I read your post.
In my dreams i have seen that one of the main and most common forms of transmutation have to do with food and micro organisms.
This is why some fermented foods are so good for the body.
Plants transmute the soil, air and sun light. Many plants are good for the body as well.
Food also has a spiritual element to it, which is why the ancients made food offerings to the spirits.
That insight is related to the truth behind this verse from the Gospel of John “And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.”
I find the iteration fascinating because it is another source of enlightenment. I have been reading in similar sources:
I have been very much caught up in this book, which has been surprising in many ways. I’m still not finished and keep on going back and forth.
Coincidentally that book “Jesus and the Lost Goddess” was suggested to me by two friends of mine who are reading it together.
The divine feminine re-emerges historically as if according to Freud’s principal of the return of the repressed. She resurfaced in the middle ages as the cult of Mary and the Shekinah of the Kabbalah and again in the late 20th century as the subject of feminist theology.
Carl Jung sought a means of making the trinity into a quaternity. Sometimes he envisioned the fourth quarter as Satan, i.e. God’s shadow, at other times as Mary the divine feminine.
That said, one of my friends who is reading the book warned that the historical basis for Freke and Gandy’s thesis is questionable.
Yes, I wasn’t too keen on the videos that Tim Freke had made, trying to set himself up as a “stand-up Philosopher” but because the book on Kindle was so cheap I had a look. I must say that the book did surprise me because there are a lot of quotations that have sources that seemed reliable. He does have a case about a lot but it gets difficult to read after a while. I’m sticking at it, in hope that the second half is better.
I haven’t fisinshed Mathieu Pageau’s book yet, probably because it is so thought provoking that I’ve put it down to think about the consequences of what he has written. At this stage, I think there is a lot to be discovered in the Bible and other ancient traditions that we have just glossed over and failed to register. It just isn’t what evangelical Christians think it should be. If so much is symbolically a description of life in our world, I think I’ll have to re-think what the final message is. Linking that with gnostic texts makes everything seem quite muddled.
Yeah I wasn’t aware that Freke is a YouTube guru. Like you said to me I’m reading so many books and watching so many videos, I don’t think I can take on another at the moment. If there’s a dearth of meaning in the secular world these days, there’s also a glut of putative meaning on the internet. I’m still taking in a lot of Pageau and Vervaeke. Peterson’s trying to make a comeback with another book. The way I see it, the symbolic world turns out to be an elaborated mandala of wholeness, “the structure of reality” as Pageau likes to put it. It is ontological in the sense that it articulates the structural unity of a way of being in the world.
Symbolism was much in evidence on Wednesday when the mob attacked the capitol in Washington. The Congressional leaders were awakened to their heroic duty by the defilement of the capitol, the sacred center of democracy by the chaotic mob from the margins of society summoned by deluded, power-drunk President Trump.
The numbers of groups involved show that this had been something that had been planned since the outcome of the vote was clear, with knowledge of Trump, and was intended to be far worse than it turned out to be. It was fortunate that the people in the capitol moved so swiftly and there were less people involved in the insurrection than originally planned. This could be a good sign that people on the right have begun to realise that this man is anything but a conservative. He does the things he says the left are doing, but I think that he isn’t the brain behind it - there are others.
Reading this I can’t help but think that we are in a time of change in which so much is swimming in a sea of uncertainty. There is a lack of solid ground for people to stand on and they grab anything that is floating by. The times are the result of the loss of substance in peoples lives and the rise of shallow soaps and bickering social media in the West as a diminished alternative.
The problem is that people will try to find a way ahead, even if it means hanging on to some conspiracy theory and finding an enemy. Consolidating around something meaningful became increasingly difficult with the Catholic Church losing ground because of the scandals, the impact of Islamic terror, “New Atheists” going on their bitter rampage, the spread of the evangelical as a fight against these developments, and the political agendas of prominent persons. What is the solution?
The question that arises now is how purpose and direction can be found without falling into the traps laid out before us. Finding the bridge between heaven and earth should be easy for Christians, albeit they have become a motely crew, split into factions and sides according to their tastes, unable to find the common ground – except in locating a common enemy.
The fascinating thing about the Gospels, even if you think of them as compositions of faith, is that the symbolism that is rife in them assists in finding that bridge. Christ is the model of holiness – that is a centre of the wheel around which we all revolve. This centre draws people together, rather than proposing a struggle against, a jihad, and lays down the rule of love – something very lacking at present. The self-inflicted exile is resolved by a Father who comes running towards the prodigal son, welcoming him back into the family. The son knew that he had forgone his rights and expected nothing. This is the vision of humility that has become so rare in our present day.
Excellent. It appears that you are receiving a restored vision of the structure of reality. That’s where we each need to begin. Without the vision people perish spiritually. Then we can take baby steps to live according to the vision we receive. To be able to live like this is a blessing in this time of the crisis of meaning. The logos is the light that shines in the darkness and gives meaning to everything. On a depth level it shines in the heart to give insight into our deepest parts to show us who we really are and how to proceed. The impact we can have on the world depends on where we are in the great chain of being. Jesus washed the disciple’s feet. They didn’t understand what he was doing. He was reconfiguring the world.
To paraphrase Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson: One of the constitutive aspects of how reality unfolds and how it appears to us is something like attention. Everything that appears to us in the world has an infinite amount of details. It has an indefinite amount of ways that you could describe it and angles from which you could analyze it.
Nevertheless the world appears to us through hierarchies of meaning. For example a cup or a chair. A chair is a multitude of parts. How is it that we can say that it is one thing? There’s a capacity that we have to attend. It’s something like a co-creation of the world. You can try to analyze the chair objectively but you end up with bean bags and stumps. You can sit on them and that’s what unites them. Our object perceptions are projected modes of being. The objective world is ineluctably contaminated with utility and therefore with morality. The world manifests itself through attention and consciousness has a place to play in how the world reveals itself.
You can try to posit a world outside of that first person perspective, but it’s a deluded activity. it’s very difficult because you don’t know what to make of something like time. Time has an in a ineradicably subjective element. There’s duration. Time is kind of like the average rate at which things change. But duration is something like the felt sense of that time. If you take away the subjective element isn’t clear what to do with time. Even physicists stumble over this. There is intermingling of value and fact. The world of fact is saturated inevitably with value.
Attention plays a part in the way the world lays itself out. (Phenomenal intentionality) The stuff that the world is made of is something like attention or consciousness which has a pattern. And that pattern is the same pattern as stories. They have identities. They have centers. They have margins. They have exceptions. And that’s how stories lay themselves out. A story happens in time. An identity is broken down and then reconstructed. That’s the basis of every story. That’s a way for us to perceive the identity of things. If the world is made of this then our secular world is an aberration of every traditional worldview which saw what we today call consciousness (they called it nous or intellect) as part of how the world lays itself out. And it lays itself out in modes of being. It’s not only that you engage in modes of being but modes of being have you, (encompass you).
Hi Felix,
I heard something like this with both JPs and struggled with it a little. The reason is this: My experience of reality goes on in my head, fed by sensual input, but it is surely the reality of objects that I am experiencing and not just my attention that is creating it? The manifestation of reality, its materialization in my perception, is an indication of something being there, or not?
The second thing is detail. I know that things are in reality composite things, made up of parts down to the smallest atom, but I experience them as whole, single things. This is particularly true for living things, including plants. It is attention that causes me to take notice of these things, and differentiate between parts and wholes, between living and dying things.
I am reliant upon the air, but my senses only register its effect, otherwise it is invisible to me. My vegetative system causes me to breathe, whether or not I know what I am breathing. I wonder whether it was being forced to do things, by instinct or physical function, that was there first. Human beings, like all animals knew instinctively, that they lived off other life. Their detection of detail and pattern, much like infants, was a matter of discovery by growing attention.
In this way they discovered utility and then morality. There were things that should not be done because they were dangerous for individuals but also for collectives. Morality was probably simple to begin with, but it became subject to the developing world-view of the tribe and gained sophistication with time. An example is the sophisticated symbolism that Mathieu Pageau discovered in the Bible and explains in his book. The rising awareness of man’s special place within reality began to become authoritative, as well as the struggle with the duality of human existence (heaven and earth), which became the subject of stories, which grew into epics and mythologies.
I experience life as a story unfolding with other stories around me, with which I interact in varying degrees. These stories are identities, and the stories I read are (as you say) identities broken down and reconstructed, which gives me a larger experience base than my own existence and is the reason I read them. It is also formative, helping me to form an identity of my own, which helps me find meaning within my existence.
Just a few thoughts on what you wrote.
What value do you think this verbal has?
He said nothing to counter the “new atheists”. All he tried to do is reframe to a place which did not speak to the problem of atheist or theism.
Whatever you want to take about the “symbolic world”,; this is not about god.
This is such obvious goal post changing.
Science is a sumbolic world too. The difference is that is contains symbols of things that exist.
You can squirm as much as you like, Christianity can be whatever you want it to be, but its not about reality.
So why bother with it?
What I see here is yet another attempt - a desperate attempt to impose meaning on the world, by the invention is myths.
Have the decency to admit it. But I’d rather you had the honestly to make myths from truth not invention.
I was with you up until this part… WE often pattern our stories to resemble our experiences, not the other way around.
The world is also not apprehended through stories, but mental models.
Our models are attempts at apprehending the pattern of our experiences, this is entirely a project driven by utility. In other words, we require of our models that they give us predictive power that we may intelligently engineer our own experiences, chart our own path through life… if I am about to be struck by a car and wish to avoid it, the correct course of action is not to put the car out of my mind completely, as a means of avoiding the collision… so I would say any model that frames the car as merely an entity in my mind is not only of no use, it’s dangerous.
Stories, that is to say a fabricated or curated series of events, can have a wide variety of purposes…
Most often they merely entertain by transporting us away to another place through imagination and making us believe it could be real.
Though nearly as frequently, we use stories to manipulate perception, whether stories about other people, ourselves, our tribe, nation or even the world…
Like telling the story of how Billy used to bully you in school, to get other people to dislike him, as you do.
Or stories about how your father was a tyrant and you never learned how to show love, to get people you hurt to forgive your bad behavior, through “understanding”, while you do nothing to correct it.
Propaganda, where the purpose is to re-frame things in such a way, that you’re the good guys and the other tribe are the bad guys, to excuse or encourage certain behavior.
Or religion where the weather, disease, or even the fate of your mind after your body dies is made a consequences of your behavior, or lack thereof… yet again as a means of modifying behavior.
To empower people with knowledge (useful models), your conveyance ought to prioritise utility, demonstrability and clarity… fabrications, metaphor and ambiguity are not the best tools for this job.
To motivate people, to modify their behavior… well… brainwashing, would be the best tool, if we had the tech… but for now, stories will do.
Don’t get me wrong, stories are tools… very potent tools.
But their utility is far from restricted to conveying truth… nor are they even the best means of conveying truth.
They may well be, however, the best means we have of distorting truth… which we most often use to fool ourselves…
The sugar coating of what is effectively social engineering, in the language of “symbolism” or “spirituality” does nothing to change which loss is being lemented and renewal is wished for.
That of human behavior as when gripped by fabricated stories.
I cannot help but think that you cannot muster reasons that appeal to others, as to why they ought behave that way, when you are reduced to pushing the import of stories beyond all reason.
It’s a shame that you don’t investigate further, because Jonathan Pageau is very much a Christian (Greek Orthodox) and tries to find the Christian approach to the world.
You obviously have no idea about what we have discussed in this thread, so reading up could be an answer to your question.
But seeing as you did ask a question (although I don’t understand your concern) there is a book out by the brother of Jonathan Pageau, Mathieu, “The Language of Creation: Cosmic Symbolism in Genesis” in which is pointed out how the cosmology of the OT is largely symbolic and within that cosmology, understandable. It isn’t science, nor is it meant to be, but does still explain the situation of mankind in a manner that is coherent.
You obviously assume that mythology is invention, but that isn’t what mythology is. It is a means of speaking about the situation of mankind in a way that people can understand and remember – by the use of stories.
This throws up the question of how do we understand our world at all? Science gives us knowledge, but we can’t just go through life with amassed facts, they have to make sense. We need meaning to make sense and that is where stories are far better. We understand our own lives largely as an unravelling story, and the lives we interact with in the same way. We see patterns in behaviour and structures, which give us an idea of how things will work out if we go down a particular avenue.
That is the value of stories – and therefore of myths.
The idea that your experience of reality goes on in your head–the egocentric dilemma–is the modern legacy of Cartesian mind body dualism. It’s the modern story we were baptized into at birth. It’s the cage we moderns are trapped in. Phenomenology is the key to get out of the cage. Pageau intuitively connects phenomenology with pre-modern Christian symbolism. Peterson explains why this is psychologically justifiable. But phenomenology is the ultimate do it yourself project. It is the return to first philosophy. Tacking it onto the natural attitude won’t do.
Yours is the humanist myth. (Myth not in the sense of a fiction but rather a grand narrative.) Man creates himself. He freely generates theoretical models out of the thin air of formless experience. The all powerful “I” thinks therefore he is! The autonomous self-created man! The foundation of modernity! Self-deluded he imagines that he engineered his own emergence!
So let me present to counter-proposal. Being "I"s (I’m using I as a verb here). And Being “worlds”. Thus being -in- the-world precedes and structures the theoretical modeling of which you speak.