Is The Mysterium Tremendum Real?

Traumatology, and developmental trauma theory, would say we have reason for suspecting that it is not.

Since ancient times - or as far back as we humans can remember - the religions that have grown around civilization have developed concepts of the deity based in the "first-hand" experience of the initiate.

The experience we speak of with the word "mysterium tremendum" is the experience of God, or the "highest scalar object" conceivable, imagineable, or perceivable to the human mind.

Anyone who has experienced this state - and I've experienced it again and again over the years - describes it something like this: one is"taken" by a deep feeling of negativity, fear, and anxiety. "God", or the object interfaced with - captures the body and showers its mind with morbid thoughts related to time, existence and being. This is God; he is represented this way again and again in the Hebrew Bible as well as in other Pagan religions; Zeus is thunderous; his power is expressed as the tumult of thunder and the shock of lightning. The mind can be 'ringed' in this way, and indeed, the Mysterium Tremendum may carry with them electrical brain shocks - thus cementing the archetypal continuity between the experience of Highest Deity and the experience of Thunder and Lightning.

God Emerges From Culture

We humans still don't get that the cultures we form simultaneously constitute - symbolically and noetically - the God we actually come to experience.

First and foremost, God isn't a non-real thing. Human beings are functions of a Universe which is Alive with Meaning; this means that when we relate to the world outside of us in a symmetrical way - as Levy-Bruhl noted primitives do - we actually imbue that external reality with a semiotic subjectivity.

Don't be amazed by this - please. Humans dream every night, and every night some mysterious "other" guides our thoughts. But the primitive and unware person thinks this process is a magical journey - a mere adventure with no rules or internal structure to it all.

The cognitive sciences, neurosciences and psychodynamic and developmental sciences reveal what that substructure looks like, and it is more or less the ecological totality of the meanings-we-make-with-others. That is, it is determined and constittued by our actions and the meanings and feelings we cultivate.

A Scary God, or A Scary Father?

The biggest problem with Humans is projection. When we don't realize that our every moment of existence is simultaneously pattern formation and meaning-assimilation, we act frivolously and mindlessly; this is what 'original sin' should mean - as Gregory Bateson once wrote: the epistemological error of thinking taht you are an unchanging 'substance', as opposed to a self-constituting and self-determined physiological process. Narratives based upon an uncritical acceptance of claims which aren't justified by perceptual reality i.e. by the objective world itself, are an example of this epistemological error. Gnosticism, Satanism, or Tantrism, are all based in a profound epistemological error of assuming that a self exists apart from his or her relations. The whole idea of the "Hero", is an obnoxious denial of relationality and processes - or said differently, a denial that states depend upon background conditions.

In this sense, the background conditions for a Mysterium Tremendum, a God of the Bible, Zeus, Indra, Shiva etc - a God which grips you with fear and imbues in you a "Fear of it's power" - this state is precisely the sort of illusion that Buddhism seeks to steer the mind from.

But why is it an illusion? What is illusory about the Mysterium Tremendum? Consider the background conditions for the emergence of these views: war, genocide, theft, rape etc. These sort of events are not ones that simply go away, as Michel Serres writes, the facts of the civilization we live within begin in murder - in killing - in blood: it is the blood of the ancestors which is the true cause of the "eternal return":

“Rome rarely leaves the time of beginning; it endures by returning there…The redundancy sown on the multiple is the return to the foundations…The eternal return is exactly the return of the sacred, the return of the forgotten, of the buried, the return of the light of the head with the intact face at the top of the Capitoline Hill. Who could have buried who, dead or alive, on this mound, in this hill? The return of the founded, the lightening fast return to the abominable gesture of foundation. The sacred comes out of the black box, and it calls back, while Rome, like Hercules, has its back turned. They flee, trembling, this not very certain place, and the cattle’s mad baritone calls them back. The city then returns, blind, crazy, to the cave, to the cavern, or to Numa’s grotto. It falls into the foundation trench; Rome always has one foot in this grave, and it falls back in. Return. It leaves it due to the abundant and perennial spring. This: the false rhythm of its time, the irregularity of the luminous arms around the star come from the compromise of the irreversible time of the water pourer – spring, Tiber, Albula, the time counter without return – with the monotonous, repetitive, legal time of the sacred. Should the linear carry it along, the festoon will be long; should the return impose itself in its turn, the ray will become short…The work of the negative is a null work; it nullifies itself at the point of return, at the sacred place of foundation. Real work only comes from diverging from this position, only comes from distance from this return, distance from the fragile disequilibrium’s around the thesis, only comes from separation in relation to the foundation, in relation to the inexorable invariance of the sacred, with zero information. Livy holds together, in the palm of his hand and from the origin, the question of the foundation, that of the negative, that of the return, that of the sacred. One little word resolves them: Ab. There is history on in tearing away from there. Rome can do so, Rome can’t do so. Hence the ruleless beating around the thesis. Ab urbe condita. An impaled insect struggles madly around a thorn. Culture is, quite simply, the distance from this foundation, barbarous.” – Michel Serres, Rome: The First Book of Foundations; pg. 97-98, Bloomsbury, 2015 (1983)

The mysterium tremendum is a reflection of the human self's relation to its own self. It is the relation of Fathers to their children; of fathers to their wives; of fathers with other fathers. There is much to fear in the way the world works - with the way power arbitrarily imposes itself on innocents.

The brain has been made afraid; the amygdala have grown - and the fruit which the snake gave Eve - the body - , no doubt, is the almond: the almond shaped amygdala which wont quit representing the world in stereotyped ways, because the Self fears its relatedness to the other. Trust is killed by the act of a violent murder.

The murderers - like the founders of Rome - seem self-aware that the cult they propogate means their own destruction - so they, the naive initiates, believe that the Mysterium Tremendum is essential - and why not? The logic of statist civilization - of growth and power - is that the masses eventually rebel and, like Romulus, kill the founders - or elite - of the civilization.

On Trump's Suicidality

Trump is not an enigma but a projection of the shadow layer of society. The shadow world sets up Trump not for fun, but for destruction. "If my comrades are not destined to rule the world, then away with it! A shower of Atom bombs upon it and in place of its meaningless chatter about "love" and "peace" the voice of the howling wind over its ruins". This is the logic of those gripped by the belief that the "Mysterium Tremendum" is an objective fact of existence, rather that an ecologically generated state of affairs that can be removed from human experience with education about the brain, development, and the nature of the mind.

If no archetype or pre-existing state of affairs makes nuking and destroying planet Earth a necessity, than the people under this impression are profoundly damaged by the civilizational process; damaged by the contexts of their growth and the immaturity of their semiotic and philosophical understandings.

For such an end - the belief that the only logical end of human civilization is complete and utter destruction - to occur would be an astonishingly tragic end.

But I don't believe it. I believe love is stronger than fear; and I believe reason is clear enough to recognize that "time heals all wounds" - especially when time made the wound to begin with.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I believe that it is real.

The majority of your arguments seem to be that love and positivity are trivial and only negative ideation (traumatology) is 'true'.

While there is a 'stick and carrot' motivation apparent in societal operation, you seem to have lost the carrot.

originally posted by: Astrocyte

On Trump's Suicidality

Trump is not an enigma but a projection of the shadow layer of society. The shadow world sets up Trump not for fun, but for destruction. "If my comrades are not destined to rule the world, then away with it! A shower of Atom bombs upon it and in place of its meaningless chatter about "love" and "peace" the voice of the howling wind over its ruins". This is the logic of those gripped by the belief that the "Mysterium Tremendum" is an objective fact of existence, rather that an ecologically generated state of affairs that can be removed from human experience with education about the brain, development, and the nature of the mind.

If no archetype or pre-existing state of affairs makes nuking and destroying planet Earth a necessity, than the people under this impression are profoundly damaged by the civilizational process; damaged by the contexts of their growth and the immaturity of their semiotic and philosophical understandings.

For such an end - the belief that the only logical end of human civilization is complete and utter destruction - to occur would be an astonishingly tragic end.

But I don't believe it. I believe love is stronger than fear; and I believe reason is clear enough to recognize that "time heals all wounds" - especially when time made the wound to begin with.

OK, I see that you have reversed your position a little in this second post and therefore my previous response was preemptive.

Apologies.

Also, Trump? Really?

best thread on ATS.

I think one step is needed for the other. Feeling fear and failing humbles and prepares the mind for the limbo and then the pull of the gate. We do not fear what is essentially death itself.

She is misunderstood.

a reply to: Astrocyte

If you think that our mind, is so vast and so great ... that we can perceive, understand or imagine what an omnipotent or omniscient being says, or wants.

You should get yourself locked up in a mental institution ... and get help.

One of "many" things, original christianity tried to teach ... was "humility", and humility in this aspect is to understand ... that you are less than an ant, less than anything ... and any thought of understanding, hearing or anything on that scale, of an omniscient being ... is vanity, to the brink of insanity.

Unfortunately, with time ... religions have wondered far from their cause, and their teaching are about as far from truth as anything can be. Religions today, are merely propaganda that has been hammered into the conscious of weak minds, for the purpose of global political control.

Or, to answer your question more directly ... no it is not Real, and never was.

originally posted by: bjarneorn
a reply to: Astrocyte

If you think that our mind, is so vast and so great ... that we can perceive, understand or imagine what an omnipotent or omniscient being says, or wants.

OT:
"I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High".


NT:
"Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods"?

You should get yourself locked up in a mental institution ... and get help.

That's not very Christian like... Wouldn't you agree?

The typical response of individuals witnessing the supernatural is fear.

1 Chronicles 21:16

Then David lifted up his eyes and saw the angel of the LORD standing between earth and heaven, with his drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem. Then David and the elders, covered with sackcloth, fell on their faces.

a reply to: StallionDuck

We are made in the Image of God, meaning we have an eternal soul. Absent God's presence for eternity is being absent all good things, love, light, warmth, joy, mirth, etc. Or in other words, hell.

Appreciate the replies to the thread.

I understand that this thread, like most of my threads, is complex - but I am trying to make my ideas more accesssible to others. But, of course, I am bound to be misunderstood if the person doesn't get what it is that is occupying my interests.

When I say "God", there's a certain idea that people carry when they hear it; and it is this which some people unconsciously project when they read my words, and so misunderstand what I mean.

In a philosophical and scientific sense, I believe the ideas of the Hebrew bible, Thomas Aquinas and other deep theo-logians can land upon a very sophisticated and 'extended' object. In philosophical language, "objects" are thoughts or ideas; the objects affect us when we interact with them. In biblical language, then, the God of the Bible is the highest theo-logical object possible.

But if this object a pre-existing state of affairs? In a certain sense, when the human orients to reality through the feeling of awe - which is the sense that reality is alive-with-meaning - enlivenment pours forth. Enlivenment is how modern philosophy refers to what te ancients would have called an "angelic influence". The things we do in the world constitute various object-relations that occur through particular affects - which form the ground and basis of our cognitive relationship. In this sense, every feeling is a "value" you hold; and when it is expressed - as it is inevitably and reflexively done - it becomes a judgement: a value for an other.

Now, evidently, it is impossible to think of the Hebrew Bible outside of the interactions of near-eastern culture and civilization. It is not possible to think this way; and so, we see that the Hebrew is derivative, no matter how "original" some religious people believe it to be, it was obviously based upon and referring back to preexisting traditions which existed in the developmental milueu of the scribe-priests who wrote it up. These stories were political as much as they were mystic-oriented, but a habit common to all early civilizations appears: the relationship of the self to the World so that the self is the dimunitive, and the World - or God - is everything.

YHWH: for those unaquainted with kabbalistic thinking, this name means "being", and so it was the ancient Israelite representation of the absolute truth in their day to day lives. Being is "God" - or 'going on being" - is God. Is that right? The name is not just a name, but a sort of alchemical formula - a magical incantation that contains all the powers and ideals associated with this conception of reality: Yod, Heh, Waw, Heh is said to be the world of emanation, the world of creation, the world of formation, and the world of action. The Sefer Yetzirah - book of formation - is a popular magical manual for how to "use" the various elements of the Hebrew alephbet to "control reality".

Because reality CAN be manipulated through the treating-of-reality as a subjective center of knowing i.e. in magick, ancient religions and ancient cultures seemed to handle their disagreements in terms of a way of thinking - theology - which, from my perspective, exposes the ignorance of the actors, and so, the important lessons taht Buddhism and Christianity, for instance, can teach us, is that you truly cannot resolve human conflicts through matches of power: this is precisely "feeding into the dynamics" which restore or lead-back, again and again, to the same sort of feeligns, thoughts and actions that create the problems were seeing.

In short, I think civilization antagonized the "Jews" - or Hebrews - into existence; I then think the Hebrews antagonized the pagan cults into existence. Back and forth, the religious and spiritual realities of different people from DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS led to an insane way of thinking: BOW TO MY GOD! OR feel the power of the TREMENDUM MYSTERIUM.

The Bible is a mishmash of views and perspectives that endlessly contradict and mindlessly provoke people who do not share the conditions-required to make use of the "book of instruction". What is wrong?

The Hebrew Bible may contain impressive truths; for instance, evolution is prefigured in its ealiest stories; and the founding myths, it is plausible, contradict the attitudes and views taken later on. The religion or philosophy is surprisingly pluralistic under a certain-light; and indeed, Rabbinic Judaism is likely an example of broken-telephone: a desire to keep alive a cherished and 'sacred' tradition to which one has lost the educational means to properly scaffold awareness to appreciate. Imagine soem of the books on AI today and how those books would seem to someone from the early 19th century. There would be words and ideas - numbers. Some themes would be appreciated, but much would go unappreciated because the BACKGROUND knowledge needed is absent. We extend our consciousness with education - but we should never forget that people who aren't similarly structured are simply unable to make heads or tails of a complex-subject matter because they do not realize how under-prepared they are.

The Hebrew Bible says that "3 generations" exist between the sins of the Father and his offspring. If we're generous - and there might be a basis for being so - this could be a recognition of epigenetic processes that exist between generations, so that, trauma suffered by a grandparent will be slightly represented in the parents situation, and if the parent works to resolve their own trauma, by the time of the grandchild, the affective-systems of the brain will be much more relaxed, so that the 4th generation can return to a state of "zero entropy".

More or less, we are built by love, and as Love. God is love, insomuch as Love is a creative power, and the Human being
suffers profound illusions when they attempt to separate themselves from the power of love, so that it becomes "dull care".

The art of the shaman is the ability to lose all sanity and then return.

a reply to: skunkape23


I don't see how you think your brain could be different from your relations. When you say "lose all sanity", what does that entail? If the Shaman kills or hurts another - if the Shaman drugs another to take them over - this is hardly an art to be proud about. The Shaman - like all primitive peoples - thinks the "gods" are more real than they are - even though the human constitutes the gods by his relations, and thus, the "gods" are nothing more than images of yourself.

The "art", then, of the shaman, is the same "art" attributed to the magician: to be a psychopath without "succumbing" to it.

No, no, no. People who murder or steal or harm others - be it to animal, or far worse, a self-aware human - do so because they believe the god to be the "highest truth". The shaman is therefore an idiot; as well as the magician, as they both exaggerate a way of thinking that has serious and fundamental semiotic consequences in the afterlife.

In short, shamanism, tantraism, etc, is not philosophically sophisticated or realistic. It includes doing things that absolutely warps-your-brain-functioning, and thus leading to a state of affairs where you worship demons, because, well, you're already into it - and since theres "no going back", you stick to it. But not out of anything more than abject fear.

a reply to: Astrocyte

You are interpreting my statement about 3/4 bass-ackwards.
I do unto others as I would have them do to me.
That's like, the first rule man.
I don't worship anything, much less "demons."
I may play a game of chess with one, but it pretty much stops there.

originally posted by: StallionDuck

OT:
"I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High".

NT:
"Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods"?

Which should answer your question ... let me try and paint a picture in your mind.

Cogito ergo sum (think therefore art)

Well, think and you are ... but God (if he exists) is a being existing in all places at once. But you, exist in a single place and only once. Putting this mathematically, you are an entity in single dimension, whereas God exists in a multiverse, in multiple dimensions.

It's like you zoom into a picture and see a 'dot'. This dot, is you ... now, zoom out of this picture but "note" your own dot position. As you zoom out, you see it's not a dot, but a picture of a large donkey, and the dot that were you ... is actually smack in the middle of that donkey's ass.

Get the picture?

Now, imagine this dot of yours ... going about describing itself as "God" ... that pathetic dot, doesn't even see the next dot in a picture larger than it can grasp.

Am I getting through here?

That's not very Christian like... Wouldn't you agree?

I'm not a "Christian" ...