sirguessalot

It may also be that the competence of John's baptism strongly involved the seemingly "magic" and "cultic" but actually quite pragmatic medicinal impacts of hygiene, where the competence of Christ's fire was more akin to the kind of medicine that heals when there is no cure, which involves washing in the inner flames of realities like grief, guilt, humiliation and most specifically, shame, and the depth and degrees of our capacities to touch, hold and handle any of this is what keeps us from both eden and paradise. In this light (NOT counting the dead), one might even say that there are currently maybe billions of living souls on Earth drowning tormented in such an inner lake of fire right now. Meanwhile, there are also maybe millions alive walking in the very same fire. Which is perhaps also why "fire" seems to have long been a living metaphor in the contexts of end-of-life care-giving and companionship (in what other field is the harvest so plentious and the laborers so few?), and is firmly rooted in a "healing the healer" approach, or medicine for the "wounded healer." Communities of the devoted to supporting each other in doing their inner work so they cause even less harm. Essential baseline mode of care for anyone wanting to heal (or lead or teach) anyone else. This deeper history of hospitals, nursing and medicine runs through the Gospels. Quite revolutionary in times of mass avoidance and fixers run amuck.

If I may ask...what are you thinking won't help us have no pain? Those Bible verses? or...?

Funny, I was a newborn in the Summer of 71, and the "last wave" was my only wow year. I recall those big moments when he announced it was all over. Everyone struggling to make meaning out of it all. Ended up taking home a wow cancellation refugee. Young guy with all his life stuffed in a few bags (which was me, the year prior) and suddenly nowhere to go.

Indeed. It may be, as I suspect, that the grand tour of the Apocalypse is not merely about future events, but rather a illumination of ongoing Processes, including the processes, patterns and stages of inner life, which includes of course how these inner conditions and changes impact the outer world. The book seems more like a user manual than mere list of predictions, although clearer discernment of inner processes and their impacts on the outer world does also lend to seeing clearer trajectories in outer events, increasing our capacity to predict things. These are not one-time events, but rather patterns that repeat as the conditions support them, which is perhaps why folks for millenia who try to apply the symbols and archetypes to specific literal one-time events are constantly mostly wrong. Also, the history of Catholicism is quite full of rich diversity. Often ignored or misunderstood by protestant leaning beliefs are the contemplative and monastic orders and disciplines, such as Franciscan, Cistercian, Benedictine, etc.. These include folks who do not always fit the standard current mainstream Catholic codes in belief or practice about Purgatory or anything else. Purgatory and the Apocalypse also reminds me of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo_Thodol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo "In some schools of Buddhism, bardo (Classical Tibetan: བར་དོ་ Wylie: bar do) or antarābhava (Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese: 中有, romanized in Chinese as zhōng yǒu and in Japanese as chū'u)[1] is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth. The concept arose soon after Gautama Buddha's death, with a number of earlier Buddhist schools accepting the existence of such an intermediate state, while other schools rejected it. The concept of antarābhava, an intervening state between death and rebirth, was brought into Buddhism from the Vedic-Upanishadic (later Hindu) philosophical tradition.[2][3] Later Buddhism expanded the bardo concept to six or more states of consciousness covering every stage of life and death.[4] In Tibetan Buddhism, bardo is the central theme of the Bardo Thodol (literally Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State), the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text intended to both guide the recently deceased person through the death bardo to gain a better rebirth and also to help their loved ones with the grieving process.[5]" Wondering about life after death is like the unborn wondering about life after birth. We come out screaming bloody murder because it feels like dying, yet the scope and variety of life after birth is many many magnitudes more than life in the womb (like seed versus tree), and that great cloud of ancestral witnesses are like the nurses, midwives and relatives in the waiting room. And, while the personal ego may not survive death, it may be that other forms of life after death are overwhelmingly MORE (in both scope and variety) than what we are experiencing now. And, as with birth, where there is no guarantee a newborn lives to see its first birthday, or with sprouting seeds, where there is no guarantee it flowers, the newly dead are not immediately done with their growth. The potential of life without end is simply that. Thus, notions like Purgatory and the Bardo.

Seems to me all religions are filled with words that all other religions don't know/care about, but most old religious traditions do include near-equivalents to Purgatory as both a state of being and an actual location associated with the dead. Naraka, Diyu, Tir Na Nog, etc.. As with the ecosystems of Catholicity, each is a living and unique response and expression of human encounters with the many fields and layers of life beyond life. And as with Catholicism, most are old enough to have long been hollowed out and filled with surface ideas and applications nearly utterly divorced from these kinds of roots, providing poor examples of the original ancestral wisdom, leaving us mostly naked, lost and afraid in our mortality, grief and shame. In this, we have mostly replaced living practices and direct experience for mere explanations of distant things. Yet, it seems within each religion there are folks in touch with those deeper strands. fwiw

fwiw imho it does seem there are rare threads running throughout all of human history in the form of a calling and invitation to "die before you die, so that you will not die," which involves some general devotion to practices tasting and touching the variety of states, stages and fields of consciousness associated with suffering, death and grief as a way to become compassionate, wise and harmless. The deeper story of religion is the deeper story of medicine, caregiving and midwifery at both ends of life. The story of Christ, from the Gospels to the Apocalypse (and notions of Purgatory), seems so vividly soaking wet with all this kind of thing that without such a lens, the scripture seems confusing at best.

Likewise-ish. Daily Bible, praying like never before, music as medicine, and gobs of math due constant streams of construction, engineering, agricultural tasks. Currently on much-needed reflective pause after a few years of the hardest digging of my life. Anticipating a period of deepening now that so much old clay has been broken. Feeling more prepared than ever for the next waves of pain and heartbreak emerging on the horizon. Seems all old words and habits are indeed potentially renewable and redeemable. Who, what, when, where, why and how "God" is has been quite an odyssey.

No bother here. I dig your riffs. Reminds me how healthy cultures seem to develop various rites of passage to initiate us into and through various stages and events of life, and one of the first most vital functions of such is to at least midwife new egos beyond mere ego-centricity. For while even one teenage brat could have serious consequences for a small tribe, multi-generational mobs of adult brats eventually generate all that is Hell on Earth. Unfortunately, it seems too late for prevention. Fortunately, perhaps we can still plant seeds.

Appreciate the feedback. Sentences like that seem to spill out suddenly, but only after half a life of silent reflections. I owe it to holding Genesis with more of an indigenous Hebraic consideration, which at least involves myth, metaphor and symbol as not only valid, but quite vital for navigating the landscapes and events of inner nature. I like this. Reminds me of those "many mansions" of the Gospels, or St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, or the notion of "structures of consciousness." As if not only are we a well-populated garden within, but there is architecture (including ruins). Walls, windows and doors, oh my.

Indeed. Seems Adam-ness alone was incapable of generating much more than feral children. Re: the original topic of reasonable bases for rejecting written things as God-breathed… Most of us modern folk seem to have inherited a crippling underestimation of the value and impact of story AS story in the cultivation of wisdom, especially regarding ancient sacred texts. Both fantasy and literalism are easily debunked and mocked by mere objectivism, which then naively dismisses the very real vitality of myth. I find that ideas like James Fowler's Stages of Faith seem to offer helpful approaches to noticing and evaluating patterns in the different ways we interpret text and life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._Fowler Sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, the presence and importance of stage-to-stage patterns of inner maturation (and lack thereof) seem ubiquitous throughout not only the modern Bible, but most of the world's sacred texts. Plant metaphors seem especially common as most direct and vivid examples of how inner life unfolds within (Unfortunately, it also seems, nothing stops almost anyone from mis-applying easily noticeable patterns of nature as a way to violate, manipulate, and exploit using plant terminology.). We can also see matching patterns in both interpretation and application in spite of the specific language set or mythology being used. The texts of all major world religions seem to have groups of adult folks interpreting and applying them from every phase of inner growth. Most worldview conflicts occur not only between similar stages of maturity (like fundamentalism versus fundamentalism), but also between different stages of immaturity (like fundamentalism versus empiricism versus de-construction). Tragically, perhaps, an almost wholesale rejection of the reality (and measurability) of such manifold patterns of inner maturity does seem like a quite natural consequence in societies where the very humiliations necessary for such growth are also seen as dangerous enemies. Our capacities to touch, hold and handle the fires of shame determine how resistant we are to life’s gauntlets of wisdom. Like a flaming sword that keeps us from returning to our original nature.

“There is no basis for rejecting PFAL as God-breathed that does not apply equally to scriptures that have been considered God-breathed since there was a canon.” Agreed. Seems to me that any interpretations and applications of any curated set of our world’s wisdom literature that flies in the same altitudes as TWI does with the Bible are as easily rejectable on all the same basis. That such a high percentage of humanity does exactly this is not only an enduring source of misery and woe, but reinforces the rejection of the remedy…which is not a wholesale rejection of the text, as is often quite popular, nor a tame watering down, but rather a regeneration of more sound, sane, wise and mature interpretations and applications of the very same bodies of text. Ham, please correct if I am missing your point here, but this seems to point to one related conclusion I reached some years ago. "Rejecting the Bible.. because. One person I know rejects it because he thinks that it is written by a group of primitives who think that Men should rule the world, justify various forms of slavery, etc. etc. I would argue differently- it is written TO a group of primitives who think that men should be the final authority in the house, settle disagreements by war, enslave their fellow man.." Many modern folks complain how the Bible is too-male oriented, when that male-orientation may be a primary point all along. And not just warnings TO cavemen, but stories for mothers and elders to tell children ABOUT cavemen. From indigenous Hebraic wisdom stories warning about the very real immediate danger of even one un-initiated boy aging into adulthood (Cain, etc...), to apocalyptic warnings about what masculine-only dominance looks like after cultures, societies and the planet itself finally fills up with hydras of very horny self-authorized liars, thieves and murderers worshipping money and gobbling real estate. As if one dominant theme of the Bible is that there is no greater life-destroying force on Earth than when immature masculinity takes control. Even the New Testament's opening warnings about homosexuality seem more like warnings about the very real dangers of immature masculine-only attitudes (war, slavery, etc..), not queer nature. Talk about a red thread. Also, like what Cman said: “it boils down to fear of death, all the crap people come up with, they can't face the devil....” Because yes, extreme avoidance of the nature and reality of dying and an inability to allow light on one’s own inner shadows are both key unmistakable symptoms of this un-initiated masculinity, where the Bible (and/or other sacred texts and religious acts) are seen quite childishly as a powerful magical way to avoid death and fight demons, which is kinda cute when its a 3-year old. Not so much when its mobs of self-authorized rich, powerful, old fools.

Apologies to Twinky and all for the seeming derail on the other thread. I am clearly rusty on GSC forum etiquette. I am actually a student and advocate of deep listening (although I also find hypertextual listening quite a bit more challenging and time-consuming). I honestly thought my reply spoke to some overall challenges we have with biblical idioms and such, although admittedly I went a bit too meta. Also, some of my frustrations came through. Was mostly more of a cheeky way to break my 11-year GSC fast. Strong cup of coffee probably played a role. Cheers.

Thanks. Yeah, felt like slipping in the back door and quietly pulling up a chair. Been lurking a bit. This conversation pulled me in.

Greetings, earthlings. fwiw, imho, If I may...Tragic as this may sound, I find it helps to notice how our general social and cultural fluency and competency in symbol, myth, and archetypes and such seems currently mostly in a dumpster fire. And there is this seeming endless war, not only between many folks holding onto various conflicting so-called literal interpretations of ancient writings, but between many other folks who easily debunk the many so-called literal interpretations yet also seem to believe they have debunked religion altogether and erased all its value from the past, present and future of our planet. Meanwhile, all along, many other folks have been interpreting and living and applying all that religion in significantly sound and vital ways, but are also either ignored, avoided, attacked or simply remain undiscovered by all the other folks. Some good news, perhaps, is that its not only possible to find real meaning in storytelling, but our wisdom, sanity and wholeness has always depended on our capacities to do so. "Truth, naked and cold, had been turned away from every door in the village. Her nakedness frightened the people. When Parable found her she was huddled in a corner, shivering and hungry. Taking pity on her, Parable gathered her up and took her home. There, she dressed Truth in story, warmed her and sent her out again. Clothed in story, Truth knocked again at the doors and was readily welcomed into the villagers’ houses. They invited her to eat at their tables and warm herself by their fires." Jewish teaching story.

My guess...the first "death" is referring to what we call "childbirth"...and the "second death" is referring to what we call death. To "die before you die" is the gist of a common invitation at the root of all good religion...an invitation to practice silence and stillness as a minimum foundation for service. Radical periods of silence and stillness are the most direct and "effortless" way to "taste death and live". Short of that...injury, illness, being near death or simply aging, tend to force us into such deeper layers of self-discovery. The adult religious folks who miss this are the ones who cause trouble....reacting out of some sort of premature terror. But same goes for the doctors, scientists, and other adults in charge. To be made whole by contemplating our "second death" (which we simply call death) is to be prepared to be "born again." To see our inevitable death as a second birth prepares us for our final spiritual experience in this life. It also prepares us to serve and be in fellowship with those who are ill, injured, aging and dying. We taste the same states in order to relate. This is a baptism of fire. It hurts. Period. This is key practice to stimulate things like longevity, wisdom, love and sanity.

i was under the impression that "the apocalypse" was the only one written "by" Jesus. haha

Seems to me that in the seasonality of life, autumn arrives for everyone who lives to see it. The midpoint of life is a "God-given" rite of passage into deeper reflection. We have never had as many elbows in our road to reflect on as we do now. With this comes a season of regrets. A season of noticing patterns. A season of humiliations. A season of beginning to reap what we’ve sown...even if we didn’t know what we were sowing. Some have called it a “Wilderness Stage.” The way we respond to this varies, but a common response is fight or flight. It is also a strong invitation to enter that wilderness and change the way we see our selves in the world…again. Maybe even prepare for winter. Where words like redemption and atonement become useful again. We spend the entire second half of life healing (or not) from all the damage of the first half…physically too. But if we are to turn lead into gold to some greater degree in this life...this is when it naturally begins. Harder to start in winter. Sadly, much of society and culture seems mostly geared to eternal summer and spring til the end. Very little to support or prepare for the shifts of the second half. “Permission to transform/grow up” does not come cheap, if at all. Especially when the grown-ups in control are neither. I thank God these forces (the seasonalities and such) seem stronger than society or culture. So we find our way through the seasons anyway. As if “God springs forth in a desert.” … Anyway, here is what I remember from an old “Spiritual Geographying” exercise I learned: Be still. Breath. Simply note the 3 worst times of your life and the 3 best times of your life (or 5 or more of both depending on age). Reflect. Notice the relationships. Some share it with everyone. Some share it with a friend. Some share it with God alone. That sort of thing.

to add...most of my conversations/encounters occur in dreams or meditative states. some of the most profound and vivid experiences happened while practicing guided visualizations specifically designed to help dying people talk to those who passed before them...as a way to help them die well. in fact, such dreams and encounters naturally increase as we near our own death...thus, the practices.

i certainly do, E i've not only experienced very "haunted" conditions, but have studied all manner of such things in the context of end-of-life care. i am quite convinced that relationships do not end with the death of the human body, and our capacity to have those conversations is neither supernatural nor strange, but rather extra-ordinary and quite simple. Healthy and sane, even. Overall, i'm mostly with Roy on all this. Death may be more like birth than we realize. Most of us typically came out screaming bloody murder the first time, too. Natural misunderstanding.

Thanks for that, Steve. For me, any more...any demand that "you must say it this way" or that way...any deathgrip on words like that seems like the result of a very early stage of human faith. What can be described as magical and mythical faith involves a dependence on the "supernatural" power of specific words and sayings and stories (even holy canons)...mistaking the finger for the moon. Such mistakes even occurs in secular contexts. When someone says "that is not (fill in supernatural myth or story), it is really just the moon. Which is made up of ___ and ___, etc...". What we call the moon (and the things it is made of) existed long before we called it the moon, let alone any other name in any other language. likewise, perhaps the one we call Jesus Christ has a name that is above all names. And we also have names that are beyond all names. And it is not that we will ever find "the right name"...but that the actual shape of things IS the name. NO words required. Although once we get this. we are free to use language without being enslaved by it. What about the Word of God? Could it be referring to the actual universe (which includes the Bible)?

seems like a regular enough topic that we keep revisiting here to call it important. vital. sacred. whatever. like a fire that will not go out. just keeps smoldering. maybe the smoke is like a prayer in God's nostrils. i'll offer another ember. i agree with the types of monks and nuns who cared for the ill and dying throughout the histories of hospital and hospice...that unforgiveness is a type of suffering. or spiritual pain, if you will. like an inner illness or dis-ease. and it tends to really heat up and glow as we near the end of this life...whatever unforgiveness remains. it is not that we decide to forgive or not to forgive, but more like we are kinda stuck with the pain of unforgiveness and are lucky or blessed to find our way to the other side of it. if violence, injustice and crime impacts us like an injury against our will...perhaps our unforgiveness is more like the result of a wound. even if we imagine or exaggerate the "sin"...the suffering of not being able to forgive is felt. even practicing forgiveness is no guarantee that we find it..though it does make us more accident prone to fall into such radical grace. so yes, of course we do well to forgive...i pray we experience such mercy. sometimes i wonder...does "the unforgiveable sin" Jesus spoke of have something to do with the pain of unforgiveness? (apologies for all the resent emails from all my edits...i think i'm done)

Supernumerary Rainbow...Oh...My..God! :B) you mean the illusions are true? :blink:

yep, abundant honor to that which we think is less honorable. like how a valuable way to see the health of a thing is to look at the waste. and how it can be said that the seat and root of all spiritual practice is the arse. :B) one of my favorite ways to describe things like psychological shadow-work and dream-work is "processing crap" i post this as an avid composter and fan of all things alchemical.

Catnip is quite friendly to people too.

ive never been able to agree with your strategies on all this, sudo. you seem to avoid the majority of data and gobs of direct experience. not likely to perform a wide range of injunctions to test the theories you reject. yada yada. but i do respect your right to kvetch and crusade about a thing in hypertext. you obviously feel its important. good luck. regarding the "soul"...it may be that there need not be some sort of psychological or biological pathology or imbalance to start noticing the countless voices within each of us. it seems more like a natural outcome of the human experience. already happening in each of us. i would go as far as to suggest that the first century "tongues" experience may have involved practices of accessing this inner "burning bush" via voice dialogue as a form of healing art during a revolutionary reawakening of jewish healing arts. also, dreaming is a nightly baptism in the psyche. and dreaming practices make us accident prone to wake up more in the dream and interact more effectively with the contents of the dream. some say that dreams are not real. if not, than what is it? some say that dreams are not important. if not, than why does the body keep doing it? subjective sciences. i dare ya. regarding haunted houses and the afterlife and such...its too late for me not to remain an enchanted agnostic about it. i dont hold it against those who deny the existence or validity of this ongoing occurance wide range of exotic phenomenon such as this. but i can suggest that one is more than just kvetching, you may do well "put to your money where there mouth is" and actively go there...seek it...do it.