anart said:
I'm afraid that I have no where near the patience that Laura has, because I could barely make it through the original non-sensical post, much less remark on it as she has done. Insomuch as the time spent is worthwhile to clear up the portal/Organic Portal confusion exhibited by I-Eye, I must admit that the most prominent aspect of this interchange for me is the apparent startling lack of reading comprehension on I-Eye's part. I truly don't mean to sound insulting, I'm simply commenting on how difficult it must be to read all that has been written in this thread, and still come away with the thoughts that I-Eye has presented.
The difficulty of words, of communication, is obvious. I notice that my questions about the native language do not seem to have been answered. That, above all, would assist all of us in understanding the perspective of "I-Eye." This is something that I am familiar with since English is not my husband's first language and we have had a number of comical misundertandings in the past because of transliteration. I also discovered that even though he assiduously utilized his Polish/English dictionary, said dictionary did not, in any comprehensive way, convey the many subtleties of English sytax. That is, that the way the words are put together can convey subtle meanings more than the individual words; the whole sentence can be greater than the sum of its parts.
This is also true for the term "Organic Portal." Either word, taken alone, does not add together the way it does in the context we discuss it. Then, there is the tendency for the language to morph rather rapidly and words that once conveyed certain essences, begin to carry other "baggage." The word "cult" comes immediately to mind, as well as the term "conspiracy theory." The pejorative meaning that these words have acquired is a phenomenon of the past 50 years. What we are trying to do is gain some mastery of this term and imbue it with a balanced meaning to counteract the activities of those who have taken it and run with it and fallen into the trap of making checklists, turning it into a truly "dehumanizing" concept.
Just think of all the words that are used to describe mental illnesses. Think also of the history of mental illness and how it was formerly thought to be demonic possession, and the cruel acts that were perpetrated on people who were quite simply sick. Yes, more often than not the sickness was one from which they could not recover, or could only partly recover, but the much maligned "liberals" in this world have gone a long way toward finding niches of value for everyone, even the mentally ill. And what about the mentally retarded? Lord, how much they have suffered through no fault of their own.
It's funny that the issue of Organic Portal is so shocking to people. That is a testimony to the programming of our world, the democratic "all men are created equal" which is patently and obviously not true in myriads of ways. I think that a lot of people assign all kinds of meaning to the terms "created equal" that it did not originally possess. After all, Jefferson did define it as the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which pretty much covers everyone from the mentally ill to the president. Of course, I'm sure that Jefferson never imagined that someone who was mentally ill would become president - that is taking "created equal" to an obscene limit. But that's what happened to the term "democracy" in the hands of those with negative intentions.
Andrew Lobaczewski is absolutely right when he says that Western Culture has handed us a dirty deal due to the influence of Imperial Rome on Greek philosophy and then its shaping of the nascent Christianity. As he points out, in any Imperial structure, the questions of human nature are troublesome factors that only complicate legal and administrative considerations, and thus they are quickly dismissed. Instead, the tendency is to develop a concept of human nature that is simple enough to serve the purposes of law. The result of this was a concept of the human being that had very little to do with actual psychological - let alone spiritual - properties. Thus, cognation of and reflection upon psychology, spirituality, human nature, and related concepts was barren and limited within the Roman system.
Of course, Christianity went through its own phases. Right up to the Renaissance, it was still being debated as to whether or not WOMEN had souls! I suspect that this was a reflection of the ancient teaching, revived by the early "Jesus people", regarding Organic Portals. But then it was simply assigned to women since that is who men most wanted to oppress.
Burton Mack tells us about the early Jesus people in his book "The Lost Gospel"
Burton Mack said:
The remarkable thing about the people of Q is that they were not Christians. They did not think of Jesus as a messiah or the Christ. They did not take his teachings as an indictment of Judaism. They did not regard his death as a divine, tragic, or saving event. And they did not imagine that he had been raised from the dead to rule over a transformed world. Instead, they thought of him as a teacher whose teachings made it possible to live with verve in troubled times. Thus they did not gather to worship in his name, honor him as a god, or cultivate his memory through hymns, prayers, and rituals. They did not form a cult of the Christ... The people of Q were Jesus people, not Christians. [...]
Mack's discussion shows how the Jesus movement was a vigorous social experiment that was generated for reasons other than an "originating event" such as a "religious experience" or the "birth of the son of God."
The Jesus movement seems to have been a response to troubled and difficult times. Mack outlines and describes the times, and shows how the pressures of the milieu led to thinking new thoughts about traditional values and experimenting with associations that crossed ethnic and cultural boundaries. The Jesus movement was composed of novel social notions and lifestyles that denied and rejected traditional systems of honor based on power, wealth, and place in hierarchical social structures. Ancient religious codes of ritual purity, taboos against intercourse across ethnic boundaries, were rejected. People were encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to the larger, human family. Q says: "If you embrace only your brothers, what more are you doing than others?"
The Jesus people not only rejected the old order of things, they were actively at work on the questions of what ideal social order they wanted to manifest and promote. The attraction of the Jesus people to its followers was not at all based on any ideas to reform a religious tradition that had gone wrong, nor was it even thought of as a new religion in any way. It was quite simply a social movement that sought to enhance human values that grew out of an unmanageable world of confusing cultures and social histories. It was a group of like-minded individuals that created a forum for thinking about the world in new ways, coming up with new ideas that included the shocking notion that an ethnically mixed group could form its own kind of community and live by its own rules.
And one of the major concepts the "Jesus People" were dealing with was the idea of what we are referring to as "Organic Portals." The Jesus people promoted the idea that "souled" individuals should form communities and that souled individuals could be of every color, creed and ethnicity - that the "kingdom of god" was something that had nothing at all to do with those definitions and had everything to do with a particular quality that transcended racial, national, ethnic boundaries.
We, too, live in just such a troubled time when struggling to find what is at the root of the conflict between human beings and learning how to live in new ways is of paramount importance. The C's have pointed out that close or intimate relations with OPs is draining - and have even suggested that, if one is engaged in a "dance" with one of them in a close and intimate relationship that, "when the dance-hall bursts into flames," both will be burned.
Castaneda has talked about the necessity to conserve energy, and Gurdjieff has talked about the proper use of energy. Mouravieff revealed certain aspects of the ancient Christian tradition, and we went to the C's for clarification. It certainly gave an all new meaning to that ancient text that has been such an exercise to theologians: And the sons of God looked upon the daughters of men... and took wives... which then led almost immediately to the conditions prior to the Flood of Noah. So, of course, one gets the distinct impression that this is a pretty important issue that has been subjected to serious cover-up, intentional or not.
Looking back again at the Jesus People, we find significant clues as I discussed in Secret History:
What is most revealing is the fact that the only writings contemporary to the times of early Christianity which mention it specifically, remark that it was a “vile superstition”. Yet, what we have as Christianity today is nothing more or less than the same religious practices of the peoples who branded it a “vile superstition”. Tacitus tells us that in the time of Nero:
There followed a catastrophe, whether through accident or the design of the emperor is not sure, as there are authorities for both views, but it was the most disastrous and appalling of all the calamities brought on this city through the violence of fire. …A rumor had spread abroad that at the very time when the city was burning, Nero had mounted on his private stage and sung of the destruction of Troy, comparing the present disaster with that ancient catastrophe....
In order to put an end to these rumors Nero provided scapegoats and visited most fearful punishments on those popularly called Christians, a group hated because of their outrageous practices. The founder of this sect, Christus, was executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilatus. Thus the pernicious superstition was suppressed for the while, but it broke out again not only in Judaea, where this evil had its origin, but even in Rome, to which all obnoxious and disgraceful elements flow from everywhere in the world and receive a large following.
The first ones to be seized were those who confessed; then on their information a vast multitude was convicted, not so much on the charge of incendiarism as because of their hatred of humanity.
Pliny the Younger, who lived c. 62 to 113 AD, was sent by Emperor Trajan as a special representative to the Roman province of Bithynia in Asia Minor. His task was to keep the peace. When he had trouble dealing with Christians, Pliny wrote to the emperor asking how he should proceed against them describing what he knew about their religion:
However, they asserted that their guilt or mistake had amounted to no more than this, that they had been accustomed on a set day to gather before dawn and to chant in antiphonal form a hymn to Christ as if to a god, and to bind themselves by a pledge, not for the commission of any crime, but rather that they would not commit theft nor robbery nor adultery nor break their promises, nor refuse to return on demand any treasure that had been entrusted to their care; when this ceremony had been completed, they would go away, to reassemble later for a feast, but an ordinary and innocent one. They had abandoned even this custom after my edict in which, following your instruction, I had forbidden the existence of fellowships. So I thought it the more necessary to extract the truth even by torture from two maidservants who were called deaconesses. I found nothing save a vile superstition carried to an immoderate length.
The contagion of the superstition has pervaded not only the cities but the villages and country districts as well. Yet it seems that it can be halted and cured. It is well agreed that temples almost desolate have begun to be thronged again, and stated rites that had long been abandoned are revived; and a sale is found for the fodder of sacrificial victims, though hitherto buyers were rare. So it is easy to conjecture what a great number of offenders may be reformed, if a chance to repent is given.
So we have these clues:
1. Christians were hated because of their "outrageous practices."
2. Their beliefs were described as a pernicious superstition.
3. The pernicious superstition had its origin in Judaea.
4. Christians were convicted because of their “hatred of humanity”.
5. Pliny describes their practices as “benign” but that the core belief was a “vile superstition carried to an immoderate length”.
6. This “vile superstition” was pervasive and apparently led to the temples and ancient rites including sacrifice being abandoned.
The question that comes to mind is: what would the peoples of that time have considered a “vile superstition” or “outrageous practices” when one is aware of what they considered normal religious practice which included dying god myths and gnosticism and sacrifice and all the other accoutrements of Christianity as we know it today? The only real clue we have is the remark: “not so much on the charge of incendiarism as because of their hatred of humanity - a vile superstition carried to an immoderate length”.
Their what?
“Their hatred of humanity.”
That sounds surprisingly like I-Eye's accusation, doesn't it? Mack even mentions the core issue that upset the heck out of the ancient authorities:
Burton Mack said:
To explore human community based on fictive kinship without regard to standard taboos against association based on class, status, gender, or ethnicity would have created quite a stir,...
So naturally, understanding the OP problem and divesting it completely of any definition in terms of class, nationality, social status, gender or ethnicity could very well threaten the Powers That Be. What if people began to understand that it is NOT a question of any of those things? What if they began to refuse to get all tied up with nationalism, with looking at any large grouping of people in negative or exclusionary terms based on any of those false divisions that have been used for millennia as excuses for wars and genocide? What if they began to realize that the true divisions between human beings were something so fundamental that the "external reasons" imposed by Empire no longer had meaning?
The same issues seem to have been at the fore of Catharism. The so-called Cathar heresy was predicated upon the question of Good and Evil. The irreducible bone of contention between the Cathars and the Catholic Church was the role and power of Evil in the life of human beings.
For the Cathars, the god of Judaism, was an evil Archon of Darkness. They rejected entirely the Old Testament as being the work of this evil god. The Cathars considered worldly authority, based on so-called Divine Sanction such as the Church claimed, to be a fraud.
The Cathar God was a god of light who
ruled invisible consciousness and did not meddle in human affairs. The God of the Cathars simply didn't care if you got into bed before getting married, associated with or intermarried with Jews or Arabs, black or white, and whether or not you were a woman or a man. For the Cathars, it was material life, pursuit of material things, money, power and possessions, that was the hallmark of Idolatry. It's not hard to think that this division between the material world and the world of invisible consciousness extended also to considerations of souled and non-souled humans. In fact, if you revisit what is known about the Cathars with this hypothesis, you begin to see a lot of things making sense.
For the Cathars, the unique crossroads of choice lay within the human being. It was in the human consciousness that the divine spark was found - the "Kingdom of Heaven within" - and this spark was a remnant of an earlier, angelic state of existence that had the potential to be redeemed.
Now, what was so evil about this? Why did the church seek to destroy the Cathars?
It should be obvious. If such ideas were true, the sacraments of the Catholic Church were null and void, and the Church itself was a fraud, a cruel hoax played by those who were only seeking power. If such ideas were true, the status of human beings could never be looked at the same way again. If everybody believed, as the Cathars did, that soul qualities were what counted - not social status or who the Church designated as "saved," it put a whole different spin on how humans ought to behave toward one another.
One of the more serious charges against the Cathars was their repugnance against swearing oaths. It's hard to understand this now, but it can be compared to proposing the idea that a modern earthly contract has no binding power when issues of morality and ethics come into the picture. The swearing of oaths, especially oaths of fealty, was the contractual underpinning of a feudal society. It gave a "sacred weight" to the controllers of the hierarchy, the Catholic Church. If an individual broke an oath, he could be condemned by the authority of the Church to Hell. Kingdoms, estates, bonds of service, all were created, transferred, and maintained by the mediation of the Church. You could say that "swearing oaths" was medieval Corporatism.
The Cathars believed that linking the activities of business and government to the Divine was an exercise in Wishful Thinking if not out and out blasphemy. From their point of view, god was detached from such things and any idea that he was either interested, or cared about the business and government doings of human beings was a fanciful house of cards. For anyone to claim that they had the power to control human dealings by threatening the wrath of God just on their say-so was hubris in the extreme to the Cathar mind.
Catharism taught that man and woman were one. A souled human being was reincarnated over and over again - as peasant, king, boy, girl, master, servant - but what really mattered the most was one's divine, immaterial, androgynous - or rather, sexless - spiritual self. That did irreparable damage to the Catholic churche's teachings about the sinful state of women, the exclusion of women from inheritance, the "fall of man" via the temptation of Eve, and so on. It also did irreparable damage to divisions of groups based on issues of "corporate" control. If a king was as likely to be an OP (not to mention a Pope), and if the Cathars refused to be bound by contracts to OPs (because it does seem that this must have been the fundamental issue), then Catharism was one of the greatest threats to the Powers That Be that has ever existed. The church, and kings and rulers who relied on the Church to control people and to give weight to their contracts, could not allow such a heresy to spread.
John Chang said:
I think figuring out who is and who isn't, is 90% of the game. The other 10% is trying to do the right thing interacting with all. .... Of course, the other 10% - knowing what the right thing to do can also be a very hard problem indeed. Intractable even.
Indeed. And that is what exercises us here.
