Creating the New Earth Together

The “Jesus of History” . . . . Vs The “Jesus of Faith” Part 1

January 29, 2017

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“WHAT IF EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT JESUS IS WRONG?” – From the cover of Michael Baigent’s book THE JESUS PAPERS – Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History.  Michael Baigent is a religious historian and leading expert in the field of arcane knowledge.

I received a number of “likes” and a few comments on my last post, which I always love receiving. One comment came from a niece that I thought is worth sharing here, since she sent it to me on Facebook rather than posting it to my blog. She says:

“Thanks for having the courage to educate us all about the history that so many choose to ignore. You will probably be burned in effigy…lol. My belief is that we need not be ashamed of our history unless we refuse to learn from it.”

My belief as well. I am not convinced, however, that we have learned from our history – or even explored it at any length so as to know what it is we need to learn from it.  Thus my exploration, which I am somewhat tentative in sharing in a public forum such as this. Some of my readers may, indeed, burn me verbally in effigy, as my niece said, and if that should happen, I extend love and compassion ahead of such time that this may indeed come to pass. Bless you and forgive me for exploring my own Italian/French/Irish Catholic roots, which I’ve taken for granted.

With that said, I will continue my exploration of information that has come to me in a thoroughly researched and well documented book by Michael Bagent entitled The Jesus Papers – Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History. My purpose in reading his book – for the second time – is to arrive at a better understanding of who exactly Jesus was and what actually occurred during his brief life and public ministry. Again, from the cover of his book:

In The Jesus Papers, the author reveals the truth about Jesus’s life and crucifixion. Despite–or rather because of–all the celebration and veneration that have surrounded the figure of Jesus for centuries, Baigent asserts that Jesus and the circumstances leading to his death have been heavily mythologized.

One of these myths is that Jesus founded Christianity and that his apostle Peter founded the Roman Catholic Church. Nothing could be farther from the truth, according to Baigent. The “elephant in the room” in any discussion of the origins of Christianity is the obvious improbability that a Jew would be founding a Christian religion. Christianity was not even a concept in Jesus’s mind.  Judaism was the religion of his time, along with paganism. And the apostle Peter did not found the Roman Catholic Church. That was the Roman Emperor Constantine 325 years after Jesus’s time. (More about this episode later.) Baigent helps us look at the political setting into which Jesus was born and in which he lived and ministered to the Jewish people.

Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian

Jesus was born during warring times. The Zealots, a Jewish sect, were battling the Romans over the city of Jerusalem and the Temple that had become a “den of thieves,” as Jesus described it when he drove the merchants and money-changers out of the temple with a whip. They wanted priests in the temple who were descendants of Aaron. They also were looking for the Messiah to appear and restore the kingdom of Israel, as foretold by the prophets. Baigent depicts the setting in which Jesus assumed his messianic role, entering Jerusalem on the back of a donkey:

There is no getting away from it: Jesus entered Jerusalem quite deliberately, pressing all the right buttons in order to put himself forward as the chosen Messiah of Israel, the anointed king, whose arrival had been foretold by the prophets. He knew it. He was open to it.

Jesus was born a Jew from the seed of Joseph, who was a descendant of the House of David. Yes, he had an earthly father who knew his mother, Mary, in the Biblical sense of that word, and brought him forth in the same manner as any other normal birth. It was the Church later on, with its hang up on human sexuality and its “obsession with perpetual virginity and celibacy” that fabricated the scenario of the virgin birth. Jesus had to have Joseph’s genetic heritage from the Line of David in order to be the promised Messiah, along with his mother’s priestly bloodline.

The author goes on to describe how Jesus was groomed by the Zealots from childhood for this role, only to have him later betray them and their revolutionary cause:

Imagine the problem: the Zealots, whose entire focus was the removal or destruction of Rome’s hold over Judea, had organized a dynastic marriage between Joseph, a man of the royal line of David, and Mary, of the priestly line of Aaron, in order to have a child, Jesus–the “Savior” of Israel–who was both rightful king and high priest.

Whether or not the Zealots “organized” Joseph and Mary’s marriage, what is factual is their inheritance of the royal bloodline of King David and the priestly bloodline of the High Priest Aaron. The Jews knew that their Messiah had arrived and all that was left was for Jesus to fulfill the prophecies of Holy Scripture and restore Judea as a nation by driving the Romans from the Holy City of Jerusalem and replacing the priests of the Temple with a High Priest descendant from the line of Aaron.

The big let-down that led to Jesus’s crucifixion

As it turned out, Jesus did not go about fulfilling their expectations. To the contrary, Jesus let them down royally when he failed to excuse them from paying taxes in that pivotal moment when he wisely answered their loaded question about paying taxes by suggesting they “Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” Taxes were one of the chief contentions between the Jews and the Romans. Their refusal to pay Caesar’s taxes did not sit well with Caesar, as one can imagine. Then there was the issue of Jesus’ failure to be their temporal king and leader of their revolution. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus had told them on more than one occasion, and repeated it at his trial before Pontius Pilate. “They had to get rid of Jesus and find a leader more amenable to their agenda, such as his brother James who was leading the community of messianic Jews in Jerusalem after Jesus was out of the picture.”

We must take note here that it was the Zealots and not the Jewish people in general who were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. If they couldn’t have a temporal king, they could at least have a martyr.

The origins of Christianity and Catholicism

Returning to the subject of the origin of the Christian religion, as I stated earlier, it was the Roman Emperor Constantine some 325 years after Jesus’s life and alleged crucifixion who, in a grab for power and control over an increasing Christian populace, and for the sake of unity in his empire, decreed that Jesus was the Son of God and the founder of Christianity. He simply made Christianity the official religion of Rome to unify his empire:

Constantine . . . called the Council of Nicaea to oppose the ideas of the heretic Arius. The aim was to get support for the idea that Jesus Christ was “of one being” with God the Father, a claim that Arius and others disputed; for them, Jesus was not divine. As Princeton’s Professor Elaine Pagels dryly observes, “Those who opposed this phrase pointed out that it occurs neither in the Scripture nor in Christian tradition.” But the objections proved of no consequence to the politically ruthless theologians who traveled to Nicaea with a set agenda in mind.

By this decision, the Council of Nicaea created the literally fantastic Jesus of faith and adopted the pretense that this was a historically accurate rendering. Its actions also established the criteria by which the New Testament books would later be chosen. The Council of Nicaea produced a world of Christianity where a code of belief was held in common. Anything different was to be deemed heresy and to be rejected and, if possible, exterminated.

Enter the “Inquisitors”

What followed is a bloody chapter in the history of early Catholicism. Baigent retells this bloody history of the “Inquisitors,” who became “the Church’s killers — their army of secret informers,ruthless interrogators, and cold judges, all acting in the name of Christ.” Pope Damasus I (366-84) hired a group of killers to spend three days massacring his opponents.”

The next bloody chapters started in the 12th century and lasted over a thousand years of what was called the “Holy Inquisition” by which hundreds of thousands of non-believers – heretics and witches – were massacred, many burned alive for not embracing Constantine’s and Rome’s version of Christianity. The Dominicans played a central role as the Church’s killers. “The Inquisition boasted that over the course of 150 years it burned approximately thirty-thousand women — all innocent victims of a Church-sanctioned pathological fantasy.”

One particularly bloody chapter was the extermination of the Cathars of Languedoc in Southern France. These were

“holy men and women who embraced a life of renunciation, spirituality, and simplicity — les Bonhommes, they called themselves, ‘The Good Men’ or ‘the Good Christians.’ They served a population who craved personal religious experience but whose needs were hardly served by the established church, which had abdicated its spiritual role for one more commercial and venal.”

The fault line between belief in and knowledge of truth

During the Second Century AD there was a “basic fault line that separated two strong traditions…: on the one side were those who sought knowledge [Gnostics], and on the other were those who were content with belief. It is important,” Baigent writes, “that we distinguish between the two since this fault line is one of the primary forces that ultimately crystallized the orthodox Christian position.”

Today we are seeing the emergence of something quite similar to what was then called “Gnosticism” as the truth again emerges through the quagmire of a spiritual revolution in which people the world over are awakening to the realization that we are divine, made in the image and likeness of God – gods incarnate in human form to co-create a Heaven here on Earth, fulfilling Jesus’s sole mission and purpose for incarnating two-thousand years ago. And this is my offering as a worthy and believable alternative to living in a system of belief that has too long denied the truth that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, within us and all around us. We are finally repenting – literally turning around – and seeing with new eyes that this truth is true and all is well. Unconquerable Life is prevailing over centuries of lies and deception.

I will end this post on that note, because this does present a worthy and believable alternative to Christianity, which is based on the Jesus of Faith rather than the Jesus of History.

In my next post, I will explore the historical records that shed light on the “eighteen missing years” of Jesus’s life of which there is no Biblical record. Until then,

Be love. Be loved.

Antony Palombo

Read my Health Light Newsletter online at LiftingTones.com.

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Catholic Church, Christianity, Constatine, Heaven, Jesus, Mary Magdalene & Jesus, Middle East, Mythology, Pontius Pilate, Resurrection, The "Jesus Papers", The Council of Nicea, The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Essenes, The Inquisition, The Jewish Zealots, The Messiah

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“The Jesus Papers”

January 16, 2017

My Chorale Pic

“Jars of spring water are not enough anymore. Take us down to the river.”             — Persian Sufi Jelaluddin Rumi

I spent seven years as a young aspirant to the Roman Catholic priesthood and not one class in all those years of seminary training was dedicated to the study of the corrupt political history of the Roman Catholic Church. We were never told the whole truth about the bloody history of Christianity either. Alleged heretics and witches, we were taught, were evil and had to be burned at the stake. Funny how that bit of history didn’t engender fear in us of the Catholic Church and the Pope. But, that was then and things are different today. Or are they? If you don’t get burned at the stake here you spend eternity burning in hell if you dare apostatize yourself and sin against the Church. But first you are excommunicated and barred from receiving the sacraments. It’s still governance by fear, isn’t it?

Now, do not pity me . . . nor judge me too harshly as I pursue this line of inquiry into the mythical story of Christmas and of the life, death and resurrection of the man Jesus, which form the corner stone dogmas of Christianity. I do so out of a deep and abiding love for truth and a compassionate love for my fellowman. I do not like being lied to. I don’t think anybody does. Please forgive me if I step on your beliefs. I don’t mean to cause anyone insult or injury. I do believe, however, that if we do not remember our past, we are likely to repeat it. Perhaps we are repeating it in the Middle East.

A reader made this comment on my last post entitled “Transcending the Christmas Myth”:

“I think it all might help if it leads towards knowing the truth; otherwise it’s just history of the gods and goddesses made in the image and likeness of mankind. These fear-generations would be well left behind with last year’s resolutions.”

To which I replied:

As you continue reading this series of posts, I think you will see that the truth is exactly what I am leading toward. When we know the truth we are freed up from our illusions created by myths. Knowing the truth about Jesus’s life would disturb a lot of people. In the Gospel of Thomas, one of the findings of the Nag Hammadi discoveries, Jesus is recorded as having said “The seeker should not stop until he finds. When he does find, he will be disturbed. After having been disturbed, he will be astonished. Then he will reign over everything.” It is not fear that is generated by knowing the truth about how our beliefs came to be formed by pagan myths of gods made in the images of man. The God of today is still being made in the image of man. Nothing has changed. We need to be “disturbed” out of our illusions. Then we will reign over everything as promised.

Since this interchange, I’ve given some critical thought to what we both acknowledged: that both ancient and contemporary gods are made – fashioned in human consciousness and beliefs – in the image and after the likeness of humans. We project our human attitudes and characteristics on our God: He is jealous, He is vengeful, He is angry, He is loving, He is forgiving, He is a man, as opposed to being a woman, He punishes us when we’re bad and rewards us when we’re good. All human attributes and characteristics.

Now, the suggestion that my post generates fear aroused in me a curiosity about how many of my readers felt fearful reading my post. Even more curious am I about how many Christians really care about the history of Christianity – or of Christmas, for that matter. Probably not very many. Most are content with their beliefs, especially their religious ones. Alas, does it really matter what happened in the far distant past? What really matters is what we are doing now to created a more authentic and kind world, a world founded on truth rather than beliefs.

Over the years I’ve come to understand that it is easier to take candy away from a child than it is to take away a person’s beliefs. I was glad to let go of mine when a friend came along and provided me a worthy and believable alternative: the truth: that God is to be known and experienced and not just believed in. We human beings seem to love our beliefs more than we love the truth.

I wonder, dear reader, if you will allow me space here, without judgment, to explore some information that has come into my hands pertaining to the apparent fabricated “Jesus of Faith” and the factual “Jesus of history” – to the extent that authentic facts are available for exploration . . and fortunately they seem to be. Several books have recently been written by authors who have done the research and explored the historical evidence that what has been handed down to us by our ancestral religious “authorities” has been less than accurate and truthful. In fact, according to one author, it has largely been a pack of fabricated lies designed to manipulate and literally frighten the “faithful” into obedient subjection. And that’s putting it mildly – not intending to offend anyone. (I do intend to provide a worthy and believable alternative as I complete this series of posts. So, bear with me as we move forward.)

The Jesus Papers – Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History by Michael Baigent is one such book – whose subtitle speaks for the theme of the book and the intent of its author. I’m reading it for the second time with highlighter in hand, simply because there are just so many provocative findings in his exhaustive research into historical records – pivotal of which are what he calls “the Jesus papers” that contain letters written to the Sanhedrin by Jesus himself in defense of accusations leveled against him regarding his alleged claim to being divine. Jesus’s answer in strikingly clarifying as to who he was. Here’s the excerpt from Baigent’s book that tells the story of this dogma-shattering historical find:

This figure, the Messiah of the Children of Israel, was defending himself against charges made by the Sanhedrin – he had obviously been accused of calling himself “son of God” and had been challenged to defend himself against this charge. In the first letter, the messiah explained that what he meant was not that he was “God” but that the “Spirit of God” was in him – not that he was physically the son of God, but rather that he was spiritually an adopted son of God. And he added that everyone who felt similarly filled with the “spirit” was also a “son of God.”

The letters referred to here are two papyrus documents found in 1961 that also contained an Aramaic text, along with other objects, that dated the finds at about A.D. 34, which was just after the alleged crucifixion of Jesus. (I will address his “alleged” crucifixion in another post.) The papyrus texts were two letters, written in the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke, addressed to the Jewish court, the Sanhedrin. The writer of the letters called himself “‘bani meshiha’ – the Messiah of the Children of Israel.” The author continues:

In other words, the messiah – who must be the teacher we know as Jesus – explicitly states in these letters that he is not divine – or at any rate, no more than anyone else. This, we can be sure, is some­thing the Vatican would not like to be made public.

While listening to this story, I was struck by the similarity with a very curious incident described in the Gospel of John (10:33-35): in a short passage, it describes the “Jews” as being intent upon stoning Jesus for blasphemy. They hurl an accusation at him, saying, “You are only a man and you claim to be God.” Jesus calmly answers their chall­enge, quoting from Psalm 82: “Is it not written in your Law: ‘I said, you are gods?’ So the Law uses the word gods of those to whom the word of God was addressed.” Is this Gospel reporting some garbled residue of this investigation of the meshiha by the Sanhedrin?

Having discovered these two papyrus letters, my friend showed them to the archaeologists Yigael Yadin and Nahman Avigad and asked their opinion of them. They both confirmed that these letters were genuine and important.

Unfortunately, they also told some Catholic scholars – very likely one or another of the members of the Ecole Biblique, consultants to the Pontifical Biblical Commission – for word reached Pope John XXIII. The pope sent word back to the Israeli experts asking for these docu­ments to be destroyed.

My friend refused to do this, but he was prepared to make a promise that they would not be published for twenty-five years. This was done.

At the time I met him the twenty-five years were long expired, but my friend still refused to release the texts because he felt that releasing them would just cause problems between the Vatican and Israel and inflame anti-Semitism.

In this age of spiritual awakening, these findings should not – and probably do not – shock anyone. I rather suspect that most Christians, and certainly most Catholics, entertain secret doubts about the veracity of church dogmas and their blind faith in them. I do not deny the divinity of Jesus, nor our own divinity as sons and daughters of God – made in the image and likeness of our Divine Creator. I believe that Jesus was a very authentic human being who knew who he was and why he came. He came to bring love back into the hearts of human beings and to restore the connection between Man and our Creator, the Father within. He came to turn people around – the literal meaning of the word “repent” – so that they would see that the Kingdom of Heaven is truly at hand, within us and all around us.

But who factually was Jesus according to historical records? This I will explore in my next post. So, stay tuned. I wish you each one a happy, healthy and prosperous 2017.

Anthony Palombo

Read my HealthLight Newsletter online at LiftingTones.com.

 

 

 

 

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Catholic Church, Christmas, History of Middle East, Jesus, Mary Magdalene & Jesus, Middle East, Mythology, Pontius Pilate, The Crucifixion of Jesus, The Jewish Zealots, The Messiah

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Abwun – The Aramaic Prayer of Jesus

January 8, 2017
Light Divine, the Great Creator of the Universe

Light Divine, the Great Creator of the Universe

I offer this Aramaic Prayer of Jesus as an invocation for peace and harmony throughout our world at the beginning of this New Year. Saying this prayer, or listening to it, can release one from all ties to the past and free one up to move forward into a new cycle with a clean slate, so-to-speak.

Aramaic is a sound-based, rather than meaning-based, language. When spoken or chanted, it carries the spirit we send forth to accomplish absolutely that which we intend.  Above all, it sends our word before us to clear the path upon which we are about to embark of all the clutter of yesterday’s successes and failures. It literally makes the path new.

The invocation itself creates sacred space for the Great Spirit of the Father and Mother God to enter and be with us as we initiate this new cycle.

Praying this particular Prayer of Jesus helps us to enter his shem, or vibration, which is the vibration of love itself.  Love is, after all, the path we have chosen to walk.  We hereby set our direction and receive the energy we will need to travel and serve upon this path. I invite you to listen to this video recording by Dr. Rocco A. Errico and learn about the Aramaic language and the Lord’s prayer.  (See the Aramaic words and one of several translations below the video. )

The Aramaic Prayer of Jesus

Abwoon d’bwashmaya

Nethqadash shmakh

Teytey malkuthakh

Nehwey sebyanach aykanna d’bwashmaya aph b’ arah

Hawvlan lachma d’sunqanan yaomana.

Washboqlan khaubayn wakhtahayn

aykana daph khnan Shbwoqan I’khayyabayn.

Wela tahlan l’ nesyuna

Ela patzan min bisha.

Metol dilakhie malkutha,

wahayla, wateshbukhta. l’ ahlam almin. Ameyn.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION

O Birther, Father-Mother of all creation,

Your Name shines everywhere!

Release a space to plant your Presence here.

Envision your “I Can” now.

Embody your desire in every light and form.

Grow through us this moment’s bread and wisdom.

Untie the knots of failure binding us, as we release the strands we hold of others’ faults.

Help us to not forget our Source, yet free us from not being in the Present.

From you arises every vision, power, and song, from gathering to gathering.

Amen: may our future actions grow from here!

My Chorale PicMay this prayer open up new pathways in your life during this new year to bring your unique gift of love’s light to your world.

Happy New Year!

Anthony Palombo

Read my Health Light Newsletter online at LiftingTones.com. 

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Transcending The Christmas Myth

December 26, 2016

My Chorale PicMany of our cultural holidays are historically based on ancient mythology. Mythology itself is largely based on myths about gods and goddesses who inhabited ancient skies. In those days, deities were brought down to earth and given human incarnations as sons and daughters of gods and goddesses.

The Greeks had hundreds of deities, one for every human and earthly activity, from Apollo the Olympian God of the sun, light, knowledge, music, healing and the arts, to Zeus the very King of Heaven and god of the sky, clouds, thunder, and lightning. They had female deities as well, such as Hera, Queen of Heaven and goddess of the air and starry constellations, and Artemis, Olympian Goddess of virgins and young women, of the moon, nature, hunt and the wild animals. They had Astriaos, Titan god of stars and planets, and the art of astrology.

There was Aphrodite, “Goddess of beauty, love, desire, and pleasure. Although married to Hephaestus, she had many lovers, most notably Ares, Adonis, and Anchises. . . . Her Roman counterpart is Venus.” (Wikipedia)

There was Athena, “Goddess of reason, wisdom, intelligence, skill, peace, warfare, battle strategy, and handicrafts. According to most traditions, she was born from Zeus’s forehead, fully formed and armored. . . .  She is a special patron of heroes such as Odysseus. . . .  Her Roman counterpart is Minerva.” (Wikipedia)

Then there was Ares, “God of war, bloodshed, and violence. The son of  Zeus and Hera, he was depicted as a beardless youth, either nude with a helmet and spear or sword, or as an armed warrior. Homer portrays him as moody and unreliable, and he generally represents the chaos of war in contrast to Athena, a goddess of military strategy and skill. . . .  His Roman counterpart Mars by contrast was regarded as the dignified ancestor of the Roman people.” (Wikipedia)

They had many female deities, such as Demeter, “Goddess of grain, agriculture, harvest, growth, and nourishment. Demeter is a daughter of Cronus and Rhea, and a sister of Zeus, by whom she bore Persephone. Demeter is one of the main deities of the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which her power over the life cycle of plants symbolizes the passage of the human soul through life and into the afterlife. . . .  Her symbols are the cornucopia, wheat-ears, the winged serpent, and the lotus staff. . . .  Her Roman counterpart is Ceres.” (Wikipedia)

Some of these died and rose from the grave.

Dying-and-Rising Gods

Amazing what one can find on the internet. If you look up “dying-and-rising gods,” for example, you’ll come upon this on Wikipedia:

Examples of gods who die and later return to life are most often cited from the religions of the Ancient Near East, and traditions influenced by them including Biblical and Greco-Roman mythology and by extension Christianity. The concept of dying-and-rising god was first proposed in comparative mythology by James Frazer‘s seminal The Golden Bough. Frazer associated the motif with fertility rites surrounding the yearly cycle of vegetation. Frazer cited the examples of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, Dionysus and Jesus Christ.[6]

Gods Born to Virgins on December 25 Before Jesus Christ

If you Google “Gods born to virgins” you’ll come upon this very interesting article, from which I will excerpt a few paragraphs:

There are common themes in ancient religion that make one wonder if Christianity was not the one exception to the rule that societies tend to adopt beliefs, stories, and traditions from one another. True, it’s not always clear whether common themes are a testament to the human exchange of ideas or to the universal imagination of early human thought (parallels may exist between religions on entirely different continents, for example, but that does not necessarily mean one influenced another).But what is clear is where certain ideas in human history did not originate.

Long before Yahweh and Jesus Christ, many religions had gods who were born in strange, miraculous ways, at times to virgins, who came to earth, and (though these are not the focus of this article) performed miracles, taught about judgement and the afterlife, were killed, reborn, and ascended into heaven. True, these stories are different from those of Christ, but the common archetypes in cultures in close proximity to Palestine suggest pagan influences on the biblical story of Christ’s birth.

December 25 was an important birthday for many human gods.

Most Christians understand Christ was not actually born on this date (biblical scholars believe he was born in the spring, because the Bible mentions shepherds in the fields at the time of his birth).

The idea that Christ was born on December 25 doesn’t appear in the historical record until the fourth century A.D.; the earliest Christian writers, such as Origen, Tertullian, Irenaeus, and the gospel authors, are silent on the subject. . . .

Late December, the time of the winter solstice (in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year), was full of pagan European celebrations. The Roman Empire declared December 25 a holiday to celebrate the birth of their adopted Syrian god Sol Invictus in 274 A.D. Some 50 years later, Roman Emperor Constantine officially adopted December 25 as the day for celebrating Christ’s birth.

Before 1,000 B.C. we have the following gods or demigods born on December 25: Horus, Osiris, and Attis. Before 200 B.C. we have Mithra, Heracles, Dionysus, Tammuz, Adonis, and others (see All About Adam and Eve, by Richard Gillooly). Some of these characters, you will see below, were also born to virgins. . . .

Interestingly, in ancient mythology, many gods are born to women with names derived from “Ma,” meaning mother: Myrrha in Syrian myth, Maia in Greek myth, Maya in Hindu, Mary in Hebrew. . . .

The Magi’s star isn’t unique to Christmas – nor is the Magi.

Stars, meteors, and heavenly lights allegedly signaled the birth of many man-gods, including Christ, Yu, Lao-tzu, various Roman Caesars, and Buddha (see Gillooly). This parallels the strange and fantastic events that surround the births of purely mythological figures, such as Osiris in Syria, Trinity in Egypt, and Mithra in Persia. But nothing was more spectacular than virgin birth. . . .

Virgin birth, and a reverence and obsession with virginity, was a common theme in ancient religions before the time of Christ and near where Christianity originated (see “The Ancient Beginnings of the Virgin Birth Myth,” by Keyser). It marked the child as special, often divine.

Two thousand years before Christ, the virgin Egyptian queen Mut-em-ua gave birth to Pharaoh Amenkept III. Mut-em-ua had been told she was with child by the god Taht, and the god Kneph impregnated her by holding a cross, the symbol of life, to her mouth. Amenkept’s birth was celebrated by the gods and by three kings, who offered him gifts.

Ra, the Egyptian sun god, was supposedly born of a virgin, Net. Horus was the son of the virgin mother Isis. In Egypt, and in other places such as Assyria, Greece, Cyprus, and Carthage, a mythological virgin mother and her child was often a popular subject of art and sculpture.

Attis, a Phrygian-Greek vegetation god, was born of the virgin Nana. By one tradition, Dionysus, a Greek character half god and half human, was the son of Zeus, born to the virgin Persephone.

Persephone also supposedly birthed Jason, a character with no father, human or divine. Perseus was born to a mortal woman named Danae, and fathered by Zeus. Zeus also slept with a mortal woman (though daughter of a nymph) named Io, and they had a son and a daughter. He slept with the mortal Leda, who gave birth (hatched, actually) Helen of Troy and other offspring.

Even Plato in Greece was said by some to have been born to a virgin, Perictione, and fathered by the god Apollo, who gave warning to Ariston, Perictione’s husband-to-be.

Some followers of Buddha Gautama decided he was born to the virgin Maya by divine decree. Genghis Khan was supposedly born to a virgin seeded by a great miraculous light. The founder of the Chinese Empire, Fo-Hi, was born after a woman (not necessarily a virgin) ate a flower or red fruit. The river Ho (Korea) gave birth to a son when seeded by the sun. Krishna was born to the virgin Devaka. In Rome, Mercury was born to the virgin Maia, Romulus to the virgin Rhea Sylvia (see “An Old Story,” Chapman Cohen).

The Persian god Mithra was made the “Protector of the Empire” by the Romans in 307 AD, right before Christianity was declared the official religion. Some versions of Mithra’s story, predating Christianity, make him the son of a human virgin. His birth, on December 25, was seen by shepherds and Magi, who brought gifts to a cave, the place of his birth (see Godless, by former pastor Dan Barker).

Well, what do you think? Is the Christmas story just that, a mythical story, perhaps composed after the life of Jesus to explain and support his messianic divinity?

In closing this post, however, allow me this transcending perspective. We hear a lot about keeping Christ in Christmas during these days of commercialized everything. Personally, I believe that Christ was never omitted from Christmas, commercialism notwithstanding.  The Christ is Love, as we each one are in true identity.  Love is born and reborn every year when we celebrate its birth through the man Jesus two-thousand years ago. Love is very much in our hearts and in expression this time of year. I feel it strongly as we spend time with our children and grandchildren this week. I feel it when friends near and far wish me and others a “Merry Christmas,” or a “Happy Holidays.” I don’t think that Jesus would feel slighted by such a seasonal greeting as “Happy Holidays” if he were around. The Love is there so the Christ is there.  So, I wish you each one a Merry Christmas, a Happy Holidays, a Happy Hanukkah if you’re Jewish, and a Happy Solstice if you’re into celebrating the goddess Gaia’s seasons of the year . . . and while I’m at it, Have a Happy New Year!    ~Anthony Palombo

Read my HealthLight Newsletter online at LiftingTones.com where you’ll find many excellent articles. The current feature is on “Artic Ruby Oil and Fat Reduction.”

 

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"Inner Christmas", Ancient gods were planets, Christmas, Jesus, Love, Mythology, Osiris & Isis

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“Sacred Sound Field” Experiential

November 23, 2016

Still Meadow Attunement Workshop – October 28-29, 2016

My Chorale Pic

Portland, OR Attunement workshop

On Saturday evening we created what I have called a “Sacred Sound field” using four true-tone quartz crystal bowls placed outside the circles of some 40 attunement practitioners at the position of the Four Quarters. The bowls were a 14” B bowl, a 10” D# bowl, an 8” F# bowl, and an 8” B bowl. This combination of bowls created a sound field in the musical key of B Major, what I have designated as Crown Chakra and Pineal gland harmonics. This combination of bowls and tones included two B bowls an octave apart and the Major Third and Perfect Fifth notes of the B Major chord.

To move energy, I used two more bowls: a 10” D bowl to create a minor mode to bring energy up for resolution in a major chord, and an 8” E bowl to create an augmented chord for bringing energy down for resolution.

Technique used: silence the D# bowl and play the D bowl. Then silence the D bowl and return to the D# bowl for resolution of the minor mode to the major mode. Follow the same procedure with the E bowl.

While the bowls were being played, those sitting in the two circles explored sharing attunement within the Sacred Sound field. The ladies formed the inner circle and the men sat in the outer circle. Three chairs were placed in the center of the circles, turned to the left to create yet another circle in the core center of the “vesica” portal created by the sounds converging and crossing one another. In these chairs couples from the outer circles took turns sharing attunement for a few minutes, working with the first two endocrine glands.

While the bowls were being played, I had the men in the outer circle tone an OM in tune with the large B bowl while the ladies toned the Perfect Fifth harmonic in tune with the 8” F# bowl. A few of the ladies who were musically trained toned the third harmonic, moving up and down with me as I changed to a minor and augmented mode. At one point I asked the toning to stop while the bowls only were played, which many preferred.

Lloyd Meeker, the originator of the workshop, noted in the comment period that the playing  of the bowls alone had a more potent and clear impact than when accompanied by the toning. Other comments indicated that the experience inside the sacred sound field was delightful and uplifting. Paul Price, a master attunement practitioner and mentor, shared with me later on how he felt the sound field impacted the bio-molecular field as well as the quality of the energetic field.

I personally came away feeling fulfilled and satisfied with the exploration. From the comments, I felt re-affirmed in my intuitive sensing that Sacred Sound fields may facilitate our attunement work by shifting the cells of the physical body to a higher frequency of vibration while providing a harmonious sound wave for spirit and intention to move upon. The ultimate goal in this work is to help us in our transformational process and journey to lift our physical forms to a higher frequency, above the level of disease, so that they may become impervious to the lower frequencies and more available to the process of transmutation and ascension. I was satisfied and happy to hear that at least one person in her response “got me” on this core intent and purpose, which touched me deeply and nurtured my resolve to continue my exploration in the field of Attunement with Sacred Sound. I am equally thankful for the significant support and encouragement I receive from a few close friends and colleagues.

If you are interested in exploring this work with me, or simply learning more about it, you can obtain a copy of my recently released book, Attunement with Sacred Sound, from me personally (autographed in you wish; just send me an email), or from my publisher at HealthLightBooks.com. My book is also available from Amazon.

I am thankful for your presence in my life and especially for your readership. I love comments, so please do share any thoughts you may have.

Wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving,

Anthony Palombo

Email: tpal70@gmail.com

 

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Attunement, Attunement with sacred sound, Energy Healing, Frequency Shifting, Handling Sacred Energy, Healing Tones, Music, Pineal Gland, Quartz Crystal Bowls, Sacred Healing Arts, Sacred Sound, Sound as carrier wave for intention, Sound Healing, Sound Technology, Subtle energy, The Field

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Creating Sacred Sound Fields

July 13, 2016

Creating Unified Sacred Sound Fields (excerpted from my book Attunement With Sacred Sound)

My Chorale PicThis is a powerful healing technique whereby two or three quartz crystal bowls are used to create a unified sound field with the recipient placed in the middle of the setting. This can be done with vocal toning as well where two or three individuals or small groups tone the designated pitches. A Vesica Piscis is created where the sound waves meet and overlap one another. The one sitting or lying down in the Sacred Sound Vesica may experience profound frequency shifts that may open a portal through which something entirely new may be born in consciousness, such as new revelations, new thoughts and creative ideas, even new patterns of healing and transformation in one’s physical and energetic bodies. This is the magician’s realm of expertise. Sound healing in its finest advanced application.

When a single tone is sounded, it sends out a spherical waveform. This waveform creates a “sound field.”

When two harmonious tones are sounded simultaneously, their sound fields overlap creating thereby a “third field.” This opens a vibrational window referred to as a “Vesica Piscis,” a unified sound field. I am calling this a “Sacred Sound Field.”

Vesica_piscis_circles.svg

The Vesica Piscis is a vibrational portal formed by two overlapping fields of energy. It derives its name from its fishlike shape.  It has been called the “Womb of the Great Mother,” as it serves as a vibrational birth canal for a “third” waveform to come forth that may give rise to new thought and inspiration, leading to new and innovative creative expression.  This phenomenon demonstrates George Gurdjieff’s “Law of Three,” which I expand upon in my book Attunement with Sacred Sound.

We can create various unified harmonic sound fields using quartz crystal bowls. (I was not able to reproduce the color images from my book.)
  1. A “Perfect Fifth” sound field for healing can be created using two bowls that are tuned a Perfect Fifth apart in their tone. For example an A and an E bowl, or an F and a C bowl, etc. The colors in these diagrams are not true to the frequencies, but this gives one an idea of how two frequencies overlapping create a unified field with a different tonal quality.
  2. A more complex sound field is created by using three bowls whose pitches form a harmonious triad. For example F, A and C bowls. This combination of harmonic sounds is ideal for balancing the endocrine and chakra energy fields. As laid out in the chart on page 71, each pitch is assigned to a specific aspect of the sacred energy site with which one is working. Again, these colors are not true to the frequencies. One can get a sense, however, of how different tonal qualities are created by the overlapping sound fields.
Endocrine and Chakra Pitches
  1. Crown Chakra and Pineal Gland: B, D#, F  (The pound sign # indicates the note is sharp, half a step up)
  2. Brow and Pituitary Gland: A, C sharp, E
  3. Throat and Thyroid Gland: G, B, D.
  4. Heart and Thymus Gland: F, A, C.
  5. Solar and Pancreas Gland: E, G sharp, B.
  6. Root Chakra and Adrenal Glands: D, F sharp, A.
  7. Sacral Plexus and Gonadal Glands: C, E, G.
Moving energy with sound

We can move energy by changing the pitch of the third harmonic up and down. For example, while working with the thymus and heart centers, using the F, A and C bowls, by changing the middle note A to an A flat or G sharp, we can dip down and connect with stuck dissonant energies at deeper levels in the heart where perhaps troubled feelings are being harbored. Then, by returning to the A bowl, we can resolve the dissonant energy back to a harmonious tone and thereby reclaim the energy being used to maintain troubled feelings, incorporating it back into the whole.

To bring sacred energy down from higher frequency levels, change the A to an A sharp then back down to an A. This technique can introduce fresh energy into the mix to energize the field and may even help shift the frequency of the body itself to a higher level.  These techniques can be used with all combinations of harmonic triads.

In my next post I will talk about the “Law of Three” and the Law of the Octave. So, stay tuned.

Dr. Anthony Palombo, D.C.

Note: one can order my book Attunement With Sacred Sound from Health Light Books or from Amazon.

 

Category:

Energy Healing, Healing Tones, Holistic Healing, Music, Sacred Healing Arts, Sacred Sound, Sound Healing, Sound Technology

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Blessed By Sound . . . . . . . . . A Sound-Healing Retreat

May 25, 2016

A time for healing and renewal

(This event has been cancelled to be rescheduled on a future date.)

My Chorale PicIf you’ve never experienced an Attunement with Sacred Sound, then you are in for an awesome experience when you join us at our Blessed by Sound Rretreat in August.(See details below.)

Sound? Well, not just any sound — but coherent and pure sounds that have a unique and magical way of opening energy gateways in the body, allowing deep and immediate access to healing currents from within. Sound can serve as a carrier wave for spirit and intention, and “Sacred Sound” serves the sacred purpose of healing and transforming the “body temple”

Two or more sound waves can harmonize to produce a powerful and irresistible force, melting frigid and stuck energy patterns and opening the heart to the sweet healing balm of love. Harmonic sound can carry one to heights of ecstasy and, as easily, to the place of peace and tranquility in one’s “heart of hearts”. Through resonance, it connects us with the order and harmony of the Universe.

Whether produced by the voice or by musical instruments, by toning sacred vowel sounds or group chanting, by quartz crystal and Tibetan singing bowls, or by a Ukrainian a cappella choir singing beautiful uplifting sacred music – all of which you will experience during our retreat – harmonious sounds can enhance and refine one’s connection with Spirit, as it ascends in the transmuting fire of Love.

My New Book

I explore this sacred healing art in depth in my new book, Attunement with Sacred Sound,currently being published and released through Amazon. I would encourage you to obtain a copy and start reading it well ahead of the Blessed by Sound retreat. Also, I will have books on hand for purchase, along with CD’s that I use in my Attunement service. I look forward to our time of renewal together, sharing insights into this important and powerful field of the sacred healing arts. I hope to see you at Oakwood.

Tony Palombo

___________

Blessed by Sound Event Details: We will begin with 6:00 pm dinner on Thursday, August 18 and conclude with lunch on Sunday, August 21.For travel information, see: oakwoodretreatcenter.org

Cost for event, including room and board, is $475 per person ~ $150 with registration, $325 on arrival. Check to Heartland Spirit Network or cash.

To register, please fill out the registration form, to be found when you Click Here

Event Location: Oakwood Retreat Center, 3801 S County Road 575 E, Selma, IN 47383.

For further information. Phone (765) 747-7027 or e-mail oakwoodretreatcenter@gmail.com

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Attunement, Attunement with sacred sound, Books on spirituality, Endocrine system, Energy Healing, Healing, Healing for the Healer, Holistic Healing, Light workers, Quartz Crystal Bowls, Sacred Sound, Sound as carrier wave for intention, Sound Healing, Sound Technology, Subtle energy

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Extinguishing Fire With Sound

March 26, 2016

My Chorale PicI learned something today that turned on a light in my mind. Someone posted a video clip on Facebook demonstrating how fire can be extinguished with sound – a very low frequency bass sound. Here’s the demo:

Can you see how and why this works? Think about it for a moment. Fire results when atoms and molecules vibrate at a super high frequency, so high that they emit, or transmit, light so intense that it sets matter on fire. Now, the fuel in the skillet is already a high-frequency fuel, like gasoline or lighter fluid.  Add a little frequency boost with fire and the fuel immediately ignites, consuming the oxygen around it.

So how does the low frequency bass sound put out the fire? One possibility is by lowering the vibration of the fuel to such a low level that the atoms and molecules don’t burn.  In other words, fire results when molecules vibrate at a super high frequency. It would seem logical that if you lower the frequency at which they vibrate, they would stop burning. Another possibility is that the bass sound pushes the air with such a force that it blows the fire out. I am inclined to go with the first possibility.

I’ve been working with energy in my attunement with sound healthcare service for some forty years, researching the use of sound in healing for a book that is presently being released by Amazon: Attunement with Sacred Sound.  Being an energy and sound healer, I immediately saw how this phenomenon of sound extinguishing fire may work – (the first possibility above). You see, high frequencies increase the vibration of molecules whereas low frequencies decrease their vibration. This is why most of my clients love the lower frequencies of my fourteen and sixteen inch quartz crystal bowls. Their sound waves are calming. They put out the fire of anxiety, fear and worry, all high-frequency emotional and mental states.  They also calm down inflammation in the body that’s causing pain. I also use the high frequency sounds for fine-tuning the endocrine and chakra energy centers. After I’ve finished fine-tuning these energy centers, I finish with my fourteen-inch C quartz crystal bowl, which I use to attune the skeletal system along with the organs of the body. The low sound frequency is very grounding.

This brings up another way of looking at this sound healing technique, which is to see high frequencies as facilitating ascension to higher levels of being and low frequencies as facilitating a descent of spirit into fuller incarnation in the physical body.  In other words, low frequencies encourage and facilitate grounding, an essential aspect of sound healing, as sound has a tendency to lift one out of the physical and into a more spiritual state of being. Sound healing tends to be un-grounding — a word of caution to my fellow sound healers.

I like a comment a friend and colleague made about attunement on my FB post. He writes: “Attunement modulates and influences vibrational patterns , allowing a pattern that is out of control to return to it’s natural rate [of vibration].”  Sound can serve as a carrier wave for the attunement or healing current. This is what my book is all about. The following is the announcement of the imminent release of my book:

ANNOUNCING the RELEASE ofmy NEW BOOK

Attunement with Sacred Sound provides a pivotal revelation about the phenomenal connection you and I have to the powerfully grand energies of all creation. The seeming platitude that states, “We are all one,” or “We are one with everything,” is quite true, in fact! Keep reading and you will discover more about just how profoundly this is the case.                   — From the Foreword by PenDell Pittman

Sound is a tool for creation.  Not just any sound, but sound that carries a tone and a wave form that is coherent and pure. We call this “music.”  Then there’s the “Musica Universales, or Music of the Spheres” an ancient concept attributed to Pythagoras who reportedly could hear the musical harmonies of the planets. Are these the sound waves that carry the Word that creates all things sent forth by the Creator into the void of space? Pythagoras based our musical theory on this mathematically precise Musica.

Musical sound is being used extensively and increasingly in the healing arts. It can be used effectively with attunement and all forms of energy work. My use of sound in attunement is not so much to heal our physical ills as it is to facilitate the generation and clarification of pneumaplasm, the rarified spiritual substance that connects spirit with form. It is through this substance that spirit has a means of connecting with and managing the world of physical form. This is the medium for the propagation of the Tone that creates all living things and through which Love comes forth out of heaven to touch the earth of our flesh – or, perhaps more accurately, how flesh rises to touch heaven, spiritualized by the radiant current of Love moving in and through it. When flesh is touched by Love it is uplifted, transformed, made whole and holy. What I am suggesting here is that music, harmonic sound, is a tool that can be used as a carrier wave for spirit in the healing and transformational processes.

I emphasize the word resonance in this work to remind us that we are not manipulating physical substance – or mental and spiritual substance for that matter – with sound. We are simply sounding a tone that may engender and give rise to a resonantresponse from within the person’s heart of hearts. It is the vibration of the resonant response within the individual – self or other – that does the ‘work’ in harmonizing and uplifting the vibrations of life in the tissue cells of the body.

My interest in the art of Sacred Sound relates to how it may enhance our attunement energy work as a tool that is vibrational in nature. Beyond the human voice, there are musical and sound-producing instruments that lend themselves to the art of Sacred Sound – such as singing bowls, chimes, tuning forks, drums, and a few others I explore in the book.

My book will be available at www.Amazon.com. Book Price: $35.99 (includes postage within the USA)

Order my book and explore a whole new dimension of sound healing. Purchase a quartz crystal bowl (an 8″ F or a 14″ C bowl) and play it for a few minutes every day. Better still, invest in two bowls, the 8″ F and the 14″ C bowls: F is for the heart Chakra and C is for the bones and whole body.  Play them together and enjoy the harmony they produce. This is a very smart investment in your whole health.

Until my next post, here’s to your good health.

Anthony Palombo, DC

Check out my HealthLight Newsletter on line at LiftingTones.com for a variety of articles on health and wellness.

 

 

 

 

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Attunement, Attunement with sacred sound, Endocrine system, Energy, Energy Healing, Frequency Shifting, Healing Tones, Levitation, Music, Quartz Crystal Bowls, Resonance, Sacred Sound, Sound as carrier wave for intention, Sound Healing, Sound Technology

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On Human Relations . . . . part 6: The Path of Romantic Love, page 4

January 18, 2016

My Chorale PicIn chapter seven of her powerful book MARY MAGDALENE – Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity, “Reclaiming the Path of Romantic Love,” Episcopal minister Cynthia Bourgeault paints a much different picture of the spiritual path Jesus walked than the one painted by Christian orthodox interpretations of the four gospels. Continuing from where we left off in the previous post, Cynthia speaks to the question “Were Jesus and Mary Magdalene lovers.” I will let you read directly from the final two pages of this chapter.

Having described Jesus’s spiritual path as being anything but celibate, an “enstatic” path of conserving pranic energy, Cynthia makes her case against traditional Christian concepts and beliefs to the contrary.

By contrast, the path that Jesus himself seems to teach and model in his life, and particularly in his death, is not a storing up but a complete pouring out. His pranic energy is quickly depleted; on the cross, as all four gospel account affirm, he does not hold out even until sunset, but quickly “gives up the ghost.” Shattered and totally spent, he simply disappears into his death. The core icon of the Christian faith, the watershed moment from which it all emerges, is not enstatic but ecstatic — love completely poured out, expended, squandered. In contrast to clarity, it is the arche­typal image of purity, the complete self-giving of the heart.

THE PATH JESUS WALKED

And right here, I believe, we come to the fundamental problem with these celibate models of transformation. It’s not merely their monochromatic viewpoint or the implicit devaluing of a whole other stream of Christian spiritual wisdom whose roots are in passionate human love. Rather, it is the fact that at key points they seem to be slightly out of kilter with the path of transformation that Jesus himself walked and taught. One might say that this model points us toward John the Baptist rather than Jesus: to­ward those ancient and time-honored practices of renunciation, asceticism, and self-concentration through abstinence, whereas if we really look closely, we see that Jesus himself seemed to be con­stantly pushing the envelope in the opposite direction — toward radical self-abandonment, reckless self-outpouring, and the trans­mutation of passion in complete self-giving.

But it is right there, at the center of that cognitive dissonance, that a window of opportunity opens up. Rather than trying to smooth it over and pretend it does not exist, as the church has done for nearly two thousand years, we need to tune in and listen to it very carefully, for it gives us exactly the tool we need to proceed.

Were Jesus and Mary Magdalene lovers? To date, nearly everyone seems to be trying to solve that riddle from the outside, like good investigative journalists. It’s all about finding new evi­dence: secret documents and societies, new gnostic gospels, purported lost tombs, hidden mathematical messages embedded in the lines of existent texts — some new piece of data that would settle the issue one way or another. Equally, those who are ap­palled by the very notion of a romantically involved Jesus build their case by recourse to doctrines and templates that did not exist until three or four centuries after he had left the planet. It’s all external logic.

But there is another possibility, which has been sitting there right under our noses all along yet so far seems to have been consistently overlooked. That is to evaluate the evidence from the inside, on the basis of the path itself. For Jesus was, after all, a teacher, and the teaching itself is there to be consulted. Once one has compensated for the negative set and drift of the celibate current, it is merely a matter of asking a single question: In the light of what Jesus actually seems to have been teaching, is there anything in the teachings themselves that would have precluded such a love relationship?

If Jesus were indeed walking the path of classic monastic brahmacharya, then the answer is obviously yes; celibacy is an essential requirement of this path, and to diverge from this requirement would violate his integrity and sabotage his spiritual power.

But what if in fact he was walking a different path? A path difficult to identify because it was so close to its own headwaters that it was missed by nearly everyone both then and now? What if he was not an ascetic at all, but was in fact following a whole new trajectory, previously unknown in the West and with its own ways of understanding integrity and purity? Along this other trajec­tory, it might indeed be conceivable for him to be in a human love relationship, although that love would probably not look like what most of us are familiar with.

Let’s see what the teachings themselves have to say.

Thus ends chapter seven with a segue to chapter eight, and to the rest of Cynthia’s provocative treatise, for that matter. The title of chapter eight is “The Great Identity Theft.” Who was Jesus and how was his presentation of himself perceived by the world he came to save from itself?  There are two brief paragraphs midway through this chapter that speak to these questions.

In the Aramaic language of Jesus’s immediate followers, one of the earliest titles given to him was Ihidaya, “the Single One,” or the “Unified One.” In context, it speaks unmistakably of this state of inner oneness; it designates the anthropos, the fully realized human being: the enlightened master of Eastern tradition, or the monad or “undivided one” of hermeticism.

The “great identity theft” to which the title of this chapter refers is that in remarkably short order this term, which was so clearly intended to designate Jesus’s attained state of inner oneness, should come to be interpreted as “singleness” in the sense of being unmarried, “the celibate one.”

Jesus was not necessarily monastic nor ascetic, which leaves him available to a romantic relationship. Actually, according to Islamic scholar Ibrahim Gamard, monasticism was not mandated by the Koran. In a letter to the author in 1998, Gamard shared the insight that “in the Islamic tradition monasticism was disapproved of in the Qur’anic verse which states that the monasticism of the followers of Jesus was invented by them and was not something commanded by God.” As I said, this leaves Jesus with the option at least of having a romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene as his wife and partner in a shared service to Humanity: personal transformation via a path of romantic love.

I will leave it there for now and continue with “The Path that Jesus Walked” in my next post . . . . or not. This series seems to be complete, so I may let this be the concluding post to the series on Human Relations. We’ll see what the Current of Inspiration brings us for exploration. Thanks for sharing this consideration with me. As always, your comments are welcome.  Until my next post,

Be love. Be Loved

Anthony

Read my Health Light Newsletter online at LiftingTones.com for helpful information about health and wellness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Category:

Celibacy, Eros, Human Relations, Jesus, Love, Man-Woman Equality, Man-Woman Relationship, Mary Magdalene & Jesus, On Human Relations, Romantic love, Spiritual intimacy before phsical, The path of romantic love, Transformation

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On Human Relations . . . . . part 6: The Path of Romantic Love, page 3

January 1, 2016

“Without the quicksilver of eros nothing transforms . . .”

My Chorale PicIn the previous post I presented and considered the first two of four propositions, or myths, that are all “firmly rooted in the soil of celibate spirituality–that together have subtly sabotaged our ability to see romantic love as an authentic path of spiritual transformation” presented by Cynthia Bourgeault in her boldly provocative book The Meaning of MARY MAGDALENE — Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity.  In this post I will present and consider the third and fourth myths and share some of Cynthia’s thought provoking views and commentary from her book — which I highly recommend to my readers.

Myth Number Three: Human love is inherently different from divine love

This is what has been handed down through Christian church teachings. Actually, it was Plato who classified love by types: agape and eros — although he didn’t attribute agape exclusively to divine love nor eros exclusively to human love. After all, the Greeks had their riotous gods who were capable of both human and divine passions. Rather, agape love to Plato was impartial, disinterested love and eros desiring love, which both the gods and humans were capable of experiencing. Plato’s delineation, non-the-less, set the foundation for such discussions for two-and-a-half millennia since, writes Cynthia Bourgeault.

It was a Swedish Protestant theologian in the 1930’s by the name of Anders Nygren who relegated eros to human desiring. His “monumental” three-volume work Agape and Eros, in which he writes “eros is man’s way to God; agape is God’s way to man,” had a powerful and pervasive influence on contemporary Christian spirituality. Cynthia writes:

According to Nygren, eros is by its very nature filled with desire and neediness, hence impure; by contrast, God’s way of loving is free, clear and impartial, motivated only by the goodness of the giver. With one deft stroke of the theological scalpel, Nygen essentially divided the core energy of love into two separate species and assigned to erotic love (the only love humans are by definition capable of) a permanent second-class status that essentially negates its value as a spiritual path. It is hard to escape the implication that if one is following a path of passionate commitment to a beloved, one is on an inferior spiritual track, or no track at all. This despite love’s unassailable record as the most potent force at our disposal to unify the heart and transform the soul.

Fortunately, the damaging pronouncements of Nygren has impacted only the modern era. Earlier generations of Christian teachers considered eros a “wellspring” of transforming energy that one simply had to learn to work with in one’s spiritual path. Cynthia quotes John Climacus’ sixth-century writings to exemplify this historical fact:

“I have seen impure souls who threw themselves headlong into physical eros to a frenzied degree. It was their very experience of that physical eros that led them to interior conversion. They concentrated their eros on the Lord. Rising above fear, they tried to love God with insatiable desire. That is why when Christ spoke to the woman who had been a sinner he did not say that she had been afraid but that she had loved much, and had easily been able to surmount love by love.”

The goal of “surmounting love by love” for a thousand years formed the heart of the Christian mystical program of transformation, culminating in the twelfth century in the magnificent “monastic love mysticism” of St Bernard of Clairvax and those following in his wake (and notice that whenever eros is mentioned in a text, the figure of Mary Magdalene hovers right in the background). To the extent that it still conceives of God as an object that one can “concentrate one’s eros” on, it ultimately falls victim of that same dualistic fallacy we have already seen in the first myth. But it is far, far better than what has been served up today in the name of religious and psychological health; a gutless, passionless numb “agape clone” that goes nowhere at all. Without the quicksilver of eros nothing transforms: a secret which I believe Jesus himself knew and worked with in his teachings in a profound way, only at a unitive rather than a dualistic level.

Now, of course, if you were fortunate enough to escape such indoctrination in your upbringing, then none of this serves you very much, excerpt perhaps as an educational piece at an intellectual level. I am intrigued by perspectives on historical events that shed light on the path I have traveled over the last seventy plus years. You see, I was born into a Catholic family, groomed for a priestly vocation — which was more my father’s desire for me than my own — and educated in the hallowed halls of Roman Catholic seminary. Only the halls of Catholic seminary were not so hallowed as they were hollow and empty of any transforming energy. Eros was a path to a life of mortal sin, the punishment for which was eternal damnation and separation from God. So, it thrills me to have someone like Cynthia Bourgeault articulate so eloquently some of the undercurrents that were churning beneath the turbulent and confusing terrain upon which I spent the formative and developing years of my life, as well as their origins in history.

Don’t worry for me, however, for the Church’s brain-washing, for some strange reason, seemed like water poured over a duck’s back. It didn’t penetrate the core of me. My guardian angel was apparently protecting me. However, I did not escape the damage to my human psyche and the spoiling of my physical enjoyment of a fully enfleshed life of healthy sexuality as a young man. That came later after awakening to the truth of love and of life.

But enough about me. Let’s look at the fourth myth, the one that lured me into the seminary and, ironically, disillusioned me at the age of 21 and sent me in search for the truth of love in human relations, both with the divine and with one another, a search that would last only seven years. Let me share some of her thoughts and perspectives right from her powerful book.

Myth Number Four: Celibacy is a state of greater purity.

The mistake here–and it is one commonly made in spiritual teaching — is to confuse purity with clarity. Clarity has to do with attuning the mind. Purity is about awakening the heart. The two can overlap each other, but they are not synonymous.

I enjoy her distinction between purity and clarity. She goes on to give a little history of the practice of celibacy.

In Hinduism, where the practice of celibacy as an applied spiritual technology (known as brahmacharya)  arose more than three thousand years ago, the objective has to do with conserving and concentrating prana, the vital energy or life force, so that it can be utilized for spiritual transformation. The modern Hindu master Swami Chidananda has restated the traditional wisdom by explaining it in this way: “Prana is the precious reserve of the seeker. Any sense activity or sense experience consumes a lot of prana [the sex act most of all, he claims] . . . The highest of all goals in life, spiritual attainment, requires the maximum pranic energy on all levels.”

For Swami Chidananda, the practice of celibacy harnesses pranic energy much like a dam harnesses the force of water for the purpose of turning huge turbines, and like a lens concentrates the rays of the sun to burn whatever they are focused on. Cynthia continues:

In the most ancient and powerful understanding of the practice, celibacy belongs among practices that can be classified as enstatic — those that have to do with conserving, collecting, concentrating. The positive side of this kind of practice is a significantly enhanced clarity — a relative freedom from the energy-consuming turmoil of the physical lusts and emotional passions and thus a greater capacity to stay present to the higher frequencies of spiritual energy.

For exactly this reason — that celibacy is a “storing up” process — its shadow side is avarice. One must be alert to a subtle tendency to withhold or “preserve”oneself, to hold oneself back from full engagement in the human sphere in order to have access to those higher realms of truth and light. Under all the aura of “selfless giving” with which the practice of celibacy generally cloaks itself, there can be a subtle spiritual acquisitiveness at work, betrayed in the very phrase “spiritual attainment.” Which “I,” one wonders, is this “I” who attains?

Cynthia gives her reader pause to consider what’s really at work in spiritual attainment. She then turns toward the life and death of Jesus in a most remarkable portrayal of him as being anything but enstatic in his public ministry.

By contrast, the path that Jesus himself seems to teach and model in his life, and particularly in his death, is not a storing up but a complete pouring out. His pranic energy is quickly depleted; on the cross, as all four gospel accounts affirm, he does not hold out even until sunset, but quickly “gives up the ghost.” Shattered and totally spent, he simply disappears into his death. The core icon of the Christian faith, the watershed moment from which it all emerges, is not enstatic but ecstatic — love completely poured out, expended squandered. In contrast to clarity, it is the archetypal image of purity, the complete self-giving of the heart.

Such is the character of unconditional love: “. . .the complete self-giving of the heart.” This reminds me of Jesus’s words to his disciples during his sermon on the vine and the branches: “Greater love hast no man than this; that he lay down his life for his friends.”  He was giving them all that he had to give, and for a truly selfless reason: “. . . that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” (John 15:13)

The joy of giving fully of oneself is like no other joy.  It’s a joy that utterly sets one free. This, I believe, is what’s really behind the mad rush to buy presents for loved ones and friends at Christmas time every year. We do get much joy out of giving.  I’ve actually read of a tribal community where there is no word in their language for “Thank you.” Such is their awareness that the pleasure and joy of giving are the giver’s as much as, if not more than, the receiver’s. I love Cynthia’s portrayal of this great Teacher as one who spent himself fully during his three-and-a-half years of public ministry. It is the Jesus that I can easily hold as a hero and model of true manhood.

In my next post I will share Cynthia Bourgeault’s view of and commentary on “The Path Jesus Walked.” So, stay tuned for more inspiring posts on my Healing Tones blog.

Wishing for you a Happy New Year and a healthy and happy 2016!

Anthony

Read my HealthLight Newsletter online at LiftingTones.com.

 

 

Category:

Celibacy, Eros, Human Relations, Jesus, Love, Man-Woman Relationship, Mary Magdalene & Jesus, On Human Relations, Romantic love, Sex, Spiritual intimacy before phsical

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