Radix Fidem Blog

ACBM: Part 3 Chapter 2

Posted on July 30, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 2 — Mystical Reading of ANE Literature

A critical part of mysticism is teaching the mind to serve, not lead. While we don’t have too many ANE words that can be translated as “intuition,” it’s clearly one of the tools they used. In this context, intuition can be described as the lowest level of mystical wisdom. Western psychology regards it as some native ability to see patterns without a full consciousness of the processing. When it works, you are able to jump across a lot of logical steps and still get the right answer. It’s not just intellect, but above it; it’s the upper end of what we might call “instinct.” To a mystic, this is probably the bottom end of divine wisdom, in that it teaches the mind to trust something it cannot control. That’s the real meaning behind “faith” — a commitment and reliance on things beyond yourself. Faith will often make demands that are eminently unreasonable from a human level of thinking.

A particular problem with reading Scripture from a Western point of view is the complete absence of something ANE writers took for granted in written communications. A significant portion of ANE literature is invocational. There is a very solid purpose for inviting some divine presence to participate in reading and processing the written material. The Western reflex is to see this as simply giving credit to the deity; to the ANE mind it is a request for a very literal divine assistance for the reader. They took that request seriously.

A great deal of Scripture is invocational, though sometimes not obviously so; it is typically implied. The invocation is followed by written material which is quite obscure to the Western approach. The words translate into one kind of statement, when the author would have been implying something far larger. It’s not simply passing references with abbreviated terminology or figures of speech, but an expectation God Himself will cause the reader to discover something far larger than what is contained in the words themselves. Context is everything; there are constraints. It’s not as if we are describing a boundless free association that makes no sense at all. The wider body of Hebrew Scripture presumes you already know certain things cannot come out of this mystical approach to reading. You are supposed to apply the moral imperatives to your thinking first as the frame of reference. Sin is still sin and some things can be bluntly stated as always wrong in all contexts. However, a great deal of Hebrew divine wisdom is cultivated by choosing to say one thing when the context indicates it’s really something much bigger. Often it’s an attempt to teach the reader to think differently, posing a common question and showing that it’s the wrong question and the wrong approach.

A concrete example is in Ecclesiastes. The purpose of the book is a training manual for palace staff and the wider royal bureaucracy. It was included in the canon because the lessons apply by extension to life in general. When you understand what Solomon says about serving in his courts, you understand what Solomon thinks it means to serve God. A common theme never directly stated, but consistently present in the meaning of the text is the warning to discard all ambition, a persistent sin of human nature. It’s not enough to recognize when he uses sarcasm to mock those entirely too reliant on human reasoning, as if they idolize his famous gift. He also demands a contemplative mindset when reading.

More than once Solomon mentions the work God has given men to do on the earth, describing it in terms of futility. To the reader who is studying for a job in Solomon’s administration, usually signals the question, “Why do you think I hired you? Is this task pointless in your eyes?” Then Solomon proceeds to answer the question quite obliquely. He’s raising an issue with far more implication than the simple question itself. He talks about how one could get fired, for example. The reader is presumed wise enough to recognize these oblique references. It’s not a string of disconnected thoughts, placed in some random order. Context is everything. If the reader doesn’t make the connection, he’ll obviously make serious mistakes and get fired because he’s not smart enough. If the new hire lacks even intuition as a tool of reasoning, he’ll fail, because real success in the king’s service has nothing to do with ambition. It has to do with placing human wisdom at the service of something outside the intellect and clinging to the underlying ethic of serving the king as if serving God Himself.

Readers can discover the same sort of indirect replies common to Hebrew people in Job, parts of Proverbs and some Psalms. To Western minds, there is a jarring disconnect, but to Hebrew thinkers, you aren’t taking enough time to consider what it all means.

Posted in meta | Tagged culture, divine presence, intellect, mysticism, philosophy, psychology, reading scripture, wisdom literature | Comments Off

ACBM: Part 3 Chapter 1

Posted on July 29, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 1 — Implications

The Western assumptions about reality are entirely different than that of Biblical Mysticism.

There is no single Old Testament view of the afterlife. We recognize a great many Old Testament figures lacked the full depth of cosmology that became common among Christians later. This study recounts the rather underdeveloped view of Patriarchs taken from Mesopotamian mythology. We also examined the Hebrews’ exposure to the more developed view of the Egyptians. While the majority of the people continued wallowing in various degrees of idolatry and ignorance, it becomes plain some portion of Hebrew spiritual leadership held a much better understanding.

The political rulers of Israel varied greatly in their views. We are treated in Scripture to the glaring difference between Saul’s primitive religion against David’s Psalms, with soaring lyrical expressions of a much more advanced mystical view. Some Old Testament Scripture is mixed, so that Job himself seems limited to something closer to Mesopotamian views, while the narrator is from a much later time with a clear grasp of the Spirit Realm. In other words, we recognize the Old Testament prophets were granted a much more accurate understanding against the common chatter of figures who never quite got it. It appears that Samuel’s School of the Prophets was a primary source of editing Hebrew Scripture. This group was self-consciously mystical for as long as it lasted, which was at least through the reign of Solomon, a self-consciously mystical king.

Meanwhile, the quintessential image of manhood stands close to King David. While obviously fallen, he remained God’s chosen instrument, granted a full mystical understanding. He was easily the most humble of men, waiting God’s time with patience and endurance for a calling that ended up being far more work than anyone could have expected. Charming and intelligent, he often preferred solitude. He was the sacrificially caring and competent shepherd, a signal man of God, an image utterly missing in Western mythology (emulating His Lord in the 23rd Psalm).

There was nothing of the Germanic view of the perpetual man-child against the saintly image of women. There was no mythology of human equality; people were what they were and context was everything. Women were utterly essential in society, but Scripture pointedly notes there is some indefinable thing women don’t have that requires male leadership in moral and spiritual issues. It’s not a question of blaming Eve and not Adam, but blaming each within their respective capabilities. It’s a Western fallacy to think Paul was saying women were spiritually or morally inferior; they have a different role assigned by God. The Biblical Mystic realizes that the divine necessities of womanhood leave her more likely to misinterpret the moral imperatives, while obviously better at some things than men.

Men are just as sinful, but it’s their appointed duty to lead; the primary weakness of men is letting women lead. Women are not to dominate men, yet cannot resist trying. She’ll despise him if she wins, admire him if she fails — all the more so if he is skillful at parrying her folly. There can be no greater joy in her life than willfully and persistently teaming up with her man. The woman’s mission and calling is not so much literal child rearing as the faithful motherhood of everyone while working alongside her shepherd man. So Paul says women do not teach men, implying more than mere instruction. Men lead in spiritual matters and bear some greater moral clarity consistent with their role at the head of society.

No one claims that the Hebrew tribal society was perfect, but even the churches in Greece were taught to regard themselves as spiritual family and organized primarily as ancient Hebrew clans. The tribal government and social structure was optimal and the primitive, simple life was presumed essential to serving God regardless of your national heritage. You did whatever was necessary to get along with your non-Christian social and legal setting, but within the church, you were first and foremost a tribe of the New Israel. You had church leaders who were priestly (pastors) and kingly (elders), the two primary witnesses to God’s Laws, cooperating in their respective duties with the help of attendants (deacons). While women could not be pastors, they were essential motherly advisers to elders and they could serve fully as deaconesses.

Sexual behavior standards were even more strict than under Moses, yet there is no place in the church for the silly schizophrenia of the modern West. The Hebrew people were much more matter-of-fact about human sexual desires while still quite prudish. Many of the social customs of the Hebrews were the best way to handle very real human tendencies.

We expect sorrow in this fallen realm and maintain the otherworldly focus. Our entire human existence is just a temporary tool unworthy of much concern. The only purpose for living is to reveal God’s truth. We consciously understand that every word or action is a revelation of something. We seek to conform to the moral fabric of Creation with a mystical view clearly alien to our world. Because of our moral clarity, we could sagely advise on human politics, but take no real interest. We have no interest or duty to make the world behave except that small portion God has placed in our hands directly. We observe through mystical eyes and offer to inform; we never nag. Instead, we fully expect to suffer the persecution that arises from human political disadvantage in the face of our unconditionally loyalty to a government outside this world.

Indeed, in our Western world, we few Biblical Mystics are often rather isolated. If we are going to have anything to do with our fellow Christians, blind or otherwise, we can’t demand every last detail of the foregoing image of church. There was precious little in this course about theology and very little about churches and denominations. For the record, there is no serious problem with the current Roman Catholic religion as religions go. So long as you take the mystical approach and find yourself at home in any particular church, stay with it. Be warned that if you say very much, they are likely to object. Steer your own course in your own search for the face of God.

You can give intellectual assent to a lot of things as symbols of something far above the intellect. You can engage a wide variety of ritual practices for your own peace. But you cannot pretend to know God nor His requirements for you without that mystical understanding. Whether you perceive a spiritual birth first, and then go back and rediscover mysticism, or whether you struggle through some effort to discover you belong in mysticism and realize that spiritual connection later, one thing is certain: If you aren’t a mystic, you aren’t following Christ.

Posted in meta | Tagged law, mysticism, peace, religion, society, spirituality | Comments Off

Wounds on the Soul

Posted on July 28, 2013 by ehurst

Know yourself.

There were times in my childhood when my parents willingly engaged in behavior they knew would hurt me. They found it entertaining, in part because my sensitivities were despicable to them. Nobody is perfect; I have no doubt there were times I did the same thing to my own children. Most of that sort of thing happens because we simply aren’t conscious of the dynamics involved. It’s a part of our sin nature to take unfair advantage of the weaknesses of those we love most, and nobody knows your weaknesses better.

In those days my parents were blind to how a portion of what they hated in me was a reflection of themselves. I sincerely wish it was a part of our social mythology and curriculum to know better. So I write about it here and sound the warning about the flaws of our society. I turn my own scars into lessons for others. You don’t need to bleed from the same wounds as I got, nor the ones I caused others, if I can bring myself to confess them. Let’s try to minimize the wounds for ourselves and everyone else.

Too much of what contributed to my personal development was out of my control. Some portion of my personality was simply what came with my DNA, plus the environment I could not choose for myself. Thus, there is a wide range of things that bother me and there’s not much I can do to change that.

So I cannot simply decide something doesn’t hurt. I can decide how I react to that wound. There are some wounds that simply cannot be avoided; it’s just the way our world is. But there’s nothing wrong with trying to avoid those you can. There’s nothing wrong with asking some folks to avoid certain acts, words or gestures that cause you misery. There’s nothing wrong with pulling away from them a safe distance if they don’t stop.

You don’t have to imply they are doing anything inherently evil, only that it makes you uncomfortable. By the same token, you have to realize you may be asking too much, because what they do that causes you pain is something they find necessary. We refer to this as the issue of compatibility. Even when it seems they really do delight in your misery, it’s best to handle it as compatibility.

To the degree possible, we avoid incompatible folks. There is nothing immoral about that. Unless you feel a need to attempt some kind of conditioning to build up psychic scar tissue over some weak spot, you are entirely wise and justified for keeping that tender spot out of the line of fire. There is a sort of armoring we do where we dismiss the person from consideration in some ways. The popular phrase “consider the source” comes to mind. It’s not hatred, but self-preservation. It only becomes hatred when we refuse to admit we are no better, or that our personal perspective is somehow God’s standard for all humanity.

Yes, some things in our awareness really do seem essential to human life across the board. Still, even as a prophet, I often remind folks all I’m doing is reporting on my personal experience with God. There may be dire warnings attached, but even those are never more than my opinion. I don’t pontificate as if I could control your behavior or your internal reactions. I rely on God to make it truth for you. Even when I write stuff like this, I’m just reporting what my eyes see. It’s like saying, “think about it.”

For the most part, you should make these things conscious. In daily life, we shouldn’t whine and demand people change. We give them a chance to make a conscious note and decide what matters to them. That’s God’s mercy. They may have a moral objection to our sensitivities, but there’s nothing we can do about that. Without a covenant binding people to taking responsibility for others, we have no leverage. Covenants are entirely voluntary. Your judgments don’t apply where the covenant doesn’t place you in authority over another.

Since virtually all of Western humanity has no clue about covenants, it’s pretty hard to do much with that. Instead, we talk about friendship where it’s possible, and genuine love when it can be made to work. Friends find themselves able to stay off your tender toes and want to share things with you. A lover wants to be on your team enough to sacrifice even more. But without compatibility, those things simply don’t work.

When possible, don’t expose yourself to those who won’t or can’t care about your tender spots. You’ll have enough problems without creating bigger ones because you can’t be bothered to pay attention to your own soul. Decide wisely whether you are capable of avoiding wounding someone else. Care enough to steer clear of them, too.

You can’t know peace if you don’t know what is necessary for it.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged family, mysticism, peace, psychology, religion, spirituality | Comments Off

ACBM: Part 2 Chapter 6

Posted on July 28, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 6 — Judaizers and the Early Church

The Hellenized rabbis were not done after the Crucifixion.

Taking seriously the claim that Christianity was the logical and historical extension of Moses, they sought to bring all Christians back under proper Talmudic control. Brutal persecution failed; their chief prosecutor switched sides in the middle of his biggest mission to Damascus. After a few more sputtering efforts using the powers of the Law, even with a little backing from Rome, they decided the best plan was to use on Christians what was used on them: Hellenism.

The call of Jesus back to the ancient Hebrew Mysticism was not a simple recall, but a considerable move forward. The Talmud was lies, but the Law of Moses remained an accurate reflection of how God intended men to live on earth. Moses had it inscribed in two languages at once. The obvious was the semi-mystical Hebrew tongue of the people; the less obvious was the fully mystical meaning behind that Law. You could read the Law and obey it, and things would be okay. If you really wanted to see God as Moses did, you had to see the parabolic language in it. But instead of struggling through the Law to discover it’s mystical meaning, Jesus’ plan was to simply give people direct access to that Spirit Realm up front. Then they could turn back and see what the Law meant on a higher level. They need not obey the Law in the letter, but in Spirit. His death literally opened the way into the Presence of God, closing the Covenant of Moses as the sole proprietary means to approaching Him.

Once the Apostles received this experience of Spirit birth, all their human learning and experiences took on a totally new meaning. This new faculty whipped the mind into shape to obey and remember things it would have completely lost on its own. They understood that the value of keeping the Hebrew Scripture was to mine the applicable behavior pattern that the Law suggested, to discover what the Spirit had to say about the meaning of the Covenant in a different context. Sin was still sin; it still meant getting out of equilibrium with the moral fabric. But the political entity of Israel was meaningless now; Israel-the-mission was still very much alive. So these new followers of Jesus dug into Hebrew Scripture to find the less obvious mystical meaning and build a new mystical nation with a different Covenant of the Blood of Christ and the walking in the Spirit.

The rabbis were not fools. They understood this and were utterly certain they had done the right thing in leaving that mysticism behind. They had discovered God more clearly in Aristotelian reasoning, never mind that it was an entirely different “God.” They rejected the contentions of Jesus the Rabbi, but were quite willing to intellectually kidnap all His followers for their own greater glory in the Kingdom of Judah. They realized that this required a nice friendly evangelism, like Alexander the Great used. It also required taking the time to win their confidence, distract them off into probable sounding doctrinal “depth” until they were ripe for leading back into Judaism. It worked better in some places than others, but in general, it did the job.

The first hurdle was convincing the Christians that Jesus was not the Son of God. So long as He was regarded as divine, they couldn’t get far. They set up a logical puzzle about humanity versus divinity and created a very large body of discussion about how this simply didn’t make sense. We don’t know how it was connected in historical terms, but this left the door open for Gnosticism. The Gnostics were mystical-sounding thinkers who carried the same contention as the Judaizers: either Jesus was divine or human, but could not possibly be both.

Never mind how many people were siphoned off this way; the biggest problem was how this required Christian scholars to wrestle with the issue. That was the real trap — suckering them into yielding the battlefield. Once the Judaizers, Gnostics and other wackos got Christian leaders to answer the demand to be reasonable on Aristotelian terms, genuine faith was frozen. We realize through Paul’s blunt statements that God is not hindered by anything in this realm of existence when He decides someone will have spiritual birth. What is hindered is their ability to proceed forward in the power of that spirit and claim the full heritage of mysticism. The entire message of the Bible, including the New Testament, is out of reach because the readers’ minds are still trapped within the walls of human intellect. People cannot claim the full heritage of God’s blessings available in this realm because it owns them, so His power over it is not available. The living moral fabric of God’s justice remains invisible.

So we have a bunch of happy talk about “born-again” with a totally different meaning and implication, as if this divine miracle was something any human can decide, despite blunt warnings they can’t even want it until God gives it to them first. Instead, we have generations of folks quite certain they have eternal life because they feel like it, can act like it (so they believe) and because someone told them they have it. Meanwhile, most of them hold conflicting notions of what a “Real Christian” is without the slightest inkling of what the Bible really means.

Now you know the rest of the story.

Recommended readings: Encyclopedic articles on Judaizers, Gnosticism and Early Church controversies up to 300 AD.

Posted in meta | Tagged aristotelian epistemology, church history, mysticism, propaganda, religion, scripture, theology | Comments Off

Ecclesiastes 12

Posted on July 27, 2013 by ehurst

Continuing where the previous chapter left off, Solomon reasserts the warning to his younger employees that they accountable first and foremost to their Creator.

If you wait until you are older, the youthful habits of folly will blind you to the truth. We get the feeling Solomon is rather old when he writes this, as he describes old age with such poetic imagery. The grinders would be molars older people lose too soon. Faces in the windows would be more than your eyes, but keeping them open and paying attention. The doors to the outer world are the ears. Even when nearly deaf, it is still too easy for the slightest sound to awaken you and lose sleep at night, and hard to stay awake in the day. The hair is white like almond blossoms and old men drag their limbs like injured grasshoppers. Near the end he describes the hanging lamp that falls from its fixture and goes out, then the well of wisdom what dries up or becomes inaccessible. In the end, the body returns to dust.

But this is more than the gripes of aging. Solomon knew all too well of missed opportunities for God’s glory. He gave himself to just about everything else, but knew he had missed out on what really mattered. You can’t go back and demand a second chance to do it right. People who embrace their God early find life worth living, aging just a minor insignificance, and death a mere circumstance. They aren’t wrapped up in the futile things of this world.

Solomon reminds his young employees that he has done so very much with human wisdom, writing books, collecting and cataloging proverbs. He has accomplished just about everything he started, and this current training manual is just one more. But in the next breath, he warns it is very easy to waste time on knowledge and miss out on serving God. Don’t let knowledge and wisdom become your god. There is a God in Israel, and your first duty is to know what He made you for, what He demands from you. All things must be evaluated through His eyes and if you are going to study anything at all, study His Word. If you miss His justice, nothing else you have will matter. If you are walking in His justice, nothing else matters.

Indeed, there is no wisdom outside understanding God’s justice.

Posted in bible | Tagged government, human wisdom, mysticism, peace, poetic imagery, scripture | Comments Off

ACBM: Part 2 Chapter 5

Posted on July 27, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 5 — Hellenization

The name Israel applies not so much to a nation, but to a mission given to that nation.

The true servant of Jehovah seeks to rise above mere human capability, to place the mind in service to some higher faculty and develop a moral intelligence. With this faculty he will see the world from a perspective above this plane of existence. Instead of simply the solid matter and logical renderings of it, he sees that moral fabric, that living power of justice that cannot be seen by any mere human perception. This justice was a direct reflection of God’s own personal character. His greatest field of endeavor is not in the world around him, but taming his own human weakness, those raging lusts that threaten to derail holiness. While the mind can be taught to obey this higher intelligence, there is no shortcut in the process. There is no place at which to arrive, nor discernible levels of achievement and mastery, because the fleshly weakness refuses to die. It keeps finding new ways to blindside the conscious mind. His prayer is not for power over nature, but his own nature.

The Covenant of Moses was actually quite generous in ritual provisions for human frailty. You would have to openly reject the provisions of the Covenant to suffer serious consequences. It was easy to mentally disconnect those consequences from any putative prophetic warnings. There were various ways of characterizing God’s moral fabric, His living power of justice in this world. The primary focus for the bulk of human behavior was social stability. Things prohibited were generally recognized as a threat first to society, with the understanding that such actions would violate that living justice. Picking at that moral fabric would be like poking a hornet’s nest; it’s dangerous. The business of coercive law was the obligation of the society to stand guard over obvious threats to their own peace and safety. The various laws of conduct reflected God’s underlying truth, His prescription for dealing with human weakness and keeping so much equilibrium and health as was possible in this imperfect realm of human existence.

While for the majority of the people, just knowing the provisions that could be explained in human language was generally sufficient. There always had to be someone in leadership who could actually sense trouble before human perception caught onto it, and with a depth not available to mere intellect. It would be utterly impossible to do so if the leadership departed from that highly evolved intellectual background carried by Moses and his associates. Discard that worldview and the fabric of God’s justice quickly becomes invisible. Alter that underlying mythology and moral assumptions, and you’ve lost a defining element; you risk losing the divine faculty for seeing truth. Moses didn’t decide what was true; he recognized what was true because he was a true mystic. Scripture reveals his struggle to rise above the flesh, but we clearly see a level of enlightenment that outstripped human ability. Those who took up the burden of his shepherd’s calling needed at least some of that same mystical insight.

Obviously, they lost it. Various elements of it reappeared from time to time, especially among the prophets, but once we get past Samuel and his School of the Prophets, the legacy declines rather quickly among the political leadership. It starts strongly enough with men like David and Solomon, both very gifted mystics, but despite the periodic surges in the history of Israel, there is an obvious trend of losing it. Toward the end, as Jeremiah cries out the last warnings before Exile, we see where he complains that the people seem convinced they had God over a barrel. They honestly believed He could not let Jerusalem fall to the enemy or He would be homeless. Jeremiah and some of his friends were mystics, but they were a tiny minority as the bulk of the leadership sneered at the very idea.

From there, it was a one-two punch that set them up for complete failure. First, in returning to the latter Babylon, they were reintroduced to the arrogance from urban facilities and human accomplishment. The Mesopotamian mystical foundation in Babylon wasn’t gone, just badly cluttered with cheap structures. Their mystical outlook was overwhelmed by arrogance. That the rulers appeared to be genuine geniuses helped, but it wasn’t enough.

Babylon was overrun by a different kind of genius from farther east. Forgoing a detailed examination of the Persian Empire, we note first their lack of arrogance, at least initially. A central doctrine of their Zoroastrian religion was a sort of syncretism that took other national gods seriously, so that they come off quite the good guys in Hebrew history. They wanted the Jews to return home and rebuild so they could pray for the emperor, because his god wanted to be friends with all the others. But the core of Israeli leadership didn’t return to the Land of Judah. They stuck around and absorbed the Persian sense of wealth as a reflection of divine favor, the second punch. It was not so radically far from the idea that God promised to bless a faithful nation with peace, security, stability and a measure of prosperity, but it shifted the emphasis from reasonable prosperity to pining for Solomon’s level of wealth. They began to reverse the logic. Instead of wealth being one earthly sign of God’s favor, it became the primary proof they had His favor and could do almost what they might imagine would fit into the wording of the Law.

They still tended to reason along the ANE forms of logic for a time. As the traffic between Judah and the high synagogues back in Babylon increased, there was a slight revival in the old Mesopotamian intellectual depth. Some of the scholars still understood the full mysticism of Moses, and there were genuine prophets for a time. However, the folks back in Jerusalem slipped back into the old habits, such that the last prophet of record speaks for God, asking why He should tolerate them dirtying the carpet in His temple, since there was no depth at all in their religion.

It was a short time after this last prophet, Malachi, published his warnings that Alexander the Great did his thing in backlash against the Persians. They had been harassing the Greeks for quite a while. We note in passing the Western mythology makes the Spartans good guys. In the Bible, the Spartans were filthy spawn of Hell while Persians were morally superior, but just didn’t know when to quit. So Alexander the Hellenizer plowed through the land and found the Judeans welcoming. He gave them the same gifts as every other kingdom he conquered. It started slowly as just a hobby, but within a century, the leadership of Judean scholars were entirely captive to Greek philosophy.

Though the older Hebrew outlook was never quite wiped out, it was eclipsed organizationally. The political events are mind-numbingly complex during the period between the Old and New Testaments, but the intellectual shift was painfully simple. Those who taught religion were also the government, and their ability to understand Moses was essentially dead. Going back over the Covenant without that mystical outlook meant they just barely maintained the external trappings of the cultural and social structure, but they had become openly hostile the higher meaning of the Law. So much so that they virtually rewrote the whole thing in a vast fat code of Western legalism we now call the Talmud. Today’s Jewish scholars act as if the Talmud corrects the Books of Moses, sometimes claiming that the Talmud reflects the oral teaching of Moses that he didn’t write down. It does not require much scholarship, even for a Westerner, to see the shocking difference in outlook between the two. Moses would have vomited over the Talmud.

Furthermore, it doesn’t take a genius to trace back the debates they had with Jesus to realize He was calling them back to the older Hebrew mystical understanding. By and large, modern Judaism is merely the extension of the Hellenized disaster, not at all the Hebrew religion of ancient times. They had seized upon the notion of rational absolutes; the nit-picking over precise wording and legalistic analysis is entirely a Western approach. They had God fully contained in hard concrete box, and any dispute was sin by definition. Meanwhile, Jesus talked about a spiritual awareness and how those scholars completely missed the real meaning of Moses’ Law. In an age when Jewish men seldom spoke in public even to respectable Jewish women, He told a Gentile slut that what really mattered with Jehovah was a spiritual connection, not some imaginary faithfulness to the letter of Jewish law. She started down the path to that spiritual connection despite being culturally at war with the People of Jehovah.

Whatever else we see in the Gospels, Jesus was the final living clarification of everything God’s Laws meant, and the ultimate human expression of the living moral fabric within all Creation.

Recommended readings: Encyclopedic entries on various periods of Bible History including Exodus, the Fall of Jerusalem, Exile, Restoration. Articles on Hellenism will narrow the focus on just what Alexander offered Judah. Details of the intellectual shift from East to West among Jewish rabbis is best covered by Alfred Edersheim in The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, particularly Book 1, Chapters 1-4 (electronic versions are available, some free). The author’s The Mind of Christ (free) expands on the human character of Jesus as a Hebrew mystical thinker.

Posted in meta | Tagged greek philosophers, history, intellect, mysticism, religion | Comments Off

Invisible Divine Justice

Posted on July 26, 2013 by ehurst

The whole business of mysticism is receiving actionable knowledge from outside the normal human intellectual inputs.

It requires a faculty missing from humans by default. The very nature of the thing eludes our grasp, but we can discuss it in terms of indications, not descriptions. There is a sense in which you can learn mysticism. You can train your mind to process inputs from a source higher than the intellect, and to discern the difference between that higher input versus lesser impulses that can be mistaken for those inputs. You can learn to trust processing that is above conscious reasoning. Whole civilizations in history considered it the normal way of approaching anything more than the most routine stuff of human existence. There is another sense in which it simply drops on you as a gift, when some higher authority reaches out to you for its own reasons and makes you able to find that link between the mind and those higher processes. The difference between learned and granted is hard to gauge in reality, because the primary social signal among mystics is a warm affection for the truth as a blessing, not as a weapon to keep others in line.

It’s not as if those lacking the mystical insight can’t understand anything, but there will always be that final measure of higher logic missing from their calculations. They have forced themselves into a framework that can’t possibly account for everything. This is part of the assumed background in any discussion of divine law. You could memorize a vast body of precedent and have some means to estimating, but there will always be those cases that defy your grasp. We who have mystic insight remain aware that in our current world setting, the majority will never understand completely. They will typically lack the sense of easy warmth and serenity so painfully obvious to those who are mystics. (Yes, religious pagans can manifest that same warmth.)

The difference is painfully obvious when people write about their expectations for the near term future. Aside from the blind sheeple who don’t distinguish much of anything beyond what their fleshly lusts demand this very moment, there is a rather large portion of humanity well aware that our world system is highly unstable. There has always been various measures and degrees of oppression, but we are in the part of the cycle where there is not much to distract the ogres nor their victims. Most people are frankly worried about sudden drastic changes in their daily lives, and rightly so. There is a very large volume of Internet chatter about the latest shocking abuse, and a distinct sense there is no relief in sight.

Among those making noises about seizing justice with their own hands, only a tiny portion of them would actually do it. If nothing else, the vast majority of them simply aren’t preparing realistically to respond; they have no realistic sense of what is involved. They are most to be pitied, because they have left a trail the oppressors can follow easily. They will be the prime targets of planned crackdowns.

Then there is a huge crowd of folks convinced they can stir up the population to act in some concerted fashion to overthrow the rascals — activists. They earn a different kind of pity. There is half-truth in their ideas, because oppression will be limited by the volume of folks who simply can’t comply with insane demands. What seems to be resistance will actually be systemic failure. The ogres suffer their own brand of unreality. The activists are driven by a very worldly sense of justice, somehow believing justice is part of that indefinable something called objective reality. It’s a very worldly brand of justice, typically woven from varying threads of social mythology. Everyone assumes their own sense of justice is self-evident. What distinguishes them from mystics is the painful sense of panic underlying all their communications, because they imagine entirely too much depends on human hands. Humans tend to see the most gossamer insignificance as the whole of their reality.

Mystics realize most human activity is harmless and pointless on the cosmic scale. We see from outside the human perspective. In reality, very little depends on any human, nor really all humanity. We see the course of divine justice as cosmic reality, while human activity just a lot of little piffles bouncing off of it. About the only thing we as humans can do is cooperate or not. We can ride along with where cosmic justice is surely going, or we can struggle blindly and get bitten when charging into injustice. If you can’t see it, you can’t possibly figure it out. Human tools are not competent for the question.

God has warned Americans that He will not restrain the evil that Americans have set loose. Having drifted so firmly into the path of injustice, the course has been set and must run itself out. When some filthy psychopath proposes and acts on some smaller injustice easily recognized, God will not allow anyone to stop them. That’s a generality; there will be some give and take in the specifics, but the larger trend remains unchanged. When this thing has run its course, there will hardly be any sense of closure for those on the ground who can’t see the cosmic reality. Their intellect will pick over those who seemed to get away with it, the things never quite put back in place, their rational sense of order remaining disturbed. They’ll confuse poetic justice with the higher reality and won’t understand.

Whatever they do in the attempt to recover will vary widely in effectiveness. Most of it will be pointless. They’ll miss grand opportunities to help people move forward.

Divine justice in the soul of a mystic brings the serenity that enables a very sure hand of justice in the midst of chaos.

Posted in sanity | Tagged mysticism, oppression, peace, resistance, survival | Comments Off

ACBM: Part 2 Chapter 4

Posted on July 26, 2013 by ehurst

Chapter 4 — The Covenant Nation

While the Mesopotamians kept track of a wide range of religious and philosophical considerations, the Nile Valley folks focused more on developing their own to a much greater depth.

While our understanding of Egyptian chronology and dating is admittedly a house of cards, the records on their beliefs are fairly substantial. There is debate about why they even built the pyramids and similar massive monuments, but we know a lot about their general outlook on things. It’s nearly impossible to discern what the common folks might have thought about anything; nobody keeping records seemed to care much about that. However, we have an extensive record of powerful folks and their self-proclaimed worldview. Further, all the other evidence suggests they weren’t simply posturing.

A critical element in the belief system was the perception of a sort of moral fabric, a life force within the universe that called for justice. All things were measured in terms of how well they accorded with that sense of justice. While it’s possible to declare in any given context what might offer the best manifestation of that justice, there was a fundamental assumption you couldn’t always expect that same act to be just in any other context. In other words, moral justice was a mystical power that often defied human understanding. A great many rituals were aimed at gaining access to the judgment of the various deities who would each be expert in their own areas of interest, but all shared the same sense of justice, despite any possible conflicts that humans were unlikely to understand.

Further, Egyptian mythology includes a highly developed cosmology. There is no suggestion here that other cultures lacked a sense of afterlife or other realms of existence. However, the Egyptians spent a lot more time and effort defining this concept. In their mythology, other realms of existence were utterly outside the human realm. While it’s possible that some people, and certainly deities, did cross the boundary between here and there, the qualitative difference between worlds generally required a human die to leave this one. They had a distinct sense that humans were composed of multiple elements with some parts confined to this space, and that death separated the components of one’s being. The gods came here because they were from a far higher realm, and their presence here was rather confining on them, as if they never really completely came inside this realm.

It would serve little purpose to enter into the debate about when Moses was born in terms of dates, and assigning the Bible narrative to any particular known dynasty is an exercise in frustration. Too many critical elements don’t match no matter where you place him. We must acknowledge a major part of the problem for Western Christians is the highly fraudulent portrayals in movies and popular reinterpretations. For all we know, Moses may have been the general who led a successful, empire-saving war against the Nubians, or simply one more insignificant pseudo-noble in a less important district during those times when Egyptian government was highly fragmented. Since Egyptian records never recorded military defeats, and often portrayed them as faux victories, it’s not possible to date the Exodus with what we now know. Indeed, sometimes for other reasons, the entire process of recording events among the Hebrews, as well, might see events we consider major and definitive simply left out of the narrative. We should never assume the sequence doesn’t include at least the occasional gap.

What we cannot afford to lose here is certain obvious elements in the story. Moses got an education generally not available to the rest of his nation. It’s hard to imagine they didn’t lose some of Abraham’s sophistication and intellectual depth over the generations, despite indications they kept at least part of it alive. For Moses, this was a pagan education with another heavy dose of Black Magic, but a lot more mathematics and surely some military training. Nobody forgot he was not a literal son of the queen, but any sort of public success would have created tension in the ruling house between him and the heir. Like Abraham, once his education was sufficiently advanced, God needed Moses to go and renew the acquaintance with a nomadic and contemplative existence. Further, there was no small matter of exposure to the religion and philosophy of his father-in-law, Jethro.

In the ANE, there was a complete absence of “one right answer” to larger questions of life. Juxtaposing ideas that seem to us mutually contradictory did not rattle them. It wasn’t really fuzzy thinking, but the ability to follow multiple tracks at once. There may well be one best answer, but it was always highly contextual, including the variable of who was answering the question. The concept of absolutes was considered childish. This simply is not obvious, but a critical element in the worldview of folks like Moses. The question was never what was right in any absolute sense, but what would please the one to whom you were accountable.

Idolatry had surely crept into the Nation of Israel, but if nothing else, his time with Jethro cured any of that tendency for Moses. It’s very easy for Western minds to miss the full impact of the Burning Bush. In his world, every light not in the sky had to be from fire, so perhaps a better translation would be the Glowing Bush. A baldly literal reading in English misses most of what happens here. It signified an otherworldly presence and Moses was accountable for taking this signal seriously as a demand he report. He wasn’t silly enough to think this was God, only a manifestation, an angelic messenger. It was sacred ground only because the angel was there, and only while it was there. Any site that served as a customary or reliable place of meeting with God would be treated as sacred more permanently, like Mount Sinai, also known from ancient times as the Mountain of God. It was here at the bush that Moses learned the name that his people were to call their God, which in English is traditionally written Jehovah.

Moses had trouble keeping his grip on all the things God promised here, and was human enough to need frequent reminders. Somewhere between this first meeting and that month or so stay on Mount Sinai, Moses was taught how to recognize the truth. Again, not absolute truth, because the concept didn’t exist in his world. Rather, it was the pertinent truth, what his Master wanted him to know in order to serve. This wasn’t some encyclopedic memory, but the divine insight to recognize truth in any context. Camping around Sinai included a fresh review of all past learning and mythology to winnow out the material that didn’t fit the purpose. While much of it was familiar, we know there were certain elements that were totally new, a fresh revelation directly from God.

There is no question that Abraham was influenced by the mythology and legends of Mesopotamia, and that Moses absorbed a lot Egyptian mythology, not to mention a hard to measure influence from Jethro’s unique religion. The inherent claim of Scripture is that God was in charge and intimately involved in the process, that what was adopted as Scripture was in accordance with His requirements. You can ignore all that and blow it off as simply some thoughtful copying of ideas, and no one on this earth can prove you wrong. The whole assumption behind Hebrew Mysticism is that one can develop a faculty for perceiving things not visible to the normal range of human insight. Most people have the ability to develop mystical awareness, but the full range of perception cannot be universal, though nothing attempts to explain why that is. It simply is. The lore of Hebrew Scripture is not a string of facts and events, nor even the narrative that serves as the mythology of the Hebrew people. It beckons to a full blown mysticism, of connecting with some part of the human being to a place outside the human space, and that it was not the intellect.

The older lore for worship of God was well known, so that Abraham encountered it in Melchizedek, and Moses in Jethro, plus odd figures like Balaam who knew of it. Through Moses, God commanded a certain level of close adherence to specifics that were far more demanding. This does not invalidate the older practices, but places a specific burden on this one nation as their identity. Folks outside the nation could continue as before, but to join the nation was a matter of of adherence to the highly developed national covenant, not of blood kinship. While the Israelis often forgot that fact in the face of ancient custom, it was clear from the start that their identity was not DNA but commitment. Throw aside the commitment and you were ostracized as an outsider; come in from anywhere and embrace the Covenant, and you are an Israeli. Worship God appropriately outside the Covenant and you were an ally. The natural human weakness was to forget that their God owned all Creation, and to imagine that they owned Him.

As time went on, that arrogance blinded them, but the Hebrew religion was born in full mysticism.

Recommended readings: Encyclopedic entries on Egyptian mythology and religion. We assume a familiarity with the Books of Moses, Genesis through Deuteronomy.

Posted in meta | Tagged antiquities, archeology, egyptian chronology, egyptian mythology, egyptology, mysticism, old testament history, philosophy, religion, spirituality | Comments Off

ACBM: Note 2

Posted on July 25, 2013 by ehurst

I forgot to mention that the call of mysticism doesn’t require a detailed knowledge of ANE archaeology.

Around 1700 a Catholic Priest known as Francois Fenelon started down the path of mysticism. While we might find room to criticize some of the doctrine he adopted from Quietism, the point is how thoroughly mystical is the doctrine. Naturally the Church hierarchy dragged him back, but the writings of Fenelon are quite revealing as an example of others who were touched by the call of mysticism over the centuries of Church History. Quite a few “heresies” were actually forays into mysticism.

I’ll be including Fenelon’s example in the final publication of this course. Look him up in your favorite search engine because some of his writings are online.

Posted in meta | Tagged church hierarchy, francois fenelon, history, mysticism, quietism, spirituality, writing | Comments Off