 |
There is an
important myth from
Indonesia that tells
of a mythological age and its termination. In the
beginning the ancestors of
mankind were not distinguished as to
sex. There were no
births, there were no
deaths. In celebration, a great
public
dance took place . In the
course of the dance one of the
participants was trampled to death and
torn to pieces.
The pieces were buried.
At the
moment of that
killing the sexes separated. Now death was balanced by begetting, begetting by death, while from the buried parts of the
dismembered body food plants grew. Time had come into being, death,
birth, and the killing and eating
of other
living beings,
for the preservation of life.
The timeless
time of the beginning,
+++++++++ the
dreamtime +++++++++
had been terminated by a
communal crime,
a deliberate
murder or
sacrifice.
One of the main problems of living that mythology deals
with is reconciling the mind to
this
brutal precondition of all
life, which lives by the killing and eating
of other
lives.
You may try to
deceive yourself by
eating only vegetables,
but they too are alive.
The essence of
life is this eating of itself!
Life lives on lives,
and the reconciliation of the human
mind and sensibilities to that
fundamental
fact is one of the functions of some of those
very brutal rites in which the ritual consists
chiefly of killing, a
sacrifice, an
imitation of that first primordial
crime, out of which arose this
temporal reality, in which
we all participate.
The reconciliation of mind to the
conditions of life is
fundamental to all
creation stories.
Creation stories are all the
same in this regard.
In the
Christian myth the
serpent is the seducer which amounts to a refusal to
affirm life.
In
the imperial Christian tradition of
Western civilization we have inherited, life is
corrupt, and every
natural impulse is
sinful unless it has been circumcised or
baptized. The serpent was the one who brought
sin into the temporal reality. The
woman was the one who
handed the fruit of
life to the man.
In a male oriented
religious culture this identification of the
woman with
sin, of the serpent with sin,
and thus of life with
sin, is the twist that has been given to the
story in
the biblical myth of original sin or the
fall.
It is a
foolish
attitude to say no to
life because with life comes
pain.
It is a
foolish
attitude to say that
life on Earth
should not be as it is.
The idea in the the biblical myth of original sin or the fall
is that nature is
corrupt,
sex in and of itself is
corrupt, and the female, as the epitome of
sex, corrupts us.
Why was the knowledge of good and evil
forbidden to Adam and Eve by
God?
Without that
knowledge, we would all be as innocent
animals still in Eden, without any
self-awareness of our
participation in living life.
Woman brings
life into reality.
Eve is the
mother of this
temporal reality.
There is actually a
historical explanation based on the coming of
the Hebrews into
Canaan and the subjugation of the
Canaanites. The principal divinity
of the Canaanites was El the
Creator; secondary
gods, who acted on
Earth, were Baal and Baal's consort
Asherah, and associated with
Asherah is the serpent.
The
serpent is and was the symbol of the mystery
of life.
The male
god, oriented group rejected it.
There is
historical rejection of the Mother Goddess in the creation story of the Garden of Eden.
Formerly you had
a dream time paradise there in the
Garden of Eden - no
time, no birth, no death - no
self-awareness of our
participation in living life.
The serpent
dies. The serpent
then is resurrected shedding its old skin and thus
renewing its life. The serpent is the lord
of the central tree, where
time and eternity come together. The
serpent is the primary
god, actually, in the
Garden of Eden.
Yahweh, the one who walks there in the
cool of the evening, is just a visitor. The Garden is the serpent's place. It is an old, old
story. We have Sumerian seals from as early as 3500
BCE showing the serpent and the
tree and the goddess,
with the goddess giving the
fruit of life to
a visiting male. The mythology of the Mother Goddess is
right there.
The myth of
Adam and Eve deals with moving
out of the mythological dreamtime of the Garden
of Eden - linear time does not
exist and humans have no
self-awareness as they are just
innocent creatures. God
appears as a parent. God walks in the cool of the
evening in the garden with
Adam and Eve. Then
Adam and Eve
eat the fruit of life and
come to self-awareness.
Adam and
Eve had not thought of themselves in
opposition.
Male and female is one
opposition.
Another
opposition is
men and God.
Good and evil is a third
opposition.
The primary oppositions are
sexual
opposition and the
opposition between
human beings and God.
Then comes the dualistic Zorastarian
idea of good and evil
battling for the world. (In Zoroastrian
tradition the malevolent is represented by
Angra Mainyu, the "Destructive Principle", while
the benevolent is represented
through Ahura Mazda's Spenta Mainyu, the instrument or "Bounteous
Principle" of the act of creation and
sustenance.)
Adam and
Eve broke the covenant by eating the fruit and got themselves thrown out of
the Garden of Eden, the
dream time or heaven, just by that
act of recognizing
duality of
opposition. In the biblical tradition
eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge compartmentalizes the conception of
reality into thinking in terms of pairs of opposites - night and day, good and evil,
man and woman, summer and winter, wet and dry, hot and cold, etcetera.
"Dualism is the idea that the
universe is divided into two parts,
which go by the names of matter and
spirit, God and
creation,
human and
nature or, most fundamentally,
self and
other. These two parts are by no
means symmetrical: self is more important,
other less. In traditional Hebrew,
Christian and Islamic religions, soul is
self, body is
other. The
soul is important, while the flesh is at best
irrelevant and at worst an impediment to the life of the spirit. Outside traditional Hebrew,
Christian and Islamic religions, the same dualism, following
Descartes, manifests as
mind = self, body =
other. Either way, we identify
with our minds and not our bodies, not
other life forms, not with the earth." - Charles
Eisenstein
Women are held
responsible for
the Fall because they bring forth new
life. Man
doesn't enter life except by
woman, and so it is
woman who brings human life, and all
other mammalian life, into this world of pairs
of opposites and
suffering.
"When
the deep meaning of things is not
understood the mind's
essential peace is disturbed to no avail.
The Way is perfect like vast space where nothing is
lacking and nothing is in excess. Indeed, it is due to our choosing
to accept or reject that we do not see the true
nature of things. Live neither in the entanglements of outer things, nor in
inner feelings of emptiness. Be serene without striving activily to enter into
the oneness of things and erroneous views will disappear by themselves.
When you try to stop activity to
achieve passivity your very effort fills you with activity. As long as you
remain in one extreme or the other you will never know
Oneness. Those who do not live in
the single Way fail in both activity and
passivity, assertion and denial.
Do not remain in the dualistic state;
avoid such pursuits carefully. If there is a trace of this and that, the right
and wrong, the mind-essence will be lost in
distraction. Although all dualities
come from the One, do not be attached
even to this One. When
mind exists undisturbed in
the Way, nothing in the world can offend, and
when a thing can no longer offend it ceases to concern. When no discriminating
thoughts arise, the old way of thinking
ceases to exist.
All dualities come
from ignorant inference." -
Hsin Hsin Ming
The Garden of Eden is a
metaphor for that innocence that is innocent
of time and innocent of
opposites.
The dreamtime
is the prime center out of which consciousness becomes
aware.
There is a
standard folk tale
plot dealing with the One Forbidden
Thing.
Bluebeard, says to
his wife, "Don't open that
closet"?
Each wife
disobeys.
Another would be Pandora with
Pandora's Box.
In the
Old Testament
God points out the forbidden
fruit
The
Old Testament
God is challenging his children to partake of the
forbidden fruit.
The
Old Testament
God created human
beings.
Humans exihibit behavioral traits that fall within
Old Testament
God's granted
parameters.
When a human attempts to leave the popular social
culture, when he or she partakes of the forbidden
fruit of life
agitating as an agent for social change, then that individual overcomes his
conditioning and becomes master of his own life
falling into rebellion fighting the popular cultural conceptions of
God.
The independent
living of life
begins with that first act of disobedience - the
mark of free will - the ability to question tradition - the ability to observe
life as life is as opposed to how it has been
imaginatively
conceptualized.
In most cultures there
are two or three creation
stories.
There are two in the
Bible. In the
Garden of Eden
story of Chapter 2:
God is trying to think of ways to
entertain Adam, whom he has
created to be his
Gardener's assistant , to take care of his
garden. That is an old, old
story that was borrowed from ancient
Sumer. The gods wanted somebody to take care of their
garden and cultivate the food that they needed, so they
created man.
That's the background of the
myth of Chapters 2 and 3 in the
book of Genesis. But
Yahweh's gardener is bored. So God tries to invent
toys for man. Yahweh creates the animals, but all the
man can do is name them. Then
Yahweh thinks of this grand
idea of drawing the
soul of woman out of Adam's own
body - which is a very different
creation story than that found in Chapter 1 of
book of Genesis, where
God created
Adam and Eve together in the
image of Himself as
male and female.
There God is Himself the
primordial androgyne.
Chapter 2 is by far the earlier
story, coming from perhaps the eighth
century or so B. C., whereas Chapter 1 is of a priestly text of about the fourth century B.C.,
or later. In the Hindu
story of the
Self that felt fear, then desire, then split in two,
we have a counterpart of
book of Genesis. In
book of Genesis, it is
man, not the god,
who splits in two. So we all now spend
our lives
trying to find and embrace
our other halves.
There is a basic
mythological theme that
originally all was
One,
and then there was
separation - heaven and earth, male and
female, and so forth.
How did
we lose
touch with
unity?
One
theme is that the
separation was somebody's
fault - they ate the wrong
fruit or said the
wrong words to
God so that he got angry and went away. So now the
eternal is somehow away from
us, and we have to find some
way to get back in
touch with it.
There is
another
theme, in which
man is thought of as having come not from above but
from the womb of Mother Earth. Often, in these
stories, there is a great ladder or
rope up which humans climb. The last
humans to want to get out are two great big
fat heavy humans. They grab the rope, and snap! - it
breaks. So we are
separated from our
source.
In a
sense, because of
our minds,
we actually are separated, and the
problem is to reunite that
broken cord.
There's a
Hindu image that shows a triangle, which is the
Mother Goddess, and a dot in the center of the triangle,
which is the energy of the transcendent entering the field of
time. And then from this triangle there come
pairs of triangles in all directions. Out of one comes two. All
things in the field of
time are pairs of
opposites. This is the shift of
consciousness from the
consciousness of identity to the
consciousness of participation in
duality. Now you are into the field of
time.
Another
theme involves
emanation and precipitation without
personification.
A sound precipitates
air, then fire,
then water and earth - and that's how the
world becomes. The
whole universe is included in this first
sound, this vibration, which then commits all
things to
fragmentation in the field
of time.
In the
beginning
Yahweh, the
god of the
Israelites, was simply the most
powerful god among many.
Yahweh was just a local
tribal
god. In the sixth century BC, when the
Jews were in
Babylon, the notion of a
world savior came in, and the
biblical divinity moved into a new
dimension.
The
idea of good and evil in
mythology, of life as a
conflict between the
forces of
darkness and the
forces of
light, is a Zoroastrian idea, which has come over into
Judaism and Christianity.
In other
traditions, good and evil are
relative to the position in which you are standing.
-adapted from
the Power of
Myth, interview of Joseph Campbell,
mythologist, by Bill Moyers, journalist.
If it is beneficial for
some action to take place for the individual
conscious then that
consciousness will label that occurrence as
beneficial or good to that
consciousness.
Spiritual corruption
occurs when that consciousness realizes that
the choice it is making is not beneficial to it but goes ahead and does it
anyway.
Fault occurs when that consciousness makes a
conscious choice for action based upon
a faulty understanding of
reality.
Simple minds and those who, steeped
in spiritual
corruption, deceive themselves
use good and evil as a way of categorizing
things.
Also see Joseph Campbell on:
image
myth
life
consciousness
archetype
metaphor
mystery
the
serpent
religion
dream time
hero
God
|
|
back to stacks
contents
 |
This web site is not a commercial web site and
is presented for educational purposes only.
This website defines a new religious
ideology to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification
of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern
propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an
international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt
version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any
group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due
to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of the religion
aptly named The Truth of the Way of Life - a rational religion based on reason
which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no
church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to
develop a personal relation with God through the pursuit of the knowledge of
reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the
human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are spelled out in
detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to
their religious beliefs in America is considered a “hate
crime.”
This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary
the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the
international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The
international corporate cartel already controls the world central banking
system, mass media worldwide, the industrial military entertainment complex of
America and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of
self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization
is based on cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point of a
gun.
American social mores and values have declined precipitously over
the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more
power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general
through mass media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed
into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The
results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social
structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a
perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the
bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the
corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which
further their purposes.
All views and opinions presented on this web
site are the views and opinions of individual human men and women that, through
their writings, showed the capacity for intelligent, reasonable, rational,
insightful and unpopular thought. All factual information presented on this web
site is believed to be true and accurate and is presented as originally
presented in print media which may or may not have originally presented the
facts truthfully. Opinion and thoughts have been adapted, edited, corrected,
redacted, combined, added to, re-edited and re-corrected as nearly all opinion
and thought has been throughout time but has been done so in the spirit of the
original writer with the intent of making his or her thoughts and opinions
clearer and relevant to the reader in the present time.
Fair Use Notice
This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has
not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making
such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of criminal
justice, human rights, political, economic, democratic, scientific, and social
justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such
copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the United States
Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on
this site is distributed without profit
to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research and educational purposes. For more information see:
www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted
material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you
must obtain permission from the copyright owner. |
 Copyright
© Lawrence Turner
All Rights Reserved
|