The Psychology of a religious myth

December 10, 2013 ~ J. Michael Dennis ~ Leave a comment

“One day, it was suddenly revealed to me that everything is Pure Spirit. The utensils of worship, the altar, the door-frame, all Pure Spirit. Men, animals, and other living beings, all Pure Spirit. Then like a madman I began to shower flowers in all directions. Whatever I saw I worshiped.”

Ramakrishna

Since its origins mankind always had a mythical slant upon life; therefore, the mythological realm, the world of the gods and demons, the carnival of their masks and representations, the “as if” games in which the festival of the lived myth abrogates all the laws of time, letting the dead swim back to life, and where the “once upon a time” become the very present.

In the primitive world, where most of the clues to the origin of mythology must be sought, the gods and demons never have been conceived in the way of hard and fast, positive realities. More like today, for most of the believers in the supernatural, a god, whenever represented by a statue, a painting, a picture, a sculpture or someone wearing a mask or simply a ceremonial dress, could be or coexist simultaneously in two or more places without the impact or solemnity of its presence being diluted through the process of material multiplication. Moreover, the representation of the god is revered and experienced as a veritable apparition of the mythical being that it represents, even though everyone knows that this representation is man-made or that someone human is wearing the mask representing the god or the ceremonial dress. Furthermore, the person wearing the mask or the ceremonial dress will often be identified with the god. The person wearing the mask or the ceremonial dress does not merely represent the god; that person becomes the god.

The literal fact that the mere presence of the god is composed of a physical representation, a mask or a dress, their reference to a mythical being, and a man or a woman either officiating a ceremony or wearing the mask during some kind of a festival or carnival, is dismissed from the mind of the believers, and the presentation or ceremony is allowed to work without correction upon the sentiments of both the beholder and the actor or minister. In other words, there is a shift of view from the logic of the normal secular sphere, where things are understood to be distinct from one another, to a theatrical or mystical play sphere, where the actors and representations are accepted for what they are experienced: a game of “make believe” and “as if.”

We all know the convention and the rules of the game, surely!

It is a primary, spontaneous device of innocence and childhood, a magical device, by which the world can be transformed from banality to magic in a trice. And its inevitability is one of those universal characteristics that unite all human races in one family: the belief in one self-induced belief, the spontaneous shift of an idea from the level of the sentiments to that of sensual consciousness. A certain spiritual process has reached a conclusion. This process is highly creative, in the highest sense of the word; for, as we have seen, a picture, a statue, a mask, the wearer of a dress become a god. Briefly stated: the phase of becoming takes place on the level of the sentiments, while being is of the conscious world. This is what is to be called the phenomenon of “Divine Seizure” or “Divine Rapture”.

In all the wild imaginings of mythology of all times, a fanciful spirit always have been playing, on the border-line between jest and earnest. The mental attitude in which the great religious feasts are celebrated and witnessed is not one of complete illusion. There is an underlying consciousness of things not being real. A certain element of “make-believe” always has been and is still today operative in all religions. If some of the followers have total faith, some others are just playing the game doing “as if”. The human is a good actor who can be quite absorbed in his role, like a child at play or a politician or a minister of the cult at work. And also the follower, like a child, a good spectator who can be frightened to death by something he knows perfectly well to be no “real” threat, or monster.

A game of make believe

In the Roman Catholic mass, when the priest pronounces the formula of consecration with utmost solemnity, first over the bread, then over the wine, it is to be supposed that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, that every fragment of the host and every drop of the wine is the actual living Savior of the world. The sacrament, that is to say, is not conceived to be a reference, a mere sign or symbol to arouse in us a train of thought, but is God himself, the Creator, Judge, and Savior of the Universe, here come to work upon us directly, to free our souls, created in His image, from the effects of the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which we are to suppose existed as a geographical fact.

In India, it is believed that, in response to consecrating formulae, deities will descend graciously on earth to infuse their divine substance into the temple images, which are then called their throne or pītha. It is also possible, and in some Indian sects and even expected, that the individual himself should become a seat of deity. In the Gandharva Tantra it is written: “No one who is not himself divine can successfully worship a divinity”; and again, “Having become the divinity, one should offer it sacrifice.”

Furthermore, whatever the religion or the spiritual belief, factual or ephemeral, it is even possible as we sadly see it too often, for a really gifted player to discover, to ascertain or even pretend that everything, absolutely everything, including himself and everyone with him, the cats and the dogs, the flowers and the plants have become the body of a god; that everyone and everything on earth and in the universe reveals the omnipresence of god as the ground of all being.

Toward the divine seizure

Belief, or at least a game of “make believe” or playing “as if”, is the first step toward divine seizure and divine rapture. The chronicles of the saints abound in accounts of their long ordeals of difficult practice, which preceded their moments of illumination or being carried away; and we have also the more spontaneous religious games and exercises of both, the professional cults, amateur priests and folks to illustrate the principle involved. The spirit of the festival, the carnival, the holiday, the holy day of the religious and mystical ceremonial, requires that the normal attitude toward the cares of the world should be temporarily set aside in favor of a particular mood of dressing up.

The world is hung with banners. In the clerical sanctuaries, the temples and cathedrals, where an atmosphere of holiness hangs permanently in the air, the logic of the cold hard facts of real life must not be allowed to intrude and spoil the spell. The gentile, the Cartesian, the humanist, the positivist, who cannot or will not play the religious and mythological game, must be kept aloof. Hence the guardian figures that stand at either side of the entrances to holy places: the lions, the bulls, and the fearsome warriors and priests with uplifted weapons and scriptures. They are there to keep out the bad sports, the knowledgeable, the enlightened, the advocates of Aristotelean logic, for whom a cat can never be a dog; for whom the actor is never to be lost in the part; for whom the mask, the image, the consecrated host, the tree, or animal cannot become God, but only a reference. Such heavy thinkers are to remain out of the so-called holy arena. For the whole purpose of entering the blessed sanctuary or participating in the game is that one should be overtaken by the state known in Oriental religions as “the other mind”, “the anya-manas”, “the absent-mindedness”, “the possession by a spirit”, where one is “beside oneself,” mesmerized, set apart from one’s logic of consciousness and awareness, overpowered by the force of a spiritual logic of “indissociation”, wherein a cat is a mouse, and an elephant is also a mouse.

To be continued…

JMD

jmdlive@lefuturistedailynews.com

Systemic Unity

December 7, 2013 ~ J. Michael Dennis ~ Leave a comment

The Birth of a New Science

The comparative study of all the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a single unit. Such themes as the fire-theft, the deluge, the land of the dead, the uniqueness of God, the virgin birth, and the resurrected heroes, have a worldwide distribution, appearing everywhere in different times, in each and every civilizations, in new combinations while remaining, only a few but always the same. While in tales told for entertainment, such mythical themes are to be taken lightly, in religious and mystical contexts, they are intended not only to be accepted as factual but also, even represented as divine revelations from which entire cultures have or are to derive both their spiritual authority and temporal power. No human society, ancient or modern culture has yet been found in which, such mythological themes have not been repeated in liturgies, interpreted by prophets and vaticinators, poets and authors, theologians or philosophers; presented in art; magnified in song, hymns and psalms; and ecstatically experienced in life empowering visions.

Indeed, the chronicle of our species, from its earliest page, has been not an account of the progress of man the toolmaker, but even more tragically, a record of the pouring of blazing visions into the minds of seers and the efforts of earthly communities to incarnate unearthly covenants. Every society, every culture of the past has received its own seal and sign of supernatural designation, communicated to its heroes and daily proved in the lives and experience of its folk. And though many who bow with closed eyes in the sanctuaries of their own tradition rationally scrutinize and disqualify the sacraments of others, an honest comparison immediately reveals that all have been built from one fund of mythological motifs variously selected, organized, interpreted, and ritualized, according to local need, but revered by every people on earth.

Mankind, apparently, cannot maintain itself in the universe without the belief in some arrangement of some kind of general mythical inheritance. In fact, for all mankind, the fullness of life would even seem to stand in a direct ratio to the depth and range not of his rational thought but of his local mythology.

Why is it that for too many societies and cultures, there is no possible personal empowerment without the existence and the belief in so many and such unsubstantial mystical and mythological themes?

Why is it that so many people are lacking of such ego that they cannot have a destiny of their own?

Why is it that whenever men and women, even today, when they decide to empower themselves, more than often, always elect to do it not on the facts in which the world abounds, but rather on some mythical and immemorial irrational imagination of the facts of life and the reality of their existence?

Would it not be easier for mankind, instead to make life a living hell for themselves and their neighbors, in the name of some more or less rational, merciless abundance of gods, to gracefully accept the plenteousness the world provides?

How long are the modern civilizations to remain spiritually locked from each other in their local ritual entrenchment and false notions of the sense of the general tradition?

Would it not be better and more productive for everyone and all people to come to some more profoundly rational and systemic based point and counterpoint of human understanding?

While we have to agree that it is a fact of life that the myths and legends of our several cultures work upon us, whether consciously or unconsciously, as some possibly energy-releasing, life-motivating and directing agents, one is to observe that even though our rational minds may be in agreement, the myths and fabulations by which we are living, or by which our fathers lived, can be driving us, at that very moment, more and more diametrically apart.

Fresh insights in psychological research, comparative symbolism, religion, mythology, philosophy and science are now suggesting a new possible image of the possible fundamental unity of the spiritual and metaphysical history of mankind. No one, as far as I know, has yet tried to compose into a single picture the new perspectives that have been opened to us by the scholarship of recent years.

Without straining beyond incommensurable amount of evidence already on hand, but simply gathering from it the fundamentals of a new unitary systemic science, in the days to come, I will, demonstrate, once and for all, through the natural history of the gods and heroes of all time, that we have now reach the final frontier of mankind intellectual absurdity and that it is now time for humanity to take a step forward, not to say backward.

Believing in the divine beings will never drive mankind anywhere else than straight into a living hell.

To be continued…

JMD

jmdlive@lefuturistedailynews.com

Creating your own living hell

December 6, 2013 ~ J. Michael Dennis ~ Leave a comment

Ye know how to interpret the face of the earth and the heaven; but how is it that ye know not how to interpret this time?”

Probing together the days of the ancient, fathoming the grottoes of the Cro-Magnon of the Great Hunt and the Neanderthal, the dens of the crouching cannibals of the glacial ages, examining the enigmatic chalky, skeletal remains of what have been the chimpanzee-like hunter-pygmies on the open plains of the early Transvaal, we shall be finding clues to the deepest secrets not only of the most extraordinary cultures of both the Orient and the Occident, but also of our own most inward expectations, spontaneous responses, and obsessive fears. Our intention therefore, is to explore the deep, very deep well of the past to ascertain what part of the collective universal knowledge has been already labored and perfected, and what portions have been long ago left unfinished or entirely neglected.

Doing so, we will investigate together the mythological fabric of the “Oriental”, all the traditions of that broad and various, yet essentially unified, major province represented by the philosophical myths and mythological philosophies of India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, to which can be joined the earlier yet closely related mythological cosmologies of archaic Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well as the later, remotely, yet essentially comparable systems of the Pre-Columbian Middle America and Peru. Then, we will venture in the mythological world of the “Occidental”, the progressively, ethically oriented mythologies of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of this in relationship and counterplay to the animus of the Greco-Roman pantheons and the Celto-Germanic. And finally, we will be considering the recent contemporary “Creative Mythology”, that most important mythological tradition of the modern world, which can be said to have had its origin with the Greeks, to have come of age in the Renaissance, and to still be flourishing today in the works of those artists, poets, and philosophers of the West for whom the wonder of the world itself, as it is now being analyzed by science, is the ultimate revelation.

Gathering into a single summation all the information, mystical, mythological, historical and scientific materials pointing out to the roots, the true nature of mankind, its origins and all the possible futures of mankind is no child play. Keeping it rational, impartial and unprejudiced is even more difficult. No one, as far as I know, has yet tried to compose into a single picture the realistic image of the fundamental unity and history of mankind. Never before such an undertaking has been attempted before. Gathering from the deep well of the past, I will, demonstrate, once and for all, that we have now reached the final frontier of mankind intellectual absurdity.

Believing in the divine beings will never drive mankind anywhere else than straight into a living hell.

To be continued…

JMD

jmdlive@lefuturistedailynews.com

No religion is honest

December 3, 2013 ~ J. Michael Dennis ~ Leave a comment

Who looks into heavens for answers is dreaming!

Each and every one of all mythical narratives, of every past and present religious and spiritual beliefs, faith or confession, are nothing else then multiple variations of one single great story: The story of the “Psychic Unity of Mankind”. Regardless of their origin or time of creation, common pattern exists beneath the narrative elements of all the greatest myths and mythical stories of the past.

Since the origin of civilization, all humans shared and are still sharing a basic mental framework and a collective, sometime ignored, sentient mind. This is what we call the “Somatic Mass” of “Knowledge and Awareness”, which each one of us own, have in him or herself and share with all beings and creations of the universe. Some will tap into it very early in their life, some will never do.

As a strong believer in the psychic unity of mankind, I also believe that, from immemorial time, the whole of the human race has been, and still can be perceived, as engaged in its nonstop effort of making this world of ours “Transparent to Transcendence”. Underneath the realm of mystical and mythical phenomena created by mankind, lies a forever eternal source of knowledge and enlightenment, which is constantly pouring its energies into this world of often harsh time, suffering, and ultimately death: “The Collective Mind and Consciousness of Mankind”.

Thus, eliminating all possible intervention of the divine in the day-to-day activities of the human race, what do we have left to govern our life? The answer is easy: Wisdom, knowledge and enlightenment!

To fully demonstrate this affirmation, to fully achieve this almost impossible task of making the world transparent to transcendence, one would need to speak about things that existed before and that are beyond words. One way to do this would be to create “Mythical Metaphors”. One other way to do it would simply be to listen to our own inner sanctum, what some will call consciousness.

Better than conversion: Contemplation!

In contrast with enlightening comparisons, “Mythical Metaphors” often pretend to be the “One and Only” “Absolute Truth” that shall be interpreted and understood literally as representing the “Supreme Reality”, more than often immaterial, of what they are referring to.

First, understand this: Myths and “Mythical Metaphors” are to religions and vaticinators what bullets and guns are to empires and dictators.

Sentences like: “Jesus is the Son of God” rather than “The relationship of man to God is like that of a son to a father”; “I am the son of God” instead of “I am your one and only King”, are all very deceptive. They all tend to only one thing: To instate fear to better maintain “Law & Order” or to better enslave “The People” in the religious and political power of the authorities governing the society in which they live in.

Another good example of the too often perverse effect of the “Mystical” and “Mythical Metaphors” is the always possible appropriation and misuse of the scriptures, whatever their origin and time, by some malevolent clerical or secular either individuals or groups. For whoever wants to enlist you in whatever religion, cult or sect, “Holy Scriptures” such as the Talmud, the Bible and the Quran, amongst all others, will too often become powerful instruments of conversion and domination instead of being a source of knowledge and enlightenment.

For the unsuspecting naïve and the credulous of the world, “Metaphorical Myths” such as “Genesis” and “Revelation”, are no longer poetic and literary figures of speech epitomizing the understanding, in time and space, of the rise of man’s cognitive consciousness as it evolved from a prior animal state. Instead, they now represent a literal description of historical events as they happened since the creation of the Universe and the unavoidable fate of humanity. Thus: the Universe was created in seven days; the earth is five thousand years old; all of mankind, except for those who received some sort of baptism or protection in consideration of some cash, will soon be destroyed and their soul go to hell to burn in the fires of eternity.

All of this, because the unwillingness of men and women to join one of the one thousand plus gods now available on the marketplace and their unwillingness to obey by the rules of the “King”.

Religions are doomed.

JMD

jmdlive@lefuturistedailynews.com