When I was studying magic as a member of a mini-coven in the mid-90's, I learned that the root origin of the word 'religion' was 're-ligare'. As our coven priest Merlin explained it, 'ligare' meant to 'connect', therefore the word religion meant literally to reconnect - presumably with God.
I found it odd that the word 'religion' itself implied that somehow our connection with the divine - with God - had ever been severed to begin with.
Merlin also took us, (the coven), eleven to see the author and Terrance McKenna ethnobotinist give a lecture. I had not heard of him prior to my going so was completely incapable of comprehending the material in his lecture, but remember my curiosity being piqued at his musings over Whether the mind of the universe Reflected the mind of man or vice-versa.
These curious puzzles of theology, spirituality, and the quantum physics of consciousness and matter became the motivating force of my life that drove me to explore and hopefully understand with greater clarity how they all fit together and why. Later, I read in Terrence McKenna's book Food of the Gods while in India that he "... learned, that 'religion', where ever the luminous flame of spirit has Guttered low, is no more than a hustle."
On this point, I could not agree more.
One of the interesting aspects of the word 'religion' I've recently discovered is that the root, 'ligare' is more accurately derived from the word 'ligament' and means 'to bind'. It is my feeling that the true meaning of the word religion actually Communicate the effect of binding peoples' consciousness more than it does the idea of re-attunement to one's creator.
Doctrinaire religions introduce a third party or group whose agenda may be in conflict with people of greatly varied backgrounds and cultures. Priests and pedagogues act in abitrage of environmental stimuli and impose their ideas of how we should relate our experience to the imagry in our environments. This arbitration deliberately binds our consciousness to symbols and ideas, like the reserrection for example, or the engraved images on a Federal Reserve Note, that are then perceived in rational devaluations. They may not sustain their relevance to our preservation in a rapidly changing environment or worse, may never have been relevant to our success as interdependent and self sustaining individuals at all to begin with.
Even science has been used in ways that are morally relative to support the advantage of our corporate, institutional agendas.
The imagery of doctrinaire religions is generally drawn from ideas fermenting, as James Joyce said, "forged in the smithy" of uncreated collective supra-consciousness, and is then distorted and censored by Instututions of Authority in ways that are relative to institutional advantage as well as the disadvantage of its victims.
Every aspect of our environment is for many of us, hightly controlled. The revised and dubious imagery is familiar enough in spite of its distortions and therefore is more or less adopted with relative receptivity by an audience which has been so deprived of the elements of Nature.
Consider the conversion of Pagan rites spring into the Easter holy day largley which excluded any referrences to Natural phenomenon and the reawakening of the earth from the death of winter, or any other ideas of rebirth we may have a personal connection to. The abstracted imagry, highjack and distorted out of the collective today, is reinforced through the media, and easily enforced through a population toggling between fear and greed.
The net effect this predatory system has on its victims is that it separates them from the nature of their changing environment and renders them less able to connect to their true power and authentic identity. This is true of both religions and secular ecclesiasical.
The reason I bring these points up is that there is a great deal of evidence suggesting that our economic system is another form of doctrinaire religion where the luminous flame of spirit has gutteres so low I wonder how low it can go. It relies on confidence, and that confidence is faith. This system to which we are all bound in varying degrees is, by any measure, "no more than a hustle", and the gap between the symbols legitmacy we identify ourselves with and what those symbols actually deliver is growing wider each passing moment.
It's a grand fleecing. Anyone who does not take "conspiracy theories" with at least a few grains of salt credulous has never studied the history of paper money. Our environment began to change most rapidly with the institutionalization of credit, easy money, and various schemes to defraud the public debasements connected to currency and credit cycles of booms and busts.
Charles Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent. Rather it is the one that is most adaptable to change."
And I might add that adaptability is the one characteristic most stringently required at present by laws other than those of Nature ... (-Lillian Readon), namely powerful men in high places with a great deal to gain from a population confused over where its greatest risks lie.
This past winter solstice of 2009, while preparing for a ceremony at the home of some friends in Laguna Canyon, I meditated for a while on what this longest night of the year might have meant to early hunter gatherer societies of pre-historic times, before the market economy began to bud with advances in agriculture and animal husbandry.
As their world began countless times its annual, seasonal decline into the stasis of winter, mankind could rely on the relative stability of Nature's temperament and maintain the reasonable expectation that the sun would be resurrected to spend more time above than below the earth in the underworld , bringing life giving energy and warmth for earth's rebirth. That's when it struck me. 'Hell' is the image of that moment within the cycle of seasons frozen without any hope of the sun's resurrection. Think of it. An eternity spent in the firey place to geocentric below to philosophy is a world without warmth, without love, without reasonable expectations or even a sliver of hope for change.
Joseph Campbell said;
"The aspect of hell is pain. People in hell are people temporarily fixed in their interests, people trapped in their ego systems, practical people for whom the world has not become transparent. That is what hell is, a place for people who are fixed forever. And being fixed for eternity is very painful. Every sense is tormented - sound, smell, taste -- and a black fire burns but does not eat. "
It is this 'fixing' that is where I believe our troubles begin. Nature is not static. If it is to be commander, it must be obey. We are morally obliged to move with it with all our senses vigilantly aware. It moves and vibrates, rolls and stretches, rumble and crashes, withers, dies, ferments, bubbles, bubbles, boils ... and Perceived as big trouble to mankind who have Achieved a great ability to protect himself from these HARDSHIPS and this constant motion.
Mankind's ability to control nature through its destruction is only as great as our willingness to tolerate that Immorality. It's funny, but I feel now like I'm an actor in a Twilight Zone episode - one of Serling's best - where I'm reading a book and as I'm reading the words they are describing the events are actually happening in the outside world.
The book that I'm reading ... still, is Atlas Shrugged, and on page 877 there is a paragraph where Jame's Taggart is fiendishly exposing a government plan to which he is privy and complicite in to his wife in an attempt to recapture her lost respect. The plan states he will change things;
"For the better of course ... It's a plan to save the country, to stop our economic decline, to hold things still, To achieve stability and security."
It's in reality, to plan for more draconian interventions to 'fix' the mess that he and his cronies created by their meddling Under the auspices of public need.
When something that moves is 'fixed' or 'frozen' or not allowed to move in the way that is most characteristic of its being in order to satisfy our need for comfort, it suffers enslavement and dies.
When natural corrective forces are postponed, or when human interventions Continually interfere with the cycles and movements of the marketplace environment in order that it is immoral maintained in all its glory, and preventer from achieving atonement ... there is a cost.
The burden of that cost is born by those to Which risk Effectively most has been transferred to in our based debt economy; the people. All the risk of institutional debt is, by design, the moral hazard of each member of society. Of course there is the price of suffering under this immoral system paid by the animals, and the environment as well.
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This year, our treasury is obligate to sell $ 80 billion dollars of debt a week and it appears that an extremely high percent of that $ 80 billion is being monatized meaning, we the people are buying our own debt.
If Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged can be more aptly read as a Romantic novel mythic archetype that characterize consistently over arching economic and socio-political themes of the industrial age, then we can see once again in the laboratory of life happening that her material hits the bullseye as we watch yet another nation , The once great United States of America, smother the light of brilliance with pillow of public need.
Those who are arbitrating whose "need" is a priorety no longer have any connection to the communities and entities to which they favors from a hollow portion and bottomless public purse. They are accountable only to those who've purchased their allegiance. They are our elected whores and pimps.
****
This year, our treasury is obligate to sell $ 80 billion dollars of debt a week and it appears that an extremely high percent of that $ 80 billion is being monatized meaning, we the people are buying our own debt.
If Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged can be more aptly read as a Romantic novel mythic archetype that characterize consistently over arching economic and socio-political themes of the industrial age, then we can see once again in the laboratory of life happening that her material hits the bullseye as we watch yet another nation , The once great United States of America, smother the light of brilliance with pillow of public need.
Those who are arbitrating whose "need" is a priorety no longer have any connection to the communities and entities to which they favors from a hollow portion and bottomless public purse. They are accountable only to those who've purchased their allegiance. They are our elected whores and pimps.
This most recent play of Obama's to freeze the budget is a move right out of the handbook on 'end-game' destruction by Socialism, but because it is not meant to go into effect until next year it seems more like political pandering that dubious affect is not intended to any real meaningful change. There was after all, a quantum upset in Massachusetts last week.
If he should make good on this promise (or threat as the case may be), at a time when our global economies enmeshed and are so intimately interconnected, you can be sure that it will have a chilling effect on the entire planet. If Hell is, as Joseph Campbell describes, "a black fire that burns but does not consume" and the economic overstimulation of the past decade can be perceived as that Hellish decline, then perhaps a low budget freeze will the catalyst that causes Hell to finally freeze over.
If he should make good on this promise (or threat as the case may be), at a time when our global economies enmeshed and are so intimately interconnected, you can be sure that it will have a chilling effect on the entire planet. If Hell is, as Joseph Campbell describes, "a black fire that burns but does not consume" and the economic overstimulation of the past decade can be perceived as that Hellish decline, then perhaps a low budget freeze will the catalyst that causes Hell to finally freeze over.
