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Looks like this place has kind of gone to sleep.
Since it is Friday happy hour soon, maybe some of the old timers will be around.
Exactly! God love us no matter what. We have the power to decide how things go down, to make our own reality and let that light within us shine for each other.
Easy to see the disconnect from each other. Sad that so many have succumbed to an altered reality when the honest truths of our existence is what we should be exploring and dealing with.
I'm at work now but will look at this later. Thanks!
Yes, VR will strip away what little is left of what it means to be human. Memories will be all we have left of what used to be.
Wait 'til VR comes of age. Have you read the Foundation Trilogy yet?.....prolly no, lol.
Take a look at this....brilliant!
LOL! But we were controlling our own illusions;) Nintendo has these people living whatever reality they want to make for them and they will blindly follow it wherever it leads. Great for massing people where you want them.
I'm taking advantage of our temp benes;)
People just don't like to think about anything anymore. We are living in a total reactionary world now without substance. There is a park near where I live and I walk my dog there everyday. Recently, it's been full of people wandering around mindlessly playing Pokemon Go app. I swear it's like being in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.
On assignment for a local newspaper. This was the 1st post here in almost 4 yrs, lol. It was one of my favorites.....too heady I guess.
No, never saw it until now. Two Eagles, good stuff;)
Where the hell did you run into a scribe anyway? LOL;)
God doesn't care if you show your ignorance either, in fact I believe he prefers it. Something to do with honesty I believe. We are the ones preoccupied with reputation and controlling our appearance. imho
How to Think
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_to_think_20120709/
Posted on Jul 9, 2012
By Chris Hedges
Cultures that endure carve out a protected space for those who question and challenge national myths. Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster. Members of this intellectual and artistic class, who are usually not welcome in the stultifying halls of academia where mediocrity is triumphant, serve as prophets. They are dismissed, or labeled by the power elites as subversive, because they do not embrace collective self-worship. They force us to confront unexamined assumptions, ones that, if not challenged, lead to destruction. They expose the ruling elites as hollow and corrupt. They articulate the senselessness of a system built on the ideology of endless growth, ceaseless exploitation and constant expansion. They warn us about the poison of careerism and the futility of the search for happiness in the accumulation of wealth. They make us face ourselves, from the bitter reality of slavery and Jim Crow to the genocidal slaughter of Native Americans to the repression of working-class movements to the atrocities carried out in imperial wars to the assault on the ecosystem. They make us unsure of our virtue. They challenge the easy clichés we use to describe the nation—the land of the free, the greatest country on earth, the beacon of liberty—to expose our darkness, crimes and ignorance. They offer the possibility of a life of meaning and the capacity for transformation.
Human societies see what they want to see. They create national myths of identity out of a composite of historical events and fantasy. They ignore unpleasant facts that intrude on self-glorification. They trust naively in the notion of linear progress and in assured national dominance. This is what nationalism is about—lies. And if a culture loses its ability for thought and expression, if it effectively silences dissident voices, if it retreats into what Sigmund Freud called “screen memories,” those reassuring mixtures of fact and fiction, it dies. It surrenders its internal mechanism for puncturing self-delusion. It makes war on beauty and truth. It abolishes the sacred. It turns education into vocational training. It leaves us blind. And this is what has occurred. We are lost at sea in a great tempest. We do not know where we are. We do not know where we are going. And we do not know what is about to happen to us.
The psychoanalyst John Steiner calls this phenomenon “turning a blind eye.” He notes that often we have access to adequate knowledge but because it is unpleasant and disconcerting we choose unconsciously, and sometimes consciously, to ignore it. He uses the Oedipus story to make his point. He argued that Oedipus, Jocasta, Creon and the “blind” Tiresias grasped the truth, that Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother as prophesized, but they colluded to ignore it. We too, Steiner wrote, turn a blind eye to the dangers that confront us, despite the plethora of evidence that if we do not radically reconfigure our relationships to each other and the natural world, catastrophe is assured. Steiner describes a psychological truth that is deeply frightening.
I saw this collective capacity for self-delusion among the urban elites in Sarajevo and later Pristina during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. These educated elites steadfastly refused to believe that war was possible although acts of violence by competing armed bands had already begun to tear at the social fabric. At night you could hear gunfire. But they were the last to “know.” And we are equally self-deluded. The physical evidence of national decay—the crumbling infrastructures, the abandoned factories and other workplaces, the rows of gutted warehouses, the closure of libraries, schools, fire stations and post offices—that we physically see, is, in fact, unseen. The rapid and terrifying deterioration of the ecosystem, evidenced in soaring temperatures, droughts, floods, crop destruction, freak storms, melting ice caps and rising sea levels, are met blankly with Steiner’s “blind eye.”
Oedipus, at the end of Sophocles’ play, cuts out his eyes and with his daughter Antigone as a guide wanders the countryside. Once king, he becomes a stranger in a strange country. He dies, in Antigone’s words, “in a foreign land, but one he yearned for.”
William Shakespeare in “King Lear” plays on the same theme of sight and sightlessness. Those with eyes in “King Lear” are unable to see. Gloucester, whose eyes are gouged out, finds in his blindness a revealed truth. “I have no way, and therefore want no eyes,” Gloucester says after he is blinded. “I stumbled when I saw.” When Lear banishes his only loyal daughter, Cordelia, whom he accuses of not loving him enough, he shouts: “Out of my sight!” To which Kent replies:
See better, Lear, and let me still remain
The true blank of thine eye.
The story of Lear, like the story of Oedipus, is about the attainment of this inner vision. It is about morality and intellect that are blinded by empiricism and sight. It is about understanding that the human imagination is, as William Blake saw, our manifestation of Eternity. “Love without imagination is eternal death.”
The Shakespearean scholar Harold Goddard wrote: “The imagination is not a faculty for the creation of illusion; it is the faculty by which alone man apprehends reality. The ‘illusion’ turns out to be truth.” “Let faith oust fact,” Starbuck says in “Moby-Dick.”
“It is only our absurd ‘scientific’ prejudice that reality must be physical and rational that blinds us to the truth,” Goddard warned. There are, as Shakespeare wrote, “things invisible to mortal sight.” But these things are not vocational or factual or empirical. They are not found in national myths of glory and power. They are not attained by force. They do not come through cognition or logical reasoning. They are intangible. They are the realities of beauty, grief, love, the search for meaning, the struggle to face our own mortality and the ability to face truth. And cultures that disregard these forces of imagination commit suicide. They cannot see.
“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,” Shakespeare wrote, “Whose action is no stronger than a flower?” Human imagination, the capacity to have vision, to build a life of meaning rather than utilitarianism, is as delicate as a flower. And if it is crushed, if a Shakespeare or a Sophocles is no longer deemed useful in the empirical world of business, careerism and corporate power, if universities think a Milton Friedman or a Friedrich Hayek is more important to their students than a Virginia Woolf or an Anton Chekhov, then we become barbarians. We assure our own extinction. Students who are denied the wisdom of the great oracles of human civilization—visionaries who urge us not to worship ourselves, not to kneel before the base human emotion of greed—cannot be educated. They cannot think.
To think, we must, as Epicurus understood, “live in hiding.” We must build walls to keep out the cant and noise of the crowd. We must retreat into a print-based culture where ideas are not deformed into sound bites and thought-terminating clichés. Thinking is, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “a soundless dialogue between me and myself.” But thinking, she wrote, always presupposes the human condition of plurality. It has no utilitarian function. It is not an end or an aim outside of itself. It is different from logical reasoning, which is focused on a finite and identifiable goal. Logical reason, acts of cognition, serve the efficiency of a system, including corporate power, which is usually morally neutral at best, and often evil. The inability to think, Arendt wrote, “is not a failing of the many who lack brain power but an ever-present possibility for everybody—scientists, scholars, and other specialists in mental enterprises not excluded.”
Our corporate culture has effectively severed us from human imagination. Our electronic devices intrude deeper and deeper into spaces that were once reserved for solitude, reflection and privacy. Our airwaves are filled with the tawdry and the absurd. Our systems of education and communication scorn the disciplines that allow us to see. We celebrate prosaic vocational skills and the ridiculous requirements of standardized tests. We have tossed those who think, including many teachers of the humanities, into a wilderness where they cannot find employment, remuneration or a voice. We follow the blind over the cliff. We make war on ourselves.
The vital importance of thought, Arendt wrote, is apparent only “in times of transition when men no longer rely on the stability of the world and their role in it, and when the question concerning the general conditions of human life, which as such are properly coeval with the appearance of man on earth, gain an uncommon poignancy.” We never need our thinkers and artists more than in times of crisis, as Arendt reminds us, for they provide the subversive narratives that allow us to chart a new course, one that can assure our survival.
“What must I do to win salvation?” Dimitri asks Starov in “The Brothers Karamazov,” to which Starov answers: “Above all else, never lie to yourself.”
And here is the dilemma we face as a civilization. We march collectively toward self-annihilation. Corporate capitalism, if left unchecked, will kill us. Yet we refuse, because we cannot think and no longer listen to those who do think, to see what is about to happen to us. We have created entertaining mechanisms to obscure and silence the harsh truths, from climate change to the collapse of globalization to our enslavement to corporate power, that will mean our self-destruction. If we can do nothing else we must, even as individuals, nurture the private dialogue and the solitude that make thought possible. It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.
What is religion?
What is religion? It is the investigation, with all one's attention, with the summation of all one's energy, to find that which is sacred, to come upon that which is holy. That can only take place when there is freedom from the noise of thought, the ending of thought and time, psychologically, inwardly, but not the ending of knowledge in the world where you have to function with knowledge. That which is holy, that which is sacred, which is truth, can only be when there is complete silence, when the brain itself has put thought in its right place. Out of that immense silence there is that which is sacred.
The Wholeness of Life,145
How can a mind which is everlastingly chattering perceive anything?
Meditation implies a quality of mind that can completely attend, therefore, a mind that can be completely still. The mind is always chattering, always talking, either to itself, within itself or to somebody, always in movement. How can a mind which is everlastingly chattering perceive anything? Only a mind that is completely attentive has the total energy to observe, because you need tremendous energy to observe. The religious monks and others say that you cannot waste energy; therefore no sex, if you want to be a saint. And when you become a celibate and have taken vows of celibacy, there is havoc in you, because you are denying the whole biological system and there is a wastage of energy. You are battling, battling, battling. Or you go to the other extreme, indulge, which is another form of wasting energy. Whereas, if you are attentive, it is the greatest form of all summation of energy. It means intensity, passion, and you cannot be passionate if you are wasting. Without any effort the mind can become completely quiet and therefore full of energy without any distortion.
Krishnamurti_ Talks and Dialogues in Sydney 1970
The Truth About the Dark Ages
http://www.hermes-press.com/DAtruth.htm
We gain tremendous power by understanding the truth about the past and the present. The truth does set us free from ignorance and suicidal acquiescence to present policies which are destroying the very fabric of our culture.
We'll examine what actually happened in the time called "the Dark Ages" -- nullifying the false histories of Christian apologists who would have us believe that this era of retrogression was caused solely by the "heathen barbaric hordes." As more honest historians such as Gibbons have discovered, the Dark Ages was largely brought on by the corruption of a counterfeit Christianity.
As is made clear in my recently published book The Perennial Tradition, only a few persons associated with Jesus of Nazareth truly understood his message. Paul had experienced Jesus in a mystical encounter. Peter and other of the disciples completely misunderstood Jesus' intentions, turning their brand of Christianity into a neo-Judaism, requiring converts to undergo circumcision and follow the Jewish law.
The true dissemination of Jesus' teaching proceeded with Paul, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Marcion, Valentinus, and others, while the so-called apostles began to turn Christianity into a sacerdotal religion of dogma and ritual.
Within a few years, the leaders of what was called the Christian church were nothing more than bosses of vicious gangs who murdered their rivals for power and position. We can trace the rapid degeneration of these so-called Christians, as they helped to destroy the Roman Empire and plunge the Western world into the Dark Ages.
In 198 CE a cleric named Zephyrinus became Bishop of one of the Christian factions in Rome. During Zephyrinus's long tenure as Bishop from 198 - 217 CE, factional rivalry in the city became endemic. A group of soothsayers led by Montanus built a strong following, even among the bishop's own followers, and a third group, led by Sabellius, rejected ridiculous dogmas that were being put forward.
Zephyrinus was succeeded as "Christian" Bishop by a young man named Callistus. As a youth, Callistus had been the slave of a Christian master named Carpophorus, a freedman in the imperial household. Callistus had stolen funds collected by fellow-Christians for the care of widows and orphans. When Callistus tried to make a run for it, he was apprehended aboard a ship in the port of Portus. He was imprisoned and forced to work on a hand-mill. After being released, Callistus was arrested again, this time because of a brawl in a synagogue where he had tried to extract money from a group of Roman Jews.
Dragged before city prefect Fuscianus, Callistus was denounced by Carpophorus and sentenced to a penal colony, the silver mines of Sardinia. But during his checkered career, Callistus had somehow gained friends in high places. He had been a "counselor" to Bishop Victor and also a friend of a certain Marcia, a concubine of Emperor Commodus, the dissolute son of Marcus Aurelius. Marcia had been "brought up" by the presbyter Hyacinthus before being passed on to Commodus. This young "Christian" woman named Marcia was party to the conspiracy that ultimately strangled Commodus.
During his reign as Roman Emperor, Diocletian had divided the empire into the eastern and western provinces. In 306 CE, on the death of the western Augustus (province ruler), Constantius I, his son Constantine quickly claimed his father's throne. Constantine wanted to seize power in the east as well as the west, and he saw the Christian cult as the means to his goal.
The Christians constituted only about five per cent of the total population of the Roman Empire, but they were concentrated in enclaves in the key cities of the east. The eastern Christians were an organized cult of fanatics, in many cities holding important positions in state administration. Some held posts even within the imperial entourage. The main body of the church confronted the Roman State as a "Republic within the Republic," with its own treasury, laws, magistrates and command structure.
The ambitious thug-ruler of the west, Constantine, realized that he could use the "Christian" fanatics and their hierarchical structure, as part of his plan to become Emperor of a united Rome. He declared Christianity as the official religion of his regime. By championing the cause of the Christians, Constantine put himself at the head of a "fifth column" in the eastern province, through which he was able to seize power.
By 330 CE Constantine had taken control of both the western and eastern provinces and declared himself supreme Caesar over all of the Roman Empire. He appointed one of the rival "Christian" chieftains Lucius Lactantius as his official Latin theologian, propagandist, and tutor to his son Crispus. Lactantius soon lost the job of tutor when Constantine had his son murdered for adultery with his stepmother. Lactantius praised Constantine as "a model of Christian virtue and holiness" (De Mortibus Persecutorum).
Among many other insane policies that Constantine enacted--leading to the fall of the Roman Empire--was that of disbanding the praetorian guard and replacing them with a special imperial guard, an elite cavalry regiment of 500 soldiers, mainly Germans. This left Rome essentially defenseless, and within a century the Visigoths were sacking Rome and other imperial cities.
"Constantine abolished security by removing the greater part of the soldiery from the frontiers to the cities that needed no auxiliary forces. He thus deprived of help the people who were harassed by the barbarians and burdened tranquil cities with the pest of the military, so that several straightway were deserted. Moreover he softened the soldiers, who treated themselves to shows and luxuries. Indeed (to speak plainly) he personally planted the first seeds of our present devastated state of affairs." Zosimus, sixth century CE Greek historian, Historia Nova
Succeeding "Christian" leaders influenced the Caesars of the Roman state, assuring a position of power for themselves in this deteriorating empire. In 370 CE, the Emperor Valens ordered a total persecution of non-Christian peoples throughout the Eastern Empire. The philosopher Simonides was burned alive and the philosopher Maximus was decapitated. The twilight of civilization was fast approaching.
In 380 CE, Christianity became the exclusive religion of the Roman Empire by an edict of the Emperor Flavius Theodosius. The Roman Empire was now a "Christian" theocracy. The corrupt "Christian" leaders were ecstatic at the prospect of being able to loot all the "pagan" temples and monuments. Ambrosius, bishop of Milan, began the destruction of pagan temples throughout his area. "Christian" priests led a vicious mob against the temple of the goddess Demeter in Eleusis and attempted to lynch the hierophants Nestorius and Priskus. The ninety-five year old hierophant Nestorius terminated the Eleusinian Mysteries and announced "the predominance of mental darkness over the human race."
From that time on, pagan temples throughout the Roman empire were torn down or refurbished as "Christian" churches. The fourth Church Council of Carthage in 398 CE prohibited everybody, including "Christian" bishops, from studying pagan (non-Christian) books--on penalty of death. Illiteracy became official Christian policy. Roman society by the fifth century was becoming ever more rigid and hierarchical, with eroding social and geographic mobility and an immense and widening gulf between rich and poor. Rome's urban middle class was being taxed out of existence, freedmen were being confined in indentured labor and slavery and the soldiery was being reduced to a peasant-farmer militia.
In Alexandria in 415 CE, a "Christian" mob, incited by the bishop Cyril, attacked a few days before the Judeo-Christian Pascha (Easter) and cut to pieces the famous and beautiful female philosopher Hypatia. 1 The "Christian" mob carried pieces of her body through the streets of Alexandria, finally burning her remains together with her books in a place called Cynaron.
In 429 CE depraved "Christian" mobs sacked the world-famous Parthenon, the temple of the goddess Athena on the Acropolis of Athens. From 440 to 450 CE, the "Christians" demolished all the monuments, altars and temples of Athens, Olympia, and other Greek cities.
Roman emperor Theodosius II in 448 CE ordered all non-Christian books to be burned. In 529 CE emperor Justinian ordered the Platonic Academy in Athens closed and its property confiscated. The bonfires set by Christian zealots reduced the science of a millennium to ash. In the new Christian tyranny all scientific thought which contradicted the Bible was suppressed. If rationality and observation contradicted the "revealed Word of God" then it was rationality and the observer who were in error.
"For the Christian, it is enough to believe that the cause of all things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator."
Augustine, Enchiridion, 3.9
Ammianus Marcellinus, Rome's last great historian (died in 395 CE) lamented that
"Those few buildings which were once celebrated for the serious cultivation of liberal studies, now are filled with ridiculous amusements of torpid indolence. . . The libraries, like tombs, are closed forever."
The "Christian" church had no interest in preserving the Roman Empire; it now had its own empire to build. As the Roman Empire crumbled, career opportunities now lay exclusively within the hierarchy of the church and a Christianized state bureaucracy--for those few bright and privileged enough to be able to seek education. With the active cooperation of the imperial court the Church had seized complete control over education and now restricted instruction to potential priests. Initially, rhetoric and grammar remained in the syllabus but knowledge which did not serve the purposes of the Church was suppressed.
Some classic writers such as Homer (in whose work Christians saw allegories), Plato and Aristotle (philosophies which were said to have "anticipated" Christianity), and some poetic and rhetorical works (Juvenal, Ovid and Horace) were seen as useful as teaching aids. But Christian hostility to general learning and practical knowledge was so pervasive that access to scripture itself was forbidden to any lay-person who might happen to be literate.
Preoccupied with ceremonial and propagandistic pageants, within a few generations most priests could not even read the Bible. Ritual had replaced reading, iconography had replaced language. The scientific method--empirical observation and the testing of hypotheses--had no place in an age in which eternal truth was made known to man by the revealed Word of God. In the Christian world-view, "Nature" was now seen as the domain of evil, not a realm worthy of respect and exploration.
As Christianity led humankind into a mindless life of obedience to its dogmas and leaders, the light of human intelligence began to go out. Christendom lost the art of brick and tile making, of bridge building and public sanitation. A despotic theocracy did not want people to think or to examine the world about them.
One of the major parts of pseudo-history created by Christian propagandists, is the myth that Christianity won over the barbaric hordes to Christ. We are given the unbelievable image of the heroic priest, armed only with his Bible and Christian courage, who subdues the savage warriors with homilies from the Good Book.
Barbarian groups became "Christian" whenever their chiefs felt it was to their advantage to take on the nominal title of Christian. Power in a barbarian clan was fragile and leadership changed often and violently. Barbarian tribes raided neighboring territories out of military and economic necessity, By acquiring "prestige goods"--such as slaves, jewelry, gold pieces, fine weapons, Christian titles--the barbarian ruling elite preserved its rule and raised its social status. Success at raiding strengthened the link between a chief and his warriors.
From the third to the fifth centuries, the barbarian tribes migrated constantly; territories were ill-defined, ever-changing, tribal alliances were continuously made and remade, and warriors of the same tribe fought both for and against the Romans.
Contact with leaders of the Roman Empire--both civil and religious--brought prestige to tribal chieftains. They saw the Roman Empire as everything barbarian society was not: stable, universal, and eternal. By emulating Roman characteristics the barbarian aristocracy gained a semblance of "civilization" and power.
"Every Goth wishes to be like a Roman, " said Theodoric, "but only the humblest Roman wants to be like a Goth."
So strong was barbarian desire to establish a "Roman" legitimacy for their new kingdoms that the illiterate Charlemagne, centuries later, styled himself "King of Franks and Lombards and Patrician of the Romans." He was crowned Emperor and Augustus.
Once a warrior king embraced "Christianity"--an adoption of form and formality with basically no regard to content--the warrior aristocracy followed its king. Thus, for example, when Clovis accepted Christ as his new god, he compelled 3,000 of his retainers to follow him into the baptismal font. Among the common tribesmen religious allegiance was not an issue of conscience. This was not an age of individual opinion or preference. When the tribal leadership adopted a new god the tribe followed suit. Not to have done so would have been tantamount to rebellion. When Charlemagne insisted on baptism as the sign of submission, he punished with appalling barbarity any resistance, as when, in cold blood, he beheaded, in a single day, 4,500 Saxons at Verden, in 782 CE.
The barbarian kings sought marriage into the Roman imperial bloodlines. And they wanted Roman patricians in their entourage, men who could advise them in the governance of their newly acquired lands and peoples. Everywhere, the indigenous "Romans" outnumbered their warrior overlords. The outstanding example is the court of Theodoric, Ostrogothic king of Italy. His administration was modeled on that of his imperial predecessors and was staffed by Romans. Among "men of letters" at his court was Aurelius Cassiodorus, senator, statesman, monk and writer. As the local "statesmen," the pseudo-Christian Bishops "spoke" for the native people and served as "administrators" of cities and districts on behalf of the barbarian king. Theodoric's reign can best be judged by his vicious murder of Boethius, with the collaboration of his "Christian" advisers.
Thus arose the Dark Age elite--a fusion of ex-pagan chiefs who were in awe of all things Roman (including its Christianity), and degenerate Roman landowners who survived by foisting Christianity on superstitious tribesmen. The very heart of this veneer of legitimizing romanitas was the pseudo-Christian religion by which the emperors had legitimized and made "divine" their own rule. Hence the rise of the Christian bishops and in particular the Bishop of Rome--the custodian of the corpse of the empire and self-styled bestower of its legacy.
With his book of Christian spells and the inheritance of more than a thousand years of Roman "gravitas" behind him, the patrician-bishop easily swayed the untutored mind of a barbarian king.
As well as "Christ magic" (salvation through mere belief in the "founder" of the Roman church, Christ) the head of the Roman church offered "legitimacy" and the power of the written word as a kingly imprimatur. With his help, an upstart king's authority could now be proclaimed everywhere. With bribes and baubles, he gained access; he took on the role of ambassador and agent; he lent support to one side against another in fratricidal conflict; he advised; he provided "virgin brides" and officiated at royal weddings and ceremonials; he governed the locals on behalf of his barbarian overlord.
Through it all, the wealth and authority of the "Christian" leader grew. And the nonsense he peddled - pseudo-Christianity - became official dogma. Before the closing years of the fifth century the Christian Church showed no interest in converting barbarians. God, it seems, had chosen the Roman Empire to spread his Word. Yet when the fierce tribesmen arrived at the city gates, that event was "God's Judgement" and the Christian bishops were all too ready to abandon the empire and throw in their lot with the invader.
Despite the "3-day wonder" of the sack of Rome in 410 CE by the Visigoths, it was Gaul that was in dire straits in the fifth century, not Italy (which enjoyed a late 'Indian summer' under its Gothic king.) In the late fifth century, Salian Franks under Clovis began three centuries of expansion by absorbing the other Frankish tribes. In 486 CE Clovis defeated the Roman general Syagrius and the last Gallo-Roman region of Gaul--Soissons--was overrun. Subjugation of the Thuringians and Bavarians followed.
The Franks were a heathen German tribe, almost the only one untouched by Arianism (the belief that Jesus was not a God), spreading from the east. While the primitive Franks continued to give homage to their old Germanic gods, other, more Romanized, tribes had adopted Arian Christianity as a "national" religion.
Backward and barbarous they may have been but for the beleaguered Catholic bishops the Franks were the great hope. In the Franks, the papal agents found a fierce but malleable tribe and they spared nothing to bring the Frankish overlords under their sway. The dominion of the Franks in the west ensured the triumph of Roman Catholicism.
The "conversion" of Clovis was a crucial event, comparable to the "conversion" of Constantine--and equally surrounded by the same fanciful mythology. Clovis's conversion, like Constantine's, was no "inward experience of grace" but was a military matter. He was convinced that victory in battle lay in the gift of the god of the Christians. Christ for him was a talismanic war god.
According to the myth, in 496 CE, after a close call against the Alamanni, the day had been "saved" by a prayer either from Clovis himself, or the Catholic Bishop Gregory of Tours (or maybe both). A grateful Clovis took baptism to become the first "Catholic" ruler in the west. Of course, he had been softened up somewhat by marriage in 493 CE to a Catholic princess, the Burgundian Clotilda, put forward as his bride "on account of her beauty and wisdom" (and no doubt her Catholicism). Clovis, like Constantine a century and a half earlier, was also aware of the political advantage of posing as a liberator of "those oppressed by religious heresy."
"It grieves me," he said, "to see that the Arians possess the fairest portion of Gaul. Let us march against them, vanquish the heretics, and share out their fertile lands."
In 507 CE Clovis took Aquitaine from the weak Visigothic king Alaric II, and then subjugated Burgundy. Both areas were forcibly converted to Catholicism--to the delight of the local bishops. At Clovis' death in 511 CE, Clotilda went into a monastery at Tours where she stayed until her death in 545 CE. It can be no surprise that a grateful Roman Catholic Church made her a saint.
The weakened and demoralized Roman troops who remained on the frontiers were re-grouped into small units of 1,000 men (compared to 5,000 of the former legions), with limited cavalry support under the command of a "dux." These small detachments were stationed in hill-top forts, where, essentially they avoided any engagement with an enemy they were not expected to defeat.
Training for these demoralised and irregularly paid troops seriously declined. Expensive body armour was abandoned, and simple leather caps replaced the iron helmet. Under such conditions, traditional Roman infantry tactics, driven by harsh discipline and constant training, simply disappeared. The luckless frontier troops, dependent upon payment in rations and only the occasional cash bonus, degenerated into a peasant militia, spending more time in growing food than on the parade ground.
The Light of Truth
To see to what depths the human mind is currently devolving, we must understand the true history of what has been called the Dark Ages. Only by going behind the falsifications of historians prejudiced by their Christian beliefs is it possible for us to understand how degraded people's minds had become during the fifth through sixteenth centuries in Europe: the earlier Dark Ages.
Europe languished in intellectual and cultural retrogression during the Middle Ages, while the light of wisdom was preserved and advanced by those they labeled "the infidel Saracen." The reintroduction of the Classical (Greek) Tradition and the Perennial Tradition through the confluence of European and Muslim thought, beginning around 1000 CE, revitalized earlier conceptions of knowledge as derived from experience--participation in reality.
As d'Alembert states in his introduction to the French Encyclopedia,
"most of the great minds during those dark ages . . . were preoccupied with a thousand frivolous questions about abstract and metaphysical being instead of thoroughly investigating Nature or studying man."
You have not ended your sorrow, and you want to find enlightenment
You can sit in the right posture with your back straight, breathing correctly, do pranayama and all the rest of it for the next ten thousand years, and you will be nowhere near perceiving what truth is, because you have not understood yourself at all, the way you think, the way you live. You have not ended your sorrow, and you want to find enlightenment. You can do all kinds of twists and turns with your body and this seems to fascinate people, because they feel it is going to give some power, some prestige. Now, all these powers are like candles in the sun; they are like candle light when the brilliant sun is shining.
Krishnamurti in India 1970-71,55
Now, how do we awaken in ourselves an energy that has its own momentum, that is its own cause and effect, an energy that has no resistance and does not deteriorate? How does one come by it? The organized religions have advocated various methods, and by practicing a particular method one is supposed to get this energy. But methods do not give this energy. The practice of a method implies conformity, resistance, denial, acceptance, adjustment, so that whatever energy one has is merely wearing itself out. If you see the truth of this, you will never practice any method. That is one thing. Secondly, if energy has a motive, an end towards which it is going, that energy is self-destructive. And for most of us, energy does have a motive, does it not? We are moved by a desire to achieve, to become this or that, and therefore our energy defeats itself. Thirdly, energy is made feeble, petty, when it is conforming to the past -and this is perhaps our greatest difficulty. The past is not only the many yesterdays but also every minute that is being accumulated, the memory of the thing that was over a second before. This accumulation in the mind is also destructive of energy. So, to awaken this energy, the mind must have no resistance, no motive, no end in view, and it must not be caught in time as yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Then energy is constantly renewing itself and therefore not degenerating. Such a mind is not committed, it is completely free, and it is only such a mind that can find the unnameable, that extraordinary something which is beyond words. The mind must free itself from the known to enter into the unknown.
Krishnamurti_Collected Works, Vol. XIII,337,Choiceless Awareness
And that's why you turned me on to it?
It's kinda like Youtube, it starts off with a commercial but, the live feed plays after. It really requires somebody with too much time on their hands.
Yeah....2 of them were commercials. I don't understand all that technical stuff.
Did you see the webcams? I watched them a little the other night, didn't see anything though. It can get pretty boring really fast, lol.
Took a look. Anything in particular?
Did you check out the Knickerbocker?
Sorry......I still smile whenever I come across it.
I remember you showing me that one.
Irish father O'Malley is so upset about a rumor he's hearin in the congregation. So on the next Sunday He announces "Faithful, I've heard despellin' rumours that the flock believes in ghosts. By a show of hands who at church today believes they've ever set eyes on a ghost?" To his dismay a lot show their hands."Oh no people.I've told you there's no such thing as a ghost and being God fearin Christians you can't believe in them. His next question asked if anyone has ever touched a ghost before. Three of the flock raised aye. No! no! There's no such thing I tell you! I hate as a Man of the cloth to ask this final question but I must. Is there any one in church today who will testify that they have ever had SEX with a ghost?" Way in the back 1 hand went up. "Mr.O'conner!!! How can you stand before God and say you've had sex with a ghost? Said O'conner"pardon me father, thought you said Goat!"
Once upon a time, there was a ghost and you couldn't see it. The End.
I made a post on my paranormal board the other day, it's about the Knickerbocker Hotel. There's a live feed and chat room. It's pretty cool. When I found it, they were all chatting about a door that had moved. Check it out!
RIIIiitchie....what up? Tell me a good paranormal story.
Where'd you disappear to for so long?
Hey EG....great ta hear from ya. Congrads on your daughter....it's a big day. Stop by when you have the time.....we're just hangin'.
I just wanted to stop by and say hi. My book has arrived and I look forward to reading it. My daughter graduates high school today and I will finally have free time after all the family leaves. I can't wait to catch up on what I have missed. Hope life is treating you well and you are treating it well in return
To god we hope you don’t mind but we would like to talk to you; there are some things we need to straighten out, it’s about these christians they claim to be from your nation but man you should see the things they do all the time blaming it on you: manifest destiny, genocide, maximized profit, sterilization, raping the earth, lying taking more than they need in all the forms of the greed. we ask them why, they say it’s god’s will.
Damn god they make it so hard. Remember jesus? Would you send him back to them, tell them how to kill him, rather they should listen stop abusing his name and yours.
We do not mean to be disrespectful but you know how it is, our people have their own ways we never even heard of you until not long ago, your representatives spoke magnificent things of you which we were willing to believe, but from the way they acted we know we and you were being deceived.
We do not mean you and your christian children any bad, but you all came to take all we had we have not seen you but we have heard so much it is time for you to decide what life is worth we already remember but maybe you forgot.
Look at us, look at us, we are of Earth and Water
Look at them, it is the same
Look at us, we are suffering all these years
Look at them, they are connected.
Look at us, we are in pain
Look at them, surprised at our anger
Look at us, we are struggling to survive
Look at them, expecting sorrow be benign
Look at us, we were the ones called pagan
Look at them, on their arrival
Look at us, we are called subversive
Look at them, descending from name callers
Look at us, we wept sadly in the long dark
Look at them, hiding in tech no logic light
Look at us, we buried the generations
Look at them, inventing the body count
Look at us, we are older than America
Look at them, chasing a fountain of youth
Look at us, we are embracing Earth
Look at them, clutching today
Look at us, we are living in the generations
Look at them, existing in jobs and debts
Look at us, we have escaped many times
Look at them, they cannot remember
Look at us, we are healing
Look at them, their medicine is patented
Look at us, we are trying
Look at them, what are they doing
Look at us, we are children of Earth
Look at them, who are they?
John Trudell
We are a love explosion;)
The religious mind is the explosion of love
A meditative mind is silent. It is not the silence which thought can conceive of; it is not the silence of a still evening; it is the silence when thought, with all its images, its words and perceptions, has entirely ceased. This meditative mind is the religious mind, the religion that is not touched by the church, the temples or by chants.The religious mind is the explosion of love. It is this love that knows no separation. To it, far is near. It is not the one or the many, but rather that state of love in which all division ceases. Like beauty, it is not of the measure of words. From this silence alone the meditative mind acts.
Krishnamurti_The Only Revolution,115,Meditations
yes, posting is a dangerous activity the first days.
on the other hand weaseling and marooning other people may be a good therapy, lol.
that means posting. you say something innocent and WHAM, lol.
lol!
when I stop I don't have side effects.
all I need to do is stay away of people with which I could easily start an argue.
It's such a habit......I was postin' one nite and had an eCig in my mouth. I reached for a lighter and almost lit it up, lol.
Yeah....best to quit cold turkey.
they don't really help me.
I'm an all or nothing guy, lol.
to keep on doing the smoking moves keep me in the game.
how about you?
I know the feeling, lol. Have you tried eCigs? For a toke here and there, they're great.
sometimes. means I quit and I restart (makes one feel like a retard, lol!)
Are you a smoker?
I have to try this out.
LOL! The endless sea of Bablyon;)
A confused mind cannot find clarity
A confused mind seeking clarity will only further confuse itself, because a confused mind can't find clarity. It's confused; what can it do? Any search on its part will only lead to further confusion. I think we don't realize that. When it's confused, one has to stop, stop pursuing any activity. And the very stopping is the beginning of the new, which is the most positive action, positive in a different sense altogether. All this implies that there must be profound self-knowing: to know the whole structure of one's thinking-feeling, the motives, the fears, the anxieties, the guilt, the despair. To know the whole content of one's mind, one has to be aware, aware in the sense of observing, not with resistance or with condemnation, not with approval or disapproval, not with pleasure or nonpleasure, just observing. That observation is the negation of the psychological structure of a society which says, 'You must, you must not.' Therefore, self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, and also, self-knowledge is the beginning and the ending of sorrow. Self-knowing is not to be bought in a book, or by going to a psychologist and being examined analytically. Self-knowledge is actually understanding what is in oneself: the pains, the anxieties, seeing them without any distortion. Out of this awareness clarity comes into being.
Krishnamurti_ Collected Works, Vol. XVII,21,Choiceless Awareness
To understand one habit is to open the door to understanding the whole machinery of habit
So, I must first understand the futility of resistance or effort in breaking a habit. If that is clear, what happens? I become aware of the habit, fully aware of it. If I smoke, I observe myself doing it. I am aware of putting my hand in my pocket, bringing out the cigarettes, drawing one from the package, tapping it on my thumbnail or other hard surface, putting it in my mouth, lighting it, extinguishing the match, and puffing. I am aware of every movement, of every gesture, without condemning or justifying the habit, without saying it is right or wrong, without thinking, 'How dreadful, I must be free of it,' and so on. I am aware without choice, step by step, as I smoke. You try it next time, that is, if you want to break the habit. And in understanding and breaking one habit, however superficial, you can go into the whole enormous problem of habit: habit of thought, habit of feeling, the habit of imitation and the habit of hungering to be something, for this too is a habit. When you fight a habit, you give life to that habit, and then the fighting becomes another habit, in which most of us are caught. We only know resistance, which has become a habit. All our thinking is habitual, but to understand one habit is to open the door to understanding the whole machinery of habit. You find out where habit is necessary, as in speech, and where habit is completely corruptive.
Krishnamurti_Collected Works, Vol. XIII,204,Choiceless Awareness
"Truth is a Pathless Land".
"Take a ride to the land inside of your mind
Beyond the seas of thought Beyond the realm of what.
Across the streams of hopes and dreams where things are really not".
Is the thinker different from the thought?
"Is it possible to love without thinking? What do you mean by thinking? Thinking is a response to |
Before we can answer those questions, we need to understand the nature of the mind that is asking them.
Come Along If You Dare! |
Join Us In The Exploration Of The Mind.
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