A Bit More on Religion

                            It is only the religious mind

                                       that is truly a revolutionary mind.

                                                                                       –   J. Krishnamurti

 

In his book – “The Sibling Society”  Robert Bly examines the cost (to us) for having removed the ‘vertical dimension’ from our collective paradigm.  Bly says that (now) without God, we are reduced to a culture without elders … where everyone is regarded as a ‘peer’ … as an equal.

A ‘sibling society’.

And is this an improvement?   I doubt it.

 

Here is a comment (on our situation) by James Hillman –

 

When The Father Is Absent

The missing father is not your or my personal father.  He is the absent father of our culture, the viable senex who provides not daily bread but spirit through meaning and order.  The missing father is the dead God who offered a focus for spiritual things. Without this focus, we turn to dreams and oracles, rather than to prayer, code, tradition, and ritual.  When mother replaces father, magic substitutes for logos, and son-priests contaminate the puer spirit.

Unable to go backward to revive the dead father of tradition, we go downward into the mothers of the collective unconscious, seeking an all-embracing comprehension.  We ask for help in getting through the narrow straits without harm; the son wants invulnerability. Grant us protection, foreknowledge; cherish us. Our prayer is to the night for a dream, to a love for understanding, to a little rite or exercise for a moment of wisdom.  Above all we want assurance through a vision beforehand that it will all come out all right.

Without the father we lose also that capacity which the Church recognized as “discrimination of the spirits”: the ability to know a call when we hear one and to discriminate between the voices….

The mother encourages her son: go ahead, embrace it all.  For her, all equals everything. The father’s instruction, on the contrary, is: all equals nothing  – unless the all be precisely discriminated.

 

You remember the first Star Wars movie? … when (at the end) Luke Skywalker is commanding a fighter and they are trying to destroy the bad mothership (or whatever it was)?  And this ENTIRE BATTLE IS ACCOMPANIED BY TRIUMPHANT MUSIC !

This makes me think – that Hillman’s words have (already) come to pass.    Mmm?

 

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Let us consider Van Morrison’s song – “Into the Mystic”.  This is a song (mainly) about birth & death.

Morrison suggests that when we were born, we had ‘sailed into the mystic’ in order to get here.  And while he does not claim great knowledge about the craft which brought us … he reckons it must have been a “bonnie boat” because, after all, it DID get us here.

 

And (if my studies are correct) about one in seventeen (on this planet) are starseed … not from here … or even NEAR here.  And the distances involved are so enormous that “repersonalization” turns out to be one of the fastest ways of getting around.  We (some of us) just ‘got born’ here … and then (even taking into account the time required to grow up … the journey was (still) very quick.

 

And do not think that if you have no clear memories of (any) former lives, that that means you are not a starseed.  It is unusual to be able to remember such things.

 

Here are the lyrics.  (I have altered them some, so that I could use the song at a friend’s memorial service) :

Into the Mystic

                                                                                                       – Van Morrison

                                                                                                           (based on his song)

We were born before the wind                                                                                       

Also younger than the sun

Ere the bonnie boat was won

And we sailed into the mystic

Hark, now hear the sailors cry

Smell the sea and feel the sky

Let your soul and spirit fly

Into the mystic

     And when that fog horn blows

     I will be coming home

     And when that fog horn blows

     I wanna hear it

     We don’t have to fear it

And I bless your soul with all my soul

Like you did for me   in cosmic days of old

As we magnificently fold

Into the mystic.

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I want to share with you what the Urantia Book says about death –

 

3. The Phenomenon of Death

112:3.1 (1229.8) Urantians generally recognize only one kind of death, the physical cessation of life energies; but concerning personality survival there are really three kinds:

112:3.2 (1229.9) 1. Spiritual (soul) death. If and when mortal man has finally rejected survival, when he has been pronounced spiritually insolvent, morontially bankrupt, in the conjoint opinion of the Adjuster and the surviving seraphim, when such co-ordinate advice has been recorded on Uversa, and after the Censors and their reflective associates have verified these findings, thereupon do the rulers of Orvonton order the immediate release of the indwelling Monitor. But this release of the Adjuster in no way affects the duties of the personal or group seraphim concerned with that Adjuster-abandoned individual. This kind of death is final in its significance irrespective of the temporary continuation of the living energies of the physical and mind mechanisms. From the cosmic standpoint the mortal is already dead; the continuing life merely indicates the persistence of the material momentum of cosmic energies.

112:3.3 (1230.1) 2. Intellectual (mind) death. When the vital circuits of higher adjutant ministry are disrupted through the aberrations of intellect or because of the partial destruction of the mechanism of the brain, and if these conditions pass a certain critical point of irreparability, the indwelling Adjuster is immediately released to depart for Divinington. On the universe records a mortal personality is considered to have met with death whenever the essential mind circuits of human will-action have been destroyed. And again, this is death, irrespective of the continuing function of the living mechanism of the physical body. The body minus the volitional mind is no longer human, but according to the prior choosing of the human will, the soul of such an individual may survive.

112:3.4 (1230.2) 3. Physical (body and mind) death. When death overtakes a human being, the Adjuster remains in the citadel of the mind until it ceases to function as an intelligent mechanism, about the time that the measurable brain energies cease their rhythmic vital pulsations. Following this dissolution the Adjuster takes leave of the vanishing mind, just as unceremoniously as entry was made years before, and proceeds to Divinington by way of Uversa.

112:3.5 (1230.3) After death the material body returns to the elemental world from which it was derived, but two nonmaterial factors of surviving personality persist: The pre-existent Thought Adjuster, with the memory transcription of the mortal career, proceeds to Divinington; and there also remains, in the custody of the destiny guardian, the immortal morontia soul of the deceased human. These phases and forms of soul, these once kinetic but now static formulas of identity, are essential to repersonalization on the morontia worlds; and it is the reunion of the Adjuster and the soul that reassembles the surviving personality, that reconsciousizes you at the time of the morontia awakening.

112:3.6 (1230.4) For those who do not have personal seraphic guardians, the group custodians faithfully and efficiently perform the same service of identity safekeeping and personality resurrection. The seraphim are indispensable to the reassembly of personality.

112:3.7 (1230.5) Upon death the Thought Adjuster temporarily loses personality, but not identity; the human subject temporarily loses identity, but not personality; on the mansion worlds both reunite in eternal manifestation. Never does a departed Thought Adjuster return to earth as the being of former indwelling; never is personality manifested without the human will; and never does a dis-Adjustered human being after death manifest active identity or in any manner establish communication with the living beings of earth. Such dis-Adjustered souls are wholly and absolutely unconscious during the long or short sleep of death. There can be no exhibition of any sort of personality or ability to engage in communications with other personalities until after completion of survival. Those who go to the mansion worlds are not permitted to send messages back to their loved ones. It is the policy throughout the universes to forbid such communication during the period of a current dispensation.

 

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From Rumi’s ‘Prayer to be Changed’ –

Muhammad said,

Three kinds of people are particularly pathetic;  the powerful

man who is out of power, the

rich man with no money, and the learned man laughed at.  Yet

these are those who badly want

change!   Some dogs sit satisfied in their kennels.  But someone

who last year drank ecstatic

union, the pre-eternity agreement, who this year has a hangover

from bad desire wine, the way

he cries out for the majesty he’s lost,  give me his longing!

 

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And here is an excerpt from the Rig Veda, the oldest of the Hindu scriptures —

 

 

                                                    Rig-Veda        

 

                                                                                   ANUVAKA  XI

                                                                              ______________

 

                                                                                        X.  11.  1.

 

The deity is PARAMATMA, the author of the creation, preservation and dissolution of the various entities (bhavas), these being the subjects treated of in the hymn;  the Rishi is PARAMATMA, under his appellation PARAMESHTHIN.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

The non-existent was not,  the existent was not; then the world was not, nor the firmament, nor that which is above the firmament.  How could there be any existing envelope, and where? Of what could there be felicity? How could there be the deep unfathomable water?

Death was not nor at that period immortality,  there was no indication of day or night; THAT ONE unbreathed upon breathed of his own strength,  other than THAT there was nothing else whatever.

There was darkness covered by darkness in the beginning,  all this world was undistinguishable water; that empty united world which was covered by a mere nothing, was produced through the power of austerity.

In the beginning there was desire, which was the first seed of mind;  sages having meditated in their hearts have discovered by their wisdom the connexion of the existent with the non-existent.

Their ray was stretched out, whether across, or below, or above;  some were shedders of seed, others were mighty; food was inferior,  the eater was superior.

Who really knows?  Who in this world may declare it?  Whence was this creation, whence was it engendered?  The gods were subsequent to the world’s creation; so who knows whence it arose?

He from whom this creation arose, he may uphold it, or he may not;  no one else can;   he who is its superintendent in the highest heaven, he assuredly knows,   or if he knows not, no one else does.

 

 

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It’s my view – that we know WAY too little to make any glib pronouncements … or take any ‘final’ position on the cosmos … and our place in it.