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Quoting Gina Cerminara from her …handbook for religious sanity: (Yes, I know it is an oxymoron…)
"In the early years of the Church, many of the Church Fathers, such as Origen, believed in and wrote about reincarnation with great explicitness. In fact, Origen gave an explanation for ‘original sin’ which makes much ore sense that the usual theological dogma about ‘the fall of Adam’ For him original sin was the bad behavior of souls in lifetimes before the present.** ‘Is it not more in conformity with reason,’ he wrote, ‘that every soul …is introduced into a body according to its deserts and former actions?’
Reincarnation was not formally outlawed by the Catholic Church–at the instigation of the Emperor Justinian and his evil wife Theodosia–until the Second Council of Constantinople in AD 553*** Therefore there would seem to be grounds for suspicion that the references to reincarnation were willfully deleted from the early gospel manuscripts, and early books referring to it destroyed.*
Also, from the same source, in a passage chronicling the levels of meaning, from allegorical to esoteric, in the scriptures of many faiths as taught by the greats of those religions:
“…Origen, one of the early Fathers of the Church, set up three, rather than two, levels of meaning: the literal, the moral, and the mystic.”
Origen’s writings, among many, tend to support the idea that the Catholic Church as we see it today is not similar to the Church at its beginning, when it was clearly a derivation of mystical schools of sorts dating back to at least 5K BCE. In any case, all the councils, diets, and other gatherings on doctrine, whatever the claim of the Church regarding them, are the interpretations of men absent from the direct influence of the alleged founder of their Church. From His own words, a case can be made that Jesus Himself, if he ever was an actual person, taught what is and always has been the soul of religions that devolve into the superficialities necessary for something to be popular.
There is nothing wrong with that for the general public, as most have neither the desire, will, ability, nor occasion to delve more deeply than the surface of their faith, that faith in most cases being a matter of accidental acquisition and habit as are most. The tenets and forms of faith, such as the Catholic, as far as I have seen and experienced, tend not to encourage the kind of depth required for actual insight, even in the cases of many who are desperate and yet are constrained to piety.
But there are those who actually are capable of delving deeper into the ideas of Soul, God, reincarnation, and Unity, all of which ideas are to some extent, usually largely, misrepresented from their actuality by the Church. The usual remedy for Catholics who become aroused into a valid spiritual curiosity, is to leave the faith in order to gain clear access to ideas which their own faith is actually founded on, but which are hidden due to the ignorance and politickings of centuries of men lesser in capacity of perhaps any sort than the alleged Founder of their faith.
"In the early years of the Church, many of the Church Fathers, such as Origen, believed in and wrote about reincarnation with great explicitness. In fact, Origen gave an explanation for ‘original sin’ which makes much ore sense that the usual theological dogma about ‘the fall of Adam’ For him original sin was the bad behavior of souls in lifetimes before the present.** ‘Is it not more in conformity with reason,’ he wrote, ‘that every soul …is introduced into a body according to its deserts and former actions?’
Reincarnation was not formally outlawed by the Catholic Church–at the instigation of the Emperor Justinian and his evil wife Theodosia–until the Second Council of Constantinople in AD 553*** Therefore there would seem to be grounds for suspicion that the references to reincarnation were willfully deleted from the early gospel manuscripts, and early books referring to it destroyed.*
Also, from the same source, in a passage chronicling the levels of meaning, from allegorical to esoteric, in the scriptures of many faiths as taught by the greats of those religions:
“…Origen, one of the early Fathers of the Church, set up three, rather than two, levels of meaning: the literal, the moral, and the mystic.”
Origen’s writings, among many, tend to support the idea that the Catholic Church as we see it today is not similar to the Church at its beginning, when it was clearly a derivation of mystical schools of sorts dating back to at least 5K BCE. In any case, all the councils, diets, and other gatherings on doctrine, whatever the claim of the Church regarding them, are the interpretations of men absent from the direct influence of the alleged founder of their Church. From His own words, a case can be made that Jesus Himself, if he ever was an actual person, taught what is and always has been the soul of religions that devolve into the superficialities necessary for something to be popular.
There is nothing wrong with that for the general public, as most have neither the desire, will, ability, nor occasion to delve more deeply than the surface of their faith, that faith in most cases being a matter of accidental acquisition and habit as are most. The tenets and forms of faith, such as the Catholic, as far as I have seen and experienced, tend not to encourage the kind of depth required for actual insight, even in the cases of many who are desperate and yet are constrained to piety.
But there are those who actually are capable of delving deeper into the ideas of Soul, God, reincarnation, and Unity, all of which ideas are to some extent, usually largely, misrepresented from their actuality by the Church. The usual remedy for Catholics who become aroused into a valid spiritual curiosity, is to leave the faith in order to gain clear access to ideas which their own faith is actually founded on, but which are hidden due to the ignorance and politickings of centuries of men lesser in capacity of perhaps any sort than the alleged Founder of their faith.
Code:
*The fall of Adam, a story now widely regarded by theologians as not literally true, has an entirely different interpretation which Catholics in general have never even heard of. That interpretation has a rather different dynamic driving it, one that actually makes sense in the context of reason and history.
**see also J. Head & S.L. Cranston, *Reincarnation, an East-West Anthology* (New York, the Julian Press, 1961) p 196
****The Hidden History of Reincarnation* A.R.E. Press, Virginia Beach, Virginia
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That embodies my very first thought and concern about all of Christianity. I used to refer to it (many years ago) as “the missing gene in the resurrection” referring to the lack of emphasis on understanding that allowed an over emphasis to be manifest toward popularization.
I would be very interested in that “different” interpretation as I have a very firm understanding of that story held only by those who seek understanding.
I’m still a bit confused as to why understanding has not been realized as the backstop for faith. I have heard the argument that if one gains understanding, then they will not exercise faith. Although I understand the general concept of the argument, it reveals a misunderstanding of how understanding and faith work together in forming a more harmonious spirit. There is a required balance. But then I guess you have to have understanding to realize that.
If a Church depends too much upon mere faith and popularity, it leaves an ever growing fissure in its foundation. Jesus obviously taught with understandings. He did not merely say, “have faith in doing what I’m telling you to do”, but included many allegories to yield understanding. If he wanted mere faithful following, void of any understanding, then he would have merely been silent about anything but “the rules”.
But I’m not ready to pronounce wrong doing, merely perplexed as to what reasoning might be driving what seems to be a dangerously misplaced emphasis.
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" You are what we think…geez, that’s frightening!" – Lily Tomlin
Humans are believers. We consistently mistake belief for knowledge. We are “built” that way, and that has a pragmatic and ad hoc use. Nevertheless, the inherent faults we commonly incorporate into our thinking, of which there are primarily six, prevent us from experiencing a greater degree of one-to-one correspondence of our thinking with reality/Reality. An impartial examination, I believe,
, of history relative to faith, religion, and philosophy made form a standpoint of connecting dots of a Universal theme reveals a thread of the idea of transformation. It takes many forms, but is generally pointed to by the myth of the Hero who descends into hell or a hellish situation, and emerges victorious united with his Love.
These are wonderful stories, but have the remarkable feature of accommodating the growth of awareness from surface perceptions through to the greatest “spiritual” maturity possible for a a particular individual. Indeed, that, like all teaching tales and koans, is the point of their being. They are a lozenge of distillation of metaphysical experience coated in the appearance of what ultimately is the “red pill.” Pious religiosity is, alas, despite its advertised result, the “blue pill,” those colors referring to the well known Matrix movies, the first of which actually had some value in the genre of myth.
I have heard, though, that even as few as one in a million can actually penetrate the veils by use of the map factor of myths. Generally they are just good stories until that moment when one is seized with need or with the descent of insight which yields another perspective and meaning regarding these “stories.” Christianism in general has lost and as a body of faith refuses to restore the mythic value of the Jesus story, even in the case of those who have been able to move from the pious literalism of their faith even to the psychological, let alone the metanoic possibilities of the underlying Way inherent in the foundations of exoteric faiths.
In this regard, when we look at the myth of the “fall” of Adam, it can be seen that it is at least a symbolic representation of the development of human awareness to that stage from which it is possible to distinguish self from sense and environment. We are yet, even in our times and this culture, in the midst of this struggle, being held back largely by notions offered as the basis of christianist faiths.
The alleged “fall,” as I see it, is tied into the alternate understanding of the “fall” of Lucifer as well. Both have to do with the state of awareness. In one case, Adam, it is the development of the ability to be self observant and to distinguish categories and degrees of separation and manipulability, both internally in the psych, and externally in the world. This translates, perhaps, as the development of tools of perception, manipulation, and most importantly communication, that latter being the greatest proof of commonality of the permeable nature of awareness as based on a common or Unitary Consciousness which may be called “Source.” In the case of Lucifer, it is the symbolic loss of the feeling of Being “I AM” as the foundation of interpreting the world. Physical reality overlays Being with a sense of duality, which though not Real, in the sense of unchanging and foundational, appears relatively real in terms of pragmatism relative to physical survival.
In any case, the Church has abandoned, for whatever reason, the metanoic values of these myths and by popularizing the surface story of their christianist incarnation, have caused a tragedy of inconceivable proportions. That tragedy is the loss of opportunity for many to transcend their sense involvement with the physical world and re-assess their identity in terms of the underlying Invisible Reality of the manifest world.
This entire question rests on the understanding of the simplest and most common of words: “I.” Experiencing Right Identity is the Key, if one is capable, to understanding and living from the premise pointed to by the Teachings attributed to Jesus. His teachings are demonstrably identical to what might these days be called The Perennial Philosophy, though it has and is known by many labels, none adequate and all misleading. Many factors, from degree of faith to intellectual acumen, through information regarding even grammar, psychology, phenomenology, general semantics, religious history, etc,etc, and even unto downright grace and insight, can all factor into this re-assessment, voluntary or not, of Identity.
But though this all has been a clumsy and incomplete attempt to delineate some form of answer to your question, I can finally only say that it is all a matter of waking up. That is the whole point, in my estimation, of the Law of Love and both forms of the Golden Rule. If you know the “other” as yourSelf, how can you do harm, and how can you not support? The stories of the Bible and other holy books and all of esoteric mythology point to the whys of our condition today and to the Way of remembering who and what we, in Fact, are.
Humans are believers. We consistently mistake belief for knowledge. We are “built” that way, and that has a pragmatic and ad hoc use. Nevertheless, the inherent faults we commonly incorporate into our thinking, of which there are primarily six, prevent us from experiencing a greater degree of one-to-one correspondence of our thinking with reality/Reality. An impartial examination, I believe,
, of history relative to faith, religion, and philosophy made form a standpoint of connecting dots of a Universal theme reveals a thread of the idea of transformation. It takes many forms, but is generally pointed to by the myth of the Hero who descends into hell or a hellish situation, and emerges victorious united with his Love.These are wonderful stories, but have the remarkable feature of accommodating the growth of awareness from surface perceptions through to the greatest “spiritual” maturity possible for a a particular individual. Indeed, that, like all teaching tales and koans, is the point of their being. They are a lozenge of distillation of metaphysical experience coated in the appearance of what ultimately is the “red pill.” Pious religiosity is, alas, despite its advertised result, the “blue pill,” those colors referring to the well known Matrix movies, the first of which actually had some value in the genre of myth.
I have heard, though, that even as few as one in a million can actually penetrate the veils by use of the map factor of myths. Generally they are just good stories until that moment when one is seized with need or with the descent of insight which yields another perspective and meaning regarding these “stories.” Christianism in general has lost and as a body of faith refuses to restore the mythic value of the Jesus story, even in the case of those who have been able to move from the pious literalism of their faith even to the psychological, let alone the metanoic possibilities of the underlying Way inherent in the foundations of exoteric faiths.
In this regard, when we look at the myth of the “fall” of Adam, it can be seen that it is at least a symbolic representation of the development of human awareness to that stage from which it is possible to distinguish self from sense and environment. We are yet, even in our times and this culture, in the midst of this struggle, being held back largely by notions offered as the basis of christianist faiths.
The alleged “fall,” as I see it, is tied into the alternate understanding of the “fall” of Lucifer as well. Both have to do with the state of awareness. In one case, Adam, it is the development of the ability to be self observant and to distinguish categories and degrees of separation and manipulability, both internally in the psych, and externally in the world. This translates, perhaps, as the development of tools of perception, manipulation, and most importantly communication, that latter being the greatest proof of commonality of the permeable nature of awareness as based on a common or Unitary Consciousness which may be called “Source.” In the case of Lucifer, it is the symbolic loss of the feeling of Being “I AM” as the foundation of interpreting the world. Physical reality overlays Being with a sense of duality, which though not Real, in the sense of unchanging and foundational, appears relatively real in terms of pragmatism relative to physical survival.
In any case, the Church has abandoned, for whatever reason, the metanoic values of these myths and by popularizing the surface story of their christianist incarnation, have caused a tragedy of inconceivable proportions. That tragedy is the loss of opportunity for many to transcend their sense involvement with the physical world and re-assess their identity in terms of the underlying Invisible Reality of the manifest world.
This entire question rests on the understanding of the simplest and most common of words: “I.” Experiencing Right Identity is the Key, if one is capable, to understanding and living from the premise pointed to by the Teachings attributed to Jesus. His teachings are demonstrably identical to what might these days be called The Perennial Philosophy, though it has and is known by many labels, none adequate and all misleading. Many factors, from degree of faith to intellectual acumen, through information regarding even grammar, psychology, phenomenology, general semantics, religious history, etc,etc, and even unto downright grace and insight, can all factor into this re-assessment, voluntary or not, of Identity.
But though this all has been a clumsy and incomplete attempt to delineate some form of answer to your question, I can finally only say that it is all a matter of waking up. That is the whole point, in my estimation, of the Law of Love and both forms of the Golden Rule. If you know the “other” as yourSelf, how can you do harm, and how can you not support? The stories of the Bible and other holy books and all of esoteric mythology point to the whys of our condition today and to the Way of remembering who and what we, in Fact, are.
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