Events in Nature

[tonyrey]

Hi,

Read 398 and 400. I don’t see any way to interpret this other than that physical death also is a consequence of the first sin:
vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p7.htm

1. 385 At the beginning of the paragraph on the Fall:

“Yet no one can escape the experience of suffering or the evils in nature which seem to be linked to the limitations proper to creatures: and above all to the question of moral evil.”

“seem” is the operative word. If it were a dogma the statement would be:

“The experience of suffering or the evils in nature are linked to the limitations proper to creatures: and above all to the question of moral evil.”

The most decisive objection to the “physical death due to sin” theory is that throughout the Old and New Testaments there are references to “sheol” and “the bosom of Abraham”. The dead are certainly not viewed as extinct. Why did Jesus say “Fear not those who kill the body but the soul”? There is a clear distinction between physical and spiritual death.

 

[Detales]

Tonyrey,

I enjoyed your posting #20. All the dynamics are, by my lights, accurate, though mislabled by implication in two instances. They are right, but mislabled, and this mislabeling is an area where the Church has, inadvertantly or not, caused some confusion.

The first of two alternative adjustments I submit for your consideration is this: that what is described in your text as “born into an environment where there is moral evil” is in fact a simple description of human ignorance. That ignorance results in an incompetent paradigm handed from generation to generation as truth, therefore causing clashes between individuals on up to nations. This includes every parochial belief system inadequately designed to cope with a local actuality, familial or geographic or whatever, taken habitulally and expected to be applied as “truth” over other systems also thus designed.

So these parochial systems designed by default up to the point of least common acceptability in whatever social group, are expected to apply, by extension and assumption, over other folks equally valid and locally necessary assumptions. The error here is one of depth, and in the sense of the brain being wired to deal with environ-mental issues at least superficially, it may be called “original.”

But though it is now accepted in many circles that DNA is thermodynamically inherent in the physics of matter, matter doesn’t compose symphonies or write poetry, or make gods in its own image and likeness, except bigger.

That last is a clue to what, in my observation, is a key to the difficulty we are experiencing as the exquisit horrors of religious differences. The gods we have made, as a race, are composed on the basis of sideways observation, despite sidereal or aesthetic components.

This is in part why historicaly there has been a “class” of “holy” men or women. Interestingly, things have always been better for the common man when the feminine was ascendant, but that is a sidebar. But the point is that “god” is not everyone’s all consuming interest, as we as a race are very commited to feeding our bodies and being comfortable, or being busy getting other people’s stuff. ( www.storyofstuff.com ) Unfortunately, there has also historically been an overlap between the organization of god belief systems and power. Holy men and women who are exactly and only that are rare. But they do exist.

The cheif characteristic of such holy men and women is the direction of their gaze. We, as common citizens, or consumers as we are called today in this country in order to facilitate comfort and sideways stuff, look mostly sidways and have a bit of depth. Holy men and women of a genuinely holy character look sideways as necessary, but mostly have depth. They are Einsteins of depth compared to, yes, you and me.

I have no doubt that some of these have actually seen God and lived. But they died as ordinary people because they were born into a new Understanding. That is capitalized to distinguish that sort of understanding from the sort of sideways understanding we use to get stuff and be comfortable. Sometimes these holy men and women diegn to share with us what they have learned, as if that was possible.

We think we know things when we can make intellectual connections. But knowing God is not an intellectual connection. It is an experience. But because we collect stuff and it makes us feel good to have it, we take what holy men and women say and think that what they said is the stuff. It is not. What they say points to an experience so that you can have that experience as well. But we are too concerned with having stuff.

In the case of religion, that stuff is intellectual and emotional and called “faith.” The more of it we have, the better we feel, because we have “holy stuff.” In the mean time we have neglected to go down the path that the genuine holy men and women went down in order to experience God and die to the ignorance that we have used to construct our parochial systems of coping tha we think that everyone ought to share because our system is ours and it is therefore right.

We fail to notice in all this that genuine holy men and women have bypassed the component of locality and even of egoistic personality. This makes them pink monkeys among the brown, a very very dangerous position. This is because, as many pink monkeys have told us, we are stupid because we don’t think from the right premises, and therefore have conflicts and kill pink monkeys. You see, genuine holy men and women think after they have experienced the premise of Universality, or the Allness of God. This is very unlike most of us who reason from our own personal sense of survival. For a holy person this premise is unnecessary by reason of its ultimate unreality, despite its temporary actuality.

But as we have seen, holy men and women are interpreted by lesser beings who only think they understand them. So they have an understanding of the words of the holy that is different certaily in degree, but most importantly in kind.

That is what happened with Jesus. He, despite being the Son of God, has been horribly misunderstood and tragically misinterpreted. This activity of fervent misconstruing has, in our local case, been called the Church. That Church is the result of the scrambling by lesser beings to get more spiritual “stuff.” Impossible. God IS. God has no parts capable of codification or explanation except as a poor attempt at a signpost.

On the other hand, Goodness, as lived by someone who has seen God, is a different matter. Goodness and religion are different planes of experience. Read the news. But being in the presence of Love is like an induction field that makes an ordinary nail into a powerful magnet. The induced nail experiences the actuality of the Force of Love and is transformed. Now does that trump dogma, or what?

 

[tonyrey]

Tonyrey,

I enjoyed your posting #20. All the dynamics are, by my lights, accurate, though mislabled by implication in two instances. They are right, but mislabled, and this mislabeling is an area where the Church has, inadvertantly or not, caused some confusion.

The first of two alternative adjustments I submit for your consideration is this: that what is described in your text as “born into an environment where there is moral evil” is in fact a simple description of human ignorance. That ignorance results in an incompetent paradigm handed from generation to generation as truth, therefore causing clashes between individuals on up to nations. This includes every parochial belief system inadequately designed to cope with a local actuality, familial or geographic or whatever, taken habitulally and expected to be applied as “truth” over other systems also thus designed.

So these parochial systems designed by default up to the point of least common acceptability in whatever social group, are expected to apply, by extension and assumption, over other folks equally valid and locally necessary assumptions. The error here is one of depth, and in the sense of the brain being wired to deal with environ-mental issues at least superficially, it may be called “original.”

That last is a clue to what, in my observation, is a key to the difficulty we are experiencing as the exquisit horrors of religious differences. The gods we have made, as a race, are composed on the basis of sideways observation, despite sidereal or aesthetic components.

This is in part why historicaly there has been a “class” of “holy” men or women. Interestingly, things have always been better for the common man when the feminine was ascendant, but that is a sidebar. But the point is that “god” is not everyone’s all consuming interest, as we as a race are very commited to feeding our bodies and being comfortable, or being busy getting other people’s stuff. ( www.storyofstuff.com ) Unfortunately, there has also historically been an overlap between the organization of god belief systems and power. Holy men and women who are exactly and only that are rare. But they do exist.

The cheif characteristic of such holy men and women is the direction of their gaze. We, as common citizens, or consumers as we are called today in this country in order to facilitate comfort and sideways stuff, look mostly sidways and have a bit of depth. Holy men and women of a genuinely holy character look sideways as necessary, but mostly have depth. They are Einsteins of depth compared to, yes, you and me.
We think we know things when we can make intellectual connections. But knowing God is not an intellectual connection. It is an experience. But because we collect stuff and it makes us feel good to have it, we take what holy men and women say and think that what they said is the stuff. It is not. What they say points to an experience so that you can have that experience as well. But we are too concerned with having stuff.

In the case of religion, that stuff is intellectual and emotional and called “faith.” The more of it we have, the better we feel, because we have “holy stuff.” In the mean time we have neglected to go down the path that the genuine holy men and women went down in order to experience God and die to the ignorance that we have used to construct our parochial systems of coping tha we think that everyone ought to share because our system is ours and it is therefore right.

We fail to notice in all this that genuine holy men and women have bypassed the component of locality and even of egoistic personality. This makes them pink monkeys among the brown, a very very dangerous position. This is because, as many pink monkeys have told us, we are stupid because we don’t think from the right premises, and therefore have conflicts and kill pink monkeys. You see, genuine holy men and women think after they have experienced the premise of Universality, or the Allness of God. This is very unlike most of us who reason from our own personal sense of survival. For a holy person this premise is unnecessary by reason of its ultimate unreality, despite its temporary actuality.

But as we have seen, holy men and women are interpreted by lesser beings who only think they understand them. So they have an understanding of the words of the holy that is different certaily in degree, but most importantly in kind.

That is what happened with Jesus. He, despite being the Son of God, has been horribly misunderstood and tragically misinterpreted. This activity of fervent misconstruing has, in our local case, been called the Church. That Church is the result of the scrambling by lesser beings to get more spiritual “stuff.” Impossible. God IS. God has no parts capable of codification or explanation except as a poor attempt at a signpost.

On the other hand, Goodness, as lived by someone who has seen God, is a different matter. Goodness and religion are different planes of experience. Read the news. But being in the presence of Love is like an induction field that makes an ordinary nail into a powerful magnet. The induced nail experiences the actuality of the Force of Love and is transformed. Now does that trump dogma, or what?

A superb survey. The only reservations I have is that not all evil can be attributed to ignorance and Jesus founded the Church precisely so that there would be continuity in His teaching. For all their faults the bishops, priests and laity have handed down the beliefs and values He gave to the Apostle. As a result there have been many saints and mystics within its fold. That doesn’t mean they haven’t existed outside the Church.

 

[Detales]

Hi Tonyrey, (part1)

Thanks for your words. I completely and fully, as far as my experience allows, understand your reservations. I am speaking as a former hotly proselytyzing Roman Catholic. I was such until I had an unexpected dose of the very kind of experience refered to in my post. I had to, by force of that experience, re-assess my understanding of the basis of my faith. I was forced to do what few are: I had to inventory my ways and means of aquiring my faith, and get very pro-active in the way of examining my motives and methods.

I now see clearly that the Church has developed a very cogent and functional methodology in its reasoning an recommended practices, despite the deviations from those, according to my own pew surveys and items in the news, of nearly everyone. My contention is that the words and intentions of Jesus, being for the most part filtered through men of far less understanding, through languages, motives, cultures, and time, have been skewed. this is despite the alleged guidance of The Holy Spirit, which I hold absolutley sacred, and despite alleged papal infalability, something I construe as somewhat questionable on scholarly grounds. They have been skewed in a way that makes the current interpretations to a large degree prophylactic of the very kind of interior experience that would open the doors of perception to a more, OK, “Catholic” in the original sense, understanding. This prophylaxis would be mostly in the area of cognative exegesis.

That is to say that there are certain assumptions in the canon that would prevent the cognative acceptance of certain inevatibilities inherent in such an experience. I can only, again, within the context of the Church, refer to St. Thomas. He, after what must have been a stupendeous realization, stopped writing his magnificent works, saying about all of it that it was “as straw.” That is exactly how drastic I understand a genuine revalation to be.

I do believe that “ordinary” faith is well and good for the very large majority of people. Nevertheless, there are folks such as yourself that may have the capacity for, if not the experiential need or desire, to see and experience a more complete paradigm. I was lucky in that I was unceremoniously forced itno a shift that gave me at least a perspective from outside my train of thought. In fact, it is pretty well established that after the “age of reason” it take some sort of shock or other to derail one’s habitual thinking in order to expand the cognative or emotional aspects of one’s horizons. Or break them, in some instances, unfortunately.

I have never recommended or even encouraged my particular conclusions, but I am adamant in recommending to each one to constantly re-assess their experience. We live in a state of awareness that is very limited in scope. We are fed information that is taylored to economic or political ends, for the most part. The whole of the spectras of inquiry and experience outside a very narrow band is actively discouraged byt the mentality of conformity.

Yet we have an opportunity in this short life to encompass the whole of human awareness if we but wish to go beyond the ordinariness of day-to-day. That is true in scope of paradigm, if not in aquisition of the infinite minutiae of intellectual bits. But our possibility is vast.

The greatest dimension in this possible exploration is the very understanding of the nature of our own awareness, and the Consciousness it is an atribute of. My experience of discontinuity with the ordinary perception of myself was in this realm. It is not largely or widely known that we have as a natural and intrinsic attribute a different foundation of our perceptual world that is of a Universal nature. It is distinct from intellection, reason, and even from time. It is, if I may be so bold, what in my estimation, is the experiencable Soul factor of our being. This factor may be experienced, not as the emotionalaity ordiarily associated with the concept, but in its purity as a state by anyone willing to do the work, though such individuals are exceptionally rare. Some are able to experience it as a grace. Maybe that is what happened to me.

Nevertheless, I can safely and certainly report that the ordinary basis of our daily experience is the veil that hides the actual nature of our being. It is unknowing of this datum and the vital experience of this datum and its inevitalble significanc which I refer to when I say “ignorance.” In that sense, I do certainly and completely feel that ignorance is at the root of our delimas. They appear to be morally tainted, but are in fact simply uninformed by the experience of the universality inherent in the experiential knowledge of Soul.

I can say this on the basis of one simple observation. To someone who has not experienced the profundity of the actual nature of their own being, the world is sensually presinted as discreet from oneself, and therefore is emotionally and intellectually understood at a base level as an adversarial relationship. This is a false perception, and if there is an original sin, this is it. The fact of the matter, the Garden of Paradise, is the self knowledge of the actuality of right Identity. The loss, or covering over of the original feeling of connection by the exigencies of daily life, supported byt the habitual interpretations and aquisition of the worldly stuff and comfort dynamic, is the expulsion from the Garden. If you remember that the human is composed of both intellect and feeling, the masculine and feminine, it will become ap-pearent (that’s a pun) who the Adam and Eve were. Of course, Eve, the feminine ate the “fruit” first. She, or the feminine felt the sense of separationas an implication, and Adam, the masculine, confirmed it by reason. The angel with the firy sword it the elevated thought one must pass through to regain the Garden. There is more, but I think you might get the point.

 

[Detales]

(part 2)

I expect no one to agree with this view. It is merely my own accounting of my own experience. However, I do find in retrospect that it is in harmony with the age old dynamic of The Perennial Philosophy. That much is interesting, at least. Think about it. There is a common understanding of the paradigm of existance that has been independently arrived at by individuals for millenia. It transcends time, culture, geography, intellect, education, economics, politics, science, gender, whatever. It is consistent over all that, and causes no wars, rivalries, or separations. That might be worthy of thought.

 

[Coder]

Hi,

The statement in 400 is clear that returning to the ground is a consequence of sin.

1. 385 At the beginning of the paragraph on the Fall:

“Yet no one can escape the experience of suffering or the evils in nature which seem to be linked to the limitations proper to creatures: and above all to the question of moral evil.”

“seem” is the operative word. If it were a dogma the statement would be:

“The experience of suffering or the evils in nature are linked to the limitations proper to creatures: and above all to the question of moral evil.”

As for 385, whether or not suffering (including physical death) is linked to our limitations as creatures does not appear relevant to the teaching that the original failure to cooperate with God’s grace has left us subject to suffering. 385 is merely proposing a more thorough explanation that it is our limitations apart from cooperation with God’s grace that result in suffering (including physical death) as opposed to some other factor. Note also that our limitation apart from God’s grace also subjects us to weakness against temptation and evil. I propose that 385 combined with 400 indicates that Adam and Eve before sin were not subject to their limitations merely as created beings.

In regards to the statement of Our Lord that indicates not to fear physical death, this does not mean that physical death is not a consequence of sin. Whether to fear something or not does not address the cause of it.

 

[Eddie_Mac]

Only fundamentalists believe in the garden of Eden. Some individuals must have been the first to distinguish good from evil and sinned at some point in history but adverse weather has existed since the origin of the universe!

I believe that there was a Garden of Eden and I see no relation between being a fundamentalist and believing in the Garden as the truth.

Why would it not be the truth?

Do you not believe in Adam and Eve?

What parts of scripture do you also not believe?

Do you believe in the great flood?

Do you believe that the plagues in Egypt are just stories?

Do you not believe that there was a great earthquake on the instant that Jesus died on the cross?

I actually believe that the Garden exists today at this very instant, somewhere, hidden from us by G_D, just like heaven is hidden.

Read some of Blessed Catherine Emmerich’s writings.

Eddie Mac

 

[tonyrey]

I believe that there was a Garden of Eden and I see no relation between being a fundamentalist and believing in the Garden as the truth. Why would it not be the truth?

I respect your belief but it is incompatible with the theory of evolution.

Do you not believe in Adam and Eve?

I believe that Adam and Eve represent the first human beings.

What parts of scripture do you also not believe?
Do you believe in the great flood?
Do you believe that the plagues in Egypt are just stories?

This sounds like a cross-examination! I believe there is much mythology in the Old Testament, particularly Genesis.

Do you not believe that there was a great earthquake on the instant that Jesus died on the cross?

I do indeed. Whether or not we believe the Old Testament literally is far less important than believing the New.

 

[tonyrey]

(part 2)

I expect no one to agree with this view. It is merely my own accounting of my own experience. However, I do find in retrospect that it is in harmony with the age old dynamic of The Perennial Philosophy. That much is interesting, at least. Think about it. There is a common understanding of the paradigm of existance that has been independently arrived at by individuals for millenia. It transcends time, culture, geography, intellect, education, economics, politics, science, gender, whatever. It is consistent over all that, and causes no wars, rivalries, or separations. That might be worthy of thought.

I agree with much of what you say, particularly with regard to the Perennial Philosophy,
but I still believe in the Apostolic Church..