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Re: Unraveling the supernatural.

Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 4:01 pm
by tat tvam asi
DWill wrote:That was super, tat. One comment I have just incidentally, is that it seems somehow more genuine to me for your grandfather to call his god Yahweh. I have kind of a problem with the name 'God' and sense that Christians don't like it when we call God Yahweh instead. But why should it bother them?
Thanks DWill. Let me elaborate further on my grandfathers Yahweh study. He was under the impression that the names Yahweh and Yahshua are to be used and not the more corrupted forms of Jehovah and Jesus. And he went through the reasons for concluding on that.

Forgive me freethinkers and anti-mystical atheists browsing through the thread because I'm about to write something that may burn your eyes for a moment. My grandfather looked me dead in the eye and said Yahweh means "I am that I am" and Yahshua means "Yahweh Saves", or rather "Yahweh is Salvation". And then we went through texts talking about God saying "I give you my name" and everything emphasizing the aspect of the names of God the father and son. He said, "Yahshua - Stephen". WTF did that mean I wondered? I didn't make sense at the time. Not until years later when I penetrated the tetragramaton down to it's bare mythological meaning. The father here is replacing what had been previously the purpose of the goddess myths, "I am" was formerly Isis and Neith and the like. With the patriarchal take over of the previously matriarchal myths the father now took on the representation of mere existence as the totality - "all that ever was, is, or shall ever be.." You have the realm of existence on one hand - infinite and eternal and grounded in deep wonder and mystery - and then we come to the son of existence, the human form, which is ultimately one with the father as it were. "I give you my name..." The myths began to open up to me in ways I never previously understood. "Yahshua - Stephen". "I am that I am is Salvation" But salvation from what? I began to understand that it's a type of salvation from the ignorance of not recognizing who and what we all actually are. We are the universe itself, we are the realm of existence experiencing itself from the perspective of a living creature. There's something in the way of a valid human experience being expressed here in the mythology and like Tulip I took off thinking that major reformation is in order that should sweep across the whole of Christianity. It was an extreme mystical time in my life, but a time of completely atheistic, pantheistic based mysticism if you can follow what I mean by that.

But the more I studied the more I began to realize that the only reason I was detecting these deeper pantheist concepts in the Christian mythos is because it was largely thrown together in Alexandria Egypt with a strong Antioch - Alexandrian connection throughout. Bits of eastern enlightment tossed in with western Judaized views, some of with a strong esotric purpose and some of it totally exoteric. I eventually realized that the notion of any large scale reformation of Christianity is ultimately futile. Sure a case can be made that there are certain things described in the mythos which can be re-interpreted and changed around to suite a modern understanding, but people are set in their ways and any suggestion of change is immediately the realm of anti-christ accusation and negative response. So why bother?

What I did was take a personal interpretation out of it that suites my own world view. God is existence and I am one with that God. It may or may not be a mind, I don't know in any absolute terms. But what ever the realm of existence is or is not, I am that, plain and simple. I get up in the morning and set my eyes on a river stone talisman that I engraved with the tetragramaton written from top to bottom which forms the human image when written that way - as the kabbalists portray it ( www.Yhwh.com). And it's a way of grounding myself in the understanding that I and the whole are one regardless of the appearence of space, distance between objects, and separateness... That's one of my own personal mystical practices which is oriented towards a completely natural based pantheistic form of mystical thinking. I mean this should not come as all too surprising considering the screen name I've chosen, which is simply the exact same type of understanding given in a sanskrit form.

This forum is rather hostile towards mystics and I know this and I have been a part of the hostility at times. But only towards the mysticism of "supernaturalism". As for natural based mystics I have no real problem, I am of that fold. Mysticism to me is very simple. It only has to do with an interest and focus on the mystery underlying existence itself with respect to one's own person existence. It doesn't have to refer to anything unnatural or supernatural. But at the same time I'm willing to admit that this entire worldview I've developed over the years is nothing more than the fact that I was raised a theist brought up to think in supernatural terms and simply kicked the supernatural out of the mix and continued on with a natural form of mystical thinking instead. And those brought up differently who may not suffer from any internal urge towards some type of mystical thinking simply can not understand why an atheist would bother to think in these terms. The psychological aspect of it is interesting to analyze and I was hoping that Johnson may take issue with my posts and offer some advice. I've followed many of his posts about death and near death experiences and the problems with pop culture mystics and such, and I largely enjoy what he has to say about all of it and do agree with a lot of it. I've just sort of thrown my own experiences and stories on the chopping block here for analytical scrutiny...

:wink:

Re: Unraveling the supernatural.

Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 4:45 pm
by Azrael
tat tvam asi wrote:The Russian guy was giving his testimony on a show I watched about near death experiences, along with an interesting story about a woman covered by an avalanche who died and returned. I have no idea whether they were true or not, it's just that I went through a time of interest with death and near death experiences and wound up reading "Life After Life" in the process. I was interested in hearing a variety of accounts on the matter...
Not doubting you Tat, as you only have their word sorry if you took it that way.

Re: Unraveling the supernatural.

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 3:12 pm
by tat tvam asi
And the truth is that I only have the word of someone else as I have never died, been near death, or had any out of body experience myself. The Russian, the woman packed in snow, my grandfather, or even my mothers claim to have been out of her body looking down during the birth of my youngest sister, could all be complete bullshit through and through. But once again that goes back to the agnostic position because this is something that I just don't know one way or the other. Maybe they really did experience these things and maybe they didn't.

Actually, the closest I've come to any possible near death experience is where I was pinned down to the bottom a few times (rolling underwater) while surfing a hurricane swell when I was younger. I went down on a big close out set on the outside break at New Smyrna Inlet while hurricane Andrew was hitting south Miami. I went past the point of struggling to get to the surface and into the point of just letting go and feeling a peaceful feeling come over before blacking out completely. When I came to I was on the surface coughing out water wondering how in the hell I got there. I don't recall anything during the time period where I blacked out. And I don't think I died at any point during the struggle either. But the experience was one that seemed like a brief loss of consciousness only to regain it again. No light at the end of any tunnel or anything like that...

Unless of course I'm about to have a Bruce Willis moment right now and suddenly realize, hey, wait a minute, I died that day and this forum and everything else has all been taking place in the afterlife all the while???

:lol:

Re: Unraveling the supernatural.

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 3:23 pm
by Azrael
"Sweet is Death, who comes like a lover."

Re: Unraveling the supernatural.

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 5:17 pm
by Vishnu
I died that day and this forum and everything else has all been taking place in the afterlife all the while???
Shit, the jig is up Star Burst.

Re: Unraveling the supernatural.

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 5:49 pm
by Azrael
Vishnu wrote:
I died that day and this forum and everything else has all been taking place in the afterlife all the while???
Shit, the jig is up Star Burst.
Oh well everyone has to pay the Ferryman sooner or later no one rides for free......he will visit us all one day:

Image

http://www.westgatenecromantic.com/History.htm

"Show me your cemeteries and I will tell you what kind of people you have." Ben Franklin.

Where the angel of death appears there is no remedy (Ned. 49a; Ḥul. 7b). If one who has sinned has confessed his fault, the angel of death may not touch him (Tan., Balaḳ, ed. Buber, 139). God protects from the angel of death (Gen. R. lxviii.). By acts of benevolence the anger of the angel of death is overcome; when one fails to perform such acts the angel of death will make his appearance (Derek Ereẓ Zuṭa, viii.). The angel of death receives his order from God (Ber. 62b). As soon as he has received permission to destroy, however, he makes no distinction between good and bad (B. Ḳ. 60a). In the city of Luz the angel of death has no power, and when the aged inhabitants are ready to die they go outside the city (Soṭah 46b; compare Sanh. 97a). A legend to the same effect existed in Ireland in the Middle Ages ("Jew. Quart. Rev." vi. 336).

Read more: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view. ... z1Jux8bP5r

End of Life: Schedule and Transcripts:
http://www.npr.org/programs/death/trns.html

Re: Unraveling the supernatural.

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 8:32 pm
by tat tvam asi
...I've been in hell all of this time and Stahrwe has been the devil himself preaching his message of constant literalism and mindless fallacy as absolute matter of fact truth.

But really, youkrst's experiences are interesting enough to consider. I have a buddy who is very atheist, loves Dawkins and Harris, but at the same time swears by having exerienced an out of body episode. He really frowns on mystical thinking which is the oddest part about it. He's like me in terms of viewing things like this as just mysterious aspects of the natural world not yet fully understood by science.

Re: Unraveling the supernatural.

Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 9:09 am
by Frank 013
tat tvam asi
And the truth is that I only have the word of someone else as I have never died, been near death, or had any out of body experience myself. The Russian, the woman packed in snow, my grandfather, or even my mothers claim to have been out of her body looking down during the birth of my youngest sister, could all be complete bullshit through and through. But once again that goes back to the agnostic position because this is something that I just don't know one way or the other. Maybe they really did experience these things and maybe they didn't.
My personal thought on this matter is that they did indeed experience what they claim, but what they experienced has been misunderstood.

The things they experienced may have been the mind speaking to itself much like a dream… largely influenced by the already imbedded beliefs.

This is why (as you touched on earlier) a Buddhist or Muslim will have experiences that validate their religions and a Christian will have one that validates their own… I do not claim this to be conclusive, but it seems more likely than the alternatives.

Later

Re: Unraveling the supernatural.

Posted: Tue Apr 19, 2011 4:47 pm
by johnson1010
I think the most likely answer to near death experiences would have to be that their brains were either dead, or on the verge of death.

If i can't remember what i said to my wife, when she doesn't quite wake me up at 3am, how can we expect somebody who's brain DIED to have a reliable story when they come back to?

It's all after-the-fact rationalization, and imposing what they would LIKE for there to have been over what they actually experienced.

It's like remembering cloud formations you saw yesterday, and recalling how perfectly you could see godzilla in the outlines.

But it wasn't godzilla. That tunnel of light is just what happens when you pass out and your vision narrows to a point. Imagine laying on a gourney staring at the flourescent lights as your vision narrows to a point. Your mind is racing, trying to deal with your imminent death. What kind of story would we expect a person to come up with after going through that?

Re: Unraveling the supernatural.

Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2011 10:57 pm
by tat tvam asi
You guys are right. The more probable explanation is that these people honestly experienced something but don't quite understand what exactly theywere literally experiencing at the time. I'm sure the mind is going through all sorts of things during these near death and even actual flatline clinical death experiences...

And I don't really see why we should be all too frightened about consciousness dying out anyways. It arose from something and it will subside back into something (something = something). But what I wonder about is the general mind of nature if you will. The driving force of evolving life and such. Consciousness seems to be a collected network of various universal properties all of which contribute to the over all experience of a conscious living being. It can seem like a sort of primal energy consciousness underlying everything in a strange way. This kind of goes back to where Campbell used to speak of energy and consciousness seeming to be two aspects of the very same thing.

Also, in materialist Milo Wolff's wave structured atom diagrams the two way in and out wave motion provides an explanation for the transfer of energy and information concerning the distance and location of the local surrounding particles in space - http://www.quantummatter.com While going over his theories it occured to me that if he's correct and space has the properties of a continuous wave medium, and matter is actually caused by the wave motions of space, then the whole of the universe begans to take on the appearence of a massive exchanging of energy and information between all the visible and invisible material objects within the entire expanse of space. I got into some heated debate about this because the wave structure physicists hold to this materialist cosmological model where all that exists is the result of a wave medium substance underlying all things, which we call "space". Matter comes before mind and mind is the result of the existence of matter. And this opposes the pop mystics and metaphysics of mind before matter BTW. So my suggestion was received harshly by some of them. But Milo Wolff himself began to admit that I had a point and that my point doesn't even violate the matter before mind worldview. If space does have the properties of a continuous wave medium making for a way of two way communication between all matter and by which provides a simple explanation for how the natural laws are communicated, then this very primal level of the beginnings of what can later become mind, as we experience it, is the result of the existence of matter first and foremost. But this began to open the door to a type of all is mind philosophy associated with this newer strain of materialist physics and cosmology nontheless. And a sharp tension began to arise because of it. But I was just following the wave structured electron theory / model to it's logical conclusion.

I've thought about this for years and I realize that an entire belief system with mystical appeal can be based around the simple starting point of saying that the mythic gods of antiquity were the human mind grasping towards trying to understand the mystery of it's own existence. What can be said to someone who believes that existence itself is actually the 'uncreated creator' which the mythological Gods are but metaphorical terms to refer back at this mystery to the mind? Can you say that the God who is simply existence itself doesn't exist? The reference here is understood as mere existence so how does one go about suggesting that it doesn't really exist? That's a rather firm starting point for a progressive modern type of belief system based around basic truth seeking. Who's going to knock that version of God down? As far as God belief goes, this is rooted in a firm pantheism. Existence is the all, the whole, the totality. It always was, it is now, and it will forever be in some form or another (something = something). It's everything attributed to the ancient's supreme deities of mythology. And that includes if there is actually some type of natural network of energy and information exchange taking place at all times everywhere throughout the expanse of mere existence, which is likely an infinite expanse with no possible fixed starting or stopping point. That's seems like why the mind associated those attributes to the construction of the mythological Gods... This is just a good healthy panthiest cosmology and worldview which consumes all of the trappings of popular pop culture, mystical oriented, 'all is mind' hype, but based upon a completely natural and materialist model of the universe.

It isn't completely developed by any means, but it has been developing gradually over the years since my grandfather set me off in search of discoverying the truth about Yahweh and the many names of God found in the bible. I tend to think that it is actually possible that our minds can indeed have an effect on reality in terms of attracting certain people, information, circumstances, etc, which have to do with the way in which matter interacts at these fundamental levels. Strong minded and strong willed people pray and hope and wish for things that can at times seem to miraculously come true and unravel in stand back type of ways. But what was the mind doing all the while? Not understanding or thinking about it in these terms people are inclined to attribute any positive results to mysterious outside forces and supernatural activity. But what if it's just the mind interacting through brain wave activity in communication with the natural universe of wave energy based matter? This is a completely different perspective than what you get with the usual mystics flocking to "What The Bleep Do We Know", and "The Secret", etc. etc.

This is how strange my personal experiences have turned out over the years of paying close attention to these things. I went and read the original book "The Secret of the Ages" by Robert Collier - who Ronda Burns based her business on - and shortly aftergetting through that I ran into Robert Tulip and basically brainstormed my way through getting to the bottom of the evolution of precession themes in world mythology once and for all. I understood a little in the beginning and it rapidily became a lot in a rather short period. Just from bouncing ideas and sudden realizations off of one another constantly. And the hub of it all eventually came down to finally realizing that the Sphinx is oriented towards marking out the two extremes of the ages of Leo-Aquarius and the soon coming age of Aquarius-Leo, which is actually echoed down through the bible and hermetic writing periods only to turn up again in the Theosophy movement as well. This interest in the wobbling observation of the heavens kept passing down from the megalithic era's to today and it largely has to do with the notion of human consciousness and mind going through stages of peaks and throughs according to the angles of the sun and stars in relation to the earth. Greater Light, closer sun, greater knowledge and awareness as these myths go. As that was all sinking in, I happened to glance over at my book shelf and there it was the entire time. My edition of Colliers book had a picture of the Sphinx on the front cover right below the title "The Secret of the Ages". I thought to myself, "what a f@#cking coincidence that turned out to be. I read the book about universal attraction and then proceeded to attract the unfolding of this ancient mystery about the "ages" literally.

All of the wave structured electron models I ran into were the same way, by chance. It all just fell into my lap really. Throughout all of this I've harbored the intention of wanting to find truth, wanting to unlock lifes mysteries with a certain degree of passion behind it all. And that's how all of the happenstance events in life began to unfold every since that intitial truth seeking intention began to take root in my subconscious. The subconscious mind being the mind of nature within you as it goes, and the supposed method by which these things are to be communicated if you follow the claims made by Collier and other how claim to have observed it at work.

The way I've digested and perceived all of this is very mystical oriented and yet materialist based at the same time though, opposite to how Robert Collier perceived mind in his day. And it's served to make me the odd man out whether talking to mystics or materialists for sure. No one else seems to be able to see it in that way, but with little wonder because who else has read through the very same variety of books and information necessary to arrive at similiar thoughts and conclusions. That's where I sort of took off on the Heros Journey - entered the forest where it was the darkest, where there was no cut path... That was the Campbell bouncing around in my mind for sure. And this strange journey of happenstance has indeed led me here to these forums where mysticism is strongly opposed with very impressive argumentation :!: :wink: The mystics speaking here seem to get blown out of the water as they arrive. And perhaps that's the reason I felt compelled to follow Tulips link trail to these discussions.

This strange mesh of materialism and mysticism floating around in my mind must face the sword so the outcome can be known...