Archetypal Truths in the Bible

originally posted by: Specimen88
Should we call God, God even though he got outsmarted by spineless, lowly when, pea brain of a snake in a grass, even though snakes have plenty of backbone.

God is the whole..... non separation.

Language and words make believe there is separate things.....Alan Watts stated that 'thinking is thinging'.

What is there really? Only ever what is happening.

The snake with it's split tongue makes believe separation.

God is the only power......God is what is actually happening.....there is no thing other.

a reply to: glend
Adam was made in the image of God.

The image of God is this image that is appearing always.......nothing can appear outside of it.
Even thoughts of tomorrow or thoughts of yesterday appear in this image.

So strange that it is known that God is all powerful...all presence and all knowing yet there is belief in you as a separate person/ thing.

You can only seem to be separate when time stories appear......all is happening now so there can only be dreaming of separation presently.

Stories made of words make believe that there is a you traveling through time.

a reply to: Itisnowagain

Even thoughts of tomorrow or thoughts of yesterday appear in this image.

Yes but there is a distinction, The snake conjurs Eve to exist in past and future dreams. Whereas Adam only exists in the now.

aka - the eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me --Meister Eckhart.

If we allow the ego-brain to dominate, it will inudate our seat of consciousness (the eye) with noise. However if we become master of our ego-brain, by taming its roar, it will eventually allow spirituality to percolate into our awareness.

originally posted by: glend
a reply to: vethumanbeing

glend: Buddhism isn't about planting, more so, uprooting beliefs. So how did you realise truth?

How did I Grok this 'truth' (to know as both observer and observed; merged with what is being observed with extreme empathy)? I don't know; 'why am I here' was the starting point.

a reply to: vethumanbeing

I once drove through a swarm of locusts for an hour. It was soul destroying seeing thier lifes terminate on my windscreen second, after second. I wouldn't class myself as extremely empathy, but perhaps moreso on that side of the scale, than the other side.

I am sure your watcher has guided your path, as has mine.

originally posted by: glend
a reply to: vethumanbeing

I once drove through a swarm of locusts for an hour. It was soul destroying seeing thier lifes terminate on my windscreen second, after second. I wouldn't claim myself as extremely empathy, but perhaps moreso on that side of the scale, than the other side.I am sure your watcher has guided your path, as has mine.

I don't regale windshield insect deaths as karmic righteous deaths deserved (they probably volunteered for that experience). My watcher is ME but living outside this 3D existence as/in another version of myself MORE EVOLVED (just as yours is). Would it not be fun to have a meet and greet of guides/over souls? Cocktails at 8:00 PM.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Is Noah's story not just a rinse and repeat of the Sumerian flood account?

a reply to: vethumanbeing

If anything, I would say my watcher is far more simplistic. Its essense is that of love and concern. Existing in in a state of pure bliss.

In Hindu terms the watcher is called the Atman (aka soul). In Chirstianity its represented by the Son of Man. The Atman is in fact Brahman, which is why Jesus said, "the Son and Father are one".

Thus our watchers are one and the same. They cannot meet, because they were never seperated.

a reply to: gosseyn

There are so many assumptions in what you say. But let's first start with the obvious. You are basically saying that nothing of value has been said regarding human nature since the bible ? And not only that, but you also seem to say that nothing new can ever be expressed because everything that could be expressed is already contained within the bible ? If that is not the most glaring example of what a preconceived idea is, I don't know what is.

Do you read Hebrew? Yes, No?

Are you aware of the archetypal meanings of its teachings? Yes/No?

The entirety of our conversation hovers around this issue. If you think your interpretation is "as good as any other", you aren't getting what I'm trying to convey: human nature is FIXED. It is fixed because all go through the same sorts of situations around living - relating with one another, with our affects, with our thoughts, with the foods we eat, with the social situations we enter, with the anxieties and trepidations we feel, etc.

If you are developed enough intellectually and phenomenologically for this, than the bibles myths will make much sense to you. No one needs to convince you that they are more or less accurate descriptions. When I said "may be", I never said "is" - that is, the Bible is not anything but the creation of human beings. But it's lessons and meanings apply to all humans because all humans have the same sorts of experience in the world.

I know too little of Taoism or Buddhist Psychology to comment very deeply, but the latter one also contains teaching that apply to all humans.

Furthermore, as someone who typically speaks from the perspective of science, clearly I think there are other ways of describing the same phenomenon - and even capturing dimensions or elements that may have never been touched. But at the same time, I do not know the meaning of every verse or theme in the Bible, and so, I cannot comment on how deep its understanding really goes. I only know so much, and what I do know genuinely impresses me.

As to your discussion about maps. What exactly is the 'territory'? Is the territory non-verbal experience? Perceptions - images - affects? These too from a neuroscientific and systems perspectives are just as much maps of other maps. When it comes down to it, we're a function of relationships and there is never an effect or an event that doesn't have relata - or underlying units - which give rise to it. For instance, a perception of a flower entails the light which hits off the object/flower which then interacts with my retina, which feeds a neural impulse to my visual cortex which than transforms all the elements (edges, color, shade, depth etc) into a visual percept. Where is the territory if the percept is no more simple than the ingredients which create it? Is it not then a sort of 'mapping' - or reduction - of all the units which create it? It's real I would say. The ingredients are real, and so is the percept; and not only is the percept real, but my naming it, "flower", discriminates and plucks out a real object that is different in a way that makes it different from other objects. This is what language is - a mapping of a territory, yes, but the territory is itself a mapping of another territory.

Language too becomes a sort of territory when you realize that our ethical lives are bound by how we know the world, each of us, and how correlation and symmetry in meaning (language) is essential to our effective navigation of social life with one another.

How can you evolve if for you the best map ever drawn is a 2000 or 4000 years old map

Have you ever read the omega point by Pierre Telhard de Chardin? Maybe Human beings, as human beings, have already evolved to become what we are? Maybe our existence entails that a symbolic representamum has once been evolved (315,000 years ago according to archeologists) - that the representation, as an ideal attractor - is what stabilizes our existence in the mode that it does? No human being needs to be alive with the exact understanding of our nature, but it would be the case that we would converge again and again in our search for truth upon the same truth discovered by others in the past. There is not more than one truth, and furthermore, not all human beings are drowning in ignorance about their nature - its quite evident that 'enlightenment' is universal. But what may not be universal is bringing "heaven down to earth", or integrating every element of our living and being in the world with metaphysical ideas - for instance, in our socializing, embodiment, and reflective processes.

And I have to say, I have read many of your threads over the last years and I think you don't care if you're being understood or not. I don't think you really care about clarity and communication. I think you care more about the words that you use and what you think they represent. Your threads rarely spark a debate, because people don't understand what you mean, and I suspect they even feel like I do, which is that you don't care about being understood. You cling to words way too much, and it is obvious when you say something like :

This is true. I could make a greater effort to explain myself, but I haven't the time for that. If I'm writing a book, then that book, when its available, will do a far greater job explaining what I mean. It entails a lot of knowledge and acquaintance with science and philosophy and psychology; the books depth and breadth may still eliminate certain people from understanding it purely because they lack the educational resources/acumen to be able to 'metabolize' its complexity. Do you think bridging fields - like physics, cosmology, origin of life, biophysics, evolutionary biology, etc, is easy? If you aren't a massive reader already, then you aren't the audience I'm aiming to influence. Right now, the issue humans deal with is nominalism (believing language is arbitrary), which promotes a metaphysics of relativism. Which means I'm going to be very confusing for you, and given we always experience the other in terms of our own needs, if I seem sophisticated/complicated but you can't make sense of what I'm writing, then you might just be stimulated to represent me in a negative light, as arrogant, haughty, uncommunicative, etc, and some of that might be legitimate - I could communicate more - but at the same time, you can't communicate the lifetime of work that makes a certain subject matter meaningful. Do you know how to make sense of a cells molecular function? Does a molecular biologist? The nature of becoming an 'expert' at something means that some earlier ignored subtlety becomes meaningful, and in becoming meaningful, is assimilated at a higher level of organizational complexity. This is basically how the sciences progress, whether it be physics, cell biology, neuroscience, earth systems science, astrophysics, etc - we're always adding, and sometimes even modifying, our understanding based on new understandings.

For me, as a generalist who reads between fields, I am an expert in nothing - or at most, I could claim to be am an expert at what makes human experience the way it is, and how that relates to all the fields of human inquiry humans have engaged in. I understand a lot, but I am not an specialist in any particular science or philosophy.

a reply to: glend

Would you have preferred to get outside your car and walk through the lotus swarm?

I can get that killing an insect can feel wrong, and I never go out of my way to do it, and if I can avoid killing an or a bug in my path I will, but a lotus swarm is one of those things that you cannot help but kill a few hundred or thousand even if you tried your darndest to avoid it.

Nature, after all, created the lotus swarm, and put you in the midst of it, needing to get somewhere, and couldn't help but do what nature compelled you to do.

Is feeling "soul destroyed" then too extreme a response given you had no choice in the matter?

a reply to: glend

The interpretation I'm aware of, and the one that seems more metaphysically consistent with the structure of the real, see's Adam and Eve as not 'higher nature' or 'lower nature' - especially since the latter interpretation has a somewhat misogynistic ring to it - but as the two parts of our human experience.

For someone who likes Buddhism perhaps this interpretation will appeal to you.

Eve - Chawah - means 'living one", not breathe (which is ruach). Adam on the other hand means "blood" (dam means blood) with an aleph in front of it. Aleph is the grammatical prefix for the personal pronoun "I"; so 'Adam' can be interpreted as "I [am] blood". Eve on the other hand is completely a verb. Living one. The living one is our human body, living, breathing, feeling the fluxes of living-in-the-world. Taken together, Adam is the eternal static point of the eternal witness; Eve is the living body that the witness is experiencing, hence "I" "am the blood" expresses an identification between the eternal witness and its feeling body. It is an identification that is at the root of a healthy and truthful and non-dualistic way of being in the world: I am the blood means that Eve, Chawah, is, contrary to the traditional belief, is actually the template that Adam needs to follow in order to know what is true and what isn't. So, when my body feels tired, there's a regulatory homeostasis process at work which is dictating to the conscious reflect mind what is required; but since the mind can be "eccentric", or partly outside, of the processes of the body, the reflective, language based mind can if it wants to completely ignore this command of the body and do something else.

Hence, the narrative of Adam, Eve and the snake is really a narrative of how traumatic experience affects human phenomenology, of how the lower, more ancient, reptilian (metabolically conservative) brain misleads feeling states (Eve) by misrepresenting how the world works (if you read the verse in the Hebrew, the snake in fact misrepresents Gods commands to Adam). Adam is the knowing, reflective dimension of the mind, the mind that is eccentric to the body. The mind only knows the real, however, by reading the signs of its body - the living one, or Eve - in the right way. Eve tells Adam, or the reflective mind interfaces with its feeling body - and the effect is that the reflective mind believes what its body is saying. The origin of projection begins here - or is described here within the archetypal narrative.

Since human beings are in fact God, or the Universe, experiencing itself, Human beings are understood within the Torah's narratives as the transcendental dimension of God - the reflective part (Adam) - interfacing with its embodied, ecologically diffuse dimension - Eve. The Torah is really about the blueprint of where we came from, how we got there, and what we can do to get back there.

As for sensory experience; the issue is not the sensory world since that's the way we learn what is and isn't real - remember Eve, the feeling body, and the fact that we refer to its states to know the real? Sensation is the truest part of what we are - indeed, the REAL, the nature of God, is symbolically encoded in the world we perceive with our senses. Denying the sensory world is the beginning of the root of evil, and hence, the snake has Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil i.e. the misrepresentation of the real becomes a "tree", which is a metaphor for a system (trees are the metaphor used in many sciences for organizing and classifying things); when we misname things, we become committed to our representation through attachment processes; we misname reality and begin to see things in 'black and white', without the complexity and non-linearity of the 'tree of life' - the ecological way of knowing.

The sin of Adam and Eve is the sin of the reflective mind not reading the feeling body so that it properly understands the ecological nature of why it feels the way it does. By misreading the body, a false reality is set up - the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - which is what sets up the whole delusion of being separate from God to begin with i.e. "you can be as God" as the snake utters deludedly imagines that the ideal can be anything other than what the REAL is. The only lasting, stable truth, as climate change is very well showing us, is a truth that acknowledges the relational nature of things.

a reply to: Astrocyte

The territory is anything and everything that lies beyond perception, what exists without going through the filtering of perception. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound ? And the map is our perception of the territory. We all use maps, because everything we think we know has first to go through our senses and our brain. The only thing we can do is to make sure our maps are as precise as possible, knowing that a map could never be as precise as the territory, otherwise the map would just become the territory. Whatever we say about anything, whatever we think we know about anything, we are always wrong. Our understanding is always imprecise and incomplete, because our only choice is to use maps. In a way, the only thing we can be sure about, is that we don't know, and this is a strength in itself.

Words are maps. When you see a tree, you don't take that tree into your head. There is nothing inside your head that resembles the reality of the object "tree". And later when you talk about that tree, to yourself or to others, you are not talking about the real object, but about an abstraction. You talk about a map of the real object, a simplified mental object that we can just call an abstraction. The real tree is an incredibly complex object, that may not even be comprehensible if it's considered as an isolated object, cut from everything else around it. But our brain and our senses cannot do better than that.

Problems arise when you mistake the map for the territory. Language is just a map. And your map may not be my map. For Bob a tree might be just firewood, for Leon it might be more like a house for birds, because Leon loves birds and he has studied them all his life. For a physicist, it's a bunch of atoms, for a biologist it's a lifeform, for an artist it's just a beautiful thing, for a war strategist it might be something that is just waiting to be turned into weapons or defenses or war boats, etc.. It all depends on life experience. For someone who has been bit by a dog when he was young, dogs might just be dangerous creatures, and he see all dogs the same way. So, what are we really talking about when we talk about a tree ? Are we talking about the real object, or are we talking about a map ? And are we talking about my map or your map ? We will talk about a map, and then we will start talking about a map of the map, and then about a map of the map of the map, etc.. We will keep abstracting the real object until what we talk about becomes just a pure fiction, something that doesn't exist in the territory, just stuff arbitrarily drawn on our maps.

Human nature is not fixed. What is a human being ? What does your map tell you ? Where did you get your map ? Did you question your map ? How do you know your map isn't just a fiction ? If you keep rehashing in your head the same stories with the same protagonists that act and react the same way(because it's always the same story), and all that in the same environment, it is no wonder that you believe that human nature is fixed. How could you believe otherwise ? That's just called having preconceived ideas. Everything you see in the now is tainted with the same color and every music sounds the same. It's like an explorer who explores the territory, and when he discovers something new, he chooses to ignore it just because it's not on his map. He says "this can't be, my map is so perfect that there must be a problem with the territory". And the problem goes even deeper because not only you choose not to perceive what's new and what's changing, but you also don't allow it to happen : you will create rules, and structures, and systems that won't allow for any potentiality to be expressed.

That's the problem with humans, they don't update their knowledge. There is no mechanism integrated into our brains for updating information, because for the brain, information is just information, and whether this information is related to the territory, to reality, or not, the brain doesn't see it. Whether it's a fiction or not, the brain is blind to that, it just processes information. The belief that human nature is fixed is just a dogma, the result of accumulated information over 1000s of years that we don't update. We need to have a method in order to make sure our maps are kept up-to-date, and it just happens that we have invented science, something which at its core is a method of investigation. But we don't apply that to our everyday life way of thinking, and we even believe that there are domains where a method of investigation is not needed. The reason is that we have always separated mind and body, and we think science is only good for the material realm, for the lowly terrestrial, while the mind is the expression of the divine and as such is perfect as it is, so it would be useless to try to improve it and even blasphemous to try.

No, I don't read Hebrew, and I don't think there is anything in that language that couldn't be translated into French or English with simple words and expressions. And even if I was able to read it, I would just consider the text for what it is, the product of certain people in a certain place at a certain time.

I may answer your other points in a later post.

a reply to: Astrocyte

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
— Genesis 2:16–17

Yes it is a blueprint. But we have to remember that the garden is within us. That the tree's are integral to our nature. So the above warning is not saying to reject the tree of Good or Evil (or our senses). Its warning us not to taste from the tree. When we taste somethng, we classify it as good or bad, which empowers our egoic mind to crave for things it percieves as good (sex, bigger hourse, yacht, tesla, icecream, etc etc etc). These cravings are impinted on our soul, which when we die, forces us to return to try quench those cravings (thou shalt surely die = reincarnation).

To understand the process entirely we need examine the Tree of Life. Its the Sefirot or 10 levels of consciousness. The lowest in which man exists now, only allows us to partly percieve the collective at an unconscious level. Whereas the uppermost consciousness allows full collective consciousness in an awakened state. The restriction in us attaining the upper levels are gates which only allow light from anti-egoistic desires to pass. If you want read more on this matter, the Zohor explains it in laborious detail.

God gave man free choice. Thus sin is not a punishment. Its a process that teaches us the emptiness in dualities.

btw the locust swarm took me over an hour to drive through!

originally posted by: glend
a reply to: vethumanbeing
If anything, I would say my watcher is far more simplistic. Its essense is that of love and concern. Existing in in a state of pure bliss.In Hindu terms the watcher is called the Atman (aka soul). In Chirstianity its represented by the Son of Man. The Atman is in fact Brahman, which is why Jesus said, "the Son and Father are one".
Thus our watchers are one and the same. They cannot meet, because they were never seperated.

But one can be aware of the separation..that being I am separate in body from my creator in a physical form. I must then realize this sadness is caused by a separation from It. The state of knowing or gnosism allows me to (with great empathy) merge with It. I know I am separate at this time because I am progressing an individualized soul. Why? so that I can, as God know myself better. This is why I/It divided myself/Itself into 3 trillion parts.

a reply to: vethumanbeing

Yes agree, but the mind has also been programmed by DNA to desire strength, riches, success so it can spread its seed to the masses. So we need be mindful of the reasons behind its needs and wants as well.

The mind lives in its world of dualities. Non-duality (Spiritualism) is foreign to its nature. So if we live in our mind, yes we will feel that separation

a reply to: glend
Nonduality is not spiritualism.
Mind is simply thought arising.

No one can live in the mind but thoughts speak as if there is someone.

originally posted by: Itisnowagain
a reply to: glend
Nonduality is not spiritualism.
Mind is simply thought arising.

No one can live in the mind but thoughts speak as if there is someone.

Why not consider that the sense of "I", is a human sense like sight, hearing, touch, etc.. It is a clutch. Just like my eyes lie to me about everything that light actually really displays, just like my ear lies to me when it makes me believe that sound waves really make noise while in reality sound waves are just silent, or just like my sense of touch which makes me believe I am really touching something while in reality we don't really touch anything because of electromagnetic repulsion between the particles of my hand and the particles of the object ?

When I see the red color, this red color doesn't exist anywhere else but in my head. It is an interpretation of reality. In the same way, the sense of "I" might just be a lie, but a useful one, just like seeing red or blue or hearing music. All that is the fruit of evolution, and evolution is much more mysterious and interesting than what people seem to think.

a reply to: Itisnowagain

I didn't realise "spiritualism" is defined as religious movement. thanks for correcting.

originally posted by: glend
a reply to: Itisnowagain

I didn't realise "spiritualism" is defined as religious movement. thanks for correcting.

It is not; it is distinct to that individualized soul as a truth only unto itself. No one can know your truth but you.

a reply to: gosseyn

If you don't acknowledge evolution, you and I cannot have any meanngful discussions about the nature of the real, since your whole attitude seems to be there is no stucture or order which can be relied upon to guide us in our knowing - a sort of epistemological agnosticism - and since reality is in essence processual, and human beings are structures of interactions between objects in time, we cannot effectively understand our nature without understanding the history of interactions between objects in evolutionary time. Since symmetry is the blueprint for knowing the real, symmetry is the fundamental conceptual parameter in guiding humans in their understanding of what is what. Furthermore, you essentially ignored all my examples as to what I mean by a "fixed nature"; for instance, you ignoring my example irritates me, because effective human interaction demands recognition of the others intentions - not overriding them with projective needs to enforce your own narrative. When that happens, we're basically caught up in a solipsistic situation where we don't effectively communicate because one or both parties aren't making an effort to understand the argument of the other.

You've also contradicted yourself countless times in your post. First you say that the territory is everything beyond perception, and then you say you shouldn't confuse the map for the territory. But if we know the world through perception (or perhaps you may be dualistically associating perception with external sensation alone?) then that means we know the world only through maps: the territory is by your own definition beyond perception. To be beyond perception means that passive perceptual processes are themselves maps of the cycles of cognitive activity taht exist between ourselves and external objects and ourselves and emergent internal objects. Maybe the confusion between us lies in you relating to internal objects as somehow unrelated to external object perception - as if there wasn't just a singular dynamical process at work within us.

That's the problem with humans, they don't update their knowledge. There is no mechanism integrated into our brains for updating information, because for the brain, information is just information, and whether this information is related to the territory, to reality, or not, the brain doesn't see it.

The brain and experiential knowing are not two different processes. The brain works through symmetry dynamics - or dissipative structures that are regulated through what....? Correlation in knowledge between organism and world. Symmetry links the logic of brain processes (as geometrodynamics) with the logic of cognitive appraisal of an environment.

No, I don't read Hebrew, and I don't think there is anything in that language that couldn't be translated into French or English with simple words and expressions. And even if I was able to read it, I would just consider the text for what it is, the product of certain people in a certain place at a certain time.

So you don't know Hebrew, yet you feel certain - in ignorance, yet still for some reason you're certain - that it doesn't make a difference.

My asking you if you know Hebrew is about you're understanding and comprehension of the Hebrew Bible. Since the Bible uses names and words metonymically and metaphorcially, not knowing Hebrew basically means you don't - and CAN'T - know the meaning of the texts. Non-Hebrew translatations do not convey these meanings as the meanings are related to grammatical constructions and word roots. If you don't know that QaYiN (Cain) comes from the word root QaNaH (to acquire) you can't appreciate the metonymic metaphysical intention of the narrative. If you don't know Enoch means "to dedicate", and IRaD is a contraction of the words "to flee" and to "witness", and so suggesting, "to flee witnessing", you can't understand what you're reading as all the meaning is contained in the entire lexicon of the language.