But for centuries, since the capitulation of Judah, the Jewish peoples had been almost continuously under foreign control. So, where was Yahweh all this time while his people suffered...? Far from ever questioning the very being of such an inept deit...
Without understanding your place as a conscious entity manifesting and engaging an experiential Reality, you will only be able to perceive Jesus within the confines of your belief structure. And that would present that hall-of-mirrors Jesus caricatur...
Moving man’s view of himself and life past common thinking, the true visionary faces great difficulty: exactly that deluded mindset the sage would have listeners outgrow is the very filter through which any new perspective must pass.
Most people, solidly frozen into long-held, common notions, are unable to grasp clearer views.
Visionaries have two principal means to immediately communicate insights beyond people’s mundane, common mindset. They can liken awareness to equivalent situations in life to which the listener can relate – using metaphor, analogy and other gramm...
As to “facts” as a basis of understanding things in this investigative age: if there is anything greatly preferred to valid, reliable information in our culture, it is the appearance of facts – nice, tidy story lines that seem complete and perf...
It is vital to see not only what Christianity asserts, but where its precepts came from – how they evolved from primitive, superstitious metaphysical claims into “Gospel Truth”.
While scholarly research provides extensive information, the real Jesus, the man who voiced various timeless insights on life, can only be revealed when life is understood better than the common mindset of our time allows.
The principal inhibiting factor in the pursuit of understanding is the utter gullibility of the mind – this over-riding tendency for the psyche, once having accepted a set of beliefs and definitions, to interpret reality in a way that confirms them...
Religions take hold and dominate a culture, not because they accurately portray reality, but because they appear to, once having been accepted – such that succeeding generations are heavily indoctrinated into the shared cultural mindset from birth.
Yet, reality operates in a consistent way – the same physical, interactive functions are in play for every conscious human in existence. If religion reflected reality as it actually works, all religions would be the same: accurate rendering in word...
Reality’s functional flow can never be debated: reality manifests as it does regardless of individual recognition of its value-based inter-active function. Only simulated notions about reality – creeds, definitions, assumptions, paradigms – can...
Understanding points Jesus presented to his peers requires exploring how Jews, local Greeks, Romans and other ethnic mixes inhabiting the region perceived reality. Without a clear recognition of the common ancient mindset, regard for precepts present...
Had the common man in (first century) Palestine thought about it at all, he would have considered the world flat, with land riding on and surrounded by water below and above. Keeping water up there was the “firmament” – a great, canopy-like dom...
Clouding the exact evolution of El and Yahweh as concepts (and any other aspect of belief, for neither El nor Yahweh ever existed as anything except mind images of fervent believers) is the invariable propensity of associated religions to revise thei...
The pathway to seeing life clearly is not one of absorbing another better explanation, but rather of getting rid of old beliefs and invalid paradigms.