Buddhist/Christian metaphysics

[HumeFabregas]

i was first intrigued by the ra material and it's description of the soul's evolution. however, upon further reflection, i'm beginning to wonder...

first off, i'm surprised that ra and david don't mention the buddha more--as the sammasambuddha (perfectly enlightened one) of our dispensation, surely he would have been an appropriate personage to mention in the l.o.o. material--instead, we have lincoln, hitler, and a few others who are interesting, but obviously not the same caliber. on that note, where is jesus in all this? ra says he was a 5th dimensional being who reincarnated out of service of others, or perfect love. however, that's it; there's no mention of jesus' claims to divinity, or anything like that--it seems ra plays into the new age assumption that christianity is archaic and backward spirituality. but if christians assume christ did incarnate from the 5th dimension, and struck up a divine deal with the highest intelligence he could (god), then it makes sense that god is love, and the virgin birth gains plausibilty, and the karmic sacrfice for humanity, allowing their reincarnation despite heavily flawed lives, as a violent atonement for a plethora of sins, makes sense. for anyone with an understanding of buddhist metaphysics (which, incidentally, should be considered far more trustworhty than a channeled source) knows that this concept of soul evolution is completely fabricated. that is, until one enters christ into the picture, who took the karmic load off our shoulders so we can evolve to have the spiritual maturity to enter the kingdom of heaven (remember, in buddhist metaphysics one can only enter heaven by merit or attaining perfect skill in several states, including several states of samadhi, lovingkindness, compassion, and joy; so it is only through repeated lives that our spiritually weak inclinations can slowly build a spiritually competent individual)
but if that's the case, which makes sense, than where is christ? why is he mentioned by the wayside as some figure of mere general emulation? why is he not considered the saviour that he necessarily must be if our souls have the capability of evolving? and while i do think souls will make it to 4d/kingdom of heaven through works or faith or both, and so in that sense i condone the l.o.o., i still find the metaphysical statement that souls evolve through incarnations without christ questionable--in other words, i can' see the status quo having been the case ubiquitously, unless it is a fairly common event, astrosoteriologically speaking (ha!), that 5th dimensional beings incarnate with the explicit path of taking the karmic load off the race of beings in question a la christ. but again, that seems crucial, and isn't mentioned.
however, there is still one thing that remains totally unaddressed: hell. both buddhist and christian metaphysics includes a place of torment based on karmic activity. the buddha's is bad karma during life, then many lives in misery, and then back to bug or human or whatever. christian metaphysics seems to trade the misery of hell after one failed life for a cluster of lives with the oppurtunity to evolve spiritually, but the penalty of turning from god and ignoring his sacrifice is eternal punishment, or at least, until their karmic debt is paid, which after many incarnations might as well be eternity. yet, in the ra material, there's nothing...
what i'm essentially asking is how can there be the evolution of the soul, which implies both reincarnation and karmic atonement, without there also being a hell for those who not only spurn jesus and his sacrifice, but activily seek out service to self (a euphemism for brutal acts of violence, hatred, etc.)???

[Truth180]

how do you suffer other peoples sins or bad karma, when we create our own karma. thats where in the bible that don't make any sense. the impression is to worship one man for suffereing for our bad karma. if that was the case then no one will learn anything. it defeats the purpose. let's not forget that we have choices "freewill" for our own growth. no one can take that away from us.

[onething]

dear humefabrigas,

your post is so all over the board with unusual assumptions that i hardly know where to begin. some of the things you say, i never heard before.

it may be that ra didn't mention the east because his questioners didn't ask about it, and were of a christian bias.

you seem to buy into a lot of traditional theology, but why do you assume it is correct?
a good case can be made that jesus did not in fact claim divinity, at least not in the trinitarian, unique sense. as to the virgin birth, i am mystified as to how it is even relevant.

how do you suppose that jesus lightened our karmic load? i have a very different idea of jesus' mission. i think he came to explain to people of his time and place that god was good and to reconcile people to god. he also came to teach spiritual adulthood, in which the intuitive inner faculty of knowing gets 'quickened' or brought to life, which he called being born of the spirit. this is the essential starting point for working out your salvation.

eternal hell is not a true biblical teaching, much as it appears to be. that is a huge topic so i won't go into it. but there could certainly be hellish realms of suffering brought about by our own actions and our own spiritual state, until such time as we are ready to move on and progress.

you seem interested in buddhist metaphysics, but then you say its idea of soul evolution is fabricated. so i'm confused.

in my opinion, one of the most damaging and downright demonic theologies is the idea that god or jesus is going to be very, very angry with someone for 'spurning' his sacrifice. no one does such a thing. either they don't believe his sacrifice or they do. if someone believed that jesus was a being in a position to make a sacrifice for their salvation, they would not reject it. what we have here is a lot of confusion and people really don't know what is what. it is ludicrous to think that highly evolved beings or god hold that against us.

[Deerclan]

what i'm essentially asking is how can there be the evolution of the soul, which implies both reincarnation and karmic atonement, without there also being a hell for those who not only spurn jesus and his sacrifice, but activily seek out service to self (a euphemism for brutal acts of violence, hatred, etc.)???

it's my perception that people who need hell carry one around inside themselves.

by chance, i mentioned this same concept a couple of days ago to a rudely intrusive individual who refused to accept my answer declining one of the tracts he was trying to hand out to a buddy and me. i ended up just asking him to please leave, but before i did that, i suggested that he allow jesus to cleanse that inner part of himself that wanted to control what other people think & feel. i guess another way of saying the same thing is that hell begins with disrespect towards other human beings. he seemed a bit slow to catch on, so i told him that he was carrying hell around inside himself, and i knew it for a fact because i could smell the smoke coming off him. he still didn't seem to get it, so i pointed out that he was even wearing a red shirt, the color of hell's flames. even despite my articulate word pictures, he still did not seem to get it. he got close enough to intrude into my personal space, and that's when i asked him to move on.

but it is a fascinating question, how can "new age" frameworks be fit into the mold of traditional christian doctrines. most people i've known who have made any study of such things seem to end up concluding that it works the other way around. for anyone who needs a hell, though, i will plant my flag on the assertion that i support them & have no objection them having one.

[HumeFabregas]

"unusual assumptions...i never heard before..." -and- "you seem to buy into a lot of traditional theology..."
this seems absurd.

first, i see the bible as basically true, and jesus and the buddha as fundamentally different from the rest of humanity in spiritual development. thus, my first presumption is that they are unto the same truth of the underlying fabric of reality. my second assumption is that, given that there are obvious descrepancies in doctrine, something is different about reality itself--which is logical to conclude given the divine claims of jesus (even if he didn't claim godhood--which i assume but don't require others to--the reason he was crucified (blaspheming, i.e. forgiving sin) essentially implies that)--for not even the buddha could reverse karma. (sorry about the stacking--it's just the way it comes out)
if jesus was born of a virgin, not only is he divine but also karmically flawless, which is crucial if he will be the karmic sacrifice for humanity, as paul writes, as his self-applied name son of man seems to imply, and as the metaphysics of buddha necessitate if we are to reincarnate repeatedly on the human plane. i'm sorry i didn't make that more explicit.
actually, i totally agree with the intuitive quickening you describe...but i don't understand what you mean by "reconcile people to god" b/c to me that implies ridding humanity of it's karmic load...how else would a just god put up with humanity's incessant idiocy?
and i don't follow you: what metaphysics are you subscribing to, and why, when you say this intuitive understanding is the "starting point for working out our own salvation?" b/c while the buddha taught self-salvation, jesus did not--at great risk i quote "no one gets to the father through me." but the risk (not knowing the original texts, or not knowing how corrupt the texts have become through history) to me is acceptable b/c of how authentic jesus' words are, and how closely they dovetail in to what happened (obviously this congruence would be expected even if it was fabricated, but like the buddha's words, there is...something about what is attributed to jesus that outright precludes fabrication). what i'm getting at is your mixing the metaphysics of jesus and the buddha, which i assume means you don't realize that it thus doesn't make sense. the only way they can be reconciled logically (that i've seen) is through christ taking our karmic load. hence the argument for the divinity of christ, the mention of the virgin birth, etc.

there are two hells referenced in the bible: hell, and the lake of fire. i understand the translation of the first is actually the dump outside of the city--i.e. not the fire and torment that was fabricated during the middle ages to control the population. however, not only is there a lake of fire that has yet to be contextually dismissed (to my limited knowledge), there is a glaring hole in virtually all new age metaphysics: how do you subscribe to karma yet claim to be on a ever upward spiraling path of spiritual evolution? if you know anything about karmic metaphysics, you know these are almost totally incompatible--the lone exception are the buddhist monks who can get to heaven via one of the paths the buddha discusses (samahi, lovingkindness, joy, compassion--and obviously you don't need to be a monk, but it's virtually impossible without renoucing the lay life) and continue their spiritual progression through buddhist methodology. the reason they do this is because their consciousness is sufficiently controlled, focused, etc. so that they remember their past life, and continue on the pursuit of nirvana. without this supranormal awareness, there can be no evolution, because there is no soul. but again, if you enter jesus as the ransom paid to reality for humanity's sins, you can permit the soul into the discussion and retain karmic metaphysics.
so: if you subscribe to an ever upward spiraling spiritual evolution without considering jesus the karmic absolver...then where does your karma go, and how do you have a soul?
you have some explaining to do.

and no, i said that buddhist metaphysics teaches anatta, or no-self, which it does. there is no evolution of the soul in buddhism, only transmigration through becoming, which implies the absence of a soul. christian metaphysics teaches the soul, with an eternal destination. i don't mean to be rude, but please read more carefully before you critique.

i challenge you to answer my questions with the logic and source-credibility i have maintained, while keeping the assumptions that have littered your first reponse out of it.

ironically, i have the exact opposite view of your final paragraph, but i'd keep the the first sentence verbatim save for three characters.
"in my opinion, one of the most damaging and downright demonic theologies is the idea that god or jesus isn't going to be very, very angry ..."

[HumeFabregas]

"it's my perception that people who need hell carry one around inside themselves."

fair enough.
but please don't think an anecdote will somehow answer the questions i've posed.

trust me, i used to think the idea of hell was purely ridiculous...incompatible with god, absurd without god, a telltale sign of human oppression. but then i became a buddhist. and then i became a christian. and now, it seems to me that the metaphysics of reality demands a hell, regardless of the damage done to new age feel-good spirituality...for again, i bring up the fact that while the buddha didn't claim to be god, and while there's much controversy about the historical jesus, at least they came from this world, and it was obvious of their benevolent intent. yes, i am questioning the validity of what ra says, on metaphysical grounds, because these have moral implications. to be blunt and run the risk of being labeled close-minded, ignorant, and dogmatic: given the metaphysical questionability of ra's l.o.o. unearthed in this thread, i wonder if ra isn't in service to satan (yeah, i know...) by giving us a really appealing, really plausible near-truth, which grants plenty of reason to forgo christian theology and totally ignore the jesuit prophesy that there is a hell, and people who "call on me lord lord" and "those who cast out demons, prophesied, and did all manner of works of power in my name" will also go to, among the obviously godless. understand me: i think what ra teaches is actually very advanced and good, but also incomplete, and in that sense i think it can mislead people who don't have the karmic merit to make it to heaven (4d)--> and no, it's not incompatibile with christianity to say that people can get to heaven on merit: if you see jesus' sacrifice as both karmic debt absolution and justification by faith (read romans--yeah, that archaic, stupifying bible..ugh! ;) then you realize that people have been reincarnating on earth or going to hell (city dump metaphor, which likely is nothing like common portrayals of hell) but ultimately spiritually progressing. and during that progression, they generate karma, good and bad, only jesus forgives the bad, and the good accumulates on the soul so a person can eventually make it by works (read 2 esdras of the apocrypha--not only very mystic and interesting, but also reveals god saying people make it by works or faith). so in that sense, the ra material can be good. but again, i think it may be a stumbling block for those who aren't wanderers or highly evolved, b/c as we all know on this site, 2012 is coming, and there are plenty of people who don't have the spiritual capacity to make it to heaven on works or spiritual capacity alone.
sorry for the length. :o

[PriestOfLight]

this is a very good topic. i have been pondering this alot lately.

i am not up on all the forms of christianity, but in the catholic church you can reach spiritual enlightenment through the sacrements. since i became a reiki practitioner, i had been directed to notice that the when the sacrements are given, attunements are also given. each sacrement is another level of enlightenment. it has been taught to me that these are same attunements that jesus gave his disciples and brought them there inner light.

jesus was a great teacher and is very connected to this planet. i feel that his presences brought in a simplier path to enlightenment. christ consciousness is not a catholic/christian thing. it spans many other paths to enlightment, it's just named something different. i have noticed that some yogi's actual refer to it as christ consciouness directly.

love and light

paul

[onething]

hello hume,
you say the bible seems true to you, but i look at it that it must be examined for truth using our own intuition, because -for example -it is shown by linguistic scholars that the old testament first 5 books were written at different times and with a different agenda which were blended together later for political/religious purposes. two of the four sources were written as refutations of prior scripture - all of which are now blended together. the new testament seems far more pure to me, but again, we don't know the true authors and some of the writers has opposing viewpoints. point being, there is not one unified and identifiable teaching in the bible.

i, too have always disliked channeled stuff and have paid no mind to any of it - except loo and that is because of my respect for david's work and his intro of it here - so i had to look at it and it seems like a pure teaching to me. as for me, my teacher is the holy spirit and that is where i get my metaphysics from, but the law of one aligns with it and that is why i accept it. but if you see the problems with the bible as stated above, and if it is possible to have a pure source of good teaching from a channeled material then perhaps that is a good thing, because the problem with old texts is that they are very old and have been altered. also, so far as i can see, the prophets were channeled or something.

jesus had several possible reasons for being crucified, and forgiving sin was just one. he was considered a lawbreaker, which i strongly agree with as the old testament law is largely negative but i think he did it somewhat indirectly. another reason had to do with driving the money changers out of the temple. but in the end the one which stuck was the messianic claims which meant he might foment revolution against the romans. this is why he was crucified with a sign that said king of the jews.

i do not know what it means to say he died for our sins. can you explain it?
also, please explain why it matters if jesus was born of a virgin. i see some sort of great soul incarnating into the world as jesus - how is that related to his mother's body and whether she had ever had sex? why would that affect his karma to make him pure?

i strongly disagree with some of paul's theology, specifically all the stuff about sacrifice. i don't think this idea is helpful to humanity and the teaching of the bible is of two minds. jesus himself went out of his way to refute the idea of sacrifice by quoting from hosea and saying to his detractors: go and learn what this means, "i will have mercy and not sacrifice."
by the way, the entire eastern church does not believe that god required a sacrifice.


actually, i totally agree with the intuitive quickening you describe...but i don't understand what you mean by "reconcile people to god" b/c to me that implies ridding humanity of it's karmic load...how else would a just god put up with humanity's incessant idiocy?

by reconcile i mean turning the hearts of the people toward god. jesus came to uplift people's understanding of god and to help their spiritual faculty come awake which he called being born of the spirit.

the path to intimacy with god, the trip of becoming like christ, is one in which the karmic load and the idiocy will be lifted. but why think god is impatient or upset with our stupidity?

i think all people are good and god never loses sight of it. buddhism calls sin ignorance, and i think that is much more accurate. the time that it takes to overcome evil is the time that it takes. there is no need for impatience or anger. here again, the law of one teaches that after a long period of time, those in service to self will eventually see the error of their ways and return to the rest of us. this has been great for me to hear because it is what i also believe. all is from god and nothing can be lost.

oh! it is frustrating to see the religion engaged in legalistic formulations of salvation when the inner truth is in complete agreement with law of one - all people, even those we call evil, are always at their core pure in spirit, in the image of god and nothing can ever be separated from god.

due to length, part two will be next.

[onething]

hello hume, part 2

the metaphysics i subscribe to are my own. i read a lot and often find kindred spirits. but the holy spirit is my teacher, and i need no other.

here's my idea of jesus. jesus came as a teacher in the flesh, someone who could talk to us in words, who could straighten us out and be an example and someone for us to follow. but he also said that the essential ingredient was for people to be born of the spirit. the holy spirit is the everywhere-present, uncreated, energy of god which fills the universe. our bodies and brains can take us just so far. spirit teaches spirit. but this truth can be said in many ways and fits all faiths. holy spirit is the term i like.

i would not agree to call it self salvation even though it is a purification process. there's no such thing because all selves are united, and there is no such thing as separation from god. but the individual must always give their assent as god never uses force against the unwilling. that is what service to self entities do. you neither do it alone, nor is it done unto you. instead it is a two-way street, a cooperative venture of the individual soul and grace.

i do not know if jesus ever really said that no one gets to the father except through him. it likely was added by those who wanted to make the religion exclusive and use fear tactics. on the other hand, we must remember that when he said that he was speaking to a group of specific people to whom he felt he was sent - to witness the truth to them. and his truth was opposed to their own. they really needed to get what he was teaching them in order to be freed from their negative path. in that particular lifetime and place, he was their only chance.

how am i mixing the metaphysics of jesus and buddha? aren't you trying to join them? i do believe that reincarnation is a missing piece in christianity. i am not sure i can understand transmigration.

why is it necessary to christ to take our karmic load and how can such a thing be? i don't know about all new agers, but i don't think in general that the understanding of karma is that the spiral is ever upwards. there are some setbacks. also, the journey is rather long. but there probably comes a point at which one begins to really get it, that slipping back is not likely.
and of course law of one teaches that souls get lost in service to self for a long time. it's not a fiery hell of course, but i'd rather stay on the good path as it seems more joyous.

another question! why must we renounce normal life to embark on a path of compassion?
where does the negatively accrued karma go? well, we suffer a lot, and many people suffer without seeming to deserve it. but in my opinion, once a person has a certain level of breakthrough, karma can't hold them. it may be that this can only happen at a moment when the karmic load is in balance. i can't know the answer to that.

i am rereading your first post and you say that in buddhism, one can attain nirvana through "skill" in applying such principles as compassion. i find this to be a similar error to the christian one, of assuming that one can do something mechanically in order to please a creator. one doesn't love one's enemies because someone told you to. that's impossible. one grows spiritually in wisdom and insight until such time as loving one's enemies (and compassion) becomes one's true nature.

the word translated as eternal in the bible is in fact eon, which is a period of time, so i have read. the idea of eternal punishment is very negative, and unworthy of a good or universal being, unworthy of an infinite being, and incompatible with unity, which the law of one as well as many other mystics teach.

it seems to me the fundamental discrepancy for you is that buddhism has no soul and christianity does. and you seem to say that we can have a soul if we have christ. how badly did i mangle that?

[aqcheryl]

i think the number one thing everyone here should remember is that as we are currently in this incarnation... we do not know the answers. therefore, we can only base our beliefs on speculation.

so whose right? whose wrong? time will tell - but its not worth the negative karma we attract by opposing views and statements.

for what its worth, it is my personal belief that all have valid points, and all have wrong ones. that includes buddha. that includes jesus.

and for sure that definitely includes the bible. it is my opinion, and only my opinion, that the bible is not infallible. it has many contradictions held within it, and many other things that are just morally and universally wrong. the history of the bible even goes as far as to reflect the social climate at the time of its translation and first conception. by conception i refer to the period of time that the council decided to gather all stories about jesus and his teachings and compile them into one.

but they were merely men, and therefore subject to error and misinterpretation. if they could not conceive of aliens, for example, then is that why we read their interpretation of celestial beings that very well may be aliens.

on my spiritual journey ive come to know and understand many things, and the most forefront one is that the journey is never over, and what i come to know, at least in this lifetime, will never be more then a grain of sand compared to the vast amounts of universal truth and knowledge out there.

i have to accept that i may be wrong in my beliefs, even if i am 99.9% sure of them. i have to remember they are just beliefs. i have to remember that someone who believes differently then i do, could be just as right - that we both could be right even if we contradict. the universe works in mysterious ways that way.

either way, i think david put it best when he said that when a negative force comes to you, deny it with love. say thank you but i do not require your services. instead of comparing beliefs to make them in defense of anothers, instead i remain open to anothers beliefs with the confidence that it does not mean i have to conform my own to hear theirs.

its like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, this understanding we do come to in our lives, and that other belief system might hold a missing jigsaw piece to your spiritual puzzle. just because we do not understand something does not make it invalid, we just need to find our pieces. everyones puzzle is different and unique from someone else, as we come to our understanding in a different manner and way of thinking. :)

[billybobbutterball]

dear hume

hinduism, buddhism, christianity, islam ...in all their forms and variations
have less than little to do with the law of one, much less form the base on which the law of one rests.

your conceptual basis is mutually exclusive to the basic premise of the loo.
you might just as well be standing on the ground, waving your arms around trying show eagles how to fly. :p (sorry, the devil made me do it)

since you are currently a christian lets stick with that particular distortion.

orthodox christianity is theistic, holds that the cosmos came about by a miraculous 'creation ex nihilo' -- i.e., something really humongous -- out of nothing.(wow! unbelievable!) what we have delivered to us in that questionable concept is a creator confronting an alien cosmos across an unmeasurable, virtually unbridgeable gulf. this god is all knowing, omnipotent, unchanging, a virtual high point of completed perfection ...needing nothing.

since god is on one side and the helpless human critter toys on the other, it is obvious that for humans to reach god -- for whatever reason or the other-- there has to be some kind of a bridge. in this case, it is the composited god/man jesus designed to bridge the gap...he is our designated 'saviour' (incidentally, jesus came from the upper 4th not the 5th -- but that is a different story.)

the ra gives us a radically different version: infinity became aware. out of its being came the cosmos. the one creator is therefore the cosmos....but the cosmos is not god. (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts) while christianity poses a dualism between god and the cosmos, the one creator is the i am (all). this view is basically that of panentheism. all is of god. we have a holographic universe were even the smallest particle contains the all. we are not humans needing to be born again, we are programed to be essentially our own savior. this "god" is not complete, but rather learning through the activities of his little sparks of self set out in the cosmos to explore all potentialities. wisdom is acquired via the experience of diversity within unity, in short, we have a job!

the nice part about this is that since we are all of god, and god is thrifty and doesn't throw parts of itself away much less burn itself up in a stupid hell....all is eventually redeemed -- saved as the xians put it.

a side note: charles hartshorn spent a lifetime wrestling with concepts of god. he finally set up a so-called logic truth table to weigh some 26 concepts of deity. the top logical contender was that of panentheism (half-assed pantheism was way down the list) for what it is worth, one of his admiring compatriots dubbed him, "the einstein of religious thought"

hume, what you are now doing often occurs here. you see, enthusiasts come aboard dragging their bibles along with them. they try to blend the two theologically. it doesn't work. now dear carla considers herself a mystic christian, she prays and sings and soaks up the good hi-vibe atmosphere, with the essential jesus untouched by mere quibbling. when i studied myself out of christianity i was convinced along the way that jesus was not even a historical figure. but i've softened that attitude. he was around...seems his social memory complex was influential in virtually all the great religions even tho their forms varied a bunch out of necessity to accommodate what was already in place.

oh! you might be interested that from a reading of ll research satan is disclosed as a thought form, the virgin mary is also a thought form. that makes sense, you have billions of prayers directed to a feminine ideal and something is going to oblige by supplying it.

okay hume (is that like david hume? the hard-nosed philosopher?)

i'm getting tired.

i believe the question did arise concerning the flaws of different religious. buddhism's achilles heel was that of some sense of intellectualism. as i remember, christianity is that of the sinner being a helpless victim, piously waiting around for jesus to do the needed work. and then there is the added complication of suffering from guilt coming about from wallowing in sin and feelings of unworthiness, etc. the truth is as i understand it, is that each one of us is responsible for ourselves. if someone comes along and does the work for us, then we have to come back later to do it in person.:(

enough for the moment. hume, you need to come up to speed on what the loo is all about. you have got to view it without all the christian paraphernalia drooped all over it to the point that you can't see it for what it is. i have the feeling that you've dipped and doodled here and there trying to get a feel for it and whenever there appears to be a hole you merely stick a buddhist or christian patch over it:eek::)

notes: the ra is not infallible. (98% would be incredible) hard to imagine they would be working for the that thought form satan.

i don't think the literal validity of the new testament would reach that figure.
some of the writers of nt didn't know much about the geography of the area....they had jesus occasionally travelling in the wrong direction. really.

as for the old testament, google scott mandelker and check his east/west gnostic studies... find out who the various jehovahs really were.

best, later, bill g aka bbb

[Deerclan]

[quote=humefabregas;49467]"it's my perception that people who need hell carry one around inside themselves."

fair enough.
but please don't think an anecdote will somehow answer the questions i've posed.[quote]

anecdotes are the communication tools jesus used. as jesus said, they function to separate individuals with understanding from those without it.

[HumeFabregas]

hello hume,
the new testament seems far more pure to me, but again, we don't know the true authors and some of the writers has opposing viewpoints. point being, there is not one unified and identifiable teaching in the bible. .
while i dismiss the theological integrity of the ot except in demonstrating the power of faith or mythological truths, i don't think the nt is as disintegrated as you make it out to be: actually, i would say it closely reflects the sto ideal of the l.o.o. (the submission of women is a cultural artifact, seen in buddhism as well, and reflects the sto ideal in that culture...although i do ruminate on the nature of that imperative...may be a pragmatic anticipation of personality trends in general (please note that i'm very liberal in theology and work closely with a female pastor))

jesus did have many reasons for being crucified...but if he was self-aware enough to last three years, i'm feeling certain enough to say that he intended to be crucified. but ultimately, i follow christian theology b/c it speaks to my intuition (holy spirit), b/c there are warnings against falling into other faith paradigms that aren't legit, and b/c it is the logical answer to my spiritual quest, part of which invovles the question posed at the top of this thread.

i said jesus was born of a virgin not to imply anything about sexuality, but to imply the necessity of divinity if he wasn't concieved naturally, i.e. without sperm fertilizing the egg. miraculous conception, i should have said.



jesus himself went out of his way to refute the idea of sacrifice by quoting from hosea and saying to his detractors: go and learn what this means, "i will have mercy and not sacrifice."
by the way, the entire eastern church does not believe that god required a sacrifice.
.

whoa. you have great material on the necessity of context and then say something like that. i'd venture it's much more consistent to say he meant that the pharisees should practice mercy to receive divine mercy, as per jesus' teachings, and discontinue sacrificing animals for divine pardon, as was the custom. and the eastern church thought...the kkk thought...jim jones thought...and they knew that they were christians.

all of this to say this: i don't have the audacity to challenge the buddha's metaphysics, and b/c of that i love christ.

by reconcile i mean turning the hearts of the people toward god. jesus came to uplift people's understanding of god and to help their spiritual faculty come awake which he called being born of the spirit.



the path to intimacy with god, the trip of becoming like christ, is one in which the karmic load and the idiocy will be lifted.
.
i totally agree with this.


but why think god is impatient or upset with our stupidity?
.
remember my contention. i'll propose it syllogistically to clean up this messy exchange and we can be clear on descrepancies.
premise: the buddha knows his stuff.
conclusion: anatta (no-self), anicca (impermanence) are central to the universe and the beings within it, which move from states of being ranging from hell to heaven based on karma and reincarnation of consciousness.
thus, there is no spiritual progress spanning different incarnations b/c there is no perduring soul/personal essence to exist between and across lives. thus, except in the rare case of a monk attaining heaven, and continuing what she has learned, people are stuck in samsara for good, and progress to the higher realms independent of vipasanna practice will ultimately yield reincarnation into the lower realms.
premise: jesus knows his stuff.
conclusion: heaven is attainable to the lay based on faith in christ and on works/spirit. thus, there is a soul, because something needs to house the spiritual maturation that occurs over lifetimes that buddha taught directly against. [prior to this exchange, that was my logic] now, i think this isn't logically necessary: it could be that jesus' sacrifice purges karmic debt after each incarnation, thus ridding humanity of the karma that would send them to the hell realms, thus allowing reincarnation on the human plane w/o a soul. if that's the case, it would seem fitting that the "hell" that people go to and experience the "weeping and gnashing of teeth" (really strong regret) is the 3d realm (as i thought before, but was befuddled by my own thinking...happened more than once :d)

and the lake of fire has hell itself thrown into it...seeming to indicate a true christian universe, devoid of the punishment that even the buddha taught.

[HumeFabregas]

spirit teaches spirit. but this truth can be said in many ways and fits all faiths. holy spirit is the term i like.
but the individual must always give their assent as god never uses force against the unwilling...it is a two-way street, a cooperative venture of the individual soul and grace.
we must remember that when he said that he was speaking to a group of specific people to whom he felt he was sent...they really needed to get what he was teaching them in order to be freed from their negative path. in that particular lifetime and place, he was their only chance.

i really like this.


why is it necessary to christ to take our karmic load and how can such a thing be?

this is the crux: if you include karmic metaphysics...you'd be screwed. trust me. bad karma arises from unskillful mental states, which are nearly constant unless you're enlightened or are constantly mindful. thus the necessity of jesus for spiritual evolution (clarification: that doesn't mean you need to worship jesus, or have faith in jesus, to get to 4d!!!!) and the true depth of his sacrifice.

you don't need to renounce lay life to be compassionate, it's just much easier, and far less common for a person not instructed and practicing in a spiritually conducive environment to succeed at mastery of compassion, i.e. incapable of anger, negative thought, etc.



one grows spiritually in wisdom and insight ...becomes one's true nature.

this is what is meant by skill. no offense, but that simply shows how people read buddhism already biased towards some ideology and then misconstrue it.

i appreciate your humility in this onething, and i also appreciate the dynamic soundboard you've provided for me to work my thoughts out.
peace :)

[MarkM]

very interesting thread!

i'd simply like to point out some of the loo pronouncements, as they may relate to the conversation.

we have (according to my understanding of the loo) what is perhaps best described as a holographic universe, in which the totality of the creator is found in the smallest fragment of that which is manifest.


questioner: was the galaxy that we are in created by the infinite intelligence or was it created by a portion of the infinite intelligence?

ra: i am ra. the galaxy and all other things of material of which you are aware are products of individualized portions of intelligent infinity. as each exploration began, it, in turn, found its focus and became co-creator. using intelligent infinity each portion created an universe and allowing the rhythms of free choice to flow, playing with the infinite spectrum of possibilities, each individualized portion channeled the love/light into what you might call intelligent energy, thus creating the so-called natural laws of any particular universe.

each universe, in turn, individualized to a focus becoming, in turn, co-creator and allowing further diversity, thus creating further intelligent energies regularizing or causing natural laws to appear in the vibrational patterns of what you would call a solar system. thus, each solar system has its own, shall we say, local coordinate system of illusory natural laws. it shall be understood that any portion, no matter how small, of any density or illusory pattern contains, as in an holographic picture, the one creator which is infinity. thus all begins and ends in mystery.

here, we are invited to apprehend our own natures, in fact the beingness of all which is manifest, as absolutely intrinsic and indispensible to existence itself.

further, the loo mirrors my own feeling that each individual represents a foray into a sort of kinetic and 'becoming' exploration of existance; without which the creator would exist as pure potentiality minus anything at all happening. individuated consciousness is invested into a 'from the ground up' journey of discovery of an infinite diversity of possible experiencing, thus rendering each journey as singularly unique and equally valuable to the creator.


questioner: while an entity is incarnate in this third density at this time he may either learn unconsciously without knowing what he is learning, or he may learn after he is consciously aware that he is learning in the ways of the law of one. by the second way of learning consciously, it is possible for the entity to greatly accelerate his growth. is this correct?

ra: i am ra. this is correct.

questioner: then am i correct in assuming that the creator then grants for this knowing the concept of total freedom of choice in the ways of knowing? am i correct?

ra: i am ra. this is quite correct.

questioner: could this then be the primal mechanism for the creator to experience itself?

ra: i am ra. this is not a proper term. perhaps the adjectives would be “one appropriate” way of the creator knowing itself, for in each interaction, no matter what the distortion, the creator is experiencing itself.

if one accepts this line of thinking, one may guess that no matter what choices are made, the whole point of the operation is for the creator to experience for itself (as there is nothing outside of the creator) an infinite variety of experiencing, thus accruing to itself the aggregated sum/product of this experience/wisdom.

to me, all this and more suggests that there is no obstacle conceivable, in the long run, to all individuated parts of the one big i am from having a birthright of divine validity of being, an intrinsic immortality, and direct identification with the one consciousness from which all springs.


ra: i am ra. consider, if you will, that the universe is infinite. this has yet to be proven or disproven, but we can assure you that there is no end to your selves, your understanding, what you would call your journey of seeking, or your perceptions of the creation.

that which is infinite cannot be many, for many-ness is a finite concept. to have infinity you must identify or define that infinity as unity; otherwise, the term does not have any referent or meaning. in an infinite creator there is only unity. you have seen simple examples of unity. you have seen the prism which shows all colors stemming from the sunlight. this is a simplistic example of unity.

in truth there is no right or wrong. there is no polarity for all will be, as you would say, reconciled at some point in your dance through the mind/body/spirit complex which you amuse yourself by distorting in various ways at this time. this distortion is not in any case necessary. it is chosen by each of you as an alternative to understanding the complete unity of thought which binds all things. you are not speaking of similar or somewhat like entities or things. you are every thing, every being, every emotion, every event, every situation. you are unity. you are infinity. you are love/light, light/love. you are. this is the law of one.

therefore, i intuit further that the concept of an outer agency, necessary to facilitate my salvation, is but a distortion unnecessary for me to consider. i feel that there is nothing to be saved from, and the very act of manifesting the concept of a savior or 'karma soak' exterior to myself is self limiting and an unnecessary roadblock to my journey of total acceptance of my responsibility to accept, forgive and appreciate my own infinite, diverse and stumbling being. i feel i have never been actually unconnected from all that i am, and the upward calling to unconditional love has progressively entered my self awareness from the roots of being.

to move into the vein of my level of sense of separation from the creator, which all humans share to some extent, i feel that, in consonance with the loo, the creator has infinite patience and forbearance with my distortion and personalized experimentation, and in fact revels in it. distortion of infinite intelligence equals potential for experience - richness of being - mystery, change, discovery, disappointment, illumination; and all this is the substance and glory of our becoming and evolving creator.

all paths are equally divine and grand beyond measure, and i need not fear any sense of stumbling off the path and into some abyss from which there is no escape. i recognize that any such fear is a shadow born of misapprehension of the very simple yet totally beautiful fact of my intrinsic divinity and literal identification as the infinite creator. there's only one of us here - although yet there is room for concepts of perceived pyramidal and layered heirarchies of being! all visions of reality are perfectly acceptable, and desireable! mark

[onething]

hello hume,

my true opinion is rather unfavorable to the ot, and quite favorable to the nt, so i may not have expressed that well. nonetheless, i do not think there is a clear teaching in the nt, nor do i think that all the authors were equally inspired as one another nor even in all of their thoughts. therefore, i think paul, for example, had some truths to teach, and was off base in some ways. in addition, translations were not always done well, and i'm pretty sure phrases were added here and there, so even jesus' words are probably not entirely accurate.

if you have a good guide or sound premise from which to work on the nt, i would agree that it teaches sto as its ideal, and contains the seeds or tools of purification equal to any other system.

jesus self aware enough to last 3 years? buddha lasted 49 and died in a ripe old age! and jesus had to be careful and sometimes slip away or he'd of been killed sooner. my point was, he had to pick his battles and he had to refute the burden of the law and vengeful god indirectly, and he did so. yet it was tragic he was taken so soon. had he been able to stay longer, he might have left a clearer teaching and had more time for his pupils to get what he had to teach, and the monstrosity of undoing his teachings with the inclusion of the ot might not have happened. (my opinions all!)

ok, i understand now about the virgin birth, but does that mean a divine egg and sperm as well? originally, people thought females had all the creative power to give birth. when men figured out that wasn't quite so and patriarchy arose, they went to the other extreme and decided that only they had seed, and women were like soil. so for this reason, the early church taught that original sin was transmitted only by men, and it was after the discovery of the female egg in the 1800's that the catholic church found it necessary to introduce the doctrine of immaculate conception, which refers to mary and not to jesus as many think. so this is a lot of man made ideas. if you think jesus was divine by conception, what if we had him here today - would his body display normal blood type, dna, etc? perhaps jesus had an alien father and was conceived by artificial insemination from a race outside our planet. i'm serious about that last.


whoa. you have great material on the necessity of context and then say something like that. i'd venture it's much more consistent to say he meant that the pharisees should practice mercy to receive divine mercy, as per jesus' teachings, and discontinue sacrificing animals for divine pardon, as was the custom. and the eastern church thought...the kkk thought...jim jones thought...and they knew that they were christians.

i don't find my reference out of context, nor do i disagree with what you say here, but c'mon. does god the creator of billions of galaxies really enjoy sacrifice or not? does it please him? if animal sacrifice is not good, why have a human sacrifice? the situation with abraham in the ot is repugnant in the extreme. it is entirely possible that he did in fact sacrifice isaac. there is a midrashic (rabbinic) tradition which says he did, and there are linguistic clues that the story was altered to have an angel of yhvh stop him. but that doesn't matter. the point is abraham lived in a time when the idea that his god (and i use a small g purposely as the early hebrews were not monotheists) would ask him to sacrifice a child was quite within his paradigm. if it were not, he would never had agreed to it. and this story is presented as something beautiful and upon which christian theology is built.

and you think it is unimportant that the eastern church does not believe it, but i tell you this because this is the most ancient and traditional church. of its 5 original bishoprics, it has lost only one - rome. and the west follows rome despite the reformation. point is, this belief in the necessity of a sacrifice has got ahold on the western mind but it is very negative (in my opinion!)
what you have not answered is, nuts and bolts, how does jesus sacrifice work to relieve our karma every lifetime?

i think you are caught in some kind of noose, determined to reconcile buddhism with christianity. i am not sure what anatta means, but i do doubt that our consciousness is lost at death. for one thing, there are so many people with nde's who report continuity of consciousness. no self may be true in one sense, that we are all part of the one being, but we have a long journey before our individual selves are completely dissolved. if ever.

a lot of mystics report some kind of annihilation, "fana" as the sufis call it, and yet it is an experience which does not obliterate the individual after all.

certainly your system of buddhism seems incredibly meaningless and sad. i can't believe that we live in a meaningless and sad universe. all the human striving and experience for naught.

in what way can buddha teach punishment if there is no soul? each lifetime is a unique (and meaningless) event.

isn't buddha supposed to have said he had about 500 prior lifetimes? how does that fit in with what you say he taught?


this is what is meant by skill. no offense, but that simply shows how people read buddhism already biased towards some ideology and then misconstrue it.

i don't think it's a matter of bias but language. for example, the buddhist no-thing is really a bad translation into english, gives a completely different feel to what it means, which is not nothingness.

[HumeFabregas]

hey one,


jesus was divine by conception...here today...blood type, dna...an alien father and was conceived by artificial insemination...
.
i see your points, am open to virtually anything, and above all don't know. but that's ok with me, b/c this is a mere discursive distraction to the reality of my faith. i'm sure you can identify with that. i'm just speculating on the metaphysical dovetailing possible between buddhist metaphysics and christian mythology/reality/who knows.



does god the creator of billions of galaxies really enjoy sacrifice or not? does it please him? if animal sacrifice is not good, why have a human sacrifice?

if we can share any aspect of our respective angles on this, let it be this: it's not god that demands a sacrifice. part of the appeal of unifying christian and buddhist metaphysics is doing away with the horrifying divine requirement of jesus' death. rather, it is reality that requires such a sacrifice if christian metaphysics are to hold! it is universal law of karma that not even god can circumvent, b/c it is in the fabric of reality itself.



i think you are determined to reconcile buddhism with christianity.

i am. :)



i do doubt that our consciousness is lost at death... we have a long journey before our individual selves are completely dissolved. if ever.

you views are concordant with buddhist philosophy. the only time consciousness is escaped is nirvana (a beautiful word if there ever was one, in sound and meaning) it is the soul the buddha said was a myth. it was the hindu idea (contextually) that there's something undergirding consciousness, the vehicle for reincarnation of consciousness, that the buddha said was unnecessary and incorrect.



a lot of mystics report some kind of annihilation, "fana" as the sufis call it, and yet it is an experience which does not obliterate the individual after all.

there are various states of samadhi where there is unification with the object of meditation. this is not the highest, most skillful mental state according to the buddha, and thus must be considered in light of that.



certainly your system of buddhism seems incredibly meaningless and sad. i can't believe that we live in a meaningless and sad universe. all the human striving and experience for naught.

first, it's not "my system." that's quite the honor you're bestowing there! second, buddhism is based on karma, and thus is just. and life isn't meaningless--everything you do has meaning, for the current and future lives. finally, i don't think buddhism is the final description of the universe. christianity has truth as well. i just think chistianity lacks the metaphysics of buddhism, and buddhism lacks the creator/mercy of christianity. hence my determination, as you pointed out.
there's punishment b/c each lifetime isn't a unique event. they are all connected, just as the moments of our current lives are all connected to give the illusion of a self moving through time.
he had more than 500 prior lifetimes...again, in buddhism, there's no soul, but only a constant state of becoming brought about by desire. there's no difference between the becoming that happens instant to instant of our current life and the becoming that happens at the end ("death") and beginning (?...when does life start?) of incarnations.

part 2 coming

[HumeFabregas]

part 2
hello again one,



what you have not answered is, nuts and bolts, how does jesus sacrifice work to relieve our karma every lifetime?


well, if you ask a question like that, you'll get a response like this:d :

first, i think the creator the buddha said didn't exist came into existence through buddhist metaphysics, yet actually existed eternally before that. first, there was love, an aspect of the impersonal yet perfectly just universe of the buddha (and the zillions of buddha's before him). this love is the basis upon which karma is generated; it is the moral standard, the only yardstick. due to the nature of this force, it generates behavior in entities (such as jesus) that leads to greater good. in effect, i'm proposing that love inspires beings of all levels to sacrifice for others. it is this effect that eventually led a diva or celestial being in the heavenly realm to devote its existence to others, instead of simply reveling in the pleasure and longevity of its existence (according to buddha, this latter path is what all gods take who aren't instructed in the eightfold path). thus, in accordance with the nature of the universe, this being generated merit in realm where merit is always spent. thus, this being accumulated more longevity, more wisdom/intelligence/sophistication, and more power.
eventually, this being, inspired by love, produced enough merit to cause an event analogous to a third dimension being generating a lot of merit--it goes to the next realm and gains advanced attributes. only in this case, there was nothing higher than the heavenly realm, as seen by the buddha. that's because the next realm is transcendent. it is the realm where forces (love) are personified. it is the other end of the spectrum of universal forces: if love as an impersonal force flows through beings and sustains them, from "below" on the metaphysical scale of complexity, this is the love that interacts with beings as the embodiment of that love, from "above" on the metaphysical complexity scale. thus, it is as abstract and unknowable and real as essential love, as a force that the buddha knew, but it is personal, in that it has a will. thus, the creator, as love.
this creator can creat her own universe and soverignly enact its will within that construct. thus, we have a creator who must operate within the laws of the universe (karma and love are universal) yet can bend the rules as long as the equations balance out. thus, this creator can, out of love, send an emissary (jesus) of a similar disposition to itself (when it was generating merit) to take the karmic load of the constitutents of its universe. it does this by first finding jesus in the 4th realm, a being of pure love with zero bad karma (in your own words, bad karma is eradicated past a certain point, which the buddha also claimed). this being then orchestrated an incarnation back in 3d where it would undergo the karmic opposite of what it karmically deserved: jesus should have been born a prince, had a perfect gorgeous body, been surrounding by adoring followers, and began a universal monarchy or became perfectlyl enlightented (sound familiar?). obviously, this wasn't the case; indeed, he not only created more good karma through his undoubted mindfulness of being and healings, but he then sustained a horrific torturous death...the universe owed god. karmically, there was thus a scale that needed to be balanced out. and god balanced that scale with the karma of humanity, and thus they are karmically absolved after each incarnation and thus can reincarnate on the 3d realm every time (thus the parable of the sowing and the harvest) some of us are the seeds sown years ago, with the spiritual maturity evident. others are wanderes. others are recently incarnated (myself) and must have faith (which, by god's will, is considered meritorious--"faith was reckoned to [abraham] as righteousness") to enter the heavely realm of christ.
further, god is eternal as the personification of love b/c we, as his adoring creation, are the recipients of his good will, and thus allow him to generate merit! conversely, our heavenly adoration/service to others generates our own merit...thus eternal life, without a soul.
furthemore, i reconcile some difficult passages in the bible (passages hinting at predestination, seemingly fatalistic) with a loving, just god through karmic metaphysics. people were incarnating before jesus came. thus, based on their karma (3rd eye relatively open) they could understand jesus' parables and thus benefit, or they couldn't understand b/c they didn't have a consciousness improved by merit.
finally, i still don't know about hell. the buddha taught it, and it seems likelyl given what i find in the bible and as a logical conclusion (the karma of those who are total jerks (to put it mildly) would be taken by jesus' sacrifice, but at the cost of really, really making god angry...
at the same time, it wouldn't surprise me if jesus make one final appeal for all of those who spurned him (not that they weren't christians, but that they rejected any sto spirituality altogether, even in daily living) so that they simply had to undergo 75,00 years or whatever of 3d life again. but that's just me. i do know that god is just, and that there is one book in the apocrypha that really hammers home the idea of a hell (not for eternity tho...for an "age", as you pointed out) which makes sense to me both for the karmic deal and b/c god ultimately loves her creation, and that her love and mercy have always outweighed her justice.

i hope this makes sense.

if you actually read all that...then you're probably a wanderer! :d

[HumeFabregas]

hello bbb,

first, i have no idea what you mean by "conceptual basis" that doesn't also apply to the l.o.o.



since you are currently a christian ...orthodox christianity...

dude, c'mon. strawman if there ever was one. and please assume i have some intellectual sophistication, geez :p



infinity became aware. out of its being came the cosmos. the one creator is therefore the cosmos....while christianity poses a dualism between god and the cosmos, the one creator is the i am (all). this view is basically that of panentheism.

um, could you please explain exactly what you mean by "infinity became aware"--how could it be unaware if it became aware? given that's it's inifinite, it's logically absurd to introduce a cause, factor or impetus to move "infinity" to becoming aware, yet there's a distinction there. also, isn't this just the romanticization of "infinity"? what would it "become" aware of, given that it's everything and awareness implies the existence of something percieved as "not-i". third, why does awareness imply anything further? it seems this kind of awareness would be similar to nirvana, in that no other state is remotely desirable. in that sense, it seems to be also personifying infinity in that we're projecting on it our desires for sense experience, which seems absurd yet isn't unexpected if it's the focal point of a metaphysical belief system.
these are things i want you to consider, not spend time answering. i do realize what we're talking about.



the nice part about this

aka the emotional appeal, divorced from metaphysical considerations...



hume....enthusiasts...bibles ...blend the two theologically. it doesn't work.

um, dude, i never once said i was trying to unify christianity and the l.o.o. buddhism, yeah, but not the l.o.o.
i was proposing a metaphysical question relating jesus and the l.o.o, which has yet to be satisfactorily answered...

see bbb, what we have here is a vet of the boards who thinks everyone who quotes the bible is an idiotic fundie totally enamored with the l.o.o. :cool:


and yes, like the hard-nosed philosopher. i respect anyone who yields nothing to logic but experience. and like the spanish soccer player (go aresenal! haha)--they better have soccer in 4d, or i'm not going!



buddhism's achilles heel was that of some sense of intellectualism.
gonna have to call you out on this one. if you understood buddhism, you'd know it is the antithesis of intellectualism. if anything, it is experientialism. remember, the buddha refused to engage in metaphysical discussions, saying they are a "wilderness of ideas."



as i remember, christianity is that of the sinner being a helpless victim, piously waiting around for jesus to do the needed work.

you didn't happen to get your understanding of christianity from focus on the family, did you...
really, i'm curious. why is it you and others can subscribe to this l.o.o. with personal interpretive liberties taken with the text (even encouraged, which i think is good) to make it more meaninful, relevant, etc. but when someone comes along who mentions an established faith tradition, they're assumed to be completely orthodox, fundamentalist, and ignorant?
aren't you simply projecting what you've encountered with christianity from your past onto me?

and of course ra, the nt, etc. aren't infallible. the concept is ridiculous except as applied to god.
what i meant is, i don't think the l.o.o. is the best route for everyone to take. i think for wanderers and spiritually mature people, it's great. but for the majority of the new age movement (a groundless guess), it is a construct that will not serve to facilitate growth but rather license immorality under the guise of "the creator experiencing itself" what i mean is, for those who are mature, freedom is good b/c it invites self-control. for those who are immature, freedom is bad b/c it invites careless indulgence, and progress doesn't happen b/c someone is still enamored with the sts aspects that, really, in the l.o.o. have no repurcussions for indulging in, yet buddhism and christianity do. hence the "tool of satan" label.

and i realize we won't agree on this. but that doesn't matter. as long as we understand why we disagree, we're golden.

[billybobbutterball]

[quote=humefabregas;49626]hello bbb,

first, i have no idea what you mean by "conceptual basis" that doesn't also apply to the l.o.o.

## hume i'm baffled by the above comment. the conceptual ground for all three are arguably mutually exclusive


dude, c'mon. strawman if there ever was one. and please assume i have some intellectual sophistication, geez :p

## from your first posting i assumed you have an impressive iq graced by a high degree of intelluctual sophistry. to whit, i'm not sure about your complaint that i constructed/destructed a straw person...i thought it was a really solid fabrication.


um, could you please explain exactly what you mean by "infinity became aware"--how could it be unaware if it became aware? given that's it's inifinite, it's logically absurd to introduce a cause, factor or impetus to move "infinity" to becoming aware, yet there's a distinction there. also, isn't this just the romanticization of "infinity"? what would it "become" aware of, given that it's everything and awareness implies the existence of something percieved as "not-i". third, why does awareness imply anything further? it seems this kind of awareness would be similar to nirvana, in that no other state is remotely desirable. in that sense, it seems to be also personifying infinity in that we're projecting on it our desires for sense experience, which seems absurd yet isn't unexpected if it's the focal point of a metaphysical belief system.
these are things i want you to consider, not spend time answering. i do realize what we're talking about.




aka the emotional appeal, divorced from metaphysical considerations...


um, dude, i never once said i was trying to unify christianity and the l.o.o. buddhism, yeah, but not the l.o.o.
i was proposing a metaphysical question relating jesus and the l.o.o, which has yet to be satisfactorily answered...

???

## hume, we have a policy problem here that should have been noticed earlier. i made a mistake in thinking you were trying to reconcile the three together... but as you mentioned above, it seems that you are not. the following is a section of the 'rules for posting' that we all signed off on: (of course few read them...i confess i didn't:o

guidelines for participation in forums
the dc forum is a group of individuals who communicate via this forum on topics related to the work of david wilcock. we are all here because we are interested in his work and how it relates to other information, personal experiences, etc. group dynamics are prone to extremes, and these guidelines seek to define the common ground upon which we can have meaningful and informative discussions about topics concerning wilcock’s work.
1. participants are asked to keep their posts on topic. possible topics include mr. wilcock’s written work, personal experiences and thoughts related to that work, material upon which mr. wilcock has based his research (ra / the law of one, seth, etc. - see the list of recommended reading materials in the “files” thread under announcements), and new scientific / empirical data related to mr. wilcock’s research. this is not an exhaustive list of proper topics, but it does give one a general idea about what is considered “on topic”. our intention is that members are here to discuss this material and will have read at least a certain amount of the divinecosmos.com website. many basic philosophical questions and concerns can be answered by reading the law of one study guide posted at http://www.divinecosmos.com/index.ph...d=23&itemid=36

this study guide is a distilled document of all major points raised in the law of one series, and is highly recommended as a prerequisite for list participation.

2. your presence in this group comprises a tacit acceptance of our core values and beliefs as set forth in mr. wilcock’s work and the law of one series from l/l research company. while skepticism and critical thinking are always useful in the pursuit of knowledge, we cannot have meaningful discussions if we must constantly defend our fundamentals against those who choose to disagree. if an individual cannot approach the material with an open mind and respectful demeanor, they will make others uncomfortable, and in turn may receive uncomfortable responses. such skeptics will be unsubscribed from the group if their criticism hurts the community spirit of the group.

3. similarly, the new age, et, metaphysical, and alternative physics communities are diverse, popular, and numerous. in order to have worthwhile discussion that is beneficial to those who are interested in the material, we must restrict our focus to topics that relate to our core mission. members who selfishly use the list’s common resources without regard for its members’ shared interests may be unsubscribed. this includes those who insist on promoting / showcasing themselves, their own websites, philosophies, products, services or other unrelated teachings.

4. we feel that the law of one represents a complete body of spiritual teaching, which becomes increasingly useful the more that it is studied and applied. this group is optimally designed for those who have made a free-will decision to study the teaching and harmonize their own attitudes and behaviors with it, instead of endlessly searching for more “new” teaching to read. be aware that mr. wilcock and his associates receive large volumes of email each day, and when a person “discovers” a new source of channeling they often email us and ask for our opinion. the recommended reading list is a direct result of this broad spectrum of feedback, and the vast majority of “popular” channeling is not included, and thereby considered off-topic. such material is best discussed on other message boards devoted to the study and integration of those particular teachings. the question of one’s personal journey in integrating the law of one teachings is of extreme interest and importance for this group, thus leading to practically limitless areas for personal sharing and participation in a “safe” atmosphere of mutual trust and respect. ###


ok...this post is running overly long...i will move the remainder to a new post


bbb

[billybobbutterball]

### some questions were raised by hume concerning a suspect romantic description of infinity.

from the loo vol one page 129.

...the first known thing in creation is infinity. the infinity is creation. infinity became aware. awareness led to the focus of infinity into infinite energy ... the creator is the focusing of infinity as an aware or conscious principle called by us (the ra) as closely as we can create understanding/learning in your language, intelligent energy.

(time for a plug a very readable, romanticized work of the loo is ken carey's "the third millennium")


see bbb, what we have here is a vet of the boards who thinks everyone who quotes the bible is an idiotic fundie totally enamored with the l.o.o. :cool:

## hume, i'm totally confused by that sentence above.


and yes, like the hard-nosed philosopher. i respect anyone who yields nothing to logic but experience. and like the spanish soccer player (go aresenal! haha)--they better have soccer in 4d, or i'm not going!

## well for sure they have soccer in 4d negative... i understand it is a bit off-putting for the newbies when they discover that the balls are heads.


gonna have to call you out on this one. if you understood buddhism, you'd know it is the antithesis of intellectualism. if anything, it is experientialism. remember, the buddha refused to engage in metaphysical discussions, saying they are a "wilderness of ideas."

##think you got me there since i could not find the source. it may have advanced the idea that the lack was in intellectual concepts...and then there is the idea that there is no substance in reality. a problem is that my memory takes holidays.


you didn't happen to get your understanding of christianity from focus on the family, did you...

## you got sumpthin' against focus? no, i got a late start in 1980. that lasted about ten years. ran into some fascinating intellectuals who made a case for augustino cavinism...baptist version. i was taken by theology, especially the work of wgt shedd in his magnificent dogmatic theology, 1894.


really, i'm curious. why is it you and others can subscribe to this l.o.o. with personal interpretive liberties taken with the text (even encouraged, which i think is good) to make it more meaningful, relevant, etc. but when someone comes along who mentions an established faith tradition, they're assumed to be completely orthodox, fundamentalist, and ignorant?

## no, that's not quite right. many of those are here on dc because they got soured on established faith traditions. as i mentioned earlier many come still dragging baggage left over from their christian upbringing. its understandable that they try to graft the old onto the "new".

aren't you simply projecting what you've encountered with christianity from your past onto me?

##yeah. that's true in a way. i studied basic reform theology and that is why i know that there is no way in hell that you can combine theism with panentheism...and your attempting to do such burdens me.

and of course ra, the nt, etc. aren't infallible. the concept is ridiculous except as applied to god.

that doesn't quite fit. we are all one and that includes the creator.

what i meant is, i don't think the l.o.o. is the best route for everyone to take. i think for wanderers and spiritually mature people, it's great. but for the majority of the new age movement (a groundless guess), it is a construct that will not serve to facilitate growth but rather license immorality under the guise of "the creator experiencing itself" what i mean is, for those who are mature, freedom is good b/c it invites self-control. for those who are immature, freedom is bad b/c it invites careless indulgence, and progress doesn't happen b/c someone is still enamored with the sts aspects that, really, in the l.o.o. have no repercussions for indulging in, yet buddhism and christianity do. hence the "tool of satan" label.

##the sts path does have repercussions but it is still a valid spiritual path...just lacking the more gracefully traveled path of the sto.

##it is not necessary for anyone to cling to the loo...the inner drive keeps pushing even tho progress is much slower.

and i realize we won't agree on this. but that doesn't matter. as long as we understand why we disagree, we're golden.[/quote]

ok. but i shudder at your karmic concepts, and jesus being the karmic alleviator of the universe...and that the buddha's are grandfathered into the equation. too much hocus pocus going on...good grief hume! time for you to employ occam's razor, don't you think?

yeah. the idea of a ruthless hell did bother me emotionally and theologically.
...a sin against an infinite god results in an infinite punishment... so, reading the loo was a breath of fresh air...incidentally, i suggested that you check out scott mandelkers site, and especially on the east west doctrines... all these "thou shalt not's" are orion inspired...negativity masquerading as positivity.

i've enjoyed reading your stuff...but we have to adhere closer to the rules from now on or we will self destruct. you brought up some other stingers which i haven't dealt with -- but it is 4 in the morning, my brain is dead and i'm crashing.:o

bill g aka bbb

[MarkM]

my own experience has led to the observation of deepened or 'inspired' states of awareness within myself, and i may well consider questions concerning the providence of this 'inspired' stuff - whether it comes from deeper, or even perhaps more correctly from a higher vantage of view, or from (in the case of channeled stuff) some other outside intelligence not my own.

a loo student may feel that as there is only one, the true heritage of the channeled material is from somewhere in the range of one's own higher (or deeper) self, as edgar, david and carla seem to claim. the mental/emotional/spiritual attitude of the channel may also, as it would seem, colour the tone and content of that which is 'piped' through, as we see with the many instances of negative and fear-based pronouncements which now so proliferate on the net. there's a good reason to be wary of channeled material, even though if it resonates with you, it's something which you may need or want to experience or 'try on' in your personal evolution.

there are those who claim to channel in largely undistorted form some wide swaths of creative principle, or higher or more evolved densities of existence - creative logoi or aspects thereof which seem to represent in some way or aspect the life and intelligence of the solar system itself, or even aspects of the galactic logoi, or even beyond - who can really define what? ;)

when someone like carla channels a principle like ra, and her body utters words not of her 'carla' personality, but the words of an extremely highly evolved and creative aspect of her higher self, might not jesus have been doing the same? might jesus have been channeling a higher aspect of himself when his body uttered, 'i am the way, the truth, and the life; and no man cometh unto the father but by me'? are we really to believe that of all humanity, only this man jesus in some way personified the christ in a way so as to offer the rest of us a seat on the bus?

might there not have been an ordinary guy, albeit with a highly evolved sense of love and oneness and with much to teach those less advanced in third density - an ordinary guy who had a not so ordinary propensity to channel high creative principle? a guy who wanted as many as possible of us to know that the 'christ' was the primordial creative and universe sustaining principle that we are all made of? hmm... all of us are the christ? or just the one guy?

if christ made his home in nazareth 2000 years ago, maybe he also makes his home at your house in 2009. if jesus is the savior, then perhaps each living thing or essence shares that reality of being.

this line of thinking may suggest to some that the doctrine of humanity’s intrinsic unworthiness due to some eternally cursing original sin is suspect. here, we are taught that we are dirty and unclean beings, and – for whatever reason, exist in a state of being whereby we are only allowed to live due to some event which specifically involves the man jesus. we’re also taught that for us to even question and deny the truth of these things will condemn us to hell.

we’re told that we can’t manage our own karmic load; that we must rely on an agency which is not intrinsic within ourselves for mercy and pardon, and that to doubt and/or reject this view is forbidden on pain of banishment to an 'eternity' in hell. hey, can you say, ‘diabolical control/fear mechanism’? thank christ that more and more of us are seeing past this twisting of love’s message - even as we are grateful for the whole range of catalyst and experiencing available, even control/fear mechanisms! maybe if fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom, the transcendance of said fear represents moving beyond the beginnings!

i don't mean to suggest that the millions who love christ are guilty of pushing fear and control - quite the contrary! there are those of all faiths who serve to raise the frequency of consciousness of all. there are also those whose evolution is best served by a spell of laboring under some pretty 'out there' distortions of love.

yet i do believe that all the world's religions are distortions of the loo, which heralds and proclaims the utter divinity, complete perfection, and absolute creatorship and literal oneness of all life. a feeling of unworthiness is useful to a person until their own direct experiential evidence proves to them otherwise; at which point they may see the illusary nature of that particular distortion - all is good!

also, i would agree that perhaps the majority of humankind are legitimately not ready to hear of or to live the loo, as it does seem to be almost like a post graduate course in reality beyond the veil which resonates with those who have or are ready to polarize either positive or negative.

the loo is not something to be preached or evangelicized, or used to attempt to 'correct' the ways of becoming of those who are chewing the meat of life's experiencing in third density. it seems to exist as a passive resource for those who will inevitably gravitate toward it when their time is right, and either come to know the loo instinctively/subconsciously, or are propelled into its study after 'chancing' upon it. some will not resonate, not ready to identify with the creator/all there is, and for them its best to carry on with their personal evolution as is natural for them. all paths and levels of attainment are perfect, and any conceivable belief system serves its necessary and divine purpose in the infinitely diverse pageant play of evolution and becoming. mark

[onething]

hey hume,


if we can share any aspect of our respective angles on this, let it be this: it's not god that demands a sacrifice. part of the appeal of unifying christian and buddhist metaphysics is doing away with the horrifying divine requirement of jesus' death. rather, it is reality that requires such a sacrifice if christian metaphysics are to hold! it is universal law of karma that not even god can circumvent, b/c it is in the fabric of reality itself.

well this is one reason i told you about the eastern branch of the christian faith. it is really odd to compare it to jim jones or the kkk. i have a passionate little tract written in russian and translated into english by the highest ranking bishop of russia after the revolution and who led a group of religious who fled the country. he regards the entire western teaching that god required a blood sacrifice as a horror and hopes that a future church council will formally reject it. he states that it is a holdover from roman feudal law, in which a rich or royal or high ranking military person guilty of an offense must satisfy it with an equal party and can use a substitute for the actual guilty party. so this doctrine comes from rome, which transferred its aspirations to world power from the empire to the church, in many ways. so the spirit which drove the creation of this theology is one of negativity.

the point is that such a teaching is not and was never necessary to the christian faith.

now, i like your understanding that certain things are woven in the fabric of reality itself. i am not sure at all that i agree that this sacrifice does what you say. i'm going to continue to ponder your words as i write my response. certainly, the only karmically valid sacrifice is a voluntary one.


the only time consciousness is escaped is nirvana .. it is the soul the buddha said was a myth. it was the hindu idea (contextually) that there's something undergirding consciousness, the vehicle for reincarnation of consciousness, that the buddha said was unnecessary and incorrect.
well, this is interesting. my general impression is that hinduism is unsurpassed within the world's body of religious teachings, and i have never been quite able to understand buddhism. hinduism teaches that there are several subtle vehicles, an astral (soul) body, and a mental and causal body. each more subtle than the last and requiring a very long evolution before they are shed and one rejoins the godhead. this accords with law of one, more or less, or at least it seems to...

following nature, it makes sense, on a physical level, for there to be gradations between the heaviness of the body and the ultimate lightness of being, rather than one swift break. (i always insert nuts and bolts into my philosophy...)


he had more than 500 prior lifetimes...again, in buddhism, there's no soul, but only a constant state of becoming brought about by desire. there's no difference between the becoming that happens instant to instant of our current life and the becoming that happens at the end ("death") and beginning (?...when does life start?) of incarnations.

so i have spent a fair amount of time trying to assess anatta...and you say that there is no break in consciousness, that between our sleeping the big sleep and awaking in the next lifetime is a series of becomings a lot like our little sleep each night and even moment to moment... which i sense is true enough and a decent enough description of things.

i do always, though, balk just slightly at the idea that there is nothing really holding my existence together. you know, i have for many years - and this is why i love david's work so much - been on a continuous, instinctual quest to unite physics with spirituality. one thing physics talks about is how things like a wave of light are in fact little discrete units or packets of energy. a photon stream that looks continuous. this could be compared to the moment to momentness of our lives that actually occurs in minuscule instants. nonetheless something holds them together, at least for a time. there is the body, which remains visibly recognizable even though it undergoes steady change, and then there is memory. as jim morrison said:

"if you give this man a ride (the killer on the road)
sweet memory will die."

o sweet memory! you give me my identity without which i am...what exactly?


there are various states of samadhi where there is unification with the object of meditation. this is not the highest, most skillful mental state according to the buddha, and thus must be considered in light of that.
and what are the spectra of possible mental states including samadhi? i myself have not really experienced samadhi, or perhaps just very briefly. at heart more than anything i'm a sufi - besotted with love for our wonderful creator and perfectly content in the suspicion that i am not yet perfected in knowledge. living as i do in the bridal chamber of the lord...it is the process of increasing understanding and flirtatious and terrifying interplay with the divine other that is best poetically compared to an eager and bashful virgin spending a week in sexual love learning with her new husband in the bridal tent as the bedouin do...

[in fear and trembling at having this post rejected due to length, will now adjourn to part 2...]

[onething]

o humefabregas,



there's punishment b/c each lifetime isn't a unique event. finally, i still don't know about hell. the buddha taught it, and it seems likelyl given what i find in the bible and as a logical conclusion

my dear hume, of course there is hell. i am going to let you in on a little secret.
[drumroll]

we're in hell now. oh, that's not to say there aren't worse hells. one of the many tortures of hell is the fear of worse hells, of course. i mean, just take a little stock of our situation here. let's take off the rose colored glasses (pms is very helpful here). we humans on planet earth live in a state of near total blackness. it's just an eclipse, but we don't know that.

we have no real idea of who or what or why or where we are. the only verifiable fact is that "i" exist, for experiences are happening. each of us is like a single particle floating in an endless black universe of nothingness. there is no north star, no compass, no such thing as a location. never mind the who, we don't even know what we are.

what disguises this bleak reality for us is the two main distractions: sunlight and the (apparent) presence of other beings. without that, we'd be stark raving mad with terror. as it is, we use up most of our consciousness suppressing that existential terror.

this place is run on lies and use of force or threat of force. the corrupt get ahead. oh, there are many places where the good erupts, but it can never relax and is always being undermined sooner or later. religions like christianity give with one hand and take with the other, so that the people spin in circles, never able to make real progress. and it does this by teaching a god who is both good and evil. this causes soul paralysis.

there is deviousness and delusion everywhere!

since our presence here is of course voluntary, and since there are no real bars or doors to this prison, at least not physically, there are other mechanisms in place to make our escape more difficult and protracted.
one of the biggest clues, a hell mark - is the state of endless confusion that reigns. one of the best containment devices is to pretend that our situation is other than what it is, that we are not in hell, and fill people full of fears that they might go there! i mean, surely you can see that the first tool for escape would be understanding that one is in prison in the first place? but no! tell people that they may go to prison if they're not good, and they'll not figure out that they are already there. you see, if they got clarity on that, the next step would be to become far more discerning and suspicious.

the thing is, it's all fine because as soon as one begins to have a non-hell mentality, one finds oneself in far pleasanter surroundings, and going from strength to strength eventually hell has no ability to hold you anymore. truly it is sad to say that not everyone would regard a good god and a universe that leaves no child behind as good news. they want to wallow in the lower realms and the higher joys and blisses available have no interest to them at all. it isn't a good idea for people to escape until they are really, really ready.

snip

speaking of the polarization which david says is occurring as we approach 2012, i have been pondering the way that, politically, certain groups which need not be named, seem impervious to the hypocracy and dishonesty of their leaders, and this is because they actually desire to be misled and they have a religious interpretation that goes hand in hand with the level of perception that they are comfortable with. hell has its pleasures, just like prison or war, even if we regard most of them as horrors. inward glee as one's manipulations are fallen for is one. thus many underdogs do not want to live under a better system, they just want to become a top dog.

alright, enough of this strange interlude...onward to 3

[onething]

well then hume,

i too appreciate that it isn't every day that i talk to someone who has truly pondered the enigma of how a universal and infinite god could be personal. nor have i figured it out.

yes, i actually read all that, couple times.

now, about sacrifice. it is a sacrifice for an elevated being to squeeze himself into a body in this reality with all its attendant horrors and dangers. it is a sacrifice of love to teach humanity until one's dying breath, not that the death itself was somehow of value, much less of value to god. jfk, i believe, was a good man, and found out a lot about the nefarious ones who rule this world. he tried to fight it and to tell us about it. he died trying. and martin luther king, he got a pretty good idea shortly before his death that his life was in peril, but he kept going until they got him.

i find it interesting that not too far into the first gospel jesus speaks of the perfection of universal love to which we are called and tells people to do good to those who are evil, and then he gets nailed to the cross saying, forgive them, they don't understand what they're doing.

nothing like showing that you really mean what you say. i find that alone a worthwhile reason for him to be sacrificed, in order to show that. the idea of loving one's enemies is the most difficult and yet true litmus test of the christian path.

now, i've had the thought that since all we humans are forever connected, that even one perfect one will eventually uplift us all. and i think this is the meaning of jesus' leaven metaphor. jesus himself was the leaven. anyway, what i get from the gospels is a man trying desperately to convey to people the magnanimous nature of god and to wake them up spiritually. once awakened, they may even enter the bridal chamber.

not some scheme of offense and recompense.

i suppose you are saying that jesus was not only perfect but then created merit on top of that, creating a kind of spiritual black hole capable of sucking in an infinite amount of human badness. but by what connection is jesus' extra merit useful to us in your understanding? i can't figure out this bit about taking the karmic load, nor why such a thing if true should be a matter of bending the rules of the universe.


karmically, there was thus a scale that needed to be balanced out. and god balanced that scale with the karma of humanity, and thus they are karmically absolved after each incarnation and thus can reincarnate on the 3d realm every time

ah, here it is. well, well, this is a juridical doctrine. but - absolved? of what and by whom? i do agree that negative karma needs to dissolve, and that negative accrued karma will attract to itself its natural recompense. but what of learning? you seem to say that there are advanced beings who spend their good karma...and then what? is their karma endless or do they completely forget and fall again?

i guess i have a simpler system. in it, people such as myself, after who knows how many lifetimes as a pirate and running the inquisition, begin to ponder reality and ethics and spirit. seek grace, invite grace in. oh, my dear hume, i shall reveal to you my deepest secrets.

all of us, every one of us, has a deep pure core of spirit, universal spirit, the same in everyone, perfect, uncorruptable, invulnerable. it is the soul which contains the individuality, such as it is. the soul undergoes such a terrible journey! but all the mistakes, the sins no matter how great, all are done in ignorance and fear, and once ignorance is overcome, why all that negativity just falls away and becomes actually irrelevant. boring even! not of much interest. this is what it means that "every tear shall be wiped away."

you see, salvation is not about debts and payment, it is about changing one's character, and after that, why worry about wrongs when the sinner who committed them exists no more?

but you see if you live in such a way that you engage in violence and manipulation, you will live in an environment and among other beings of a similar ambition. your ego will be small and tight, you'll live in fear and struggle. that's just how it works, you know, fabric of the universe. so it is not at all the case that actions have no consequence.

(i happen to have the hopeful philosophy, generated by my interest in the queen of philosophies - alchemy - that we are engaged in a process of creating for ourselves perfect individuations, souls that become real and purified, powerfully united with its spirit and dipped over and over again into the earth but reunited and cleansed by the never-abandoning spirit which can't be sullied.)

anger, frustration, impatience - these are all emotions felt by only certain types of limited egoic beings. they have nothing to do with god. with god you were forgiven since before time began.

tales of an angry god who gets spurned if we made a mistake - these are just tactics the guardians use to frighten the inmates into thinking the situation is worse than it actually is, so they won't try to escape.

so if you wanted to tunnel your way out of prison but all you had were your fingernails, that would be tough indeed, and so i will give you a trowel, that your joy may be full. and here it is from the first epistle of john:

"god is light and in him is no darkness at all."

[lightblue]

onething,

your elucidations are much appreciated...serve as a precious reminder that truthfullness and discipline of thought is key!

would like to know what literature you often refer to? thanks.

warmest wishes

[billybobbutterball]

in the twilight of my current 3d tour i find my mental pencil getting a bit dull. here is one recent example:

"see bbb, what we have here is a vet of the boards who thinks everyone who quotes the bible is an idiotic fundie totally enamored with the l.o.o."

bbb responds, hume, i'm totally confused by that sentence above.

yeah, i wasn't being cute, it baffled me, even though most could have figured it out immediately and rearranged it to read something like this: "billybobbutterball, what we have here is a failure to communicate; you have become singularly enamored with the loo to the point of being brainwashed...thus you reflexively assume that everyone who quotes the bible is an idiotic fundie.

maybe so; i do go overboard. however, i have a certain balance in mental derangement experiences as i was once "brainwashed" by so-called biblical doctrines.

a short bio.

my mother was episcopalian, my father a latter day saint "mormon". they settled on a split education by taking me to one or the other alternative weekends. i had not idea of the dynamics going on. one day i casually mentioned that i was going to join up with the mormons. ( i didn't explain that the real reason for my choice was that there were a host of gorgeous young ladies at the one place, and just a bunch of guy friends at the other)

the compulsive church visits stopped dead...that was okay with me since sundays were then free for me to go to the model airplane get-togethers. the romance of flight easily trumped romantic entanglements of the third kind.

when i left high school i was a thinly veneered atheist. soon after-wards i moved up the scale to agnosticism.

my mormon grandmother had been seriously sidetracked into spiritualism. i was the only one in the family who was interested in her way-out ideas. seems that when she was an unhappy adolescent considering suicide, she had a dramatic psychogenic experience with the log cabin shaking itself madly.

in my early twenties i ran into books on edgar cayce. i became interested in eastern thought...one work that sticks in my mind was paul brunton's "in search of the over-self"


when i went to college on the gi bill i was over my head. i couldn't write a sentence much less a paragraph. i had no discipline...i would go off to the library and wander around... i picked up one book that attracted me,"studies in hegelian dialectics"...what fascinated me -- what made me think it was important --was that it hadn't been checked out since 1924!

i ran out of money, gov. checks were delayed. i was making myself mentally ill from trying to read works over my head...there was kant's critique of pure reason looking down on me with disdain from its lofty perch on the rickety bookshelf. my roommate took mercy on me, gave me a quarter and sent me and a head-cold off to the movie theater.

the movie was the wonderful cowboy classic, "shane." although in
glorious technicolor the moral was simplistic black and white. i went home and put a sheet over my bulging bookcase. and went on a health crusade. every morning i would get up, put on a record of grieg's piano concerto to fire me up, then take off on my two speed bicycle to once again try to reach the top of flagstaff mountain without stopping. finally i made it... i looked out at the colorado prairie extending out to the horizon and wondered about my seemingly helpless and apparently aimless life.

ten years later i was married. we had some very strange friends. one was a craftsman and artist and his friend who was a scientist during the day and a medium at night (never the twain should meet!) for over a year we had weekly "circles" with my sister, mother, several friends attending. i shudder in embarrassment in light of the great care that carla, jim and don took in their contact with the ra.

some years later i was once again single. i belonged to the a.r.e. (the cayce organization) and a group known as the a.u.m. the later group broke up when much to my shock the leader became a "born again believer" and renounced his psychic abilities.

cayce's favorite admonition, "god will not be mocked" stuck in my head. for a long period of time i could not read so would listen to the evangelicals on the radio. a dying friend touched my heart when he told me,"bill, you are the best christian i know, but you don't know christ."

soon it seemed that christians were coming into my life.

i believed the claim of the radio guys that "the bible was the most documented historical work ever" if so, one would be insane not to become a christian. so, i became one.:)

to be continued.

[onething]

billybob-

much enjoying your story!

lightblue,

not so sure about the rules regarding the naming of other books. my way of thinking is my own, especially as regards christianity. as i stated earlier in the thread, i regard my inner teacher as the holy spirit. once upon a time i found it necessary to understand the real fundamental essence of christianity and i sought it diligently and feverishly and was becoming at a loss when i finally read an obscure little book from the 50's that i found on my mother's bookshelf and it was the writings of a russian monk on mt. athos in greece (the holy mountain) and he wrote about the holy spirit in a way that i had never seen before, although it is within the paradigm of my church of origin.

due to reading his work, i came to a spiritual crossroads in which i had a choice whether to say "yes" to the holy spirit. this caused a tremendous spiritual awakening in me, and i felt this presence freely for two years. i asked it questions and it has to this day continued to remain my guide and rudder.

slowly it remade all my thinking. took me out of the church. made me understand eastern teaching that i never could before (unity of all things). in fact, that is the origin of my sign on here: one thing.

but as i went on a quest to try to understand what the heck had happened to me, i sure did read some books. i reccommend jed mckenna's first two books because they will help you learn to move beyond dualistic thinking, and he's an amusing writer.

unsurpassed author is david hawkins, i and eye of the i, just so out of this world i don't even know what to say about them, but they changed me. he also has another book which i suspect is very relevant to 3d versus 4d reality, called power versus force, but i have not read it.

there's a book called hua hu ching by hua ching ni.

also read a lot of books on alternative science, intelligent design, consciousness, and so forth. a couple favorites are the secret life of plants, the great cosmic serpent and science and the akashic field.

but if you just want to bliss out, read the sufi poetry collection of hafiz called the gift.

[billybobbutterball]

....so friends took me to various churches they were looking over -- from charismatic to straight laced.. i got dunked in a swimming pool and prayed over. i was now ready to employ my "freewill" to commit to loving god with all my heart.

(but of course that was easier said than done.)

i relished going to church and sharing the wonderful vibes.

i took the bible and the admonition in acts seriously. i spent a day burning my library of occult literature...hundreds were turned to ashes. i can remember one of the last to go. it was titled, zen,the ultimate doctrine...next to it went yogananda's autobiography of a yogi. even the pivotal little book that david mentions so often -- sherman's book on esp -- was ruthlessly martyred. much of this untoward reaction against esp was initiated by a spooky little autobiography entitled "the beautiful side of evil."

then one day a friend asked me if i was an arminian or a calvinist... a what?

well, that question got me into basic theology via the universe supplying me with the patronage of a group of very accomplished theologians.

some rightly claimed that i spent more time in reading about the bible than the bible itself. to be honest, i did not feel intellectually comfortable reading the old, and there were things in the new that just didn't seem right -- but i reminded myself god was in charge running things, was sovereign, and could do as he omnipotently willed.

i was involved in out-reach programs to heathens and assorted heretics. i even picketed an international convention of atheists. (that was actually fun..covered by tv ) and then there was a convention of scruffy, misguided new agers to deal with...and of course we loved to tangle with jw's and mormons over doctrines vs bible, etc. true-believer's vs true-believers; not a fruitful situation nor a healthy one.

one memory stands out. my faithful companion (actually i was her side-kick and in-house theologian) and i went to a lecture given at a new age bookstore by an ex-christian minister on why he left the church. ironically, we were the only two earthly entities that showed. we paid the five bucks and got the very short version. maybe he was there to plant some seeds in my mind?


ten exciting years later:

my atheistic nephew challenges me to read a book that questioned the given historicity of jesus, aka the jesus mysteries. it served to pry open some forbidden doors. i was staying with my friend and her husband at the time and when she caught site of the title she demanded to know on the spot whether or not i considered jesus divine. i hemmed and hawed just enough that she kicked me out...shook the dust off her feet, so to speak. later that week i'm listening to the bible answer man and she is on the phone telling the bam about my idiotic behavior. they both come quickly to the conclusion that "his elevator obviously doesn't go to the top floor."

well that did it. i was ticked, so i started digging around. after a couple of years i was convinced that the figure of jesus was largely mythical...just one scholarly work, the suns of god pretty much covers all the bases. another work by a canadian virtually destroyed every apologetic argument that i had ever confidently advanced to defend the faith once received.

i gave away most of my christian material to a near-by, do-good christian church headed by a korean woman convert. occasionally at the grocery i run into my initial contact from there, and she always loves to display my old thompson study bible now covered with her annotations. that pleases me.

so now my bookshelves are filled again with, guess what? yeah. what goes around comes around.

when i left the church, so to speak, i did not leave spirituality...i knew there was god...but...? after awhile gentle jesus/church bashing got meaningless and dismal, but at the psychological moment i ran into the nde of mellen thomas benedict. wow! that put a new face on the cosmos! following shortly afterward came the ra material thanks to david wilcock and his web site.

for a month or so i sat so much in front of the computer that i finally had to call the fire department to bring out their "jaw's of life" to spring me loose.

since them i have become more reconciled to the human figure of jesus, all thanks to the ra material. my former companion in our criminal assaulting free will in others still lambastes me for my betrayal/defection, but we talk until she tries to put the spear in my side. i have a long distance friend who is a traditional catholic...she talks and i listen. because i understand the catholic doctrines she feels that i'm just inches from converting. i email a married pair of my old mentors often. i still have the greatest of respect for them. the published husband has a phd in historical theology, and posseses a memory like the library at alexandra ..vast but threatened by consuming fires ...in his case the smolderings of aging.:eek:

ok

i hope this biography might be a help to others who may be taking a similar long detour in pausing to unravel the thread that makes up the gordian knot of divine speculations. and i hope it explains my efforts in drawing on my experiences in trying to keep the loo free from collecting alien doctrinal barnacles which if left clinging will end up smothering its unique view of the cosmos. :d

[MarkM]

moderator note - book mentions are generally not approved for the forum, as mods have to read/view all posts, links, and referenced material - and obviously reading all the books which are mentioned here would not be doable - the two hour long vids are bad enough;) ... i'm sure that between bill and myself we've probably read all books mentioned here, so as i don't want to follow bill's lead and put all these mentions to the torch, let's move on!:o let's keep specific book refs out from here on, as we do have the forum guidelines to at least consider! mark

[onething]

billybob

i have enjoyed reading about your journey, and looked up a couple of the things you mentioned. keeping that in mind, i would like to relate to you the story of a dream i had, probably almost 25 years ago. it's one of a very few events that in retrospect i realize was preparing me for my path - unconditional love.

we were in a bible study class with an ancient, tiny little old bishop. he was in his 80's, with an immense snow white beard and extremely bright blue eyes. he said in this class that god loves everyone the same. i remember that i balked and made him repeat that. i went away shaking my head. i found that scandalous and unbelievable. it was not that i objected to god loving even sinners or perhaps demons, but how could he love them all the same?

the thing irritated me a while and i went over to talk to a sweet old nun about it. i don't remember what she said, but it wasn't too lame; however it didn't satisfy me. finally, i decided i had to ask him about it again, so i went one night to church for confession, which was the best way to talk to him. i never confessed my sins anyway since i thought that was tedious. instead, i always brought him my spiritual concerns, and he never chided me for it.

when he saw me standing there he came over looking very tired (it was past his bedtime), but when i asked him my question it was like a light came into his eyes and he was obviously overjoyed. his answer: if we are all swimming in the same ocean, who can be more wet?

i saw the logic of that to an extent, and i was uplifted by the beauty of his response -- but i still just could not understand how such a thing could be. it still plagued me. finally one night i had a dream that was not really quite like a dream. and this person came to me and said that he had come to answer my question. so we went traveling a bit and came to what looked like a prison cell. there was a human being, a man, sitting alone in a small cement cell, utterly dejected. i understood that he was a criminal and not innocent. so the person said, "i am going to show you his soul."

and then i could see his soul. i no longer remember how it looked, but it looked so beautiful, and it was beautiful in a way that nothing within our usual sense perception is. it surpassed all earthly beauty.

then i understood.

[Matthew Clark]

hi hume and everyone,

ok, i want to respond to your posts as i feel i need to. please do not take what i am about to say personally but i have to say them.

the most important thing to remember here is that i am responding to the "tone" and "arguments" you put forward. normally (at work - in life - on here in this forum) if i come across questions or objections, i would dissect each individual point and answer accordingly. i have decided not to do that this time, for what i believe are good reasons. i am a fairly intelligent person who was brought up as a jehovahs witness and had their teachings "banged into me" from an early age. one of the teachings they (like other mainstream religions) push is that to be gay (which i am) is wrong and insulting to god. i never chose to be - and incidentally would not be any other way.:d

i know a lot about religion and if i wanted to could babble on and on about it. you obviously are very intelligent and raise what to you are some inportant points, although i do admit from reading them, some are above my level of understanding!
now as i said, i have only read your posts once and i want to give you some feedback. most people i would imagine would only read once and move on, particularly your posts as they are very deep. i have noticed that almost every reply has been made by "senior members" who are well versed and qualified. i speak for the rest of us. your viewpoint is challenging and comes across that if you were given the true answers, you would not believe them anyway. (please remember i have not dissected your posts - this is a general response). many people are becoming enlightened every day and are finding salvation in this process. if (in my early days of awakening) i were to have come across your argumentative points where you seem to be stuck in beliefs, i may well have been put off the whole thing. please think carefully on how others may take your views. in my opinion (and maybe others will back me up) you are stuck in your firm beliefs and nothing will alter your way of thinking. dont get me wrong i think it is good to have alternative points and "question" but you are like a charging bull and only the "senior members" can stop you ;)

to throw a spanner in the works, go to google video and watch "zeitgeist the movie" - it is 2 hours long but actually addresses religion (first few minutes is a blank screen so stay with it) this video is banned on you-tube for some reason. they make some interesting points about the origins of religion and how much of it is entirely false - used to "control" the masses.

i do not buy into "hell" in any way shape or form but you seem to be obsessed with it. as i said, remember there are people (myself included) who have spent years trying to "unlearn" this distorted b.s which has been banged into us from an early age. you come across as trying to validate it. this is destructive and brings back awful memories for me which i would rather forget.

as i said, i decided not to dissect your points but just put over to you how your posts actually come across - negative.

if i am wrong i apologise to you but in the meantime i send you love and hope you get the piece of mind you seem to be so desperate for.:d

love and light to you all,

matt

freaking out the neighbours by being my spritual self

[lightblue]

i feel i cooked this up - requesting onething's often referred to literature info. i did not know/have not read the forum's rules. won't do it again.. besides, i got away with what i was after so thanks for letting it sneak through.

curious how sometimes we get a mirror image of the way we understand and feel about various subject matters almost totally. onething, thanks again for the fine elaboration, i'd be pefectly ready to sign my name below what you wrote - feels like someone else is doing a tedious work for you..i now see it's not necesserily to do with the books you favour (i read neither, but i'll see that i do) but with your inspiration. also, with what i now feel must be correct: your eastern christian background (which we share) - god is not wrathful.

i don't wish to advertise or slag off any denominations here - anything that helps you see with your heart is good, it takes you one step further.

bestest

[onething]

hi lightblue,

yes, i was raised in the russian and occasionally greek churches. when i had my spiritual awakening it was entirely within its context and i was overflowing with love and gratitude to both god and church. i lived in a state of bliss for about six months, and then ran into a whole slew of books - (no names!) that were about the dead sea scrolls, the lack of proof about jesus, the way that different texts were woven together to create the first books of the old testament and how many of the christian myths were actually myths about other, prior gods such as mithra.

it absolutely stunned me. in the space of about one week my worldview blew apart. i hardly knew what to do with the bizarre truth that my church was built on lies and yet had given me the pearl of great price.

i will be eternally grateful to monk sylvan. but i live in another time than he did. he was in the old world, i am in the new. so i was able to piece it together and here i am today. the holy spirit set me free just like jesus said it would. and it guides me just like he said it would. i kept the real and discarded the unreal.

believing one has the one true faith is such a burden. now i am free to love and accept everyone and my church consists of everyone who loves god, which is actually everyone whether they know it or not.

********************
dear matthew,

i sent you a nice pm. by the way the jw's used to come around years ago when i lived in la and i would invite them in and wear them out. i could wear them out even better now.

i do think you may have misunderstood and it would be good for you to say something a little more specific. i got a little bit of flack for my post on hell but i hope you noticed that i was addressing the spiritual trouble that mankind is now in, in this world, at this time in these lifetimes and not some scary future threat. anyway, i would also like to relieve your mind if possible but i can't do it unless you throw me a bone.

i sense in you a mass of past pain, and sometimes in that situation it is hard to unravel it and it also might make you very sensitive to this discussion. certainly, the hell teachings of the christian churches are a huge psychic trauma that has damaged us in the western world.

none of us actually believe in hell. hume is not sure.

as for me, i said that god is never angry or impatient with any being at any time. nor ever a moment when you are not forgiven. evil is profoundly important in this little playpen we have been placed in, but ultimately it isn't real and will be forgotten.

i heard a lot about the zietgeist movie and managed to locate it on the net, but i gave up after 20 minutes or so because i already knew everything in it.

o mods! just going back over my post that i was asked to modify and did, i pressed the edit button and added some clarifying text - but now i see that it isn't modified at all. what did i do wrong?

[billybobbutterball]

o mods! just going back over my post that i was asked to modify and did, i pressed the edit button and added some clarifying text - but now i see that it isn't modified at all. what did i do wrong?

hello thingie. good ol' billybobblotout took care of it for ye. actually it was no big deal, merely a suggestion thrown your way. whoops! you wanted to add some clarifying text!!!? send it to me pm and i will insert it. (will send re-stocking fee later ... aw shucks, i'll make it a freebie:)) ( seems that self-editing has been shut off)

i've really enjoyed all these recent postings. heartwarming, actually. glad you took the important parts with you when you slipped away from the questionable doctrines; my experience likewise.

i think it is true that the whole of the christian message can be summed up simply by these few words: love your neighbor as yourself and the "one creator" with all your heart and being!

one figure whose background traces back to the richness of eastern orthodoxy was/is the magnificent spiritual teacher, omraam michael aivanhov (of course it figures that he was excommunicated -- along with his teacher, peter d. )

i look forward to his daily meditations every morning. they are freely offered and still seem inexhaustible even after three years.

about david hawkins: power vs force is his first work, and seemingly it is his most universally admired ... his later works offered results that turned off many of his former admirers ... i know that i was taken aback by the high rating given g w bush. hawkin's stunning results with kinesiology have not been universally repeatable among out-of-house users. (see reader's critiques and comments on amazon)

for those many who inquire here on dc about the work, urantia, hawkins' does give it a surprisingly dismal bad rating, like, 185! (received as an answer to a private communication) this interesting guidepost to the cosmos -- a production of entities from earth's astral -- was, according to the ra, for some unstated reason not passed by the spiritual council, but i don't think it deserving of such a miserable hawkins' thumb's down condemnation.

but then i'm probably missing somethng. :p

best, etc. bbb:)

[onething]

dear billy,

oh, don't bother adding my text, it's fine withdrawing it. i think i said something to the effect that it was a poor translation and indicates that heaven is gained by those who put forth sustained effort.

in my own case, that doesn't even seem to be true. i've got a special deal, where i get to enjoy every bit of the journey...

alright, i guess i have put forth sustained effort, like all my life really, but it never included too much angst or impatience, just a constant request for greater understanding. it's a very gentle path.



i think it is true that the whole of the christian message can be summed up simply by these few words: love your neighbor as yourself and the "one creator" with all your heart and being!

probly true enough but the problem is how to achieve it. being told about an unlovable god doesn't quite light the heart on fire. why waste your time loving the hell-bound? why indeed learn to love your fellow man only to go to heaven and manage to have no further compassion for them in hell?

this is what i meant by contradictory teachings instilling paralysis. but the people don't quite figure out what's wrong or why they don't learn love.

you gotta have the tools. that's why i gave hume one of the best. once you understand that god is light and has no darkness, it becomes easy. you just know that god is never anger, never punishing, because these things are darkness and not light.

in my opinion, the mission of jesus was to teach people about the true nature of god, so that they would fall in love, and to ignite their spiritual faculty, which he called being born of the spirit.

i believe it was only hawkins latest work, which i read the reviews and never bought because he endorsed conservative politics. i find that really strange and don't know what to make of it. but the two books i read never mention such things, and in fact repeatedly warn against "positionalities."

i may be wrong, but i have the impression that [name of book] is a book i need to read and will have a lot of good information about how to understand the difference between good and evil, and the use of force versus true power.

but the two books i read are beyond all that and are the most uplifting and detailed spiritual maps i've ever seen anywhere.

as to his[method], it's funny but i just never bought it. there may be something to it, but i have not really tried it. don't really trust it.

as for the urantia book, i agree it seems much higher than 185. i have a dear friend who adores this book. i gave it my best shot, but i can't stand the book. [note from moderator: this book is mentioned as a highly distorted book in the law of one books]. it's tedious and i am not sure it was written by the kind of entities it says it was. frankly, there is the possibility that a whole lot of what the urantia book says is simply untrue. it isn't negative, and presents a pretty nice picture of the universe and some good spiritual truths, at least so far as my friend seems to understand it. but if it is a fabrication, then it really can't go over 200, can it?

another urantia lover i met online said it was "channeled" by an unwilling person! and for this reason he denied that it was channeled! he actually proudly defended against this accusation i made that it was channeled by explaining how this man was horrified by what was coming through him over the course of some 11 years. because the recipient was unwilling, he thought that means it isn't channeled. they couldn't find someone willing???

there are some mistakes in it. but it seemed to me that it was an effort perhaps to improve christianity. it is a far more positive thing than the bible, but then that's not hard. i actually think jehovah of the ot may have been a demonic entity. if urantia is 185 then the ot is about 30.

i don't mean more positive than all of the new testament. the new testament contains too much negativity, but if you know how to ignore that, it can be very powerful. i didn't find the urantia book powerful, but some people do.

another thing i liked about hawkins is his dislike of the book of revelations.

[lightblue]

" i believe it was only hawkins latest work, which i read the reviews and never bought because he endorsed conservative politics. i find that really strange and don't know what to make of it. but the two books i read never mention such things, and in fact repeatedly warn against "positionalities."

i may be wrong, but i have the impression that [name of book] is a book i need to read and will have a lot of good information about how to understand the difference between good and evil, and the use of force versus true power.."

onething,

why do you think don't think it matters who's coservative, democrat or green... i haven't read the book/s you don't name, but i gather that the author made his work significant - which is what makes his profile that counts...not that he may disappoint for his political positioning..and even if he failed for that reason, he did so because he is fallable, nothing new under the sun..g l borges was a comitted fascist, ezra pound eugenecist, picasso kept up his membership payments to the communist party till his last breath..it's like reading the ot - though is packed full of mish-mash material, if you do employ creative reading and know what to disregard, you get a lot of valuable information. closed systems never work anyway..this happens to be true of all the major faith systems too. i think that every material is there to inspire and be surpassed, so we can move on. that what inspired us most is what served us best.

re god and evil - maybe try and think of it as of two different mentalities and not two different entities..you'll see that what follows is interesting.

re "love thy neighbour..." in my view the problem is that we don't love ourselves quite enough and that we actually consistently deliver..


off to sleep

"angels fly cos they take themselves lightly"

[onething]

lightblue,


why do you think don't think it matters who's conservative, democrat or green... i haven't read the book/s you don't name, but i gather that the author made his work significant

well, supporting bush's policies is pretty far out for me. i mean, bush was just the front person for his group, but it is/was a bad group. they lied and fomented war based on a lie, and thereupon killed a lot of people. i also believe they orchestrated 9-11 in order to do it. so that would be a pretty wrong call to not see this as a bad group.

being conservative isn't the problem.

one gets the impression from his books that he is very enlightened and he tells his history, although never uses first person.

i don't know if he fell or got old or what, but i guess he wrote 3 superlative books.
i did name the books!

[lightblue]

was really tired last night..

where i put:
why do you think don't think it matters who's coservative, democrat or green
..
should read: why do you think it mattters..

wher i put ot, i ment nt..

ot is far to scary and far fetched in almost every sense..

regards

[Deerclan]

your viewpoint is challenging and comes across that if you were given the true answers, you would not believe them anyway.

matt, my perception matches yours.
- deerclan

[Deerclan]

there was a human being, a man, sitting alone in a small cement cell, utterly dejected. i understood that he was a criminal and not innocent. so the person said, "i am going to show you his soul."
and then i could see his soul. i no longer remember how it looked, but it looked so beautiful, and it was beautiful in a way that nothing within our usual sense perception is. it surpassed all earthly beauty.
then i understood.

onething,
speaking as a former correctional social worker, i really appreciate what you have shared here. there are in fact some mentally twisted and emotionally destructive individuals behind bars, and there are also some shining souls that leave me wondering what they're doing in there.

that was a fascinating and powerful dream, btw. fwiw, jungian analysts call the figures you described, the priest and the nun, "wise elders" that represent that inner part of ourselves that knows the answer. i think it's particularly neat that you were able to connect with them in a dream, especially in both male and female form. that suggests to me that you have a strong inner balance. nice work, and thanks for sharing.

- deerclan

[onething]

thanks deerclan,

the bishop and the nun were real though, the dream came later. but anyway, the dream showed that all human souls have this beauty, even the twisted and destructive ones. i surmise this is the reason that the angel who took me to see him chose him, so as to make that point.

[Deerclan]

the bishop and the nun were real though, the dream came later.

well then, no wonder they were so doggone vivid. ;)



but anyway, the dream showed that all human souls have this beauty, even the twisted and destructive ones. i surmise this is the reason that the angel who took me to see him chose him, so as to make that point.

i figured that's what you meant. i will not try to claim that i am able to see beauty in all souls, although i can see beauty in a great many of those souls labeled by society as misfits. either way, it is an excellent message well worth saying, and i thought you delivered it in a powerful way. well done.

[frenzy]

i am a christian, and some people with metaphysical interests frown on that. however, there are christians who are so different than the mainstream fundies...this is what people don't understand.

i believe in reincarnation, i don't believe the bible is inerrant, and don't believe in a physical, fiery, eternal hell. quite possibly, if there is a life review, the "hell" is having to look at what you actually did during your lifetime, and the regret you will feel at some of the things you did to hurt others.

while david denies it, everything he says and believes says christian to me. i can see why it would be something that is hard to pubically proclaim considering who david is.

of course, this is my opinion. i'm am sure i will hear from a chorus of voices telling me it isn't so.

love and light to all.

[billybobbutterball]

i am a christian, and some people with metaphysical interests frown on that. however, there are christians who are so different than the mainstream fundies...this is what people don't understand.

i believe in reincarnation, i don't believe the bible is inerrant, and don't believe in a physical, fiery, eternal hell. quite possibly, if there is a life review, the "hell" is having to look at what you actually did during your lifetime, and the regret you will feel at some of the things you did to hurt others.

while david denies it, everything he says and believes says christian to me. i can see why it would be something that is hard to publicly proclaim considering who david is.

of course, this is my opinion. i'm am sure i will hear from a chorus of voices telling me it isn't so.

love and light to all.

hi, juli

of course you can describe yourself however you think appropriate.

carla rueckert, the channel for the ra material ( the "philosophy of religion" that is an ideological cornerstone for this site ) considers herself a mystical christian....carla has stated something to the effect that her faith is supernaturally indifferent to any arguments otherwise. period. to her it boils down to this: whatever the evidence for or against his existence is of no importance whatsoever to her conviction. interestingly enough carla had channeled answers concerning jesus...seems he was an entity in the upper 4th density and was called to earth on a mission. since he was of 4th density (love/service) without the moderating wisdom of the 5th, he was considered predisposed to martyrdom. at the time of the ra channeling he was then/now studying in the 5th.

i can't honestly identify myself as a 'christian' because for me the term carries too much extra baggage; to pretend otherwise would be misleading to those for whom that term has particular and stringent connotations. some years ago i read that the estimated number of discrete 'christian' denominations figured well into the 20 thousands...!!! if you know anything about doctrinal disputes you can figure that most considered the others counterfeit christian heretics.

it sometimes seems that orthodox christianity is more concerned with spinning complex theological doctrines than keeping their eyes on living jesus...rather they give him mere lip service. i joined the church late in life and was particularly drawn to basic theology. after some 15 years questions came up that i couldn't answer, i started to read afield and managed to study myself out of the church. i was going to simply fade out. of course i got shunned by some, and cursed by others...when the suggestion was made that my elevator didn't go to the top floor i got pissed and really started to research with vengeance. that took place about 15 years ago. oddly in my youth i was a student of edgar cayce, so it seems i end up coming full circle.:)

to make things clear, i hate the outrageous political attacks on christianity. most unfair!
i also believe that the churches are viable reservoirs of powerful prayer. i subscribe to the wonderful little guidepost magazine and love all its wonderful stories, many loaded with obvious psychic accounts that would fit well right here on dc.


well, juli, by your not holding the bible (or certain traditions) inerrant, nor accepting the doctrine of everlasting damnation in "hell' -- but on the other hand by adopting the heretical concept of reincarnation! you are pushing the envelope...back 500 years ago you would be summarily burned at the stake...even modernized liberal churches still have doctrines that you would chaff against once you recognized them.

personally i would be dumbstruck if david declared himself a 'christian' in the formal sense of the term.

there have been discussions concerning the jesus question that you can find in the archives. however, i think it a waste of time... just take a lead from dear carla by simply calling yourself "a devoted follower of jesus". :) who can fault that?...well, yeah... better keep quite and just make a descrete sign of the fish....

saw your website. very nice! great tribute to a wonderful young girl!!

best! bill g aka bbbba

[onething]

it is with some horror that i am reading this revived thread, in which i told of my dream 25 years ago in which my spirit guide came to answer a perplexing spiritual question for me, that of how god can love all beings equally. and of the guilty criminal whose soul i saw the beauty of...and where i wrote this:


i think i said something to the effect that it was a poor translation and indicates that heaven is gained by those who put forth sustained effort.

in my own case, that doesn't even seem to be true. i've got a special deal, where i get to enjoy every bit of the journey...

alright, i guess i have put forth sustained effort, like all my life really, but it never included too much angst or impatience, just a constant request for greater understanding. it's a very gentle path.

and this was written only hours before my beloved son was beaten to death by criminals in the course of robbing him. of course i have not forgotten that dream and it sustains me.

it is probable that they have dug themselves into a deep karmic pit where they will not soon extricate themselves, but i do know that their souls are beautiful and of equal worth. even though the thought of them does make me a bit sick, at least i am free of extreme anger and desire for revenge.

frenzy your belief system encourages me because i often wonder if christianity could sustain an upgrade in beliefs such as you hold. how do you manage it?

i too dwell in some strange limbo world regarding christianity. i don't know if jesus ever lived and don't know if i believe carla's channelings about his life, but i love very much what i take from his teachings, which is a very uplifting vision of a perfectly good god and our calling to be perfect as our father in heaven is perfect through unconditional love.

i am not sure how to find your daughter's pictures, i'll try.