Homo Novis

Not mentioned here is yet one more step. But as far as it goes, this is amazing, and as far as I can tell, accurate:

".....We define thinking as integrating data and arriving at correct answers. Look around you. Most people do that stunt just well enough to get to the corner store and back without breaking a leg. If the average man thinks at all, he does silly things like generalizing from a single datum. He uses one-valued logics. If he is exceptionally bright, he may use two-valued 'either-or' logic to arrive at his wrong answers. If he is hungry, hurt, or personally interested in the answer, he can't use any sort of logic and will discard observed fact as blithely as he will stake his life on a piece of wishful thinking. He uses the technical miracles created by superior men without wonder nor surprise, as a kitten accepts a bowl of milk. Far from aspiring to higher reasoning, he is not even aware that higher reasoning exists. He classes his own mental process as being of the same sort as the genius of an Einstein. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.

"That is why there is always room at the top, why a man with a leetle more on the ball can so easily become governor, millionaire, or college president--and why homo sap is sure to be displaced by New Man, because there is so much room for improvement and evolution never stops.

“Here and there among ordinary men is a rare individual who really thinks, can and does use logic in a single field--he's often as stupid as the rest outside his study or his laboratory--but he can think, if he is not disturbed, sick, or frightened. This rare individual is responsible for all the progress made by the race; the others reluctantly adopt his results. Much as the ordinary man dislikes and distrusts and persecutes the process of thinking, he is forced to accept the results occasionally, because thinking is efficient compared with his own maunderings. He may still plant his corn by the dark of the moon, but he will plant better corn developed by better men than he.

"Still rarer is the man who thinks habitually, who applies reason, rather than habit pattern, to all his activity. Unless he masks himself, his is a dangerous life; he is regarded as queer, untrustworthy, subversive of public morals; a pink monkey among the brown monkeys--a fatal mistake. Unless the pink monkey can dye himself brown before he gets caught.

"The brown monkey's instinct to kill is correct; such men are dangerous to all monkey customs.

"Rarest of all is the man who can and does reason at all times, quickly, accurately, inclusively, despite hope or fear or bodily distress, without egocentric bias or thalamic disturbance, with correct memory, with clear distinction between fact, assumption and non-fact. Such men exist, They are "New Man"--human in all respects, indistinguishable in all appearances or under the scalpel from homo sap, yet as unlike him in action as the Sun is unlike a single candle.”

~Robert A. Heinlein, excerpt from Gulf, in the anthology Assignment in Eternity

The tragedy of Christianity

I'm often surprised by how thorough our education in the historicity of Jesus was in our high school. That was in the 60's. We knew in detail that it was a revolutionary time and that much was afoot politically which made the involvement of Jesus as presented in the Gospels problematic for the authorities. We did, however, retain the idea of a Roman military presence of some sort in the area. We were very fortunate in that we had as instructors a triple PhD in Middle Eastern history, languages, and art who scribbled on the board in cuneiform and hieroglyphics, and another priest of most practical mind who had been a Navy SEAL. Both were dearly loved over the other faculty who came off as only book learned and inexperienced.

Over the intervening years and experience, I have come to question much of the popularization of both Jesus and of christianism as such, and in particular of the dogma and tenets extrapolated from what is, as you say, second-hand knowledge at best. Does the game "Telephone" ring a bell? 　 Given all that, I cannot find the accounts as presented for investment by faith to be nearly credible, despite some useful and even inspiring content.

So there are really two questions, as all communication has two ends sort of amorphously tied to what came before and what followed. One is, of course, the factuality of the material presented. The other is the need of the recipient to believe something or of the ability to be aware of the nature of the communication before ingesting and accepting it or of being critical of it. How critical can infants be of their family's psychosocial environment, and what tools do they have when a child is pretty much in a hypnotically receptive state up to about 7yo when they realize individuality at a point sometimes called "the age of reason"?

I won't go into the latter, but have this to say about the former: The entire sphere of christianism went through the lens of the third century politicization of the whole system, easily including, I would say, its origins. A prime consideration in all of this is what was Jesus doing in his "lost" years. We have some clues. Are you familiar with what is called "nondualism" as put forth by Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta, and others? There are many contemporary exponents as well, but in the Catholic tradition we might call St. Catherine of Sienna, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, and St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Francis of Asisi, and of late Thomas Merton and Bernadette Roberts might be considered exponents of this experience based transformational approach to what the point of religion is alleged to be: salvation and what that might actually and practically mean.

They might especially be so, (nondualists) the earlier ones, if we remember the exquisite care of expression which might be required in a politically time when the Church wielded dictatorial power and the Inquisition was in play. But through all that complexity, here's my point: There's a good case to be made that Jesus was introduced to mysticism and nondualism in Egypt, he being a precocious child, and that later he both traveled and resided in India, studying and teaching there, as some records and traditions would indicate. And perhaps he traveled home and simply was himself.

In any case, anyone familiar with nonduality will find an obvious congruence in the pittance of statements attributed to Jesus. And he was very much himself in a time beleaguered with prophets and messiahs wandering in from the dessert, as T.E. Lawrence pointed out quite clearly in his work. Could it be that Jesus was simply an exponent of nondualism who got politicized into a religion? If so, this is one of the greatest spiritual tragedies ever perpetrated on mankind.

And why would a religion be such a monumental tragedy? In the case of Catholicism, it's radically blatant on two counts: One, that in Mark 4:33,34 it plainly states that while Jesus taught in public by parable, and "He did not say anything to them without using a parable. But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything." In other words all of the preaching and teaching of the Gospels in christianism ignores that the core of his intent and meaning is not set down in the public record. And how could it be? His was a methodology of transformation alluded to in the three levels of interpretation of parables as outlined by in "The New Man: An Interpretation of Some Parables and Miracles of Christ". It was *not* publicly given, nor recorded in anything used as source material included in the Bible. Could it be that the human compilers of that collection, thought of as a single book for faith purposes, were not advanced enough to discover and add in works then perhaps available which pointed more directly to his teaching?

Second, and moreover, the derivative teaching of the Church that Jesus is and was the "one and only Son of God" is a tragic misunderstanding as flaunted in the too haggard John 3:16. Without getting particular I will be blunt here: the words more correctly are "16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only (unique) begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life." First, let's remember that this is a translation, and from John, whose Gospel is reflective and mystical rather than synoptic.

So for the sake of brevity we can say that "Son of God" for the mystics refers to a State of recognition, not to a personality. It's "only begotten" or "unique" because there is only one Nature of Reality named God and the making of us all in that image and likeness is the fact of our possessing Awareness. Not just possessing, in fact, but being primarily That. It's why it's said "I AM THAT I AM" Indeed, "aming" is the prime feature of any human. That is what constitutes being made in the image and likeness of God, who or which must be, as substance, primarily and only Consciousness, the nothing from which all is made.

The "Son of God" then is the special State, if you will, of recognizing the unity of conscious awareness as being the fundamental substance of all that IS and recognizing that one's own identity is not separate from that. It cannot be. And this is knowledge by Identity, not knowledge by assimilation or inculcation. It is the only incontrovertible knowledge that there is, and is why only the first person present tense form of the verb "to be" in English is true to fact and all the others are relatively useful but not absolutely true. So the tragedy of Christianism is that it attributes to one person the accomplishment and state of recognition which in fact is the fundamental inheritance of all humans, should they do the necessary work to discover it. Religion is meant to percipitate salvation. Sadly, in christianism that salvation is put off as an after death state. In the way that the recognition of one's true Nature is a kind of death, this is true. But it is not by any means something gained after sluffing off the mortal coil. What might happen, though, is that in the transformation which happens on the death bed, if one is so fortunate, is the realization of that fact. Sadly, then one might wonder, "Why didn't anyone tell me this before???" Well, some tried, but your faith got in the way. 

More later, if anyone wishes.