Quote:
Originally Posted by hcap
So Adam and Eve failed the test and were banished for screwing up? On the other hand god frowned on "self-mastery apart from the Creator".
Maybe god should have included some "self-mastery" when he made the whole kit and caboodle of his "children" and the universe. Galaxies, space, time, and matter and everything, but no ability to determine god's preferred direction his children should take towards him?
Seems to me all of the ensuing original sin, destruction of the world by a flood and spiritual dead ends experienced by mankind, might have been minimized with some self-discipline and knowledge and ability needed to discriminate the correct way from the wrong way.
Self mastery is not the problem. On the contrary it is mainly the ego driven substitution of an overly active analyzing mind for experience life directly. Knowledge is useful, but:
I remember as a kid, playing softball. Got pretty good. But there were a few friends that spent hours and days studying professional baseball players, games and a ton load of statistics. They would argue theoretically and knew details beyond any of us who played and developed the life skills of playing.
Of course they were awful as athletes, and were never chosen on anyone's' team when the kids actually played. They were so full of the "weight" of facts they could not run, or field, or hit or throw.
Or live.
Their self-mastery in thinking at the wrong time interfered with the proper self-mastery of playing.
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Zen Buddhism addresses this collection of substituting pre-conceptions for direct understanding :
A Cup of Tea
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a University professor, who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”
“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
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"If I were god, I'd have done a better job." Strange to see "ego" mentioned in the same response.
"Banished", the OT concept of YHWH as efficient cause/YHWH "withdrawing" his grace (but not his covenantal commitment) out of justice as a divine attribute, and other aspects such as subsequent wounded nature/concupiscence are in play here. But it will have to do.
Well, I can choose between hcap, Deepak Chopra, Levi Dowling, Jose Silva, Edgar Cayce, Richard Bach, Matthew Fox, or any of the future stars of the "Spirituality good, Religion bad" league, to inform me that the Christ of the bible can be understood in any mysterious, gnostic, esoteric, subjective manner, as long as it's my idea (or theirs) rather than a traditional, corporate understanding because, you know, fixed standards and dogmas (unless forthcoming from the above named) cause conflict, unlike these comboxes where self-help monism co-exists with young earth creationism.
I can write off the trendy and chic love affair with Eastern mysticism by Westerners, so unhindered by reason, logic and metaphysics just as easily as my Christianity, held by many a scripture scholar, is written off. I'm able to see that the rejection of authority ought to extend to my authorities admonishing me in obscure off topic forums, also. I can grasp that it's nothing more than an hermeneutic of suspicion that suggests the true Christ was suppressed in a game of arm wrestle which the Gnostics lost, who then went underground until rescued by relatively contemporary saviors of divine consciousness.
In reading your past performances, when Paul signaled for a left turn at the corner of Phrygia and Galatia (Acts 16:6), allegory or no it was a bane for the West, but I shall remain thankful. I may have stated it before, but "that's what makes a horse race."
