciousness storytelling and Jungian
dreaming-consciuosness symbolism, and taking the minimal theory of entheogens
in religion for granted. But myth-religion is actually about visionary-plant
experiences.”

It all came together, these pieces I already knew, showing me the full extent
and depth of the error of the modern paradigm(s) *across these multiple
fields*. That was the threshold into a new stage of theorizing, into a
distinctly more sure-footed mode of writing. Now I’m writing the grand
unified theory of multidisciplinary cluelessness and systematic category
error.

Reading Peter Kingsley and Neville Drury helped make this leap to see just how
off-base the modern picture of pre-Socratic philosophy and of magic are: both
fields are, properly, mystic altered state philosophy and
metaphorical-experiential visionary-plant esotericism.

That’s the latest insight I had, fully recognizing the grand cross-field
paradigmatic/systematic error that has uniformly screwed up *all* these
fields — schizophrenia, near-death-experiencing, theory of myth, theory of
mysticism, Reformed theology limitations, debased literalist religion,
entheogen diminishment in Liberal Buddhism, in-time
ordinary-state-of-consciousness causal-chain determinism, anti-realist
Copenhagenist interpretation of Quantum Physics, and so on.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience. The essence, paradigm, origin, and fountainhead of religion is
the use of visionary plants to routinely trigger the intense mystic altered
state, producing loose cognitive association binding, which then produces an
experience of frozen block-universe determinism with a single, pre-existing,
ever-existing future. The return of the ordinary state of consciousness is
allegorized as a transcendence of Necessity or cosmic determinism. Myth
describes this mystic-state experience. Initiation is classically a series of
some 8 visionary-plant sessions, interspersed with study of perennial
philosophy. Most religion is a distortion, corruption, literalization, and
cooptation of this standard initiation system.

No-separate-self vs. transcending the deterministic block-unity universe

If all is one, should I love my attacker as myself? If there is no separate
self, does that contradict the religious-philosophy idea of being in the world
but *not* of it? See the new book Urban Dharma (title?) which has a chapter
Dark Alley.

See Alan Watts’ chapter Is It Serious? about the universal put-on, universe
split against itself, and see the book of Job in the Jewish Bible/Old
Testament for treatment of this irony of religious love and
unity-consciousness in spite of the worst mundane events. And the saying
attributed to the Jesus figure, love your enemy as yourself.
Immanence/transcendence remain as two points of view in theology; the saved
soul is lifted out from the world of block-universe determinism.

The lower half of transcendent experiencing is block-universe unity-immersion,
then the higher after that — soon after that — in astral ascent mysticism is
being lifted out, but only the spiritual portion of the person is lifted out;
the lower, soul portion (body and psyche/soul) remains immersed in the block
universe.

These multiple points of view or aspects of unity consciousness,
block-universe, and rising out from it, and the multi-phase trajectory of the
classic spiritual path, give rise to complex religious theory/theology.

The phrase no-free-will includes miraculously transcending no-free-will (being
fished out from the world by the savior/redeemer figure).

The phrase no-separate-self could include notes about apparent or practically
separate selves per Watts, and notes about the idea of separating the saved
from the damned people — or separating the saved portion of each person from
the damned portion of each person. All is one and one is all, but the saved
portion of the person is born and miraculously transcendently separated out
from the deterministic cosmic rock universe.


See what I’ve written already, slightly recombine the ideas, then it’s easy to
compute my theoretical perspective on the interesting seeming inconsistencies
and paradoxes or problems. You have to calculate the solutions to these
particular problems yourself. I’ve already provided the system of math. I
can’t do every calculation myself, any more than Decartes could have when he
published his math theories. Thus it’s now more important for me to organize
what I’ve already written, rather than spending time working out the answers
to endless routine questions.

I’ve demonstrated time and again how to apply the theory to such problems;
readers need to do the same.

Compilation: We Can Fly
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00006O0PH

Alice Designs
Artist: The Sugarbeats
1966
Track 20

The style is like Strawberry Alarm Clock. Pretty, Paisley Pop harmonies,
‘clean’ electric guitar, flute, harpsichord-sound
Lyrics are somewhat like Your Gold Dress by Dukes of Stratosphear.
It’s essentially about Isis (or Virgin Mary).


Just about the time that I’m aware of where it’s at
I think of where it’s been
There is no light (love?) that covers (?) all who falsify but die
To sink or dare to swim

But everything I am belongs to Alice
I view the fundamental truth inside her palace
She gives me food for thought
All the gold could not have bought
And the energy of life flows from her chalice

Alice designs her name all up side my brain
Alice delights the garden of my soul
Alice designs her name all over my sign
But she’s not mine, she belongs to all

All of us who cling beneath her cape
And realize they no longer must escape
All of us who gaze into her eyes
And see themselves in unfamiliar guise
All of us who wanted to be real
But were forced to hide the way we tried to feel

All of us rejected by the trend (?)
When they asked us if we’d kill for them we laughed
All of us who used to wear a mask
Now they need us they’ll do anything we ask

Song: My Friend Jack
Artist: The Smoke
Compilation: Electric Sugar Cube Flashbacks
Version: demo/outtake with explicit lyrics, released in Germany only
Year: ?
Music style: 1967-style full-on psych with tremolo fuzz guitar
Transcribed by Michael Hoffman


My friend Jack eats sugar lumps
My friend Jack eats sugar lumps
Oh, what beautiful things he sees
Oh, what beautiful things he sees

He’s on a voyage
Across an ocean
Waves of his mind
Are set in motion
Lost in a wonderland
Of color and of sound

My friend Jack eats sugar lumps
My friend Jack eats sugar lumps
Oh, what beautiful things he sees
Oh, what beautiful things he sees

He’s seeing things
You can’t imagine
Landscapes in sound
Revealing to him
More than a million shapes
The eye could never see

Can’t you see how happy he is
Nothing seems to put him down
People think that he’s just crazy
He’s the weirdest cat in town

My friend Jack eats sugar lumps
My friend Jack eats sugar lumps
Oh, what beautiful things he sees
Oh, what beautiful things he sees

He’s on a voyage
Across an ocean
Waves of his mind
Are set in motion
Lost in a wonderland
Of color and of sound

My friend Jack eats sugar lumps
My friend Jack eats sugar lumps
Oh, what beautiful things he sees
Oh, what beautiful things he sees