Lies in the Sand

There's a man who says there is a light in the sky
All my friends say he's telling a lie
But he speaks with such passion that I have to think about.

And his hands, well they tremble as he points it out
But I can't see what it's all about
And the voices of many are singing along it seems.

Is it all something new? And will I see it too?
Or is this just continuing man?
Throughout all history claiming they all can see
But the evidence falters just short of my hand...
And there are lies in the sand.

There's a man, who says he was a Satanic Beast
And the many were there at his feet
And he scared all the people, cause he just what we want.

There are things that will surely seem as they are not
And I might not know all that I've got
But the bluffing is easy, and I haven't seen your hand.

-- "Lies in the Sand (The Ballad of...)", King's X

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Gnosis (γνῶσις)

One of the biggest problems with revealed religion, and fundamentalist interpretations of it, is that it assumes at the onset that anything that humanity can come up with on its own (without god) is at once suspect and flawed, and needs to be proven right by the will of god (usually in the form of some scriptural passages).

This is a dangerous principle to have hanging around your neck, first, since it presumes an inability of mankind to sucessfully navigate the waters of survival and it may become a detriment to our survival (or cause of our extinction). The truth is, mankind has been around for far longer than any of these myths (christianity being one), and there will be a time when the christian myth will be let go, en masse. In fact, we may already be in the starting phase of this process.

Second, this need for revelation (or hearsay of revelation as is in the bible) focuses the worst of mankind's thoughts on every other belief system, in fact, creating a sort of "spiritual warfare" and casting all other spritual system as "of the devil" or other such garbage. Christianity is by far a large offender on this front, islam also, of course (how many christians believe buddhists unintentionally worship satan?)... but other religions aren't quite immune to this sort of "us and them" mentality either.

Dogma, religious or not, will always enslave mankind if left unquestioned, and we all have a personal responsibility to take the first step away from literal and unwaivering interpretations of humanity's sacred texts.

In christianity alone, one MUST openly inquire into the Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Apocrypha. Moreso, one needs to read these books, and the bible (old and new testament) completely and critically before ever thinking of accepting the christian myth as real. Trust in the knowledge and evidence around you. It was all written by men, imperfect as we are. To openly acknowledge this is your first step on a path rich with wonder, understanding, and the wisdom of insecurity.

Once we think we know everything (or a single set of books and a direct prayer-line to god), we have allowed ourselves to stop thinking. The scripture can do it all for us, right?

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Freedom From the Known

"Man has throughout the ages been seeking something beyond himself, beyond material welfare - something we call truth or God or reality, a timeless state - something that cannot be disturbed by circumstances, by thought or by human corruption.

"Man has always asked the question: what is it all about? Has life any meaning at all? He sees the enormous confusion of life, the brutalities, the revolt, the wars, the endless divisions of religion, ideology and nationality, and with a sense of deep abiding frustration he asks, what is one to do, what is this thing we call living, is there anything beyond it?

"And not finding this nameless thing of a thousand names which he has always sought, he has cultivated faith - faith in a saviour or an ideal - and faith invariably breeds violence.

"In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be. We look to someone to tell us what is right or wrong behaviour, what is right or wrong thought, and in following this pattern our conduct and our thinking become mechanical, our responses automatic. We can observe this very easily in ourselves.

"For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, 'Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are secondhand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.

"Throughout theological history we have been assured by religious leaders that if we perform certain rituals, repeat certain prayers or mantras, conform to certain patterns, suppress our desires, control our thoughts, sublimate our passions, limit our appetites and refrain from sexual indulgence, we shall, after sufficient torture of the mind and body, find something beyond this little life. And that is what millions of so-called religious people have done through the ages, either in isolation, going off into the desert or into the mountains or a cave or wandering from village to village with a begging bowl, or, in a group, joining a monastery, forcing their minds to conform to an established pattern. But a tortured mind, a broken mind, a mind which wants to escape from all turmoil, which has denied the outer world and been made dull through discipline and conformity - such a mind, however long it seeks, will find only according to its own distortion."

- Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom From the Known

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Separating Diamonds from the Dunghill

I'd advise anyone with an internet connection (hint, hint) or a local book retailer nearby to check out the Jefferson Bible. Yes, from THE Thomas Jefferson. Never heard of it you say? Oh, shame, shame!

Jefferson frustrated by the christian bible, concluded that early christians, interested in promoting christianity to the romans, liberally salted the teachings of jesus with the philosophy of the pagan mythologies (god mating with human, miracles, etc), only to make it more pallatable, and in doing so created a perverse hybrid doctrine which the world came to know as christinsanity. Oops. Did I say that? I meant christianity. Erm, sorry!

"The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

The result of Jefferson's work on this matter, between 1804, and 1820, is the Jefferson Bible. Within, jesus is a great moral teacher who set out without pretensions of divinity.

----

Q1: So you mean, erm... Jefferson WASN'T a CHRISTIAN!?

No, not in the conventional sense now-a-days, and certainly not in the southern baptist, pentecostal and fundamentalist sense.

Q2: Well, I'm confused... wasn't America founded as a christian nation?

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1, 1802

Q3: Why did Jefferson have such a problem with good 'ol christianity anyways?

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814

"They [the clergy] believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. But this is all they have to fear from me: and enough, too, in their opinion."
--Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Sept. 23, 1800

Q4: Well, don't we need god to be good moral United States citizens?

"If we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? ...Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814

Q5: How could Jefferson see jesus the man as a great teacher, and not the son of god, and part of the holy trinity? Doesn't everyone who believes in god believe this?

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus."
--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 30 July, 1816

B R A V O Mr. Jefferson. B R A V O !!

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Open Inquiry

OK. I really like open inquiry. I guess that is pretty clear while reading most of this blog. How the accumlated experiences of humanity affect our views of reality is a fascinating thing for me. And nothing is off the table, because I have found through my experience, and the experiences of those around me, that more often than not, growth produces flowers (quaint, eh?). It is part of nature, which we are a product of. Our brains produce flowers of thought, and thought is a form of art. Thought doesn't need to be always characterized as "true" or "false", but it may very well be so. But to safeguard humanity's collective freedom of thought, we must do all we can to not silence the voices of the "insane", who seem to at best generate tomorrow's fiction, and at worst create tomorrow's cults. Thought is art. Thought needs pure imaginative insanity to grow. With nothing to sift through, we cannot find truth. Neither about how we find our happiness and our place in the world, nor about how the universe is, and world around us and within us works.

With that in mind, I post and respond to two separate questions which I was asked recently. They both fall under the banner of open inquiry. They are valid questions, and I highly respect the minds of those who ask such things. That they all don't have the answers, is pure poetry to me.

1. What if we exist BECAUSE of faith?

Invariably those that ask this question are usually asking it to further YOUR inquiry into THEIR religion, and in America, it is usually christianity. This is indeed a viable question, but it is as viable as the following questions.

"What if we exist because of our past life karmic debt that we still need to pay during this life, and our desire to live once again, in pleasure and pain and not distance ourself by the buddha's middle path?"

"What if we exist because an alien race did experiments and seeded our world with life?"

"What if we exist because of a shared dream we all are dreaming together, thus creating a stable and consistent experience for each of us?"

All my point is with my examples above is that there is no reason to specifically quote jesus, anymore than mohammad, anymore than joseph smith or carlos castaneda. And there is certainly no reason to live one's life any different because by chance you just happened to be raised by parents or in a society which held this belief more dearly than any other faith generated by humans. So what if jesus was right? So what if shiva was right? So what if odin was right? The list goes on and on...

Jesus is but one card in a deck of tens of thousands. Why focus all of your attention there, or see his biblical claim of divinity as more valid or greater than any other? As Richard Dawkins states, "[Every single person] is an atheist when it comes to the countless gods that humanity has ever believed in... Some of us just go one god further."

Last point... sure some questions are just invalid, or just plain meaningless, but just because a question is viable or worth asking for investigation into our humanity and needs, it doesn't mean all answers regarding this question are equally valid.

2. What are we made from?

As science shows us, we are made of the very fabric of past stars. We are certainly nothing less, and there is no reason to believe we are made of something more. Indeed, one day we will return from whence we came (this time to our own sun). It is a glorious thought. Glorious!

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Brian Eno on Perspective

'i remember the first day i arrived in new york
not actually not the very first time i arrived but
the first time i feel i felt i saw new york
on that day i saw it as a great sort of city of hope
and a kind of optimistic chaos
and it was that way of looking at it
that became "mistaken memories"

i had a place on the thirteenth floor
and looking out of my window
i'd just see the tops of all the buildings
all those beautiful castle tops
and i thought "i'm sure people building this
were also feeling that they were making
a big impression in this brand-new culture"

i more and more feel america has been
a thrilling vibrant medieval culture
medieval for me means somewhere where
things are being worked out
where cultures have crossed
and are crashing together
and hybrids are constantly being thrown up
europeans are so ready to shoot it down
because it's so easy to see
all the bad sides of america
the world awash with coca-cola

i felt people's concept of what's real is
almost always that which is most convenient
for them to believe at the time
and the convenient picture of new york
at that time was of a street city
a city where you kept your vision down
what i did on that spring day
and what i did in "mistaken memories"
was i looked up and i saw this beautiful
city against a huge sky
it's a different picture altogether
as soon as you let the sky into the picture
the city is not so overwhelming anymore
there's space in there as well'

Brian Eno
from "Imaginary Landscapes"
released on VHS 1998

You Are the Truth in Every Moment

although reality is observable, what is observable isn't always reality. as our senses often fool us, just being personally open to observing doesn't help us as individuals understand the innermost workings of the universe which we are a part of.(1) being open to observing as individuals helps us to understand the innermost workings of ourselves. a by-product of this is being "at peace" -- of leaving behind what is useless to us and being able to identify our true natures, and the nature of the truth.

don't be fooled into thinking that truth must not be observable to be truth. this is the lie we hear every moment from our spiritual teachers, from our mystics and from our religions. this is the lie that undoubtably you were raised within. faith.

truth is life, not what one hears about life. you are the truth. every instant. observe it. see it (you) for what it is. not by what others tell you about it. not by the thoughts which you've catalogued and maintained in order to give yourself a self, an identity. leave your identity at the instant, and move into what is. be faithless.

do not live on the words of another. do not be a second-hand person. do not accept spiritual slavery. mental slavery.

observation without exerting influence can help us learn how to act with purpose and intent, and not react out of some other action outside ourself which we observe or take within. if we can give pause, not to thought, not to what is old, we can live each moment like it is, new, like we have died to our last moment, and leave behind the conditioning of our competitive lives.

but do not do this to find fulfillment. that is a lie. that is an end, a goal, and upon achieving this goal, what are we to do with ourselves then? reach for the next goal, indeed. no... do it to be free, and in turn you will give the greatest gift to the world you can. to be new every momement. to not be so quick to judge. to be open to every instant of time. to be timeless.

we can learn this by true meditation, awareness, whether in waking life, or in dreams. specifically dreams offer us the ability, if one is aware one is dreaming (lucid), of working on our reactive behaviors which we are reinforcing daily. tonight's dreams may be able, if you are willing and open, to teach you how to be as new every moment as every part of nature you see around you.

for humanity, let's take this one little step, and shed our conditioning, our religion, our saints, our sins, our notions of what is, to truly observe as a child. krishnamurti called for just this. lennon called for just this. it is soon time that we all should call for just this.

"imagine all the people,
living life in peace...
you may say i'm a dreamer,
but i'm not the only one.
someday you'll join us,
and the world could live as one."

(1) science is our tool, as humans, to help provide a structure to build a collective understanding of our natural observable universe.

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