I have three brothers. Once a month, I send ’em an e-mail to catch ’em up on the news. This one was sent outside that schedule, for the reasons indicated. Names have been changed, to protect my privacy.
Tag Archives: Reincarnation
The self-loving reptile
This post has been a long time coming.
Many people in my world are fundamentally reptilian.
This largely accounts for their social marginalization.
The question is how to, for want of a better word, humanize them.
ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE.
As to reincarnation
I address reincarnation, a potentially important topic, enough here:
About organized religion
About organized religion
July 1, 2018
The evils of organized religion need no rehearsal here.
People rightly question whether it has any right to exist.
To respond, I can begin with an examination of the life of one single man, John Lee Cowell.
Read this:
BART killing: Divergent paths met tragically on Oakland platform
If that link doesn’t work, click here.
That this was a white-on-black crime led to a spasm of hysteria.(*)
No heaven or hell is of interest to me except the living heaven or living hell folk create in this life, here and now, for themselves and one another. Clearly, Cowell has spent his life creating just such a living hell.
But before he ever did that, there is the living hell he was born into.(**)
No theodicy can justify this apart from belief in reincarnation.
The question is how one got into that situation, and how one may get out.
Karma as results
It may be easy, too easy, to imagine how this individual got himself into that situation: it’s “bad karma” rising from the bad things he’s done in the past. There may be a less judg-mental way to look at it, an alternative to seeing karma as rewards and punishments. Indeed, the God I worship and believe in doesn’t deal in either one.
I’m not good at video games.
One I played a few times involved fighter spacecraft engaged in battle. Again and again, this happened (which is why I gave up on the game): I’d launch an on-target weapons blast that destroyed the enemy craft; but, as the pieces of its wreckage continued on through space along their own paths, I’d ineptly steer my craft into the path of one or more of them, and so be destroyed myself.
Similarly, for better or worse, karma is a matter of one’s meeting the results of one’s own actions. It is composed of spiritual material that is just as — material — in its own world, as any material object is in ours. Like those pieces of wreckage careening through space, or like billiard balls rolling across a pool table, each one — with its own momentum and inertia — will continue on its path unless something happens to redirect it or dissolve it.
Expiation of karma
I have lived at times in dread of what bad things I have done in previous lives that may come back to create unforseen, inevitable disaster in my future in this life. There is no need to do so; no need to explore one’s presumed past lives in search of such information. For from moment to moment, day to day, one meets one’s karma from this life and the past; as little or much as one can deal with, at the moment.
One who lives as Jesus taught is prone to present one’s best self at all times; the best self one can be at the moment, from moment to moment. In this way, such a person is not only creating the best possible present for oneself and one’s community, but also sending favorable karma into one’s own future.
By the same token, one who lives as Jesus taught is best equipped from moment to moment to deal positively with life’s difficulties as they occur. Those difficulties inevitably include the negative karma from one’s past. Dealing positively with such events expiates that karma, sublimating evil into good, changing darkness into light.
Forgiveness
In recent days, I have been assembling a list of Bible verses to examine in the chapter, “Other Jesus sayings.” I puzzled over the significance of these:
- Mark 11:25: “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses.”
- Matthew 18:35: “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”
- Matthew 16:19 and Matthew 18:18: “[W]hatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
The last one seems to me to be about forgiveness also: “loosing” a bond refers to forgiving an offense; “binding” refers to not-forgiving.
The way of the world
is to not-forgive, but rather retaliate. Much of what we see, in the world, is a matter of negativity between persons going back and forth forever, each one alternating in the roles of victim and victimizer, which is why the human state seems so seldom to improve.
All sentient creatures, all creatures that have free will, have the privilege, power and ability to change light into darkness, or darkness into light. This is a feature of God’s image in each one. To forgive is to change darkness into light.
As to the bond that is created when one does not forgive: this is, in effect, a material thing in the spiritual world, like any of the rest of one’s karma, that will careen on its own through space-time potentially forever. Something has to happen to loose or dissolve that bond, an act of will by some sentient creature.
Their task
The soul who was Nia Wilson, and the soul who is John Lee Cowell, are destined to meet again; in a future life for her, and the present or a future life for him. When they do, the person she will be is destined to feel a strong, murderous impulse toward him. If she fails or has failed to forgive; or fails to sublimate or redirect that impulse; she will act on it — possibly again, as we cannot rule out the possibility that he killed her his time in retaliation for an attack she, in some previous life, made on him before. Either one could have been of the other sex at that time.
Similar impulses clearly have beset Cowell all his life. I refer to this phenomenon as “The Itch,” an unsought desire for strife or violence or turmoil. Its presence in my own experience is very troubling to me, and I am working to purify myself of it. In other chapters, I set forth “Strategies” and “Tactics”(***) one may use to sublimate or redirect such impulses.
Cowell faces far more work in this regard than you or I. Much as he may strive in it, he is sure to sometimes fail.
A major aspect is that one must be willing to forgive oneself, which may be what Mark 11:25 and Matthew 18:35 are actually about.
Related: A short route to agony
He will never be free until he discerns the image of God within himself, and loves that, loves himself, enough to forgive himself his life of violence and crime.
Sole source
The evils of organized religion need no rehearsal here. I obviously have profound disagreements with traditional Christianity in almost any form. The fact remains that no other institution in the West, even in the world, presumes to seek to understand what Jesus taught. No other institution in the world even sets forth the proposition of forgiveness.
The church does.
That’s reason enough it should exist.
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(*)Related:
– BART slaying ignites fear among black people — ‘It just feels like they’re coming for us’
– Anne Hathaway calls out white privilege in passionate post about ‘unspeakable’ murder of Nia Wilson
– Critics say the media makes innocent blacks look dangerous. Nia Wilson is their latest example.
(**)One can compare him, in this regard, to Carter Scott, Jamarion Lawhorn or Kendrea Johnson.
(***)These will appear at a later date.
2) Give up the word “deserve.”
| <– 1) Do for yourself… | Home | 3) Get your hands dirty. –> |
John C. Dorhauer’s “An Open Letter to White Men in America” begins:
Dear White Men,
You are persons of privilege.
You didn’t earn it.
This distresses me far less today than it did when I first read it. Maybe I’ve become more comfortable with having things I don’t deserve. More likely, I’ve lost all interest in whether people have things they don’t deserve or deserve things they don’t have.
I encourage you to lose all interest in it, too.
A case for the death penalty
Death penalty sought for alleged Boston bomber Tsarnaev
A friend of mine, a Lutheran pastor, opposes capital punishment. But to my mind, her story, which she told me circa 1985, poses the premiere case for the death penalty.
She had a son, a lively pre-teen, who died suddenly under suspicious circumstances. At first, police found a person of interest in Arthur Goode, a known pedophile who was known to have been in the area at the time. It was soon enough established that Goode had been nowhere near the time and place of the death, and the death was ruled accidental.
That did not prevent Goode from harassing the family for years with phone calls and letters in which he spewed forth lurid details of what he now alleged he had done with the boy.
Continue reading A case for the death penalty
About Edgar Cayce’s dream, part 2
Continued from yesterday’s post, Part 1.
Justice and feedback
Ever since grade school, I’ve been fervently interested in prison reform. I had compassion for these “bad people.” I would want the prison experience to give a “bad” person every reason, every chance, every motivation to mend one’s ways. But this is definitely not happening in our prisons now.
About Edgar Cayce’s dream, part 1
Edgar Cayce’s dream tells me more about the material world than the spiritual world.
About Edgar Cayce
Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) is the most thoroughly documented clairvoyant in history.
Typically, he would lie down on a couch as if to take a nap. A “conductor,” normally his wife, would read certain directions to him. Thereupon, he would begin to speak, from this sleep-like state, and answer questions that were posed to him.
In this state, he seemed to have access to an infinite storehouse of information. He spoke of things and concepts he could not possibly have had knowledge of in his waking life: chakras, kundalini, the titles and authors of obscure books, the names and addresses of health care practitioners whom he had never heard of, and who had never heard of him, in real life.
A secretary was normally present who would record everything he said in shorthand, and afterwards transcribe it on a typewriter.
Each of these discourses is called a “reading.” More than 14,000 such “readings” are archived — and catalogued and thoroughly cross-indexed — at the Association for Research and Enlightenment, in Virginia Beach, VA, the organization that was founded for the study of his words.
The vast majority of readings fall into either of two categories: “physical readings” or “life readings.”
A “physical reading” involved a written request from some person suffering a physical ailment. The person had to provide an address where he or she would be at the time the reading was to take place. Cayce’s words in such a reading normally began with, “We have the body,” and then he would proceed to speak as if he were physically present with the patient in person. He would examine the person’s physical body as with some sort of X-ray vision; opine about the nature and origins of the ailment; and prescribe treatment. If the treatment instructions were followed as given, the patient invariably found relief.
A “life reading,” in contrast, involved an examination of an individual’s current life and supposed past lives, toward the end of understanding the issues and opportunities the person faced. Cayce’s words in such a reading normally began with, “We have the entity,” “entity” meaning, in effect, “soul.” He would proceed to set forth the astrological positions of the planets at the time of the person’s birth,(*) and then summarize each of the person’s lives, beginning with the present life and following with each preceding life, in that order. Thus the words that came up again and again, “Before this, the entity was …”
This catalogue of previous lives was not presumed to be exhaustive. The Cayce source concerned itself principally with those lives where events and issues occurred most pertinent to the events and issues the seeker faced today. The Cayce source claimed that it got all that information about the person’s previous lives from “the Akashic records,” a supposed record “on the skein of space-time” of everything the entity had ever done.
On one occasion, after a life reading, Cayce gave a description of the dream-like experience he normally went through when giving such a reading. That text appears in the next post here below.
Some of the readings use vague, disjointed, almost incoherent language, pretty much just what one might expect from any man talking in his sleep. Most, however, are so cogent that one can hardly believe they came from a sleeping man. He speaks lucidly and at times with passion about different aspects of the human condition; of episodes in Bible history, and the person and significance of Jesus. Those readings have gained him an avid following.
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(*)In preparing for this post, I came across an excerpt from Amazing Randi’s Flim Flam that presumes to debunk Edgar Cayce completely. By turns sarcastic and — sarcastic — Randi opines that many of the concoctions Cayce prescribed were probably noxious, and that many patients would likely have gotten better without following Cayce’s directions at all. It came to me: anyone wanting to confirm or disconfirm Cayce’s accuracy could easily do so by checking the astrological information present in each life reading. The subjects’ birthdates are all in the record.
The Homeless Blogger 