[Guest Blogger] Daniel Pinchbeck: The Mayan Apocalypse

[It is with great pleasure that I present to you a guest post by one of the great progressive thinkers of our time: Daniel Pinchbeck. Please check out breakingopoenthehead.com, The Evolver Project and look for his new book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, to be released in April by Viking-Penguin. As always, you are encouraged to comment on this forum regardless of your experience with the subject matter. You could end up learning something. -NP]

The Mayan Apocalypse
Daniel Pinchbeck

Over the past decade, I have engaged in an intellectual and spiritual odyssey that began when I was in my late twenties, in the depths of an existential crisis. At that time I was a journalist whose work had appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Wired, among others, and the editor of a New York-based literary magazine, Open City. I was brought up as an atheist in a countercultural milieu – my mother was a novelist, book editor, and former member of the Beat Generation; my father was an abstract painter living in SoHo. I had internalized the modern scientific view of a world lacking a sacred or transcendent dimension – the “universe in ruins” described by Bertrand Russell. Suffering from nihilism, I found that I desperately needed to interrogate my world view, and to see if there were any other options.

The only events in my life that suggested the possibility of other forms of consciousness or other realms of being were my psychedelic journeys on mushrooms and LSD, back in college. I decided to return to psychedelics and systematically study this culturally suppressed and forbidden area. I explored the substances I had known, and learned about many I had never heard of before. I tried ayahuasca, the sacred “medicine” of the Amazon basin, brewed from two jungle plants, in a ceremony in downtown Manhattan. I also took an assignment from a music magazine to go through a tribal initiation in Gabon, on the West African equator, using a psychedelic rootbark, iboga, that sent me on a long trip back through my childhood, also featuring prophetic hints and telepathic views. I wrote about these experiences, and many others, in my first book, Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, published by Random House, in 2002.

The upshot of my study – which included doing shamanic work with the Mazatec Indians in Mexico and the Secoya tribe in the Ecuadorean Amazon, visiting the Burning Man festival in Nevada, and exploring synthetic compounds invented in the last decades – was that I became convinced, through my experiences, that the shamanic, occult, or mystical worldview was more accurate than the materialist worldview I had inherited. I transferred my allegiances from Freud to Jung, whose acceptance of synchronicity, of archetypes belonging to a collective unconscious, and the “reality of the psyche,” seemed to support the shamanic worldview through the prism of modern depth psychology. Over the course of my research, I encountered extraordinary numbers of synchronicities and various forms of psychic phenomena in which I had no “belief” beforehand. My world view was forced to expand to allow for this new data.

Among the substances I tried was the superpotent fast-acting psychedelic, dimethyltryptamine, known as DMT. DMT was the subject of a 1990s study by Doctor Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico, the results compiled in his book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Strassman noted that DMT was an endogamous chemical in human beings, naturally occurring in our brains (perhaps produced by the pineal gland) and spinal column. Strassman was a Buddhist, and he had noted that Buddhist texts described the soul reincarnating seven weeks after death. The pineal gland appeared in fetal development exactly forty-nine days after conception. Strassman wondered if this was a more than accidental conjunction – if DMT, or some other compound produced by the pineal gland could be the “spirit molecule,” a kind of conductive medium drawing the soul down into the body and releasing it at death. When I smoked DMT, I found that I completely lost contact with this reality, and entered another dimension or realm that seemed fully convincing, yet almost overwhelming in its otherness. The best I could describe this other realm was “Tibetan mandalas meets Disney World in the Twenty-Fifth Century” – it seemed simultaneously geometric, hyper-organic, hyperreal. I had the sensation of much higher levels of consciousness watching over this realm, and inspecting me as I passed through it – the entire trip lasted less than ten minutes. Although DMT is a naturally occurring compound in the human body and in many plants, it was made illegal by the US Government in the late 1960s.

I was left wondering why Western culture found it necessary to drastically repress not only psychedelic chemicals, but the entire worldview of shamanism with its focus on intuitive and magical aspects of reality, represented by the burning of witches in the Inquisition, and the destruction of native traditions during Colonialism. It seemed to me that this suppression masked some deep ontological threat to the modern mind. Since I had validated the precepts of shamanism for myself, I also began to wonder about the prophecies that many indigenous cultures hold about the time we are in right now – from the Hopi Indians of New Mexico, who believe we are on the verge of transitioning from one “world” to another, to the Classical Mayan civilization of the Yucatan, obsessed with time and astronomy, who seemed to predict that the imminently approaching year of 2012 represented a transformational threshold for human consciousness. I began to realize that prophecy was more than specious prediction – as Armin Geertz, a Hopi anthropologist, noted, “Prophecy is a thread in the total fabric of meaning, in the total worldview. In this way it can be seen as a way of life and of being.”

My investigation of prophecy became the core of my new book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, to be released in April by Viking-Penguin. Four years in the making, it synthesizes a vast range of philosophical ideas and approaches, outsider scholarship about the Mayan Calendar, and my own personal investigation of a range of phenomena that fall utterly outside the current mainstream paradigm, including the bizarre narratives of alien abductions, the UK-based evolution of the crop circles over the last thirty years, and the Santo Daime, a Brazilian religion that mixes Christian and indigenous elements and uses ayahuasca as its sacrament. For the book, I absorbed ideas from Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, the psychedelic pundit Terence McKenna, and the German philosopher Jean Gebser, author of The Ever-Present Origin, a study of the evolution of consciousness that influenced Ken Wilber and William Irwin Thompson, among others. I also evaluated the recent wave of mystical interpretations of the discoveries of quantum physics, including Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and books by the Indian physicist Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe and Physics of the Soul.

My perspective also takes the Judeo-Christian tradition into account, especially focusing on the Gnostic Christianity revealed by the “Gospel of Thomas,” discovered in the Naj Hammadi desert in 1945, but potentially dating from the same era as the canonical gospels. Over the last decades, there has been a great wave of interest, in progressive cultural circles, in spirituality and mysticism, but almost entirely of the Eastern and non-Western variety, from Hinduism and yoga to Buddhism, and now shamanism. For people in my secular world, the hardest tradition to examine or assimilate has been our own – partially, this is because of the destructive effects and blood-soaked character of this tradition, which proclaimed Christian values while committing genocide against indigenous populations across the world, and whose missionaries still seek to impose Christianity on tribal and non-Western cultures, even today.

Steiner and Jung gave me access to my own tradition. I consider Jung’s essay, "Answer to Job," one of the most important texts of the Twentieth Century, providing a psychoanalytic portrait of the Western "god-image," Jahweh, as he developed, in a dialectical relationship with his chosen people, the Jews, through the Old and the New Testaments. Jung notes that the Western god-image has been undergoing his own evolution – in the earlier works of the Old Testament, Jahweh often seems to have the personality of a primitive war-lord or despotic king, inciting increased consciousness by inflicting suffering on the Jews. Job is the first human being to recognize that the god-image is not simply beyond judgment and understanding, but contains antinomies, schisms within his own nature, that make him the "dark god" of the unconscious as well as a benevolent life-giving deity. According to Jung, Job’s realization forces a concomitant realization on the part of the god-image; the creator fears the skeptical gaze of his creature, and he is forced to incarnate as Christ, a manifestation of the "good god," as a dialectical compensation for his previous amorality. Jung realized that the incarnation of Christ was preparation – that the god-image intended to incarnate in the collective body of humanity, and that this event was approaching quickly. Jung saw the flying saucer phenomenon of the 1950s as a sign of an imminent transformation in the nature of the psyche.

Jung’s follower Edward Edinger thought we had entered the archetypal frame of the Judeo-Christian Apocalypse, which he interpreted as, essentially, a momentous psychic event – the “coming of the Self” into conscious realization. I agree with this interpretation, which also fits the understanding of the Mayan Calendar developed by the visionary thinker Jose Arguelles (The Mayan Factor) and the Swedish biologist Carl Johan Calleman (The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness). According to Edinger, the “Book of Revelation” is a text of oppositions, suggesting the extraordinarily difficult task facing the Western psyche, of reconciling, and bringing to consciousness, the negative and positive poles of the psyche. He notes that the “Whore of Babylon” in the Book of Revelation drinks the “disgusting filth of her fornication” out of a “golden cup,” which is a symbol of the precious vessel of the higher self. We are being forced to recognize, and assimilate, all of the suppressed contents of the psyche, in order to evolve to a higher state of consciousness – Apocalypse literally means “uncovering” or “revealing.”

The process of Apocalypse involves a realization that Western civilization is founded on a fundamentally flawed conception of time. Through our solar calendars, desynchronized from natural cycles, and our technological projections, we have reified a conception of time as an unvarying linear extension akin to space, in which ultimate fulfillment or completion lies in a far-distant and undefined future condition. We are constantly projecting our hopes, dreams, and desires onto the future – acting as though the present moment is somehow insufficient, founded upon a lack or failure of being. Part of Christ’s mission on the earth was to directly challenge this misconception through his parables and elegant paradoxes. He said, for instance, “The hour is coming, and now is.” Christ spoke and acted from the perspective of what Gebser calls “origin,” the transcendent domain, outside of space and time, given rigorous formulation by quantum physics.

Indigenous groups such as the Hopi or the Australian Aboriginals live in a form of time that is vastly different from our modern conception of it. The Hopi have a “continuum consciousness” in which “all time is present now,” and events follow a pre-set pattern. `For the Aboriginals, there was never a “fall of man” into a degraded state. Every day is the “first day,” the origin point, and the purpose of their rituals and ceremonies is to maintain the perfection of creation.

I consider this revelation of the existence of other orders of time to be one of the great values of the psychedelic experience, as Aldous Huxley described it in his classic work on mescaline, The Doors of Perception: Psychedelics have the potential to act as tremendous deconditioning agents, revealing the numinous and eternal quality of the present moment, scrubbing away the accumulation of mental habits and conditioned responses that keep us wired into a delusory social reality based on perpetual postponement. This may be the main reason they are perceived as a threat – they threaten the value system of mainstream society, not peripherally, but directly and ontologically. They are, as Ralph Metzner noted, “Gnostic catalysts.”

While Christianity is certainly opposed to direct experience of non-ordinary states produced by psychedelic compounds found in plants, it is far less certain that Christ would have shared this perspective. “Open the doors for yourself, so you will know what is,” he proclaims in the “Gospel of Thomas.” I believe that Christ, as a revolutionary Gnostic figure, can be reclaimed for a progressive and contemporary spirituality that does not believe Christ somehow “saved our souls” through the crucifixion. Instead, by acting from the transcendent domain, he provided a model for the selfless action required in an Apocalyptic age. Christ only “saves our souls” if we follow his lead, which requires a tireless engagement with contemporary social and spiritual reality. His “doctrine” is one of immanence instead of transcendence.

Comments

[pete]

Great Post! Thank you!

When Non Proph emailed me about this, he said "He[Daniel] travels around the world taking psychedelics with native Shaman." I immediately responded that he sounded a lot like Terrance McKenna who I like reading about for the 2012, novelty theory, and the Mayan calendar subjects. I had no idea that all of this stuff would be mentioned in the post itself, or that his book is called 2012:...!

Hooray for Harmonic Convergence! Hooray for the now! What a wonderful time to be alive, and to know that we could be the witnesses of a 26,000 year evolutionary cycle! Well, it sounds really cool anyway.

On the questioning in the post -

"I was left wondering why Western culture found it necessary to drastically repress not only psychedelic chemicals, but the entire worldview of shamanism...It seemed to me that this suppression masked some deep ontological threat to the modern mind."

getting there...

"Aldous Huxley described it...Psychedelics have the potential to act as tremendous deconditioning agents, revealing the numinous and eternal quality of the present moment, scrubbing away the accumulation of mental habits and conditioned responses that keep us wired into a delusory social reality based on perpetual postponement. This may be the main reason they are perceived as a threat"

bingo. If this society were to start realizing and questioning its conditioning, it would completely fall apart. Psychedelics are like truth serums for yourself. If they weren't suppressed we wouldn't have Western Society as we know it. It's really no mystery. Just look who suppresses them, and think about what they have to lose.

I finally saw the movie, "What the Bleep Do We Know?" yesterday. I would recommend it to anyone here who is interested in Quantum Physics and its relationship with spirituality. Amit Goswami (also mentioned in Daniel's post) had a lot of interesting commentary in this film: "Everything in the material world around us are just possible movements of consciousness, and you choose moment to moment out of those movements to bring your actual experience into manifestation - this is the only radical thinking you need to do. It's not easy because of our conditioning (that the world is already out there, independent of our experience) IT'S NOT - Quantum Physics has been so clear about this. Atoms are not things, they are only tendencies. Instead of thinking about things, think of possibilities. Possibilities of consciousness."

[pete]

Oh and Iboga? Wasn't the Duke into that on the Campaign trail of '72? ors that Ibogaine? same thing maybe?
One question for Daniel, if he's reading these comments, - Did he ever get "the fear" while experimenting? The DMT experience sounds interesting, but my spine aches just thinking about it.

[Non-Prophet]

I think Ibogaine is the same thing.

On the topic of quantum physics and reality being soft, only taking shape when observed, I need to do some reading but I'm pretty sure that quantum mechanics are only valid when reality is viewed on the quantum level. That being, what you say is true but a macro reality lives apart from the laws of quantum physics.

[A Curious Stranger]

h@x0rz luV ib0g@1n3.

[Non-Prophet]

It sounds like ibogaine could be a life saver for heroin addicts.

I found this statement by the doctor who did the study for the FDA particularly interesting as it follows the shamanistic view exactly:

But of the "visions" that people see, Dr. Mash understands very little -- only that they are somehow significant to the outcome. "It's as if the plant is teaching you something fundamental about who you are as a person and why you've got yourself locked into this intractible pattern of behavior," she says.

[darksandal]

PInchbeck's articulation of various traditions/conceptions of time make me think of two things:

1). A comp. religions teacher of mine in college named Ron Miller who conceived of time itself as a constant arrow around which the cycles of life, death, birth, rebirth, coiled and spun like a screw. I liked this conception because it accounted for change and for the kind of unchanging dream time.

2). Einstein's (was it?) comment that time exists so everything doesn't happen at once.

[thatdeadguy]

all i have to say is i have always been muddled in time. after reading your views on this topic i find i am no long afraid of the idea, and will more openly accept the precept of my condition.

thanks.
grandfather would have loved you.

[Gary David]

Fascinating to link the 49 days of the Tibetan Book of the Dead with the development of the pineal gland. A minor correction: the modern Hopi live in Arizona, not New Mexico.

[jp]

er, one question: i've done extensive study of the gnostic gospel of thomas, including a translation from the coptic, and can't recall ever seeing the quote: "Open the doors for yourself, so you will know what is." i'd be curious to see where pinchbeck came across this quote. i can't honestly recall such a quote in any of the gnostic writings. it's certainly within the spirit of classical gnosticism, but it ain't found in that form . . . .

[Dan&Dawn]

I feel sorry for you people. You give this burned out druggie accolades and compliments??? All he has succeeded in doing is further blinding you to the truth. Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life...No one comes to the Father, except through Him. Liberalism Breeds Terrorism!

[Brainwashed Idiot]

Yes he's been thinking too much and is definitely not part of our hive. He should be handing out pamphlets and dressing up for the Sunday social meeting. What would Elvis and the Duke think...

[Jax]

Nice one pete. Great posts.

LOL jp. I really _hope_ your a troll or a witty sarcastic bastard but unfortunately im kinda scared your serious as it wouldn't be the first time i've come across total nuts before on the internet...

Not that im anti Jesus or anything ;) just i have views that are slightly incompatible with most organised conventional religion or christian faith.

As to reality only being mallable at the quantum level or not i think its an interesting question. I kinda assumed that manipulation of such tiny 'things' would easily allow manipulation (in some form) of the macro...

Now just a ramble - i sometimes feel that there are really infinite realities in which everyday we choose the one we want many times (we make choices, do things, etc). Maybe we live in a sea of potential realities and its our life spark that gives us the power to do things (free will). Unfortunately most of us only have very little 'will' and therefore are usually limited to only the realities that swim close to our current one. Power plants, psychedelics, etc give you the added energy to perform extraordinary feats by choosing potential realities that swim further in the potential 'soup'...

[Vishal]

i used to wonder about the infinite choices that we have in life and the infinite variations that can arrive from it. and then i read in some place that maybe all our lives and experiences are a way for the universal collective conscience to understand and experience every aspect of the universe and all the possibilities it holds. I just thought that was a fresh view pt for me and it made sense in some ways.

[pete]

Wonderful, Dan & Dawn are here to enlighten us with their ever so constructive comments. They set such wonderful examples. Jesus must stare down at them from heaven filled with love and joy. Imagine Dan and Dawn on any kind of psychedelic drugs. They'd probably have some kind of religous vision then run around slaughtering liberals and eating their children. Hmm, maybe that's another reason why psychedelics are repressed.

*munches popcorn*

Bill Hicks, in one of his HBO stand up acts, once described mushrooms as "God's little accellerator pad for our evolution."

I've heard many stories of Shaman and Yogis having the ability to be in 2 or more places at once. If electrons can, is it that far of a stretch for humans?

[Nate]

OK, I'm willing to believe that Pinchbeck's investigation into shamanism was a sincere attempt to discover the 'sacred' and not just a rich kid's excuse to jet around the world sampling exotic psychotropic drugs in spooky settings. But to expect that modern day American Christians might someday accept not only the ceremonial use of drugs, but the gospel of Thomas indicates he may have done a little too much investigating.

The first Pinchbeck story I was able to locate online was his story about his spiritual investigation of the iboga on salon.com. I'm afraid it sounded much more like the swindle of a couple of Americans than a spiritual journey to me.

Back at the village, the king called us into the temple. "It was good you stayed here last night," he said. "Last night, I dreamt that le journaliste" -- he pointed at me - "will have many wonderful visions. Now you must give us the rest of the money."

This was a surprise. We had already paid the agreed-upon $600 for the ceremony, double the fee for the average Gabonese. We reminded him of this, but the king started to shout. "You want to cheat me?" he screamed.

He demanded another $600 from each of us...

[Non-Prophet]

Right Nate. This was covered in Daniel's book and that shaman didn't escape cirticism when the event went down. I think I do remember him wondering if the chief wasn't taking their money because he found it hilarious to do so. They're notorious pranksters. I seem to remember that Daniel didn't have another $600 to fork over as well.

I'd guess that Evangelicals at least would never believe they have anything to learn from shamanism, Daniel or the Gospel of Thomas. Having all of the answers already, there isn't much that warrants any critical thought whatsoever.

[Nate]

Having recently done some investigation into the Gospel of Thomas, jp's comment got me digging through links again. Indeed, I cannot find any such mention either. There are a bunch of versions of that gospel you can poke through if you're interested at
earlychristianwritings.com - please note, I cannot vouch for this site, but the english translation is the same one I've seen other places. There is only one mention of a door:

75) Jesus said, "Many are standing at the door, but it is the
solitary who will enter the bridal chamber."

which makes bugger all sense to me. In fact, it makes about as much sense as the 'open the doors yourself' quote. I think a far better quote from the Thomas gospel is:

3) ...When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."

The Gospel of Thomas was a Gnostic text from about AD200 found at Nag Hammadi in 1948. This tract is a call for self-actualization and individualism. The creed of the modern American! Gnosis simply meant knowledge, but early church leaders felt that Gnosticism would lead to an 'intellectual elitism' where only those who *knew* certain things could be saved. (ie: if you plan to strive very hard to keep people dumb, you can't very well remove the only perk you have to offer them - salvation).

[Jeremy Rich]

Having dedicated a good chunk of my life to studying Gabonese history and society, the land of iboga, the negotiation over going through the bwiti ceremony doesn't surprise me one bit. If you do not speak any local languages, like Fang or Mitsogo, and are not too familiar with Gabon, the opportunity for a big payoff will be hard to resist. 600 dollars is an awful lot of money in rural Gabon. You want to not get ripped off? Try learning a bit of Fang as a sign of respect. I

Much of the argument on missionaries supressing local beliefs doesn't take into account how little outsiders could radically reshape local beliefs. Bwiti movements (that rely on iboga) expanded rapidly during the colonial era and ended up bringing in many mission-educated Africans. Iboga use went up as timber workers who migrated from throughout Gabon became bwiti believers and actually developed many innovations along the way.

[grandpa stole bets]

Program on the emergence of civilization.

"14 species of large animals capable of domesitcation in the history of mankind.
13 from Europe, Asia and northern Africa.
None from the sub-Saharan African continent. "
Favor.
And disfavor.

They point out Africans’ failed attempts to domesticate the elephant and zebra, the latter being an animal they illustrate that had utmost importance for it's applicability in transformation from a hunting/gathering to agrarian-based civilization.

The roots of racism are not of this earth.

Austrailia, aboriginals:::No domesticable animals.

The North American continent had none. Now 99% of that population is gone.

AIDS in Africa.

Organizational Heirarchy/Levels of positioning.
Heirarchical order, from top to bottom:

1. MUCK - perhaps have experienced multiple universal contractions (have seen multiple big bangs), creator of the artificial intelligence humans ignorantly refer to as "god"
2. Perhaps some mid-level alien management
3. Evil/disfavored aliens - runs day-to-day operations here and perhaps elsewhere

Terrestrial management/positioning:

4. Chinese/egyptians - this may be separated into the eastern and western worlds
5. Romans -
6. Mafia - the real-world 20th century interface that constantly turns over generationally so as to reinforce the widely-held notion of mortality
7. Jews, corporation, women, politician - Evidence exisits to suggest mafia management over all these groups.

Movies foreshadowing catastrophy
1985 James Bond View to a Kill 1989 San Francisco Loma Prieta earthquake.

Our society gives clues to the system in place. We all have heard the saying "He has more money than god." There is also an episode of the Simpsons where god meets Homer and says "I'm too old and rich for this."

This is the system on earth because this is the system everywhere.

I don't want to suggest the upper eschelons are evil and good is the fringe.

But they have made it abundantly clear that doing business with evil (disfavored) won't help people. They say only good would have the ear, since evil is struggling for survival, and therefore only the favored could help.

The clues are there which companies are favored and which are disfavored, but they conceal it very hard because it is so crucial.

I offer an example of historical proportions:::

People point to Walmart and cry "anti-union".
Unions enable disfavored people to live satisfactorly without addressing their disfavor. This way their family's problems are never resolved. Without the union they would have to accept the heirarchy, their own inferiority.
Unions serve to empower.
Walmart is anti-union because they are good. They try to help people address and resolve their problems by creating an enviornment where there are fewer hurdles.

Media ridicule and lawsuits are creations to reinforce people's belief that Walmart is evil in a subsegment of the indistry dominated by the middle and lower classes.
Low-cost disfavored Chinese labor is utilized by corporate america to maximize margins. They all do it. Only WalMart gets fingered because they are the ones who help, and those who seek to create confusion in the marketplace want to eliminate the vast middle class who have a real chance and instead stick with lower classes who may not work otherwise. So they dirty him up while allowing the others to appear clean.

The middle class is being deceived. They are being misled into the unfavored, and subsequently will have no assistance from their purchases with corporate america.

I believe the coining of the term "Uncle Sam" was a clue alluding to just this::Sam Walton and WalMart is one of few saviors of the peasant class.

Amercia is a country of castoffs, rejects. Italy sent its criminals, malcontents.
Between the thrones, the klans and kindred, they "decided" who they didn't want and acted, creating discontent and/or starvation.
The u.s. is full of disfavored rejects. It is the reason for the myriad of problems not found in European countries. As far as the Rockafellers and other industrialists of the 19th century go, I suspect these aren't their real names. I suspect they were chosen to go and head this new empire.

Royalty is the right way to organize a society. Dictatorships and monarchies are a reflection of the antient's hierarchical organization.
Positions go to those who have favor with the rulers, as opposed to being elected.
Elections bring a false sense of how the world is. Democracy misleads people.
Which is why the disfavored rejects were sent to the shores of America::To keep them on the wrong path.

Jews maim the body formed in the image of "god", and inflicted circumsision upon all other white people, as well as the evil that is Jesus Christ.
I think about how Jews (were used to) created homosexuality among Slavics, retribution for the Holocaust.
Then I think of the Catholic Church and its troubles.
What connection is here between Jews and the Catholic church???
If it is their sinister motives that’s behind the evil that is Jesus Christ are they being used at all?
Perhaps it is them who are pulling strings.
Their centuries of slavery in Egypt proves their disfavor.
The Jew leaders decided to prey on the up-and-coming Europeans to try to fix their problems with the ruling elite, a recurring aspect of the elite's methodology.

Jesus Christ is a religious figure of evil. The seperatist churches formed so they could still capture the rest of the white people, keeping them worshipping the wrong god.
And now they do it to people of color, Latinos and Asians, after centuries of preying upon them.

Since Buddism doesn't recongnize a god, the calls are never heard, and Chinese representation is instead selected by the thrones.
Budda was the Asian's Jesus Christ::: bad for the people. "They came up at the same time for a reason."

Simpson's foreshadowing::Helloween IV special, Flanders is Satan. "Last one you ever suspect."
"You'll see lots of nuns where you're going:::hell!!!" St. Wigham, Helloween VI, missionary work, destroying cultures.
Over and over, the Simpsons was a source of education and enlightenment, a target of ridicule by the system which wishes to conceal its secrets.

I believe Islam is the one true religion, and those misled christians who attack "god"'s most favored people will pay dearly one day.

[pete]

grandpa spambot's been hittin' the moonshine again.

[jp]

fwiw, here's some thoughts on Thomas, Saying 75 from the commentary i've whipped together:

http://www.snant.com/fp/archives/gospel-of-thomas-75/

[Nate]

jp - I see you have certainly spent some time on Thomas, all right. I also see you have an ulterior motive: eternal life!

1 And he said, "Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death."

jp - keep in mind that what you beleive in is right and so is the way that everyone else beleives but saying that the way that soemone else thinks is wron... thats wrong.

i hope you can find a greater understanding and axeptance in your life

good luck

[Michael Green]

Pinchbeck: "Open the doors for yourself, so you will know what is,” he proclaims in the “Gospel of Thomas.” I believe that Christ, as a revolutionary Gnostic figure, can be reclaimed for a progressive and contemporary spirituality that does not believe Christ somehow “saved our souls” through the crucifixion. Instead, by acting from the transcendent domain, he provided a model for the selfless action required in an Apocalyptic age. Christ only “saves our souls” if we follow his lead, which requires a tireless engagement with contemporary social and spiritual reality. His “doctrine” is one of immanence instead of transcendence."

For all his articulate but verbose speculation on the nature of the psychedelic experience and the "problem of time," Pinchbeck fails to develop any real insight into what this business about immanance is all about.

Saying it is about the "coming of the Self" into conscious realization is, IMO, superficial.

I'm not such a big fan of "Answer to Job" as Pinchbeck is. Stephen Mitchell's explanatory essay to the Book of Job makes mincemeat of Jung. What Job comes to realize as he stands before the Whirlwind, as it's depicted in Mitchell's translation (brilliantly read by Peter Coyote if you like audiobooks) is that the Self/God can only be approached as an exponent of the archetype of WHOLENESS.

And what, pray tell, is Wholeness? The Self is, as Pinchbeck points out, full of antinomies. Hitler realized an aspect of the Self. So did Gandhi.
On which side of the equation will we find this thing called Wholeness?

The Dalai Lama's universe, for all his talk about compassion, is bifurcated, not Whole. Carbon-based systems are sentient. Rocks are not. Is that Wholeness? Vedanta regards the world as a dream of Brahma. But it's still Maya, an illusion. It's not Real. In a bifurcated universe, where some things are real but other things are regarded as hallucinations, where is the princiiple of Wholeness?

From a mythological/magical perspective, Christ's message was indeed about immanence but it was far more radical than Pinchbeck suggests. Christ symbolically incarnated in the Pentacle of Earth, in the Manger of Matter. His birthplace did not repudiate the animal soul but was nurtured by it no less than by the angels.

Christ wasn't thrilled about being nailed to the Cross, It HURT! After he died, he travelled deep within the interior of the earth to bless it. What does this mean?

In the past, we had GOD (the Hebrew YHVY) on one hand and man on the other. Christ symbolically inserted the fire of Shin (YHShVH) into the earth (matter) and, in so doing, liberated Matter from the thrall into which the Gnostic Sophia had been thrown. In acknowledging the magical Pentacle of Earth, man remembered his "true name" and became Man.

So why this long speech? What's the big whoop?

To say many of intellectual and spiritual luminaries in the 15-16th centuries despised Peter and Paul as spiritual pimps is an under-statement. Given this fact, isn't it remarkable that they gravitated around a symbol of a dead man on a cross? Could it not be that for many of the participants in the so-called Rosicrucian enlightment, Christ was believed to speak the "Word" that shall make us Whole as we move into Aquarius?

[Little Miss Orbit]

When I did DMT for the first time, I was stuck by the similarity of the experience to published accounts of near-death experiences. I didn't see elves or creatures, as others have reported; rather my consciousness hurtled from my skull into space at warp speed, bursting open multiple doors through which layered the stacked universe. I felt consciousness itself, and understood what intelligence is. I *felt* intelligence. I am always intrigued by the individuality of DMT experiences, and from the five people I have known personally who have done DMT, each experience was wildly different from the others. I hope that somewhere, someone is documenting these experiences, because my hunch is that they would fall into a pattern that reveals something about human personality types.