Nick_A wrote: ↑Sat Dec 18, 2021 7:42 pmThere are several reasons we don't understand each other concerning Christianity. The first is your belief in the personal God which is the result of Christianity becoming the state religion of Rome and the forced adoption of the Hebrew personal God. The God of Christianity is more like the ineffable or the ONE in which the being of Man is within.
The second is the belief that to be a Christian all a person must do is to believe in the Christ. I believe we cannot do it simply because as a plurality, some parts of our collective selves believe but the majority doesn't which is why Man turns in circles.
The third is what Christian rebirth means for Christianity. You seem to believe that Man as he is must believe in a personal God concerned with what we DO. I believe that the essential purpose for Christianity is rebirth, what we ARE, and the human potential with help from the Spirit, to become the evolution of being called the New Man.
The exoteric purpose for Christianity is concerned with what the Great Beast does. The inner or esoteric purpose of Christianity is a perennial oral tradition which is private. It is passed on only when the student is ready.
We may not understand each other but doesn't mean we must come to blows.
I was interested in your reference to Plato's Cave. There are many many levels to the 'myth' but I cannot see how it could not have been, for Plato, a sort of retelling or restatement of notions and ideas about *the nature of reality*, possibly having filtered-in from the East (India). If I understood IC correctly he seems to think that the myth of Plato's Cave, if considered today, refers to 'false appearances' foisted on us by media systems. This is certainly true and in one degree or other we all are strapped-in and forced to watch the dancing images, unable to see who is creating them. But Plato could have no awareness of such things, or even of propaganda-interests, since the only site of communication in his time was the Agora.
Also I tend to see things as you are describing them. But it is of course a heretical idea and simply could not be accepted by Catholicism or Protestantism (except perhaps among some Protestants I suppose). Christianity, as I am fond of asserting, is a 'picture' of Reality. But the picture is not the Reality. I guess this is a hard truth for those who need or demand an absolutely definite and clarified picture. But there cannot be a solid 'picture' when it comes to what is metaphysical, simply because what is metaphysical is non-physical, and does not have a solid form. It is the idea pertaining to the form, but it is not the form.
Yet people will always need forms and will always confuse the form with the content or the idea to which the form alludes.
Curiously, but I admit rather strangely and bizarrely, old-school Catholicism, which is more linked to the former metaphysical system of Scholasticism (and the view of Reality known as The Great Chain of Being) offers a *picture* that has more fluidity than what is allowed by Protestant forms. For example the notion of *the guardian angel* -- some level of intelligence that is not God but is God's agent, but an entity deeply committed to the evolution and protection of the soul of men. In old-school Catholicism a 'relationship' can be cultivated with that entity which I think can best be described as mystical.
The *system* of perception that the Great Chain of Being described, though it is diminished today, still shines through the somewhat dreary picture of Reality that moderns hold to. In fact I think that CG Jung's description of Reality (the reality of the psyche and his rather labyrinthian mapping of psychology) is a re-animation of this Old School was of seeing reality. For this reason I do not think Jung can be dismissed. But there is also a strange aspect to Jung and Jungianism and this has to do with the definition of an Aryan Christ. My research showed me quite clearly that an Aryan Christ (I mean a definition of a Christ-Avatar that preceded the Hebrew revelation which is to say a way of conceiving of and conceptualizing an image of God) became necessary, and I think is necessary.
Richard Knoll wrote
The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung as a severe critique of The Jung Cult (another title of his). What I took away from this book, this expose, was that (this is a contentious idea of course) it is actually necessary for European man to separate himself from the Roman and the Jewish-Hebrew prototype. Why? Because these prototypes are, or were, political-cultural impositions, and they had very much to do with the Roman *conquest*, as it were, of Europe and those primitive tribes. But this *imposition* must be resisted, in the same sense that the constraints of childhood are resisted.
I believe that the essential purpose for Christianity is rebirth, what we ARE, and the human potential with help from the Spirit, to become the evolution of being called the New Man.
This seems to me a far more difficult, and demanding, path. It is fraught with all sorts of dangers not the least being (here referring to Jung) personal aggrandizement. But it is a process that has to be gone through.
There are really large issues and problems associated with historical Christianity. Not the least being 'the confusion of peoples' of the First and Second Centuries. There are so many strains of ideas that flowed into the Christian concept. And so many different peoples with their different tendencies and perceptions (and descriptions). How to extract the proper notion and idea from this confused mass is not easy.
After all What essentially does Christianity propose? What does it mean to *be a Christian*? I can agree that some part of this is clear -- the moral and ethical codes (to a degree) -- but our entire understanding of Reality (the *world*) is now very very different.
The exoteric purpose for Christianity is concerned with what the Great Beast does. The inner or esoteric purpose of Christianity is a perennial oral tradition which is private. It is passed on only when the student is ready.
This is interesting. A definition of a
Great Beast. A few centuries back and in the perception-structure of The Great Chain of Being, the Great Beast was the Earth itself, the cesspool of the Universe. Almost the lowest and almost the densest point where *the dregs* congregated. Demonic, dense being prowled this *world* and for this reason it was imperative that a man define what he would be linked with, and what *protective spirit* he would cultivate a relationship with. And those beings were of another order, a heavenly or celestial order. The notion of a salvific Christ, and also of protective angels, was not whimsical but an issue of actual survival -- psychic and soul survival.
Now, today, what is the Great Beast? It seems to be technological systems that have the capability of, literally, enslaving and controlling the mind of man, and reducing man to something captured, something constrained, something housed and exploited. Where imprisonment is presented as *freedom*. Obviously the cultural mythology is something like in The Matrix. But all of this, clearly, leads to highly paranoid and conspiracy-involved thinking. But it is not really *thinking* it is the paranoid sense that *this is really how it is*.
Just quickly written musings on topics I have been thinking about . . .
And would you suppose that to be what real "metanoia" is? 
