An all knowing God who did the above did so knowing he would have to sacrifice an innocent person to fix the problem he caused (or allowed to happen).
To understand this interpretation, one must understand the tradition of the use of sacrificial scapegoats. In ancient Judaism, on the Day of Atonement, the community would cast lots to determine which of two goats would be sent out into the desert to carry away the sins of the village. Philosopher Rene Girard noted that humans tend to single out an individual to blame for all the issues of a community, who is then punished. This punishment alleviates the collective tension, and the individual who is executed is often then deified, and the cycle restarts.
The fundamental failure of this (the old system) is in the belief of external ritual as a means to effect change in the world. Because of this system, we can rationalize the torture and murder of an innocent man as somehow necessary, and that it was God’s will only adds to the horror.
Let’s reframe the incident as a tragic misunderstanding, and we enter the second phase of this investigation.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
There are two parallel realities that we inhabit- profane, linear time (represented by the Greek titan, Kronos) and mythical, sacred time (represented by the Greek god, Aion). In the profane world, we had an innocent man tortured and murdered needlessly, but in the mythic world, the Pharisees were actually enacting a different ritual than simply scapegoating. This is the myth that Christianity brought into the mainstream- the dying and resurrecting God. There are a number of pre-Christian examples of this, including Osiris, Dionysus, and even Odin’s sacrifice of himself to himself by hanging on the world tree, Yggdrasil, could be compared.
However, I pose the (likely controversial) perspective that the physical ritualization of the murder of the Christ is actually the profane equivalent of what should be an internal process- the death of the innocence of childhood to engender the rebirth of the individual as an adult, knowing, and reckoning, both good and evil. This, like the willing sacrifice of Jesus, must be voluntary on the part of the individual, and is inevitable, as it is commanded by God himself.
Again, we return to the statement, “the Kingdom of God is within you.” This would seem to be the true secret to the teachings of Jesus, insofar as it changes the narrative from an exoteric view of the world to an esoteric exploration into the simultaneously divine and profane nature of being.
This is where the myth of the syzygy enters the fray. We can harken back to a story Plato told of the origins of humans, where they were created having four arms, four legs, and two heads. Zeus feared their power and split them, condemning them to search for their missing half, which Plato called the soulmate. I think this is actually the mythologizing of the prehistoric change from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction and the instinct that drives pair bonding, but that may be a bit of a stretch.
Nevertheless, as it is we are gendered individuals in a world of sexual reproduction, fundamentally incomplete, in at least a biological sense. This is where we draw the myth of the syzygy from- the desire for oneness, completion, and the transcendence of the duality of the profane world. However, it was with the shift towards an esoteric divinity that Christ gave us that truly opened the gates towards the attainment of this nondual state. However, due to the immense historical power of the religion of Christianity (as distinct from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth himself) that the path is made obscure.
“Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”
-Matthew 7:14 (KJV)
There is a quote from chapter 24 of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas (not part of biblical canon) that reads as follows:
“When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner as the outer, and the upper as the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male shall not be male, and the female shall not be female: . . . then you will enter [the kingdom].”
This is very clearly a reference to the development of the syzygy, especially if we understand that the kingdom is within. This, however, is where we leave the realm of pure mythology and enter that of the practical quest for Self, which we will continue in the second half.
Value in the Highest: Of Truth, Will, and Love
What is the highest value in life? What is the goal that we should pursue above all else? Many have attempted to answer this question- in fact, both philosophy and religion exists as attempts to solve the riddle. If you do not know your core values, you will live your life as a ship without a captain, adrift aimlessly in the seas of chance. If you are wrong about what you value, you will sail as a man with the wrong map. However, the man who knows his values can navigate even in the most terrible storm.
Ἀγάπη
We’ll begin with an examination of older value systems- beginning with the Christian notion that God is love (agape – ἀγάπη). When examining a religion, whatever is elevated to the status of God is equivalent to the highest value. This is the primary message of Jesus of Nazareth- the old covenant is broken, and the wrathful God of the Old Testament (“For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God,” Exodus 34:14, KJV) has become the God that he presents (“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love,” John 4:8, KJV).
What are the effects of placing love at the top of your value hierarchy? The most obvious conclusion of this doctrine is evidenced with this passage from Matthew, 5:38-40,
“Ye have heard that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.”
I have major issues with this sentiment. The most obvious failure here is “ye resist not evil,” and any value system that espouses such a belief is condemned to be a value system for the enslaved and slain. Imagine the world, had the Allied forces not stood against Nazi Germany- they resisted the evil, and we are better for it.
Part of the error lies in the rejection in our inherent capacity to do evil ourselves. Far too often, we are inclined to believe that there is a distinct segregation between good people and bad people, and, of course, we always see ourselves in the camp of the former. However, as the Holocaust (and every other abomination wrought by Man) has shown us, “good” people will do horrible things when “just following orders.” It is the grim reality that we must face the capacity for horror within ourselves, accept that it exists, and embrace the totality of our being without shame or self-loathing to live honestly.
My second objection to the primacy of love as a value is that the logical conclusion of turning the other cheek is willing martyrdom. This is presumably acceptable to a value system that believes the world is evil or that there is some superior afterlife to come. However, we seek to define the ideal values for living, so we must reject those that lead to what consists of little more than a self-aggrandizing method of assisted suicide. I firmly believe in not only the right, but the obligation to defend oneself and those that one values. This expresses a contradiction in the doctrine of cheek turning- is it an act of love to let those you love be slaughtered, raped, or tortured needlessly by those who have no such value? Could you honestly believe this value and tell those dear to you to turn the other cheek and welcome the assault? This is not a complete condemnation of love- it is certainly one of the highest values, but we have seen the flaws with it being enshrined as the value supreme.
Θέλημα
Next, we come upon the value of the Will (Thelema – θέλημα). This form of the word is most commonly associated with two things- traditionally, the Will of God, and more recently, the system of belief called Thelema created by esotericist Aleister Crowley, who famously declared the value system of Will with,
“Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole o
f the Law- Love is the Law, Love under Will.”
This is obviously no endorsement of Crowley, however his phrasing is the ideal evolution that proceeds after the enshrinement enacted by “God is Love.” To see a better expression of this value system, we have to go back a bit before Crowley to the most devout disciple of the Will, Friedrich Nietzsche:
“Weakness is in demand—why?… mostly because people cannot be anything else than weak. Weakening considered a duty: The weakening of the desires, of the feelings of pleasure and of pain, of the will to power, of the will to pride, to property and to more property; weakening in the form of humility; weakening in the form of a belief; weakening in the form of repugnance and shame in the presence of all that is natural—in the form of a denial of life, in the form of illness and chronic feebleness; weakening in the form of a refusal to take revenge, to offer resistance, to become an enemy, and to show anger.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
The flaw that I find in the Will-supreme value system is most obviously expressed with Adolf Hitler. Now, I do want to clarify that, while the Nazis were quite fond of Nietzsche, the man was in fact very much against nationalism and anti-Semitism, and as such their use of his work was a perversion. However, it is because of the failure of the Will as a supreme value that this occurred at all.
The shining example of this failure is on display in the infamous propaganda film, “Triumph of the Will,” with Adolf Hitler speaking,
“It is our will that this state and this Reich shall endure through the coming millennia.”
The fundamental flaw at play here is that the Will as primary can be used to justify any sort of whim, emotion, or feeling as equivalent to a divine dictate. Any that oppose the Will are, at best, obstacles to be overcome and, at worst, enemies to be annihilated. Crowley attempted to elevate the Will to something divine- the True Will, but that doesn’t rectify the glaring issues that allowed Hitler to rise. In other words, every power-mad person believes their Will is the True Will.
Nihilism
There is one more sinister system than these two genuine attempts to solve the problem of value- Nihilism. Nihilism is a response to what Nietzsche termed the “death of God,” or more simply the failure of the old value systems in the face of the Enlightenment-caused erosion of religion. Nihilism is the belief that life has no inherent meaning or value- ironically enough, the nihilists are too great of cowards to simply follow their philosophy to conclusion and kill themselves. Instead, the spectre of Nihilism lingers and is the greatest threat to the existence of the human race ever produced.
The failure of Nihilism is evident from the conception- anyone who chooses to live accepts that life is a prerequisite for value, and our values must then act in the service of life. The rejection of life, and life as the root of all values is therefore a recipe for disaster- it is nothing other than the outright denial of reality, and it is a cancer of the soul.
What better antidote, then, to the denial of reality than reality itself?
The only value that can defeat this sickening illness of the spirit and mind is-
Ἀλήθεια - The Highest Value
Truth, or more specifically, Aletheia (ἀλήθεια)- the unhidden Truth of Reality. There is a word in Sanskrit that means essentially the same thing: Sat, which means both Truth and Reality. Regardless, Truth is what is required to prevent the martyrs for Love, the monsters of Will, and the loathsome life-denial of Nihilism.
Many have claimed to know (or own) some form of truth, and this is where the danger lies for abuse. We must enshrine Truth as a goal, and to make Truth a goal means to make what we know like clothing- something can be changed easily as our understanding changes. By rooting ourselves in what is real, both the good and the evil, we make ourselves able to accept, understand, and then welcome the totality of being.
We embrace life without denying that suffering exists. Those who live in Truth do not seek to pretend that by refusing to fight evil we can make it go away. We will not be martyrs, we will confront the evil we find, within and without, until this evil submits. We shall temper the whims of Will with the light of the Truth, and bend the Will to serve something beyond itself without rejecting the Self. No harm can come from aligning oneself to the True except to those things that would be destroyed by the Truth- “all falsehoods, wicked, left behind.”
Go forth in eternal pursuit of what is True, and conquer any resistance to reality within yourself- the world is yours, if you should choose to accept the burden of Truth.
Pieces of Mind, 0.1: Introduction to the Structure of Self
In this article I’m going to attempt to outline a (prototypical) general structure of the Self, from a variety of angles and perspectives. This will be based on my own experience and understanding, as well as on the reading and research I have done in the past. I do want to clarify- I’m not claiming any sort of scientific validity or physiological accuracy (although I will try to maintain that to the greatest degree that I am able), this is meant to be a practical and functional guide to understanding the makeup of one’s being rather than a textbook description. Additionally, all is subject to change as time goes on and my own understanding of Self deepens.
With that said, let’s begin.
I will first establish distinctions between the words self and Self. The lowercase s self is to be used in reference to general concept of who one is, i.e., “I am so-and-so, I live in such-and such.” The capital S Self, however, refers to the actual core of one’s being, the irreducible experience of consciousness (the “man on the island” in the Solomon article.) I will also distinguish between the words ego and Ego. The lowercase e ego here is the word as used in the context of Buddhism and the other eastern traditions- the temporary, illusory things that we think to be our identity but are non-permanent (this is the negative ego that causes problems). The capital E Ego here refers to the parts of our personal identity that cannot be changed- core traits of one’s personality that are consistent over time (this Ego is not an inherent evil, as some philosophies and religions claim).
Before we acquire insight into the nature of Self, we tend to have a fairly undifferentiated, vague notion of our identities. If we were to visualize it, it would look something like this:
The self is the sum total of the identity here, and because it’s undifferentiated, it’s filled with the ego. The ego here is the same as the clouds around the island that I covered in “Solomon”- thoughts, ideas, feelings, and other transient things that occupy one’s attention. Because they are not distinguished from the silent, central awareness that is pure Being, the person having this experience doesn’t know the difference between their Self and their experience. This is the problem of attachment- because we don’t see that we (our Selves) are inherently separate from our thoughts, ideas, and experiences, we experience fear when these are questioned or threatened.
We perceive any attempt to change our mind as an actual attack on our person.
This is incredibly important to understand- it means that a disagreement is potentially an invalidation of one’s identity. To rephrase this, all of the bits of the ego (the clouds hiding the self) are literally thought of as a part of who we are, and the attempt to remove or change them is actively painful. The presence of conflicting ideas, opinions, or feelings creates cognitive dissonance, and cognitive dissonance hurts. In the event our egos are out of sync with reality, we will experience problems (suffering) directly as a result of this paradox until the disconnect is resolved. However, without insight into the nature of the cause of this paradox (through the process of self-reflection), we will not be able to resolve it.
If we go after external knowledge without first gaining knowledge of Self, we will only manage to cloud our vision of reality. The Self is like a singular eye, referenced here in Matthew 6:22-24 (KJV)-
No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in
may see the light. The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness. If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light.
Imagine the Self as this eye, and everything else that stands between the Self and the Truth of reality (aletheia [ἀλήθεια], Greek for “the unhidden truth”) is a contraption that affects the ability of the eye to see clearly. Some things are lenses (for better or worse), and they cause our vision to focus, blur, widen, narrow, distort, change tint, or even polarize. However, because we lack insight, we don’t see the contraption, we only see through the contraption. What is required is for us to take a step back and observe the machine that we’re looking through.
We can visualize it like this:
At the center is the Self, which is surrounded by the Ego proper. The Ego contains our personal experiences and core personality. The Self and Ego (which are the man and the island, respectively), when properly understood, should be the sum of one’s identity. The Self is inherently unchanging, as it is simply the conscious experience of being, and the Ego does not change but can grow outward (as a child has less of one than an adult) with experience. These form the foundation for the rest of the functioning of the mind. (For the philosophically inclined, the Self is somewhat analogous to metaphysics, as the Ego is similarly to epistemology. The rest of the mind (experienced thoughts) is analogous to ethics, the relation of one mind to another is politics, and the relation between the mind and the experienced world is aesthetics- all roughly.)
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