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Dear Star Wars fans,
You'll find a familiar reference in this post and more in the next. That's because the original Star Wars mythology is very much a symbolic representation of real forces at play. If this inspires you to become more engaged with your spiritual side than you already are, that's great. But for all that is holy, let's not make the Star Wars franchise more of a religion than it already is. Thanks. :D
Dear Science,
While we may currently have our differences, you are one of the heroes of this post. Even though you're the spiritually-challenged path of the bunch, your Rainman like passion for data has had and will continue to have its moments to shine. As one who grew up admiring you, it's pleasant to think that this is one such moment. Thank you. (Don't let it go to your head.)
In this set of writings, we'll try to flesh out a few definitions as clearly as words will allow:
God (sort of. God's not the sort of concept that words can handle.)
Good
Evil
Sin
The Devil
& (in another post)Ba'al/Satan
Please be aware, that there is much more to know..and that there are masters, both living and dead who are well versed in helping people find their connection to God. What's offered here is only a basic overview of the situation. Don't expect to be converted or convinced, because that's not the purpose of this work..it's not even possible. There are seeds planted that only God can tend to.
To begin, we first have to thank science for doing a lot of the legwork that provides us with words to describe what the ancients used metaphors for. Taking some of the clues available: The void at the beginning of many creation stories, the origins of the point used as zero in Middle Eastern numerals, the Goddess Kali, the yang, the various representations of the power of matter and its properties..all of these are different ways of describing the black hole which birthed our universe and which eventually, will re-form to swallow it again.
This cycle has happened many times, and will continue to happen many more. But we'll start at the void..a moment when the black hole has swallowed everything in the universe. She (this giant black hole) is pregnant with pressure at the center of her singularity, which is seeking release. Let's call that: moment zero. Then she releases..EVERYTHING.
A brilliant flash of light and our universe is born; a new time space bubble. Let's call that the beginning, ok? (The Big Bang?) There is neither beginning nor end, but let's call that phase 1. Now there is only one force in the universe, for a ridiculously brief moment. That primal energy..shot out by the pressure of the singularity that birthed it. But the child soon begins to take the shape of its mother, as fermions coalesce into atomic forms, creating the elements and a lot of energy. We'll call this phase 2. Phase 3? The combination of matter with matter and matter with energy to form different compounds. (Or something close. Contact your local theoretical physicist for more details,)
By the way, while we're back in the original land of puzzles, take a second to note that the shapes of our numbers roughly match these phases: 0 - a point or event horizon-like circle, 1 - a line or arrow representing energy, 2 - a line being attracted to a circle (energy forming into matter), 3 - Two circles connected (matter and matter combining), or sometimes with a line on top (matter and energy combining.) This continues with each digit 0 through 9. (We can cover those in a different topic.)
As this is happening..the Abrahamic Creation story keeps saying that God saw these things he birthed, and they were good. That's important to note, because the definition of "good" will be crucial to know if we are to define "evil".
This Creation story should be familiar to most of us by now. For those scientifically inclined, the Creation story more or less describes the evolutionary process which, as we know, brought us to HUMAN.
And this is where the story takes an intriguing jog, because after the first humans came on the scene, it was ALSO good...for a time. Then came the odd notion of a fruit that is forbidden, because once eaten, it will grant the eater the knowledge of good and evil.
Sounds like the magical centerpiece of a fairy tale, doesn't it? But what if it were just a normal fruit? What if, in the story, good is obedience to God, and evil is disobedience? (Sure fits the narrative of the majority of the Old Testament.) Then the fruit needn't contain mystical properties in order to reveal the difference between good and evil. Simply breaking the rule, would make one who had NEVER disobeyed God, aware of the short term rewards of evil, and the longer term consequences of that disobedience: shame, fear, insolence, conspiracy, death, struggle. (At least according to the story.)
And maybe that's an awful lot of "God" mentions for the skeptic to swallow, so let's come up with something CLOSE to a definition for God (at least from the human perspective.) God is described as our Creator, and the universe fits that bill. Since the universe contains everything, it would be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. That's the laundry list of qualities which we normally attribute to "God". And here's a question which seems difficult for us to engage: when exactly did we STOP being the universe? When and where did that cut off occur? Did it ever? Are we actually just one of it's many multiple personalities? But back to the Creation story..
Before that crucial moment of disobedience, there was a conversation that went on between Eve and a serpent who was the Devil. Now in ancient texts, when you see a snake, you're seeing an old symbol of intellectual wisdom. This is not the knowledge gained by organic experience, but that gained by dwelling on and entertaining one's own thoughts. This can mean many things. In it's most sacred representation, it is dwelling on thoughts of God and obedience to God. At it's worst, it represents our belief that our intellect can outsmart God, and encompasses all of the things we do to try to prove it. It is this very insolence which we see when the snake tells Eve that she and Adam can be like God.
And so the story goes, the Devil came creeping into their thoughts and actions. Notice how closely "good" and "God" are spelled, likewise "Devil" and "evil."
So there are our definitions for God and good, the Devil and evil:
God - The universe. (For our purposes. But words can't describe God.)
Good - Doing the Will of God, who seems to want to advance the evolutionary process.
Evil - To slow, stop or reverse the evolutionary process: To disobey the Will of God.
Devil - Our individual thoughts and actions which put our wants before what God wants.
And now we come to the term "sin". Sin and evil are so closely associated, that by our current definition of evil, we should find that to sin, is to do something that will "slow, stop or reverse the evolutionary process."
And so let's examine the list of deadly sins, the ten commandments and the refinements made to those commandments by Jesus in the New Testament to see if we can pinpoint what exactly we're doing that is evil when we sin. But before we do, it's probably best that we review some clues to our current stage in the evolutionary process,so that we can know what advancing that process might look like.
The subject of the origins and the purpose of intelligent life are STILL looking for the words to be covered properly. 8 chapters later, and a lot remains to be written. Still, with the kind indulgence of your imagination, here's an attempt to summarize:
Life on earth began with a VERY simple program for facilitating experience: Explore, Discover, Control, Dominate/Consume. From single-celled amoebas, to the way that a fetus learns to use its limbs(and other life accessories), this is the traditional animal habit of our neural ancestry.
Most of our struggles, be they for food, life, breeding, etc..come from a sense of individual identity that for the longest time, served a purpose as we worked our way up the tree of taxonomy to human.
When organisms did discover a rival for control or domination, it was time to see who was fittest to survive. Survival of the fittest was a strategy that worked for 3 BILLION years or so. But the evolutionary process marches on. Physical strength carved a path for intellectual strength. So what has intellectual strength been making way for?
There may be clues locked away in the warnings of those who claimed to know God's Will (what the universe wants.)
So what is sin? To understand "sin" in it's purest form, it's important that we first recognize that our brains are inclined to material thoughts. Whether this is simply a holdover from our animal heritage, or that brains made of matter are attracted to material thoughts (even after mostly rising above that animal heritage)..is up for debate. What's not up for debate is that the more we focus on material objects, events, relationships, etcetera, the more we incline our brains to the more "beastly", matter-based portion of our dual nature. (The simplest metaphor to describe this duality is that we are part star and part black hole. The black hole portion of our being is our material self, the body, the brain, it's urges, thoughts, traumas, conditioning and habits. It's very much still plugged into the old way of doing things: explore, discover, control, dominate/consume. And this is again, our BEASTly self.)
Before we discuss the "star" part of a human being, let me repeat something: The more we lean into our material side; our baser thoughts about ourselves, our desire to control, our impulsive animal rage, our desire to have what others have, our sex drive, our desire to consume, and our indulgence of a very dirt-like urge to just SIT and do nothing..the more primitive we will become.
Not coincidentally, the seven deadly sins are: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth.
Prior to this list, the Ten Commandments admonished us to avoid our animal behavior toward each other. Later, Jesus would go on to say that not only should we keep our bodies from DOING sinful things, but we should also keep our minds from even THINKING these things. In effect, the purpose is to help us train our bodies, then our brains, to de-prioritize the senses and the animal impulses. Once we've tamed our material self, we can finally be what is left of us that is NOT material. Then our "star"-like qualities can emerge.
We are currently buried in our material conditioning, and the people in charge know EXACTLY which buttons to push to keep us in our animal state.
Beast people, even at their most glamorous and sophisticated, are still little more than wastes of human skin to God, since this form was developed for HUMAN behavior, not beastly behavior.
At this point in time, the evolutionary process has made good and clever use of animal behavior. It has made good use of each living organism's sense of individuality, an illusory division that made the evolution of humanity possible.
It has made good use of the 'control and consume' portion of our thought process, which is STILL necessary during our childhood. (This is the meaning of Original Sin.)
But once our children have learned to use their limbs, and have explored the world & society enough to function, we are to STOP that control urge. We are to STOP that consumption urge. We are to teach them one final bit of control: control of their animal self.
Those who have been pumping humanity up with animal urges are the allies of Ba'al, the gatherers of devils(those driven by their animal urges), the summoners of demons (those driven by an intent to destroy and or dominate others) and beast-people. This is the meaning of "The Beast" in Revelation. It is the current system which tries to amplify our beast-like nature and drive us away from our human nature: which is to be one with the universe..since we always were.
If you look at the history of our progress as a society, we had learned this lesson many times before and tried to steer ourselves in a better direction. We discovered and tried to nurture the "temple in the tempest", a project begun many millions of years ago by the evolutionary process, when gender roles were divided in order to create a nursery for spiritual development.
It's no coincidence that our "leaders" have led us back into our urges. Animals are much easier to control than human beings. And our leaders are beast-people who were never pulled out of their primitive ways as children. On the contrary, they were indulged in their wants and became ridiculous, predatory, spider-like animals. Like I said, wastes of skin. Wastes of humanity..moneychangers and traitors. Their laws are a lie.
Hopefully we will turn away from their money and their power before it's too late. That's why Jesus focused on poverty and the poor. Why he told us to leave everything behind, EVERYTHING. Because they control us through our attraction to materialism..and the more we let them control us and our lives, the more material we will become in our thoughts and habits..in effect getting more and more caught up in the trap of materialism.
The good news is, the kingdom of heaven is real, it's all around us and it's available at any time we're alive. The better news is that we ARE a part of the universe, like a limb or an eye that it cherishes. Humanity is like a hand that is acting spastically, because we're all caught up in our sense of individuality and aren't following the signal coming to everything, from the source of it all. (Star Wars fans..think "The Force".)
In a movie called Evil Dead 2, the main character Ash, cuts his disobedient (demon possessed) hand off and replaces it with machines (chainsaw, shotgun). That's what humanity is doing to itself: The spastic hand is replacing itself with machines. God isn't like that.
God sees his wounded hand trying to come out of its illness and tends to it. God cares for us as deeply as you would your own finger. God mourns the loss of each of us who want badly to do right, but who live in confusion. And that's why it's been so important to take as much time writing these things as it takes. Because as I mentioned before, it's been made clear that the seeds can only be planted, and no attempts are to be made to convince anyone of anything. That's between you and God. May God's Will be done.
Next up..the meaning of Ba'al and it's relationship to issues of Judeo-Christian corruption and distortion.
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