This is an excellent post, very important one too. I appreciate your approach to addressing Religion. In fact, in a major way, it's helpful to show the distinction between what a Religion is and does as opposed to the inner experience of "God," which is personal.
Religion is a centralization and specification of what God is, in order to make access to God an exclusive privilege to the few. It's effectively been a tool for establishing and maintaining Power Hierarchies, in the past. In order to provide rational for Religion, it was always necessary to diminish Spiritual Life to just what was possible through the Religion; anything else was heretical. By making everyone dependent on the church for access to God, the Elites gained power.
Once the Elites could control both God and Money, they could have control over the people and their country.
Money is an important social and economic component of control, I will be looking forward to studying in your book.
I'll be an open minded student, ------------ I promise. ;-)
Thank you, Nefahotep. You put that really well and it makes me think that instead of 'organized religions' we should be saying 'centralized religions.' A Course in Miracles is plenty well organized in its 1700 pp but it's not a centralized system of power. And yes, money, ideology and violence, the three systems of control. I don't think people are capable of doing horrible things without some rationale that justifies it, turns bad into good, up into down, and wrong into right.
So I wanna figure out how you always know when I mention or link you in a comment, whether it's on someone else's thread, an old episode of mine ... ? Do you really secretly work for NSA? The CIA? Spookahotep? I just cannot talk about you behind your back! So I will keep it up, and I have your last article mentioned in my next draft. I'd really like to quote the whole thing, as you did, but I'm hoping people will go to it. I can't stop thinking about how much it changes everything.
I've been receiving your posts on subscription emails. Initially, I really didn't know you would mention anything about me. But of course, I always appreciate it. Perhaps one of the more important tools you use is the video narration. I should consider doing something like that.
I would never work for the CIA or any of those three letter abominations. I'm sure that they don't really need anyone to help them with spying.
I have been wanting to post more on the Spiritual side of things, but this ww2 study I've been on is something that has to be done.
jk of course. It's been fun to see how many of the same people we read, so when I do plug your hair-on-fire recent article, you hit it up with a like.
I started with the videos on YT before I knew about SS. One of my first ones I posted on SS, on Michael Hudson and Ukraine, got something like 5000 reads but I'd hardly written anything because it was all in the video that barely anyone watched. So that was an important lesson that I was squandering my potential audience unless I wrote. That record's never come close again.
Hey, Ratio's ordered my book too! I'm practically famous!
Whoa! I was just heading to bed and reposting my comment from the first YouTube at the top of the page, and now wishing I was doing this in the morning so that I can take a more thoughtful dive down this rabbit hole. Will have to explore the entire post about 8 or 10 hours from now, Japan time. In the meanwhile, here is my original comment, appended with one more sentence ... though I thought of some other things to add to the dialogue later.
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Original comment:
Hi Tereza. Long time no chat. Still spending more time chasing the tail of the Lahaina massacre.
I also read and marked Kathleen's substack for further contemplation.
Reminded me of past readings of Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong ... as do you.
I like your definition of revelation as it matches my own ... what some have called transcendent or mystic experiences which informs the more secular / transactional majority of our time.
This is probably old news for you, so I am just yapping to myself here ... but I've found that defining terms is both important, and problematic. For example, the words 'god" or 'knowledge" are also among "all words (as) fossilized metaphors." — a very powerful insight I agree with. In that respect, we both seem to be aware of the god of Spinoza, Emerson, and Einstein ... 'spiritual naturalism' being one metaphor I have depended on in the past. I guess the reason I don't use that term so much now is because of that old Kierkegaardian paradox of the lonely traveler, after many years of searching, finally comes upon a sign of humanity ... a street sign pointing to "Truth ... 10 miles, thataway", who then embraces the street sign with the proclamation of having found the truth, and there the journey ends.
This creates the problem of how to expound or converse while fully aware that one's own discourse is ultimately limited by its own provisional literality. For example, your (our) definition of knowledge does not seem to be so different from Kathleen's definition of faith ... "The essence of faith is ultimately mysterious and individually accessed. There is nothing to criticize here. This is not where the problem of faith resides." Maybe 'faith' and 'knowledge' are two metaphors for the same experience?
Ha. Maybe this is the biggest reason I so admire the call and response of improvisational musicians. I remember a famous anecdote where during a performance, Herbie Hancock hit what he just knew was a clunker ... and Miles just listened, and responded with something that made it 'right'. Whoa. The zen of jazz.
Cheers Tereza ... back to my raking through the ashes of Lahaina, hoping to make a house, "Body and Soul" 🤣
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OFMkCeP6ok ... oh wow, Amy sounds like such a good cross between Betty Carter and Billie Holiday ... a good metaphor for a collaboration between you and Kathleen.
steve
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Addendum: What I meant by referring to the god of Spinoza, Emerson, and Einstein is "god" as a metaphor for nature-in-its-entirety. I REALLY identify with your position regarding "all words (as) fossilized metaphors" ... both from a studied limits-of-logic position (Wittgenstein's Ladder, Sapir-Worf Hypothesis, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Emergence/Fractal theory, traditional writings about 'mystic' traditions, etc.) ... and rare, but informative, personal experience. Won't go into those personal experiences for now, but to be so few, they dovetail well with a triangulation of my readings, and form the foundation for my values and most of my 'big choice' conscious behavior.
One reason I have avoided laying out my definitions of "god" or "love" literally, is because so many of us are busy, struggling against the sociopaths running this circus. If words, (language) are ultimately frozen metaphor, trying to pin down my definitions by breathing life back into language becomes a zero-sum game. While we of good faith are trying to get our words in sync with our hearts, and then in sync with the hearts of each other ... the sociopaths, unhindered by empathy, shame, or remorse ... have burned down another Lahaina, rolled out another war, boiled up another vat of snake-oil. Those of good faith, though separated by circumstance of language and culture, are further separated by sociopathic divide-and-conquer strategies, and will always be caught in a rear-guard action, a day late and a dollar short in trying to second guess what the parasitic predators have long since been planning.
As limited and potentially dangerous as Facebook is, I am in several groups that have at least some individuals desperately trying to point out the world-wide sociopathy and spread Platonic ideals. But those who have matured, have done so within the potential and the constraints of their culture ... and many haven't found or needed the capacity to transcend their immediate social context ... or see the world in a grain of sand. Many are better able to fight the good fight from within the shield and comfort of their traditions, their frozen metaphors. I am often humbled and in awe at the specialist, technical skills a comfortable social context has allowed some to see through the sometimes sophisticated lies foisted upon us. Most of the time, rather than ask for a "time out" from the battle so that we can unpack the definitions of our fundamental values, I try to read between the lines, sift through frozen metaphors (mine and theirs) for the shields and spears that I can pass to others.
I am guessing we are able to discuss such things this far because we share so much in common.
Our language is so in sync. But I sometimes imagine a path not chosen on how to use my remaining time, capabilities, and resources ... burying myself in a mountain of metaphor, the fine arts, and whittle it all down to a grain of sand in an attempt to sway the battle at the subconscious level. Alas, in this era of algorithms churning big data into daily news feeds, even if I managed to finally carve out my grain of sand, I wonder how many ... or more importantly 'who', would see the world in it?
If. Ha. The biggest word in the English language. If it weren't way past my bedtime, I would drone on and on, and probably without realizing that you've already covered most of this ground in what I have yet to read. 😂
Will dig into your post after the morning's coffee, but it might take a while to respond. Got a doctor's appointment tomorrow, followed by a family English class.
Hi Tereza, I like your ocean experience, how cool is that one! I want to try something like that. I have been thinking about the story of Babel lately. I don't believe God would confuse people on purpose. I think if people wanted to achieve great things and work together he would be thrilled. Religions are flimsy. I like not having a religion. That is freedom to me. I can love everybody now. I see things sooooo differently. Thks for sharing your dogma of equality with me.
Thank you Helene! That's funny, I had just been writing in some comment about the Tower of Babel story. I hadn't noticed before that it comes just after God through Noah bequeaths the Shemites, sons of Shem, rule over the whole world with the Canaanites and descendants of Ham (Africa, Egypt, parts of Asia) to be their slaves. And it's before the lineage of the next nine generations that passes the inheritance from Shem to Abram.
Central to the entitlement to the whole world is that it was all populated from Noah's family, right? So if everyone came from the same family, howcum they didn't speak the same language? It's a problem that had to be solved.
So that's why the Tower of Babel was invented. It had to bridge Noah as giving Abram the blessing to inherit the world, and then Isaac (cutting out Ishmael and all future Arabs) and then Jacob/ Israel. The existence of a multiplicity of languages gives the lie to that right, a right that's central to what's happening today, not just in Israel. Whoever's doing this believes that the world belongs to them.
And I agree with you that any sensible God wants to be known and wants us to cooperate and communicate and achieve as much as we can!
Hi Tereza! Loved this post (not just because of the shout-out) and love this kind of sorting out.
Yes, words really matter.
Mostly I think we agree.
My experiences with what I can't explain I have sometimes categorized as simply mysterious and expansive, (as in, despite appearances the world ain't what you think) and sometimes those experiences come with a quality of the divine - which doesn't translate to a defined understanding of God or Source, it's more like a heart-felt, persuasive connection to something beyond my usual experience that has a quality of benevolence and intelligence. Particularly the case when it's in response to an inner question. I don't have a definition for Source outside of my current intuition of its existence - so there is a feed-back loop aspect to this - which is why I say faith as I understand it, changes as we change and it, as an experience, changes us.
Intuition may in part be accessing something in one's personal biofield that is available knowledge but has not gone through our mental reasoning. So we say we know something intuitively. It could also be when you have had experiences you don't know where to put - in a rational way - but they nonetheless inform what you know.
For me intuition is visceral and sudden; its in the body and persuasive - and often shows up prior to having a rational explanation for it. (I used to say that for 2020 and most of 2021 my hair was on fire. It was a highly uncomfortable, embodied sense of ongoing alarm though the language I had to explain the threat was fully insufficient. Now obviously, there is plenty of rational knowns I can point to, that underpin that sense of alarm.)
Still my intuition was something I placed faith in. I trusted it even when I couldn't prove it. And that's another quality that my understanding of the faithful possess. An inner compass that will guide even when it's not clear what's up. Faith then is highly personal and individuated, can become rigid and limiting, yes, but doesn't need to.
RE "I define faith as making up your mind in advance of experience, facts or logic. Believing is a block to knowledge because it doesn’t allow for conflicting possibilities. Dogma is what you refuse to raise to question."
So, obviously I don't define faith in this way. It's not belief-based though beliefs can be faith-based. And as faith deepens, it may require letting go of those temporary beliefs to allow in greater understanding. My faith has been fluid through my life, and I expect that will stay that way.
There is a steadiness to it, and deepening conviction about its reality even if defining it gets harder and harder.
Best image for me is of a flame that doesn't ever go out and gets brighter when you tend to it. Includes qualities of deep calm and openness. And yes of connection. Surely, mystery.
That is gorgeous, Kathleen. If I'd written this post only to elicit that response from you, it would have been a sufficient purpose. Yes, there are no words to really capture what we're talking about. What words there are have been turned to another agenda.
I remember in 2020 feeling like the ground had been swept out from under me. Part of me was excited because changes I never thought I'd see in my lifetime were clearly in motion. Not as something good, of course, but something that was breaking the stasis. And the other part of me was on the edge of panic because everything was falling apart so fast.
In the Course, I've started (again) the Teacher's Manual and the quality it described yesterday was faithfulness. For it, that means faith in other people and not judging. Today's is open-mindedness, combining that trust and forgiveness, withholding judgment and letting the voice for God speak for each person's innocence.
I love your image of the flame that gets brighter when tended! Appreciate you back!
"For it, that means faith in other people and not judging. Today's is open-mindedness, combining that trust and forgiveness, withholding judgment and letting the voice for God speak for each person's innocence." Lovely.♥️
I think part of the reason for the confusion about faith and religion is that religious institutions are really political institutions masquerading as religious institutions, and the religions they offer are the control mechanisms of politics. I would say that faith has little, if anything, to do with institutional religions and their many deceptions. Our relationships with each other are undoubtedly equal rather than hierarchical, which in my opinion makes religious institutions incompatible with, and unnecessary for, faith. Faith has for too long been hijacked by fraudulent religions.
I'm still halfway through this article and watched your insightful video. I just want to say, the concept of faith being internal and religion being an expression of faith has been milling about in my mindspace for the last couple days. I appreciate you sharing your ideas and those of your frens!
That's more Kathleen than me but it's just a difference of definition (right up your alley!)
Now that I moved my bookshelves, my dictionary of etymology comes right to hand. And practically opened to faith: 1250 feith = loyalty, fealty, allegiance. From Latin fides = trust, belief. Cognate with Greek peithesthai = be persuaded, obey. Albanian be = oath. Old Slavic beda = need, compel. Old High German beiten = urge, demand. Old English require, solicit.
Interesting on religion from Latin religionem = respect for what is sacred, with the original meaning of care. Cicero derived the Latin as meaning go through, read again, re = again + legere = read. So maybe I've created a religion in that you needed to read it again! ;-)
I love it! So you're saying I religioned? Omg, religion made into a verb. Impressive word-fu. I'm actually a little surprised I don't have a dictionary on etymology, not that I need anymore books.
The progression from faith to beda is very free will and gradually descends into coercion. Much like the covid madness and the jabs.
Oooh yes, let's make religion into a verb! Word-fu, so funny. I'd been known to haul that 5-lb book with me on road trips, pre-everything net. But Corbett has lately been talking about 'why real media' and I think he has a point. I wouldn't put it past 'them' to change etymology too.
I don't know if I'd read the feudal era pre-1250 definition as benign. In my book, I quote the oath of fealty owed to the Lord, and that Lord ain't some pie-ty in the sky. The successive definitions become a little more abstract but we make an enormous leap in reading the Bible to substitute an ethereal being for the tyrant to whom your fieflord reported.
Fair points. I agree that real media is important( if that was the point being made) for many reasons. In the Koran, djinn are evil entities that are able to effect and change things in the past. Which is why muslims are taught to memorize everything in case the djinn go back and change the written word(reminds me of the Mandela effect).
Please take this as the compliment its intended to be (in my head it sounds like it could be interpreted either way.) This information is dense!
It only took me 2 times reading through, on 2 separate days to get it to sink in.
The relationship between I and Other is a concept that has kept my mind busy for the last few years. One of the theories I like around this concept is,
We are all connected in some fashion (the most extreme version being we are all aspects of Source running around so Source can experience limitation and learn about itself.) This fits nicely with the Hui Neng quote.
You're not the first to tell me I'm dense! I started out as a poet so being parsimonious with my words is second nature.
I'm entertaining that extreme, which all the mystics come to. I'd say Oneness. But there are lots more episodes where I talk about this. This one starts out on the spiritual and ends up with fascism, but a different take on it from Rat: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/forgiveness-is-the-shortcut.
I was hoping to tempt you with that little morsel. And have I yet thrown out 'deracinate'? I tease Russell Brand (in absentia) by tracing the arc of when he learned the word, then uses it three times later in different episodes. His third-grade teacher would be so proud. 'Use it 3X and it's yours!'
I was the kind of kid who posted the Reader's Digest word list on the fridge and told my piano teacher a tune had lots of 'cacophony', pronouncing it like a fake cat. And antediluvian--that was tricky to work into a sentence in primary school. What a pretentious little brat I was! I'm much younger now.
Dec 13, 2023·edited Dec 13, 2023Liked by Tereza Coraggio
Deracinate is new to me, and definition 2 feels like what the universe is trying to do to me for a while now. " To displace from one's native or accustomed environment".
We as a people could benefit from deracinating most of the people in positions of perceived authority from our lives and plant ourselves in those positions, but only for ourselves, if that makes sense.
I went to a christian school at the primary level, so antediluvian could have been used easily when studying the first few books of the bible. Outside of that environment or subject though, not so easy. I bet you received many a frustrated sigh from adults that couldn't handle your intelligence. Thanks for sharing, I hope the smile that you helped me to grow today pollinates many other smiles to bloom.
As another morsel, the opposite of deracinate is radical. To deracinate is to cut off from the root. Radical is to go to the root. Where Russell used deracinate (or maybe me, I get us confused) was looking at how slavery does that, but also college and careers. We're all expected to pull ourselves up by the roots and relocate, again and again. So we're all deracinated, making us easier to enslave.
Hi Adam. I'll be interested in your reply to the one I just posted, that might address this. The first question is are you superior? If the answer is yes, the God that you believe in is a projection of your own ego. Essentially, you've made yourself God, whether you call yourself God or natural law, as Darwin did, who certainly believed in his own superiority. That's where moral relativism comes in. Those who've killed 10,000 children and counting totally believe in God, according to their definition of him. Wouldn't you agree?
This is an excellent post, very important one too. I appreciate your approach to addressing Religion. In fact, in a major way, it's helpful to show the distinction between what a Religion is and does as opposed to the inner experience of "God," which is personal.
Religion is a centralization and specification of what God is, in order to make access to God an exclusive privilege to the few. It's effectively been a tool for establishing and maintaining Power Hierarchies, in the past. In order to provide rational for Religion, it was always necessary to diminish Spiritual Life to just what was possible through the Religion; anything else was heretical. By making everyone dependent on the church for access to God, the Elites gained power.
Once the Elites could control both God and Money, they could have control over the people and their country.
Money is an important social and economic component of control, I will be looking forward to studying in your book.
I'll be an open minded student, ------------ I promise. ;-)
Thank you, Nefahotep. You put that really well and it makes me think that instead of 'organized religions' we should be saying 'centralized religions.' A Course in Miracles is plenty well organized in its 1700 pp but it's not a centralized system of power. And yes, money, ideology and violence, the three systems of control. I don't think people are capable of doing horrible things without some rationale that justifies it, turns bad into good, up into down, and wrong into right.
So I wanna figure out how you always know when I mention or link you in a comment, whether it's on someone else's thread, an old episode of mine ... ? Do you really secretly work for NSA? The CIA? Spookahotep? I just cannot talk about you behind your back! So I will keep it up, and I have your last article mentioned in my next draft. I'd really like to quote the whole thing, as you did, but I'm hoping people will go to it. I can't stop thinking about how much it changes everything.
I've been receiving your posts on subscription emails. Initially, I really didn't know you would mention anything about me. But of course, I always appreciate it. Perhaps one of the more important tools you use is the video narration. I should consider doing something like that.
I would never work for the CIA or any of those three letter abominations. I'm sure that they don't really need anyone to help them with spying.
I have been wanting to post more on the Spiritual side of things, but this ww2 study I've been on is something that has to be done.
jk of course. It's been fun to see how many of the same people we read, so when I do plug your hair-on-fire recent article, you hit it up with a like.
I started with the videos on YT before I knew about SS. One of my first ones I posted on SS, on Michael Hudson and Ukraine, got something like 5000 reads but I'd hardly written anything because it was all in the video that barely anyone watched. So that was an important lesson that I was squandering my potential audience unless I wrote. That record's never come close again.
Hey, Ratio's ordered my book too! I'm practically famous!
Whoa! I was just heading to bed and reposting my comment from the first YouTube at the top of the page, and now wishing I was doing this in the morning so that I can take a more thoughtful dive down this rabbit hole. Will have to explore the entire post about 8 or 10 hours from now, Japan time. In the meanwhile, here is my original comment, appended with one more sentence ... though I thought of some other things to add to the dialogue later.
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Original comment:
Hi Tereza. Long time no chat. Still spending more time chasing the tail of the Lahaina massacre.
I also read and marked Kathleen's substack for further contemplation.
Reminded me of past readings of Joseph Campbell and Karen Armstrong ... as do you.
I like your definition of revelation as it matches my own ... what some have called transcendent or mystic experiences which informs the more secular / transactional majority of our time.
This is probably old news for you, so I am just yapping to myself here ... but I've found that defining terms is both important, and problematic. For example, the words 'god" or 'knowledge" are also among "all words (as) fossilized metaphors." — a very powerful insight I agree with. In that respect, we both seem to be aware of the god of Spinoza, Emerson, and Einstein ... 'spiritual naturalism' being one metaphor I have depended on in the past. I guess the reason I don't use that term so much now is because of that old Kierkegaardian paradox of the lonely traveler, after many years of searching, finally comes upon a sign of humanity ... a street sign pointing to "Truth ... 10 miles, thataway", who then embraces the street sign with the proclamation of having found the truth, and there the journey ends.
This creates the problem of how to expound or converse while fully aware that one's own discourse is ultimately limited by its own provisional literality. For example, your (our) definition of knowledge does not seem to be so different from Kathleen's definition of faith ... "The essence of faith is ultimately mysterious and individually accessed. There is nothing to criticize here. This is not where the problem of faith resides." Maybe 'faith' and 'knowledge' are two metaphors for the same experience?
Ha. Maybe this is the biggest reason I so admire the call and response of improvisational musicians. I remember a famous anecdote where during a performance, Herbie Hancock hit what he just knew was a clunker ... and Miles just listened, and responded with something that made it 'right'. Whoa. The zen of jazz.
Cheers Tereza ... back to my raking through the ashes of Lahaina, hoping to make a house, "Body and Soul" 🤣
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OFMkCeP6ok ... oh wow, Amy sounds like such a good cross between Betty Carter and Billie Holiday ... a good metaphor for a collaboration between you and Kathleen.
steve
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Addendum: What I meant by referring to the god of Spinoza, Emerson, and Einstein is "god" as a metaphor for nature-in-its-entirety. I REALLY identify with your position regarding "all words (as) fossilized metaphors" ... both from a studied limits-of-logic position (Wittgenstein's Ladder, Sapir-Worf Hypothesis, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Emergence/Fractal theory, traditional writings about 'mystic' traditions, etc.) ... and rare, but informative, personal experience. Won't go into those personal experiences for now, but to be so few, they dovetail well with a triangulation of my readings, and form the foundation for my values and most of my 'big choice' conscious behavior.
One reason I have avoided laying out my definitions of "god" or "love" literally, is because so many of us are busy, struggling against the sociopaths running this circus. If words, (language) are ultimately frozen metaphor, trying to pin down my definitions by breathing life back into language becomes a zero-sum game. While we of good faith are trying to get our words in sync with our hearts, and then in sync with the hearts of each other ... the sociopaths, unhindered by empathy, shame, or remorse ... have burned down another Lahaina, rolled out another war, boiled up another vat of snake-oil. Those of good faith, though separated by circumstance of language and culture, are further separated by sociopathic divide-and-conquer strategies, and will always be caught in a rear-guard action, a day late and a dollar short in trying to second guess what the parasitic predators have long since been planning.
As limited and potentially dangerous as Facebook is, I am in several groups that have at least some individuals desperately trying to point out the world-wide sociopathy and spread Platonic ideals. But those who have matured, have done so within the potential and the constraints of their culture ... and many haven't found or needed the capacity to transcend their immediate social context ... or see the world in a grain of sand. Many are better able to fight the good fight from within the shield and comfort of their traditions, their frozen metaphors. I am often humbled and in awe at the specialist, technical skills a comfortable social context has allowed some to see through the sometimes sophisticated lies foisted upon us. Most of the time, rather than ask for a "time out" from the battle so that we can unpack the definitions of our fundamental values, I try to read between the lines, sift through frozen metaphors (mine and theirs) for the shields and spears that I can pass to others.
I am guessing we are able to discuss such things this far because we share so much in common.
Our language is so in sync. But I sometimes imagine a path not chosen on how to use my remaining time, capabilities, and resources ... burying myself in a mountain of metaphor, the fine arts, and whittle it all down to a grain of sand in an attempt to sway the battle at the subconscious level. Alas, in this era of algorithms churning big data into daily news feeds, even if I managed to finally carve out my grain of sand, I wonder how many ... or more importantly 'who', would see the world in it?
If. Ha. The biggest word in the English language. If it weren't way past my bedtime, I would drone on and on, and probably without realizing that you've already covered most of this ground in what I have yet to read. 😂
Will dig into your post after the morning's coffee, but it might take a while to respond. Got a doctor's appointment tomorrow, followed by a family English class.
G'night from Japan Tereza.
Hi Tereza, I like your ocean experience, how cool is that one! I want to try something like that. I have been thinking about the story of Babel lately. I don't believe God would confuse people on purpose. I think if people wanted to achieve great things and work together he would be thrilled. Religions are flimsy. I like not having a religion. That is freedom to me. I can love everybody now. I see things sooooo differently. Thks for sharing your dogma of equality with me.
Thank you Helene! That's funny, I had just been writing in some comment about the Tower of Babel story. I hadn't noticed before that it comes just after God through Noah bequeaths the Shemites, sons of Shem, rule over the whole world with the Canaanites and descendants of Ham (Africa, Egypt, parts of Asia) to be their slaves. And it's before the lineage of the next nine generations that passes the inheritance from Shem to Abram.
Central to the entitlement to the whole world is that it was all populated from Noah's family, right? So if everyone came from the same family, howcum they didn't speak the same language? It's a problem that had to be solved.
So that's why the Tower of Babel was invented. It had to bridge Noah as giving Abram the blessing to inherit the world, and then Isaac (cutting out Ishmael and all future Arabs) and then Jacob/ Israel. The existence of a multiplicity of languages gives the lie to that right, a right that's central to what's happening today, not just in Israel. Whoever's doing this believes that the world belongs to them.
And I agree with you that any sensible God wants to be known and wants us to cooperate and communicate and achieve as much as we can!
You're right. It does not make sense that God would do that. Perhaps it was not God? Perhaps it was a false god, someone masquerading as "God"?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124972434-gods-of-the-bible
Hi Tereza! Loved this post (not just because of the shout-out) and love this kind of sorting out.
Yes, words really matter.
Mostly I think we agree.
My experiences with what I can't explain I have sometimes categorized as simply mysterious and expansive, (as in, despite appearances the world ain't what you think) and sometimes those experiences come with a quality of the divine - which doesn't translate to a defined understanding of God or Source, it's more like a heart-felt, persuasive connection to something beyond my usual experience that has a quality of benevolence and intelligence. Particularly the case when it's in response to an inner question. I don't have a definition for Source outside of my current intuition of its existence - so there is a feed-back loop aspect to this - which is why I say faith as I understand it, changes as we change and it, as an experience, changes us.
Intuition may in part be accessing something in one's personal biofield that is available knowledge but has not gone through our mental reasoning. So we say we know something intuitively. It could also be when you have had experiences you don't know where to put - in a rational way - but they nonetheless inform what you know.
For me intuition is visceral and sudden; its in the body and persuasive - and often shows up prior to having a rational explanation for it. (I used to say that for 2020 and most of 2021 my hair was on fire. It was a highly uncomfortable, embodied sense of ongoing alarm though the language I had to explain the threat was fully insufficient. Now obviously, there is plenty of rational knowns I can point to, that underpin that sense of alarm.)
Still my intuition was something I placed faith in. I trusted it even when I couldn't prove it. And that's another quality that my understanding of the faithful possess. An inner compass that will guide even when it's not clear what's up. Faith then is highly personal and individuated, can become rigid and limiting, yes, but doesn't need to.
RE "I define faith as making up your mind in advance of experience, facts or logic. Believing is a block to knowledge because it doesn’t allow for conflicting possibilities. Dogma is what you refuse to raise to question."
So, obviously I don't define faith in this way. It's not belief-based though beliefs can be faith-based. And as faith deepens, it may require letting go of those temporary beliefs to allow in greater understanding. My faith has been fluid through my life, and I expect that will stay that way.
There is a steadiness to it, and deepening conviction about its reality even if defining it gets harder and harder.
Best image for me is of a flame that doesn't ever go out and gets brighter when you tend to it. Includes qualities of deep calm and openness. And yes of connection. Surely, mystery.
So appreciate you, Tereza.
That is gorgeous, Kathleen. If I'd written this post only to elicit that response from you, it would have been a sufficient purpose. Yes, there are no words to really capture what we're talking about. What words there are have been turned to another agenda.
I remember in 2020 feeling like the ground had been swept out from under me. Part of me was excited because changes I never thought I'd see in my lifetime were clearly in motion. Not as something good, of course, but something that was breaking the stasis. And the other part of me was on the edge of panic because everything was falling apart so fast.
In the Course, I've started (again) the Teacher's Manual and the quality it described yesterday was faithfulness. For it, that means faith in other people and not judging. Today's is open-mindedness, combining that trust and forgiveness, withholding judgment and letting the voice for God speak for each person's innocence.
I love your image of the flame that gets brighter when tended! Appreciate you back!
"For it, that means faith in other people and not judging. Today's is open-mindedness, combining that trust and forgiveness, withholding judgment and letting the voice for God speak for each person's innocence." Lovely.♥️
I think part of the reason for the confusion about faith and religion is that religious institutions are really political institutions masquerading as religious institutions, and the religions they offer are the control mechanisms of politics. I would say that faith has little, if anything, to do with institutional religions and their many deceptions. Our relationships with each other are undoubtedly equal rather than hierarchical, which in my opinion makes religious institutions incompatible with, and unnecessary for, faith. Faith has for too long been hijacked by fraudulent religions.
I'm still halfway through this article and watched your insightful video. I just want to say, the concept of faith being internal and religion being an expression of faith has been milling about in my mindspace for the last couple days. I appreciate you sharing your ideas and those of your frens!
That's more Kathleen than me but it's just a difference of definition (right up your alley!)
Now that I moved my bookshelves, my dictionary of etymology comes right to hand. And practically opened to faith: 1250 feith = loyalty, fealty, allegiance. From Latin fides = trust, belief. Cognate with Greek peithesthai = be persuaded, obey. Albanian be = oath. Old Slavic beda = need, compel. Old High German beiten = urge, demand. Old English require, solicit.
Interesting on religion from Latin religionem = respect for what is sacred, with the original meaning of care. Cicero derived the Latin as meaning go through, read again, re = again + legere = read. So maybe I've created a religion in that you needed to read it again! ;-)
I love it! So you're saying I religioned? Omg, religion made into a verb. Impressive word-fu. I'm actually a little surprised I don't have a dictionary on etymology, not that I need anymore books.
The progression from faith to beda is very free will and gradually descends into coercion. Much like the covid madness and the jabs.
Reminds me of the quote
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."
Oooh yes, let's make religion into a verb! Word-fu, so funny. I'd been known to haul that 5-lb book with me on road trips, pre-everything net. But Corbett has lately been talking about 'why real media' and I think he has a point. I wouldn't put it past 'them' to change etymology too.
I don't know if I'd read the feudal era pre-1250 definition as benign. In my book, I quote the oath of fealty owed to the Lord, and that Lord ain't some pie-ty in the sky. The successive definitions become a little more abstract but we make an enormous leap in reading the Bible to substitute an ethereal being for the tyrant to whom your fieflord reported.
Fair points. I agree that real media is important( if that was the point being made) for many reasons. In the Koran, djinn are evil entities that are able to effect and change things in the past. Which is why muslims are taught to memorize everything in case the djinn go back and change the written word(reminds me of the Mandela effect).
Oh interesting! That's what Maajid Narwaz was referring to in this episode I did on him: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/yuval-bibi-and-maajid.
I read your article, so much good information, thanks. Are you referring to the Maajid and Jordan Peterson video?
Please take this as the compliment its intended to be (in my head it sounds like it could be interpreted either way.) This information is dense!
It only took me 2 times reading through, on 2 separate days to get it to sink in.
The relationship between I and Other is a concept that has kept my mind busy for the last few years. One of the theories I like around this concept is,
We are all connected in some fashion (the most extreme version being we are all aspects of Source running around so Source can experience limitation and learn about itself.) This fits nicely with the Hui Neng quote.
You're not the first to tell me I'm dense! I started out as a poet so being parsimonious with my words is second nature.
I'm entertaining that extreme, which all the mystics come to. I'd say Oneness. But there are lots more episodes where I talk about this. This one starts out on the spiritual and ends up with fascism, but a different take on it from Rat: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/forgiveness-is-the-shortcut.
Mmm parsimonious, visually delicious! I need help with forgiveness and could definately use a shortcut. Bookmarked and thank you
I was hoping to tempt you with that little morsel. And have I yet thrown out 'deracinate'? I tease Russell Brand (in absentia) by tracing the arc of when he learned the word, then uses it three times later in different episodes. His third-grade teacher would be so proud. 'Use it 3X and it's yours!'
I was the kind of kid who posted the Reader's Digest word list on the fridge and told my piano teacher a tune had lots of 'cacophony', pronouncing it like a fake cat. And antediluvian--that was tricky to work into a sentence in primary school. What a pretentious little brat I was! I'm much younger now.
Deracinate is new to me, and definition 2 feels like what the universe is trying to do to me for a while now. " To displace from one's native or accustomed environment".
We as a people could benefit from deracinating most of the people in positions of perceived authority from our lives and plant ourselves in those positions, but only for ourselves, if that makes sense.
I went to a christian school at the primary level, so antediluvian could have been used easily when studying the first few books of the bible. Outside of that environment or subject though, not so easy. I bet you received many a frustrated sigh from adults that couldn't handle your intelligence. Thanks for sharing, I hope the smile that you helped me to grow today pollinates many other smiles to bloom.
As another morsel, the opposite of deracinate is radical. To deracinate is to cut off from the root. Radical is to go to the root. Where Russell used deracinate (or maybe me, I get us confused) was looking at how slavery does that, but also college and careers. We're all expected to pull ourselves up by the roots and relocate, again and again. So we're all deracinated, making us easier to enslave.
Thank you for that lovely note!
Hi Adam. I'll be interested in your reply to the one I just posted, that might address this. The first question is are you superior? If the answer is yes, the God that you believe in is a projection of your own ego. Essentially, you've made yourself God, whether you call yourself God or natural law, as Darwin did, who certainly believed in his own superiority. That's where moral relativism comes in. Those who've killed 10,000 children and counting totally believe in God, according to their definition of him. Wouldn't you agree?
I didn't read The Righteous Mind but I responded to Jonathan Haidt's interview with Russell Brand in this one: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/envy-and-russell-brand.
Loved an image, as the emojis say. ;-)