"Be Newborn, Be Free of Yourself"
The Tao Te Ching
"I say we all can return to before programmming and release the MAGIC after all it is the creative part of us and without creativity we can not image and with no imagination we would have no invetions (we lack our intutitive nature) because we lost our MAGIC. It's OK to release the LOVE in you...Deprogram and them watch the GENIUS grow." - Unknown Source
We are at the mercy of our own minds. It is by our conditioned minds that we have
spun a web that has developed a world that is on the brink of a major catastrophe
reflected in a quickening rate of extinction of various life forms due to our
lifestyles, philosophies, and actions. When
some of us speak about conditioned minds, it is not just the conditioned minds
of one or two people. Indeed, even in
some of the liberal media there is sometimes the same intellectual and
spiritual arrogance that exists in the mainstream culture. Indeed, many scientific types are as dogmatic
and will viciously attack folks that challenge their view as any Christian. This is not meant as an attack against
science or anything else for it is worldwide.
Even in my writing this article I can become dogmatic and want to argue
out of a sense of self-protection with people that disagree. Our conditioning is extremely strong. I would say it has been in progress for at
least the past 6,000 years. This means
our conditioned minds are very "set in their way." It is this mindset that we need to challenge.
Just as right and left hands are
actually mirrors of one another, so are conservative and liberal or republican
and democrat. Both views keep us
stuck. What we need is to transcend (or
quantum jump) the system. On a more
concrete level, it means we need to confront and change our notion of dualism,
or things operating separately. As
Lovelock's "Gaia Hypothesis" states, the Earth operates as a single organism with
various parts supporting the whole just as you operate as a single organism
with multiple parts supporting the whole you.
Whether it's you or the Earth, pull on one part of this web and you mess
with all other parts. It really is
helpful to have the left and right hand to get things done that the mind and
heart dictate.
While our dualistic thoughts and beliefs about life are grounded
in centuries of conditioning, there is an unconditioned place that we can tap
into. This is a place that is
transcendent of duality. To use an
example, as you stand on the ground and look at the scenery around you, you
will see an isolated landscape with independently functioning trees, animals, insects
and plants appearing to be functioning separately from the greater whole. Yet, as many astronauts would tell you,
looking at the Earth from a higher orbit (the transcendental state of mystics,
going to the mountaintop of Martin Luther King and the climbing of Jacob's
Ladder), you can see the Earth's wholeness.
When you fly above the dualities, you realize wholeness. It is from that unconditioned and
transcendent place that we have the potential to evolve or devolve. Both of these are possibilities. Either way, as physicist David Bohm states
regarding the Unmanifest Implicate Order, there is a place where the
possibilities are infinite.
This is important to know because if we do not realize our
conditioning and move past it, then we will stay stuck in a conditioned pattern
that began in Middle Eastern and European cultures several thousand years ago. This
could lead to a mass extinction on this planet.
At these earlier points in history, the stage was set for the
suppression of the Africans, the Americans, and, indeed, the rest of the
world. If we do not acknowledge these collective ways
of thinking, feeling and behaving that are the result of several thousand years
of conditioning, then we are going to remain stuck in surrendering our lives to
greed within ourselves which also manifests in higher scales within the corporate
and governmental sociopaths that, much like a Mafia hit man, could care less
about putting you away in jail for several years or put you forever 6 feet and under
the ground. "Hey, it's business" they
would say as your spouse, parents, children etc scream in the horror of seeing
you locked up, beaten up, or having a huge hole in your chest and lying in
state.
The movie "Corporation" does a
beautiful job at exposing the sociopathology of the corporate, and I would add
the governmental world, by utilizing the psychiatric diagnostic manual, the
DSM-IV, and determining that corporate behavior fits the category of psychopath
to a "tee."
What is the first step to change and
getting out from behind our sociopathic leaders? We need to be like an adolescent and leave
home. Leaving home is a form of
death. It is dying to the old in order
to be born anew. We have to grow up and
take responsibility for ourselves. Many
Christians believe that the dying and resurrected Christ is a matter of an
external historic figure that goes through the pain and glorification of
torture and resurrection. Yet, many, including myself, would say it is us that
need to be nailed to the cross. Indeed,
Christ Himself stated that we need to take up the cross as He did. The Man never said he was a scapegoat. A simple example of what we need to do that
isn't as potent as death by being nailed to a cross would be the statement "no
pain no gain" by a person who is trying to get in better shape. Pain or death to the old is a necessary
component to evolution. This was widely
known in ancient times. The story of
Christ was just one example of many.
It is also no accident that the
death and resurrection happens around the spring solstice since this is the
time in which the blossoming of life begins to increase. The death inherent in Winter is reborn in the
Spring. The Virgin Birth in mystical and
pagan circles has a very similar motive.
The virgin birth occurs close to the winter solstice which is the time
in which the Sun shines upon the Earth for the shortest number of hours and
slowly begins to shine for longer periods of time until the summer solstice, at
which time it begins to decline.
Mary means Ocean (Marie, Marina) and
hence the Light of the World is born just as it was in Genesis 1:2 and 3. "And darkness was upon the face of the deep
and the Spirit moved out over the face of the Water. And God said, "Let there be light." Thus Mary could be seen as the Mother of the
Manifest World"or, as the Gospel of John says (1:14), "Christ is the light of
the world." Imagine this from the
perspective of a fetus being born".out of the dark depths of the womb he
emerges into the light. To emerge into
the light entails the movement into another "womb," the Earth, which will
support his or her further evolution.
While
Christians often speak as if their virgin birth and death and resurrection
motives are peculiar to Christ, they are not.
Consider this quote from a Crystalinks page: "A dying god, also known as a
dying-and-rising or resurrection deity, is a god who dies and is resurrected or
reborn, in either a literal or symbolic sense. Male examples include the
ancient Near Eastern and Greek deities Baal, Melqart, Adonis, Eshmun, Attis,
Tammuz, Asclepius, Orpheus, as well as Krishna, Ra, Osiris, Jesus, Zalmoxis,
Dionysus, and Odin. Female examples are Inanna, also known as Ishtar, whose
cult dates to 4000 BCE, and Persephone, the central figure of the Eleusinian
Mysteries, whose cult may date to 1700 BCE as the unnamed goddess worshiped in
Crete" (taken from http://www.crystalinks.com/lifedeathgoddess.html ).
The important point is that in
whatever story you listen to, the Virgin Birth as well as the death and
resurrection of Christ point towards our having to die in order to
progress or evolve. We simply must let
go of ourselves, our conditioning, in order to evolve. We must also let go of our current ways of
looking at the world. Instead of
surrendering our power to corporations and government, we must surrender to the
death of our ego and rebirth of spirit.
This is a labor well worth the disorientation, fear and pain
involved. We will feel like a
caterpillar dissolving into a chrysalis, yet evolving to emerge as a
butterfly. As stated by Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, we must become newborn and
hence free of ourselves, i.e., our conditioned minds.
Think about the enormity of
this. We must let go to the conditioned
mind, what we think is real, and allow for a new world to be born. This is not going to happen via some external
God out there. It's going to happen from
our inner world, of us alongside the rest of the planet. As the Gaia hypothesis states, we are
instruments in the planet's functioning and not the head honcho. Could we surrender our crowns and robes to
humbly reclaim partnership, a sense of "we're all in this together", with all
creatures? Can we do this? Can you?
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