compassion fundamental

Chinese charater for myth

myth : religion

Chinese charater for religion

All of life is a meditation.

Most meditation is unintentional.

Unintentional concern about material conditions is a burden never lifted.

Material concerns can never be completely solved as they are infinite.

There is absolutely no way of making a organic organism perfectly secure.

Human beings rise above material concerns when realizing satisfaction of the flesh is an impossibility that can never be accomplished in reality.

Adults have attempted to communicate spiritual consciousness to children throughout human history by fabricating mythical narratives in attempts to explain the ineffable in a metaphoric allegoric manner.

Myths, always about the human journey through life, are designed to bring us to a level of consciousness that is spiritual in essence.

Myths offer life models.

Life models to live by.

Living models to imitate and mimic.

For the living models of myths to perform their function correctly they must be both culturally and temporally in tune with their social group.

The religious myth, a model for living, must be appropriate for time and place to function smoothly as the moral order.

Dogmatic literialist intrepretation of religious myths belongs in the mystical past when giants roamed and gods descended to Earth.

To interpret religious myths literally is to become out of sync with present social cultural conditions and values.

To accept religious myths literally is to descend into a hyperreality in which everything must be given a mask to conform to the dogmatic belief system.

As children grow into adults they recognize the impossibilty of interpreting the imaginative religious myths literally and lose faith in the dogmatic literialist religion that has been taught them.

At this point in time the child must become an adult with adult responsibilities if the tribe is to survive.

Initiation ceremonies into the tribe are designed to break the self-centered worldview of a child and initiate a paradigm shift in understanding.

The main responsibility of the child, up until this time, was to simply survive in an inhospitable world of ice and steam but now, he or she, must contribute to the continual prosperity of the tribe.

So the tribe introduces the child to their ineffable patron, breaks the self-centered worldview and welcomes the newly rebirthed member a place at the meeting table with the adults.

All cultural symbols originate in a cultures founding psychological system.

The cultural symbols of the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam originated in a priestly elite of Akhenaten that had fled the counter revolution that deposed Tutankhamun.

The priestly elite of Moshe Rabbenu needed a new theological system other than that of the deposed Tutankhamun while fully adhering to the monotheistic tradition began by Akhenaten with which to lead their band of ignorant nomadic warriors.

Moshe Rabbenu cobbled together various local myths to come up with the socially engineered foundation for their local nomadic warrior god Yahweh.

Unfortunately certain ponerological elements crept in originally to keep the warriors under social control and later to assimilate the Canaanites.

To keep the warriors under control the priests of Yahweh came up with the concept of being born into sin after being separated from Yahweh.

The idea of inherent spiritual corruption placed upon your Eternal Soul at birth as ordained by Yahweh puts the victim who falls for the ponerological pathology into a servile condition to those who claim to be interpreters of the will of Yahweh and those who claim to be intercessors for Yahweh.

To assimilate the Canaanites the Cult of Yahweh had to demonize the Canaanites religion, originally an Egyptian colony, as Baal, fertility god of the Canaanites was the Apis bull, fertility god of the Egyptians.

The Cult of Yahweh hybrid engineered religious tradition rejected the symbiotic relation with nature by derogation of 'nature religions'.

In place of the forces of nature, which define reality quite eloquently, concepts of what is good for people and what is bad for people originate in the minds of men who may, or may not, be correct in their assessment.


When the focus was moved off nature the focus was moved onto identifying human behavior as either good or evil.

When the foundation of the religion is laid in the mortar of the ethics of what behavior is considered good and what is behavior is considered evil then everything must be catagorized as either good or evil and these judgements of behavior morph over time as ethics of good or evil are defined by the tribe who very well may have demons of their own that they are attempting to exorcise:

James C. Dobson, Jim Bakker, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite, Jimmy Swaggart, Marion Gordon Robertson, Ted Haggard, William Eugene Scott.

When a religion gets mired in allowing a priestly class to decide for the Creator and Sustainer what is good for humankind and what is bad for humankind then you are in for a rough ride.

The original symbolic archetypical conceptual imagery of the religion may very well be corrupted to the point were it conveys a message that is anti-thesis to its original intent.

"Every religion is true when understood metaphorically.

When a religion gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting metaphors as literal facts, then you are in trouble." - Joseph Campbell

The mystical experience and its interpretation through metaphors becomes a threat to the existing order.

"The difference between a priest and a shaman is that the priest is a functionary and the shaman is someone who has had a mystical experience.

In our tradition it is the monk who seeks the mystical experience, while the priest is the one who has studied to serve the community.


He told me that the Catholic monks had no problems understanding the Buddhist monks, but the clergy of the two religions were unable to understand each other.

In India, I have seen a red ring put around a lingam stone, and then the lingam stone is regarded as an incarnation of the mystery of life.

Typically people think of things in practical material terms, but you can think of anything in terms of its mystery.

Take any object.

Hold the object and regard the object in terms of it's mystery, of it's essence, of it's every facet, it's every perspective and it's every dimension.

This essentially consecrates the object in your mind making it sacred as you now know the object intimately.

Do you really know what anything truly is?

It exists in time and space.

How mysterious it is that anything should exist!

Make the object the center of meditation, the center of the intelligible mystery of existence, which fully immerses and surrounds us.

This object now becomes the center of the universe.

The axis mundi is the still point in the chaotic frantic motion of reality.

In mythological systems in which the metaphor of the mystery of reality is the Father you are going to have a different set of thought structures than if the metaphor for the wisdom and mystery of reality is the Mother.

Christ says, "No one gets to the Father but by me."

The Father that he is talking about is the Creator.

It might be that you can get to God, the Father, only by way of Christ.

But suppose you need a more nuturing feminine approach.

Then, perhaps, you need to go by way of the Mother.

There you might prefer Wicca and hymns to the Goddess.

That is simply another way to get to the mystery of life.

Understand that each religion holds within itself a complete worldview that works well only within the bounded symbolic conceptual imagery of the initial religious culture that first forged it.

adapted from Joseph Campbell

"We are the Chosen Ones!

Our God is the only True God!"

"How can any cultural in-group claim ownership of God?

This is a problem you get in the book of Kings and in Samuel.

The various Hebrew kings were sacrificing on the mountain tops.

And they did wrong in the sight of Yahweh.

The Cult of Yahweh was a specific movement in the Hebrew community, which finally conquered the Land of Canaan.

The Cult of Yahweh pushed through a temple bound patriarchal warrior god, normally worshiped by nomads in the great outdoors, against the nature cult of the Mother which was celebrated in all farming cultures by settled peoples.

This imperialistic thrust of an 'in group' culture continues in the West." - Joseph Campbell

We are by nature sorters.

We evolved in small bands of hunter-gathers when there was a selection for within-group amity and between-group enmity.

With our fellow in-group members, we are cooperative and altruistic.

Unfortunately, the downside to this social bonding is that we are also quite tribal and xenophobic to out-group members.

Only when all people are considered to be members of one global in-group can we begin to attenuate these out-group associations." - Michael Shermer

Old testament biblical perspectives of reality are poneroligically biased.

They are not in accord with our current conceptual understanding of either reality or the dignity of man.

The Abrahamic religions, as institutionally practiced, are good examples of the failure of religion to function as originally designed.

These three religions were designed for entirely different cultural conditions.

Right there in Book of Genesis: We are to be the masters of the Earth.

Unfortuanetely their understanding of reality is based on the biblical condemnation of nature.

Living as masters of the Earth actually worked just fine before the industrial revolution and might work just fine on an Earth with sustainable agriculture.

Separate from nature they have disqualified themselves by condemning man to a bleak existence separate from God.

The Psychology of Ideology and Religion

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