A neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.”Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred — whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics — is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study. The results were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study showed, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.

Berns headed a team that included economists and information scientists from Emory University, a psychologist from the New School for Social Research and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France. The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

“We’ve come up with a method to start answering scientific questions about how people make decisions involving sacred values, and that has major implications if you want to better understand what influences human behavior across countries and cultures,” Berns says. “We are seeing how fundamental cultural values are represented in the brain.” …

Read more here.

Now the Virgin Mary’s likeness has popped up on a stainless steel wall inside Hamburger Mary’s, an Ybor City restaurant with customers more likely to show up for gay karaoke nights and celebrity drag-queen shows than religious revelations.

“These two ladies in one of the booths saw the image during Sunday brunch,” said day manager Melanie Todd, who goes by the name Melanie Minyon (pronounced like mignon) when performing in blue wigs and over-the-top sexy gowns at the restaurant’s nighttime drag shows. “One of them was in tears she was so moved, and they were both carrying on and taking pictures.

“Now, we serve all-you-can-drink Bloody Marys for Sunday brunch,” Todd said, “so I think it’s safe to say there are lots of visions being seen around here then. Let’s just call it a tequila afternoon.”

This image of Jesus’ face was found on a sock among items of laundry in Kent. Sarah Crane, from Orpington, was stunned when she hung her laundry out to dry and discovered the face of Jesus staring back at her.

I’d left the washing out to dry overnight – and it had probably been sitting there a bit too long when I noticed the face in the sock,’ she said. ‘I called my boyfriend over straight away – we could both clearly see the face of Jesus in the sock.

Miss Crane said she began making a shrine to the sock, but when she moved it, some of its delicate creases fell away and the image is now not as clear.

Two men have been arrested in for allegedly killing a 7-year-old girl and cutting out her liver in a ritual sacrifice to ensure a better harvest, police said Monday.

Lalita Tati disappeared in October and her dismembered remains were found a week later, Rajendra Narayan Das, a senior police officer, told The Associated Press. Tati was walking home after watching television at a neighbor’s house when she was kidnapped.

Police arrested two men, both poor farmers, last week and they told police they killed the girl to appease their gods and get a better harvest, Das said. The men were described as “tribals,” a term referring to the region’s indigenous people, most of whom remain mired in poverty and illiteracy.

Human sacrifices are rare but get prominent attention every few years. A deep belief in traditional healers, or witch doctors, is common in mostly tribal Chhattisgarh.

Most Westerners who become fascinated with Zen Buddhism are intrigued with its reputation as an anti-authoritarian, freedom-loving, individualistic tradition. Books by excellent writers like Alan Watts popularized an image of Zen as a very relaxed, go-with-the-flow type of religion. But even a brief visit to a typical Zen temple is enough to make us painfully aware of the difference between hype and reality. Life in real Zen temples, in fact, is often so structured, regimented and heavily regulated as to quickly dispel the romanticism created by much of the literature about it. Far from being a hippie rendition of Buddhism, Zen discipleship can be demanding and severe.

But sometimes even misguided stereotypes are born from seeds of truth. Enter 15th century Japanese monk Ikkyu Sojun, who was truly as free, wild and allergic to authorities as advertised.

For Ikkyu, Zen was not a spontaneous calling. Rather, he stumbled upon it as an alternative to being murdered in infancy. Given that choice, Zen training didn’t seem so bad after all. Ikkyu, in fact, was the illegitimate son of the emperor of Japan, and the object of several conspiracies aimed at thinning out the ranks of potential candidates to the throne. In an effort to have his life spared, his mother entrusted him to a Zen monastery when he was only 5 years old: not the most fun-filled scenario for a little boy, but clearly more appealing than having angry assassins slicing you to pieces.

His early life was extremely tough since the training he received from the Zen monks was brutally stern. Despite some serious bouts of depression in this joyless environment, it became quickly clear to his teachers that Ikkyu possessed an amazing intellect, and that his grasp of Zen was unparalleled. But the fact that he excelled in this setting didn’t mean he felt at home in it. Despite genuinely loving Zen (or perhaps because of it), he was less than thrilled with the spiritual bureaucracy of the temples. Also, many of the priests bugged him: too many political games and too much time spent courting the favor of rich patrons. And so when the day came when his master presented him with a certificate of enlightenment—which was both a great honor and the necessary document to begin climbing the Zen hierarchy—Ikkyu promptly decided to wave goodbye to a monastic career and burned it.

This doesn’t mean he had given up on Zen. Far from it. In his thinking, it was the entire Zen establishment that had abandoned real Zen by turning it into a dogmatic parody of what it was supposed to be. Life in the temples was stifled by too many rules and not enough fresh air. The so-called professionals of Zen were in Ikkyu’s eyes a bunch of posers—too busy acting “spiritual” to be able to really taste spirituality in its rawest forms. Some people believed Zen enlightenment could only be found among clouds of incense in silent meditation. Ikkyu, on the other hand, found sake-drinking and wild sex more to his liking. As he put it in his poems, “The autumn breeze of a single night of love is better than a hundred thousand years of sterile sitting meditation.” Or, even more bluntly, “Don’t hesitate: get laid—that’s wisdom. Sitting around chanting sutras: that’s crap.” Driven by an uncompromising thirst for life, Ikkyu became a wandering monk, testing his Zen insights far away from the seclusion of the monasteries, and earning the nickname of “Crazy Cloud.”

The point of his erotic escapades and wild adventures was to suggest that the “sacred” is nothing other than regular life experienced with 100 percent awareness. Or perhaps, sake-drinking and inordinate amounts of sex didn’t need any justification at all other than the fact that they were a hell of a lot of fun. Ikkyu didn’t give a rat’s ass about what the religious authorities of his day thought of him anyway. But in the course of his travels, Ikkyu managed to influence great numbers of artists, poets, calligraphers, musicians, and actors in such a way that his ideas left a deep mark on the development of several Japanese art forms for centuries to come. Even his love life came to be celebrated through the ages, since his relationship with Lady Mori ended up being among the most famous romances in Japanese history.

But since good old Ikkyu was a man who loved paradoxes, when a civil war had destroyed most Zen temples in the country, he came to the rescue of the very institutions he had ferociously criticized. Just when the future of Zen seemed in peril, he was able to enlist the help of the many acquaintances he had met during a lifetime of travels and mobilized them into rebuilding some of the key temples throughout the country. So, oddly enough, much of modern Zen owes a huge debt for its existence to a man who preferred the company of hookers to that of monks.

The Georgia Guidestones are a collection of standing stones near Elberton, Georgia. Built in 1980, they are primarily composed of six slabs of granite: one central pillar, four “major” stones that fan out from the center, and a capstone. The capstone has engravings on all four of its sides in four different ancient languages, all of which read, “Let these be guidestones to an Age of Reason,” when translated. The major stones are each engraved on both sides, and each side contains text in one of eight modern languages asserting ten guidelines.

These guidelines have proven extremely controversial, causing speculation and rumors of conspiracy that go far beyond northeast Georgia.

The Georgia Guidestones are at once a Rosetta Stone, an astronomical observatory, and a road map for rebuilding civilization. Theories of conspiracy, occultism, and apocalypse surround this monument, and it has been called a “prism of meaning” by many who have studied it. At the heart of this confusion is the missing piece of the puzzle: who was the mystery man that designed and funded the project?

Conspiracy theorists surmise a global plot on the part of shadowy group of men to reduce and subjugate the world’s population and create a “New World Order.” Others believe that the man behind the monument was a Rosicrucian, and that the stones are representative of that group’s occult manifestos. Are the stones proof of a Satanic conspiracy or a testament to a Cold War psychology of nuclear annihilation?

Local historian and Georgia native Raymond Wiley was interviewed for The History Channel’s Brad Meltzer’s Decoded about the Guidestones and is a principal expert for a feature-length documentary currently in production. With local writer K.T. Prime he has written the definitive account of America’s most famous megalithic monument.

A group of daring people took the opportunity to be part of a ‘Hell Tour’ in Penang. The trip was organised by Master Kek Eng Seng of the Tze Bei Guan Yin Dhamma Centre, who claims that he can travel through the realms of Earth, Heaven and Hell. For the first time in Malaysia, he offered people the opportunity to visit the ‘Afterworld’.

The number of Hell travelers was brought down to slightly more than 50, including a dozen reporters from the Chinese dailies and yours truly.

As night fell, the group, all clad in white shirts symbolising purity and sincerity, gathered at Padang Brown in Georgetown for the “tour”.

After some prayers and rituals, we were all set to start our journey at around 10.15pm. My eyes were covered with a paper talisman wrapped in a yellow cloth. Then, the lights were switched off.

As I listened to the chants by Master Kek, my head became very hot, as though there was a stream of warm air trying to get out of my body through the top. (Master Kek later explained this by saying that my soul was trying to get out of my body.) The feeling came three to four times but was gone within minutes.

I tried hard to concentrate but my mind was distracted by the sounds from a Chinese opera show nearby and noises from the watching crowd.

About 45 minutes after the “tour” began, I saw lights and followed their direction but I soon fell into darkness again with some circles flying towards me.

It was like watching a science fiction movie with a spacecraft traveling through a stream of meteoroids. (Master Kek later explained that I was passing through a whirlpool while on my way to “Hell”.) But, I was again distracted by the noises and failed to enter “Hell”.

Unfortunately, only about a dozen people in the group claimed to have managed to break the barrier and enter the realm.

Chiang Kee Chuan from China Press was the only ‘lucky’ one from among the media participants. “I saw a rainbow hanging on a beautiful sky, and a monk advised me to become a vegetarian,” he said.

Another woman, who declined to be named, said she saw many ‘people’ at a pasar malam (night market). Before she could tell more, Master Kek asked if the street’s name is Ba Jiao Jie (Octogon Street) and she gave him a Yes.

Another female participant said she saw her departed mother from a distance, but she could not go near and speak to her.
On seeing the disappointed faces of the reporters later, the master promised to take us on a second trip on Monday.

Buddhist scholar Graeme MacQueen gave a talk that explained why Buddhists should take action to stop war and its causes.  Unfortunately, even the most compassionate people in our western society often find justification for doing nothing while suffering grows around them.  Many Buddhists are in that frame of mind and they justify their non-action by claiming that their responsibility is soley to avoid violence in themselves.  But Professor MacQueen has challenged this stance, recalling Buddhist scripture and revisiting the concept of a bodhisattva.

As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”  Similarly, Professor MacQueen asks in this talk if we have the right to “give away things that don’t belong to us … the earth … species … ecosystems … the futures of our children and other people’s children.”  Through silent collaboration, that is what many people are doing today.

Graeme is now a leading voice for the 9/11 truth movement, as well as being my friend and mentor.  He and I have been joined by several others as we plan for The Toronto Hearings, coming this September.

Read More: Dig Within: The blog of Kevin Ryan

Egypt’s antiquities authority closed the largest of the Giza pyramids Friday following rumors that groups would try to hold spiritual ceremonies on the site at 11:11 on Nov. 11, 2011.

The authority’s head Mustafa Amin said in a statement Friday that the pyramid of Khufu, also known as Cheops or the Great Pyramid, would be closed to visitors until Saturday morning for “necessary maintenance.”

The closure follows a string of unconfirmed reports in local media that unidentified groups would try to hold “Jewish” or “Masonic” rites on the site to take advantage of mysterious powers coming from the pyramid on the rare date.

Amin called all reports of planned ceremonies at the site “completely lacking in truth.”

The director of the complex, Ali al-Asfar, said Friday that an Egyptian company requested permission last month to hold an event called “hug the pyramid,” in which 120 people would join hands around the ancient burial structure.

More: AP via MSNBC

In December 1945, during the tail end of the most devastating war in human history, a peasant named Mohammed Ali of the al-Samman clan stumbled upon an earthenware jar near limestone caves in the deserts of Upper Egypt. He feared an evil djin (genie) resided inside, but hoping for lost riches, he still opened the jar. To his disappointment, twelve ragged leather-bound codices fell onto the ground. He didn’t realize these 1,200 weathered pages contained a priceless treasure with dozens of lost Christian gospels that had been hidden away for 1,600 years. Mohammed carried them home to his mother, who kept warm throughout the night by feeding pages of what we now call The Nag Hammadi Library to her fireplace.

These fifty-two texts, with titles like The Gospel of Thomas, Secret James, The Gospel of Mary, The Origin of the World, The Gospel of Philip, Secret John, and The Sophia of Jesus, showed that first-through-fourth century Christianity was much more varied than previously thought, comprised of diverse sects claiming “secret knowledge” of heavenly realms. Modern scholars now label these texts as “Gnostic,” since they lay out an initiatory process for candidates to overcome the “forgetfulness,” “drunkenness,” “blindness,” and “sleep” of the illusory world in order to access gnosis, direct experience or personal revelation of a divine reality.

The Nag Hammadi Library supported the popular theory that Christianity stemmed from the ancient mystery school traditions of the Mediterranean, which featured “dying and resurrecting godmen.” In Egypt they worshiped Horus; in Greece, Dionysus; in Syria, Adonis; in Asia Minor, Attis; in Persia (and later Rome), Mithras; and in Israel, Jesus (historically the most recent). The similarities among these hierophants were uncanny. Several of them, according to the legends, were born on December 25 around the winter solstice to a virgin in humble surroundings (a cave or a manger) with a star in the Eastern sky. Some grew up to be spiritual masters with twelve disciples (Horus, Mithras, Jesus), performing miracles, giving baptisms and communions. They all died (Dionysus dismembered by Titans, Attis and Adonis eaten by wild boars, and Horus, Mithras, and Jesus crucified) before experiencing a miraculous resurrection.

In The Jesus Mysteries, authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy discuss how the Vatican sits atop a destroyed Mithraic Temple. “Where today the gathered faithful revere their Lord Jesus Christ, the ancients worshiped another godman who, like Jesus, had been miraculously born on December 25 before three shepherds. In this ancient sanctuary Pagan congregations once glorified a Pagan redeemer who, like Jesus, was said to have ascended to heaven and to have promised to come again at the end of time to judge the quick and the dead. On the same spot where the Pope celebrates the Catholic mass, Pagan priests also celebrated a symbolic meal of bread and wine in memory of their savor who, just like Jesus had declared: ‘He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation.”¹

Freke and Gandy argue adamantly that there never was a historical Jesus who walked the sands of Israel, but rather he is a composite of the earlier godmen. But perhaps that’s too hard of a line to draw, since mythical figures are often based on real people — think of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, for example.

According to Freke and Gandy, a number of the Mystery school godmen were called the “Son of God,” and some the “Sun of God.” The word “horizon” comes from “Horus-Sun,” meaning sunrise. As the Egyptian God of daytime, Horus battled his jackal-headed enemy Set (“Sun-Set”), the bringer of night, in a cosmic battle of light and dark. Jesus played a similar role as Horus being “the light of the world” surrounded by twelve disciples who represented the twelve months of the year, and the twelve signs of the zodiac. The sun enters each zodiac sign at thirty degrees (30 x 12 = 360); thus, these “Suns of God” embarked on their ministry at the age of thirty. The classic zodiac cross bisects the twelve astrological signs within a circle. The sun hangs “crucified” in the center as it passes through the precession of the equinoxes, something the mystery schools followed closely as each new sign marked the next world age.

Given the astrological significance of the cross, wisdom traditions often depicted the crucifixion in their writing and art. A notorious second-to-third century European talisman reveals a human figure that looks like Jesus on the cross (with a crescent moon and seven stars above him), but the inscription reads “Orpheus becomes a Bacchoi.” Orpheus was a prophet in the Dionysian mysteries and Bacchio refers to an enlightened disciple who had undergone the final stages of initiation. Around the same time as the talisman had been crafted, a Roman graffiti artist sketched on a pillar the image of a crucified donkey, which symbolized the initiates’ death to their animalistic nature and ascension to the higher Self. The first portrayal of Jesus on a cross wouldn’t appear until 200 years later.

Rather than rejoicing in their similarities, “literalist” Christian leaders — those who had not experienced the secret gnosis (direct knowledge) of the highest mysteries — created dams and divisions between the diverse spiritual streams that originally flowed from the same mystical source. As Freke and Gandy explain, the parallels between Mithras and Jesus threatened the emerging “Literalist Church.” Roman bishops such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Irenaeus made the ridiculous claim that the devil had engaged in “diabolical mimicry,” “plagiarizing by anticipation” the story of Jesus before it had actually happened in order to mislead the weak-minded.

The Golden Bough’s James Frazier noted a similar contention between Attis, the mystery god from Asia Minor, and Jesus. “In point of fact it appears from the testimony of an anonymous Christian, who wrote in the fourth century of our era, that Christians and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians asserting with equal warmth that the resurrection of Attis was a diabolical counterfeit of Christ.”²

Literalist Christians refused to accept that the rites of the mystery schools form the central narrative of The New Testament. But the similarities are too plentiful to ignore. Jesus encounters a baptism (spiritual cleansing), a eucharist (communion), an anointing (“Christ” means “the anointed one”) and the death and resurrection ritual. These mystical rites provided a rare alchemical education, unifying spiritual energies (pneuma, as the early Christians called it) for candidates. In the words of The Gospel of Philip, one of the so-called Gnostic texts, “The Lord did everything in a mystery, a baptism and a chrism, and a eucharist and a redemption and a bridal chamber. […] he said, ‘I came to make the things below like the things above, and the things outside like the things inside. I came to unite them in the place.”

The word “mystery” appears twenty-seven times in The New Testament with Paul telling fellow Christians, “Let a man regard us in this manner, as servants of Christ and stewards of God.” Jesus speaks of clandestine teachings for those in the inner circles when he says to his disciples, “You have been given the secret of God’s imperial rule; but to those outside everything is presented in parables.” (Mathew 4:11)

As an energy healer, I found myself especially drawn to how early Christians utilized pneuma for personal transformation. Jesus baptizes with “fire and spirit,” heals with “power,” and transmits wisdom to his disciples through the “bubbling spring” drawn from a higher source. The purpose of these schools was to create Pneumatics, people full of spiritual energy. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus announces to his disciples, “Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.”

Even common Christian terms revealed clues to this ancient transformational process. I studied the original Greek word for “sin,” Harmatia, which turned out to be an archery term meaning “missing the mark.” It lacked the guilt and shame pastors used to control their flocks and simply indicated when seekers strayed from their path and needed to get back on course. Similarly, the Hebrew word Satan (“adversary”) highlighted the ego/personality attachment the soul needed to overcome in order to reach higher states of consciousness.

Repent (metanoia) meant to “change one’s mind” or “have a shift in consciousness,” which can occur when absorbing higher frequencies from someone closely connected to source-energy, like Jesus. Most surprisingly, Christ was not our Lord and “savior” but rather our “soter,” meaning “healer,” “bestower of health,” or “one who makes whole.” Staying connected to universal spirit, Jesus travels through the rift of separation consciousness to heal us and bring us back to our celestial home. “I am the one who comes from what is whole” (Gospel of Thomas). When we finally release our attachments to the material realm, we become “redeemed” (apolytrosis), meaning “released.”

Of course, I couldn’t help wonder what happened to the original meanings of these words, as well as the numerous Gnostic churches that had proliferated in the Middle East. When the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and its Second Temple in 70 AD, after the Jewish revolt, they left one-third of the population dead, and the Christian mysteries fractured into pieces. Members joined the mass exodus out of the country. Those who hadn’t been exposed to the inner mysteries started up literalist churches. The remaining Gnostics called these rigid sects “imitation churches” as they did not teach the secret gnosis of “the Christ within.”

According to the Apocalypse of Peter, literalist church fathers were “waterless canals” bereft of consciousness-expanding pneuma who arrogantly claimed to be the sole gatekeepers of heaven. “Some who do not understand mystery speak of things which they do not understand, but they will boast that the mystery of truth is theirs alone.” These “empty” churches sprouted up across the Roman Empire. In a sad touch of historical irony, their leaders, like the infamous Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon, became heretic hunters attacking those who still carried the inner teachings of their religion. “We were hated and persecuted, not only by those who are ignorant, but also by those who think they are advancing the name of Christ, since they were unknowingly empty, not knowing who they are.” (The Second Treatise of the Great Seth).

As the number of Christians multiplied in Roman lands, power-hungry Constantine switched the state religion to co-opt this growing movement, uniting Rome under “one God, one religion,” and incidentally, one emperor. In 325 he oversaw the Council of Nicaea, where church fathers reduced the vast library of Christian written knowledge to a few documents that we now call The New Testament.

In 391 Emperor Theodosius passed an edict to close all “pagan” temples and burn their books. Christian hordes set out on murderous rampages across the empire smashing all traces of the mystery traditions from which their own religion had blossomed. They killed off the last of the Gnostic circles, including their libraries, churches, scrolls, and most importantly, the flame of gnosis that had been carefully passed down throughout the ages. By 410 AD, the Roman Empire had nearly torn itself apart and the Visigoths strolled in to finish the job. Only 85 years after the Council of Nicaea, the Dark Ages had begun.

While poring over the lost Gnostic texts of The Nag Hammadi Library, I was surprised how many of them focused on reframing the Garden of Eden story. These tales, like The Secret Book of John, explained the human origin story quite differently than Genesis. They described a complicated cosmology that began with a single being (or parent), who was ineffable, eternal, immeasurable light, and created an image or reflection of itself, Barbelo, which in turn begot a multitude of heavenly planes (aeons) that were part of a wider divine realm (the pleroma).

Christ was not just a man but a distinct aeon or larger divine being in the pleroma. Those who fully realized the mysteries became one with “Christ,” carrying this high vibrational force inside themselves. Bedazzled by the cosmic palace, Sophia, the aeon of wisdom, created her own world without consent from the über-parent or her male counterpart. This experiment went awry and Sophia separated from the pleroma, creating a sinister Frankenstein ruler called the Demiurge (craftsman or maker), who manufactured our “counterfeit” material world.

This was The Old Testament God, who Gnostics called Yaldabaoth, Samael (God of the blind), and Saklas (a fool), as he believed himself to be the only god in the universe, ignorant of the pleroma and the omnipresent light of the parent. Breathing life into Adam (and unknowingly the divine spirit of Sophia), the Demiurge ruled over humans with his demonic bully-friends, the archons. The angelic realms of the pleroma embarked on a rescue mission for both Sophia and Adam and Eve. Like an undercover agent, Jesus snuck behind enemy lines into the Garden, inviting the first humans to eat of the Tree of Knowledge (“the Epinoia of pure light”) to “awaken them out of the depth of sleep” and their “fallen state.”

The Gnostic’s description of archons immediately intrigued an activist side in me. These devilish autocrats seemed representative of the oppressive empires that dominated Western history books. Today’s Halliburtons and Bechtels, Neo-cons and Exxons, seemed to follow a long shadowy lineage of hierarchical powers profiting from human suffering while expanding their empires. Maybe the Gnostics understood that we needed mystical agents of transformation smuggling in celestial light to liberate lost souls on the planet.

And the Christ story seemed to be the perfect place to help free us from worldly bondage. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that millions of people living today have been wounded or mislead by literalist Christianity, robbed of their own divine spark. For more than a millennia, the Judeo-Christian tradition has supplied the underlying operating platform for our whole society — our languages, laws, mores, work ethic, sexuality, even our way of perceiving time (with the Gregorian calendar) — shaping our worldview, whether we realize it or not.

Integrating this tradition could prove a powerful tool in coming to terms with ourselves, and our history. And that doesn’t necessarily mean plodding through obscure Gnostic texts, making sense of strange Demiurge names. The mysteries lay right there in The New Testament for those with “eyes to see” and “ears to hear.” But we need an upgrade of the Protestant Revolution, one that incorporates the gnosis of Christ-consciousness. Imagine already established churches, the ones on your block, enhancing their services with meditation, prayer, breathwork, energy healing, body movement, possibly even late night dancing, and among the more radicalized churches, the ingesting of psychoactive sacraments in a safe and protected space. Why build entirely new systems for connecting us to pneuma when the institutions have already been created, whether Methodist, Lutheran, or Baptist? But these “waterless” religions would have to give up their addiction to dominating worshipers, address the evolution of the spirit, and infuse the essence of the mysteries into their hollow edifices.

Many of the popular Eastern disciplines of today have us turning away from the world around us, meditating on our navel. But Christ wasn’t only a yogi; he was a mystical activist, carrying his message to those who most needed it. In this time of great transition, our ailing planet needs spiritual warriors, ones capable of standing up to the Western materialist machine, so we can create sustainable societies that care for their citizens, harmonize with the cycles of nature, and receive and honor the vast healing light that quietly connects us all.

1. Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 1.

2. Sir James George Frazier, The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan, 1992), chapter 37.

These photographs of ‘spirits’ are taken from an album of photographs unearthed in a Lancashire antiquarian bookshop. They were taken by a controversial medium called William Hope (1863-1933). In about 1905 he became interested in spirit photography after capturing the supposed image of a ghost while photographing a friend. He went on to found the Crewe Circle – a group of six spirit photographers.

By 1922 Hope had moved to London where he became a professional medium. The work of the Crew Circle was investigated on various occasions, exposing Hope as a fraudster. However, many of Hope’s most ardent supporters spoke out on his behalf, the most famous being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The drive to achieve harmony — bring what is thought and felt inside into line with one’s daily praxis — has always been an issue of central importance to most cultures. Indeed, the term “integrity” comes from the idea of “being of one piece”, that is, having few if any fissures between the inner and the outer self.

Maybe it is just me, but I don’t hear much about people in public life or in positions of authority over our children talking much about the goal of achieving internal harmony anymore. And on the rare occasions when I do, it is usually with the purpose of mocking such seekers as superfluous or flaky.

My sense is that this failure to promote or celebrate the search for inner harmony may have lot to do with the presence of in our lives of massive, and therefore seemingly insurmountable, moral inconsistencies.

One of the more confounding cultural phenomena of the last decade or so has been the failure of the people on the nominal left to mount any more than fleeting and largely symbolic challenges to the organized depredation of our economy and our civil society orchestrated by the right. The presidency of Obama is the farcical culmination of a long-running show perhaps best compared to a game between the always-sharp Harlem Globetrotters and the paid-to-be-hapless Washington Generals.

Intelligent people have come up with numerous theories for explaining this phenomenon. Most touch in one way or another on the unchecked presence of illicit money and overly entrenched interest groups in our political system.

And they are, of course, right …

Read more here.

Walter Isaacson (Jobs’ biographer): I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden one day and he started talking about God. He said, “Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50–50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of — maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on. The he paused for a second and he said ‘yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone.’ He said — and paused again, and he said, “And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.”

This time the end of the world will be real, says 90-year-old California radio mogul Harold Camping — October 21, so be ready.
But he doesn’t sound quite so confident this time. He suffered a stroke shortly after his most recent false alarm — May 21. He’s been in a nursing home. But now, he’s proclaiming new warning.

Absent this time are his trusting disciples who traveled across America last spring proclaiming his urgent warning — the Rapture would occur May 21, so be ready when Gabriel’s horn sounds, the sky rolls away and Jesus arrives to judge the living and the dead.

Of course, May 21 came and went — despite millions of dollars of billboards and bus-bench signs and rental trucks festooned with his urgent message, all underwritten by donations.

Camping said he was “flabbergasted” with the way things happened and explained that May 21 had, indeed, been Judgment Day, but only in a spiritual sense.

He preached over his scores of radio stations that God’s final judgment would continue right up until October 21 — when the world would be destroyed. Indeed, the founder of Family Radio promised, this time there would be nothing quiet about the global calamity.

Now, we learn that Camping took the whole thing badly. He appears to have been completely sincere — having applied a complex mathematical system to what he says are hidden messages in Bible prophecy. In fact, he appeared to be increasingly frail and shaken that his calculations had been off. He turned up in a nursing home after suffering a stroke in June.

This new paradigm, this new consensus that Christ is our personal Consciousness — is key to lifting the veil of ignorance that has kept us in fear of each other. Incidentally, Apocalypse literally means, ‘lifting the veil.‘ This revelation of God within us will unite us on higher mental levels causing, by reflex action, peace on earth.

The original purpose of government and religion was to create in a world where they were no longer needed. They taught us the proper ways to act towards one another: Thou shalt not kill, steal or lie; thou shalt love thy neighbor as theyself. The problem, however, is that these institutions became magnets for psychopaths who have no sympathy for you or your problems. Repeat this after me: Power does not corrupt — the corrupt seek power. But the joke is on them, because, like I said, these institutions were designed to be destroyed by the very powers that created them . . . us.

At some point the ruling class realized this beautiful irony — that a truly effective government would eventually render itself obsolete. And so it’s no coincidence that the very same people who tell us we need them to protect us from criminals are the same people who CREATE crime and poverty! They do it by making certain things illegal which in turn creates a criminal class. We the people learned the lesson of prohibition — and most of us are banging our head against the wall trying to figure why our politicians haven’t learned the same lesson. Well it’s easy to understand if you accept a simple but depressing truth: Power does not corrupt — the corrupt seek power. That’s it. Mystery solved: our elected officials are not stupid and they don’t mean well.

But this doesn’t have to be depressing if we accept responsibility for the situation we’re in. In fact, this all ties back into promoting Consciosuness. The issue with Consciousness is autonomy. Conversely, the issue with animals is hierarchy — domesticated primates follow certain rules just because they’re afraid of the consequences of not following them. Real peace is only possible if we understand the underlying value certain laws possess. And that means understanding the value of empathy — and you can only understand empathy if you possess Consciousness; I think, therefore I am; therefore, I can think about YOU.

Subsequently, with the realization that Christ is Consciousness comes the dictum that we follow our highest light — God within us. Our Imagination and theology are synonymous. To promote Consciousness you must Change how you think — stop accepting beliefs and start creating ideas – ideas that make you feel good about your little corner of the universe. I’m talking about creating ART-MYTH as personal spirituality. ART-MYTH is different from RELIGIOUS-BELIEF because we go into it knowing art-myth is meant to be a personal, subjective thing. At most it inspires others to create their own art-myth.

So to recap. . . Starting now — not only will the art we create be our primary mode of spirituality — but thanks to the creative-based economy, it will also ensure our financial independence.

This revelation is the basis of a spiritual awakening that disregards the animalistic instinct for social hierarchy and promotes autonomy — creating peace on earth — “As the individual become more collective, the collective becomes more individual.”

A truly effective government will eventually render itself obsolete.

This means morality comes from us — from our Consciousness and empathy.

Women are God-fearing and don’t challenge institutions. Men, on the other hand, are skeptical and rational, and go out of their way to publicly call bullshit on faith and religion — which is why today’s well-known secular thinkers, especially in the ranks of the New Atheism movement, are all male.

These statements should sound ridiculous because, of course, they are. From Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists, whose 1963 Supreme Court lawsuit brought an end to prayer in public schools, to Sergeant Kathleen Johnson, who started an organization for atheists in the United States military, to Debbie Goddard, founder of African Americans for Humanism, countless women have worked as successful atheist activists. They’ve penned books, run organizations, and advocated on behalf of religiously repressed citizens. But you might not guess that from the popular portrayal and perception of atheism in America, which overwhelmingly treats the contemporary class of non-God-fearing freethinkers (also known as secularists, skeptics, and nonbelievers) as a contentious, showboating boys’ club …

Read the whole story via Bitch Magazine

A case of literal biblical interpretation gone gruesomely awry. If God spoke to you and told you to do this, would you? NBC New York writes:

An Italian man tore both of his eyes out in the middle of the priest’s homily at a church near Pisa, according to reports.

Fellow parishioners watched in horror as Aldo Bianchini, 46, used his bare hands to pull out both eyeballs. Bianchini later told surgeons, who were unable to save his vision, he heard voices that told him to do it.

“He was in a great deal of agony and he was covered in blood,” Dr. Gino Barbacci told the Daily Mail. “He said that he had used his bare hands to gouge out his eye balls after hearing voices telling him to do so – to do something like that requires super human strength.”

Father Lorenzo Tanganelli said he had just launched into his sermon when he saw a commotion in the back of the church, according to the Italian paper Corriere Fiorentino.

“This man at the back of the knave started tearing at his face and I realized he was gouging out his eyes,” Tanganelli told the paper. “I called for assistance and the paramedics were quickly at the scene and he was taken away and then I carried on celebrating Mass but a lot of people had left because they were so shocked by what they had seen.”

The Bible’s Gospel of St. Matthew quotes Jesus telling his disciples: ‘If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”

Elizabeth d’Espérance grew up in a tired old house on the East End of London, filled with dark, oak-paneled halls and desolate, forbidden rooms that compelled her to explore. “I was very fond of wandering about from one empty room to another,” she wrote,

“and of sitting with my dolls on the broad low window seats, whence I would be fetched with an exclamation of horror and wonder by our servant, who considered my liking for the haunted rooms as “uncanny” and unnatural, threatening me with the ghosts and their vengeance if I persisted in invading their domains by myself.

“I could never quite understand nurse’s remarks about the lonelines of the rooms, though her threats about the ghosts frightened me. To me the rooms were never empty nor lonely;—strangers were constantly passing to and fro, from one room to another; some took no notice of me, some nodded and smiled as I held up my doll for their inspection. I did not know who the strangers were, but I grew to know them by sight…”

On this note, d’Espérance sets the tone for Shadow Land, her 1897 memoir of life as a medium during the heyday of Victorian spiritualism.

Her career began, naturally enough, in experiments with table rapping and automatic writing, but before long she was performing full-form manifestations in the manner of Florence Cook, Annie Fairlamb, and other star mediums of the era. Her usual controls were “Walter,” a light-hearted American soldier, and the professorial “Humnur Stafford,” but she is best remembered for manifesting female spirits like the “Yolande:” a playful Arab girl whose favorite trick was to materialize (“apport”) exotic flowers into the room.

Accounts of purported spectral phenomena like these are familiar to any student of spiritualism. What sets Shadow Land apart is that d’Espérance weaves them into a powerful, first-personal narrative that delves into the subjective experience of giving over one’s body as a conduit to the spirit world, together with its attendant doubts, fears and anxieties. Enough has been written about whether it is possible for a medium to lend her substance to strange, otherworldly entities—Shadow Land gives us a basis to imagine what it might actually feel like to do so.

[More at Victorian Gothic]

Poster A:  religion is stupid

Poster B:  YOU’RE stupid

Sometimes it’s a little more eloquent, but this is the bare bones of it. Not very useful, nor very informative. This I think we can agree on.  So how does one go about creating a better, more informative dialogue? Can it even be done? One side believes the other to be irrational, delusional, utilizing a sort of maladaptive coping mechanism to either protect oneself from the harsh realities of life or as an easy way to answer the hard questions with which life presents us. Coming from the other direction, one side believes the other to be narrow-minded, hypocritical (“atheism is just another faith!”) and every bit as dogmatic as their opponents. Is there any ground between the two camps wherein a discussion can be had?

I believe so, and I think I’ve got the way to do it. First one must ask why the discussion even needs to take place. When these discussions occur, one may hear an oft-repeated cry for tolerance: “Why does everyone have to argue about this? Why can’t you just believe want you want to believe and let others do the same?”

Well, the problem is person x may believe that everyone needs to believe as they do, or that the laws of the land need to reflect person x’s religious beliefs because they are the basis for all morality. Allowing people to believe whatever they want means allowing them to act however they want, which means allowing moral crimes to occur. Person y believes that person x’s beliefs infringe upon their personal freedom by influencing the policies of whatever organizations that have an effect on person y’s life. So to answer the question of “why can’t we just let everyone believe whatever they want to believe”, it is because other people’s beliefs will affect you in real ways. We all share this ball of mud hurtling through space, and the things we believe can dictate how we act and how we believe other people should act. Other people’s beliefs don’t just stay in their head.

So now that we agree the discussion is inevitable, how can we go about it properly? If our goal is to have an informed and informative discussion in which there is a frank exchange of ideas, opinions and facts, how can we ensure that happens?

A productive way to move forward is to lay out some questions that will get to the heart of the discussion in a lucid, easy-to-follow way. For your consideration I have borrowed a set of questions from a fellow I speak with fairly often on Liminal Nation, a message board devoted to an “intelligent and visible” discussion on religion, occultism and associated fields. I will provide my own meager answers as examples, as well as to hopefully begin a rational discussion on the topic.

1.  What was the origin of religion? Can its origin be meaningfully traced at all?

I often hear atheists describe the origins of religion as proto-men drawing pictures on the walls of caves, of legends and superstitions from a time when our brains were wired up different and we were hearing voices in our heads. Religion comes from a time when we really didn’t know a lot about the world around us so we filled in the gaps with ideas that, from the perspective of the 21st century, seem silly, out-dated, and most importantly false.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. “Religion” and “spirituality” are not synonymous. I grind my teeth when I hear people say “I don’t go for organized religion; I prefer a non-specific spirituality”. The reason is simple: there is no such thing as unorganized religion. Religion is an organized set of spiritual beliefs and rituals. It arose when mankind began to get itself more organized. There was a time when magic, science, and religion were considered the same thing and were generally handled by the same person. There is one religious tradition that all cultures on all continents share: Shamanism. The shaman was the person who would “travel” to the Other Worlds, returning with knowledge or power given to him by spirits or gods or whomever one runs into in the Other Worlds handing out knowledge and power. But at some point in the development of mankind, magic and religion began to separate.  It’s useful to consider when priests began to become separate entities from magicians. They became two separate jobs, performing different duties. The priest ran the rituals and served the public through the duties of an office in an organized religion.

The follow up question is very important, and it has quite a bit to do with what I was just talking about. Can this moment, this separation, be traced meaningfully? What if it can’t? More importantly, if religion IS a product of the past, why is it still around? Why is it still very, very popular? This leads us to the next question…

2. What functions does religion serve?

This is a difficult question to answer. There are many different religions, and many different people following these religions, and many different interpretations of the same religion. Attempting to answer this question seems to involve trying to get inside the heads of religious people.

Fortunately, there are ways to begin answering it. One can look to history to see what role religion has played in different countries at different times. I’ll leave this to others to investigate, but I can offer answers from my own experience.

When people ask me about my religious beliefs, I usually make a joke or brush it off or distract them or ignore it completely. I do this not because I don’t enjoy talking about religion, but because I don’t want to disclose that I worship Hermes Trismegistus, a fusion of the Greek deity Hermes and the Egyptian deity Thoth. Aside from the fact that it would break my dyed-in-the-wool Southern Baptist mother’s heart to learn I was involved with a *GASP* pagan deity, and thus am barely a step above worshiping Satan outright, in these times it is still considered odd to have a DIY religion or be involved with a deity whose worship insignificant numbers dropped off at least a thousand years ago.  It leads to dumb and occasionally insulting questions that I would prefer not to hear.

But the question is “what role does religion serve in my life”.  To be blunt, it helps me achieve my goals.  There is a style to Hermes Trismegistus, a way of operating, a style that I appreciate and want to incorporate into my own life. I find it graceful and a useful way to get what I want.  The objective existence of Hermes Trismegistus is unimportant; what matters is whether or not the things I do in regard to my religion actually help me accomplish my goals.

3. To what extent does religion serve as a psychological crutch for some people?  Does religion have legitimate functions other than as a psychological crutch?

I just told everyone that my own religion is basically a tool, a method for adjusting my behavior to get what I want, so I can’t deny that it functions as a tool. I wouldn’t call it a crutch; I can (and did for quite some time) get along without it with no adverse effects. I would not be limping along, psychologically-speaking. But what of other religions, specifically those that offer a “happy ending” for folks when they die?  What about those that offer (or demand) a set of behavior that takes care of a lot of decisions one runs into in daily life? How deep does that go, and is it a legitimate function of religion? Should it be? Marx’s famous phrase “Religion is the opiate of the masses”, is commonly thrown about. But few mention the sentence that is directly prior to that, wherein Marx calls religion “the heart in a heartless world”.

Since Abrahamic faiths are by and large the most popular in the west, it is obviously a good step to answer these questions as they pertain to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

4. Is there a significant connection between religion (as opposed to other aspects of human culture) and violence?  Between religion and morality?  Between religion and love?

This is similar to the question of what role religion plays in one’s life. This is a very meaty topic, so I won’t attempt to give any quick answers. I  hope this gets explored by others, though. These questions are important when one considers religion’s influence on morality and law, two areas where one’s religion intrudes on another’s religion (or lack thereof) and life in general.

5. Can Atheism be considered a faith?

This question, or rather answers to this question, are proposed very often here. Is the lack of a belief a belief, can atheism be considered a “belief” like Christianity?

Here’s a hint: no.

Militant atheists seem dogmatic, yes. They place a great value on reason and the scientific method, and since neither has produced any proof or anything close to proof, they don’t believe there is a god.  Is that the same as saying they believe there isn’t a god? Yes. Is it the same as a religion? No. The difference comes in the word “believe”, which is being used in two different ways when one says one “believes” in god and when one says one “believes” there is no god.  It’s a shame that one word can have two very different meanings, but that’s English for you.

For instance: I believe the sun will rise tomorrow. I have sufficient evidence for this. The belief is based on things like prior events and a heliocentric view of the solar system.  A belief in god relies on something very different, something called “faith”. Which leads us to the next question…

6. What’s up with faith?  I mean, what’s the deal there?

Okay, so it’s not phrased very eloquently. The same fella who offered these questions offered this quote from Sam Harris’s The End of Faith:

It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes. To be ruled by ideas for which you have no evidence (and which therefore cannot be justified in conversation with other human beings) is generally a sign that something is seriously wrong with your mind. Clearly there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are. This is not surprising, since most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down as though they were primordial truths. This leaves us believing what no sane person could believe on his own. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.

Of what use is faith? Where does it crop up besides religion, and is it treated the same way when it does? Is it an essentially human thing? What is a life with faith like compared to a life without?

It is my hope that these questions lead to a discussion between atheists and those that follow a religion that isn’t based on insults and questioning the sanity of each other.

In 1970 Amar Mahant [of New Delhi] left his job, family and friends to dedicate himself to his religious beliefs. In 1973, the clerk raised his hand in honour of Hindu deity Shiva – and he hasn’t put it down since. It’s now been 38 years.

Amar’s followers claim his sacrifice is a beacon of peace, while others say he has given up the use of a limb in order to separate himself from the pleasures of mortal life.

Amar’s sacrifice has turned his arm into a useless stump of flesh and bone, with a gnarled hand and unclipped fingernails hanging from the end. He says he experienced years of excruciating pain in order to follow his beliefs, but the pain has now passed. What’s left of his arm is now stuck in the bizarre position, atrophied after years of non-use.

Devotees of Hinuisim will often undergo incredible acts of self-sacrifice, sometimes involving starvation or vows of silence. Many of Amar’s followers have followed suit, raising their own arms for years and even decades.