sirguessalot

thanks Gen...helps a little

edited to clarify...helps me see your opinions a little better

i am aware of the scope of the initial post..as well as differences around the world

What Roy put up and what you wrote, sirg, it's how death is viewed through the American Cultural filter today. Not everyone sees things the same way.

maybe you can help me out...because i'm still not clear as to what you are referring to with the "it's" here

what's been posted is not limited to the American Cultural filter. And the initial post is referring to 1500 years of changes...i'm pointing to these changes as relating to changes in religion, Christianity, including PFAL.

I don't see them as a horizontal series of holes in the road, rather I see them as nested.

Me too, Steve. And although i can guess that most Christians, perhaps even yourself, will consider me non-Christian, i feel its worth adding that so much of what you wrote reminds me of a developmental view of faith...where every stage of faith has a valid and valuable purpose, but rather than being completely discarded when their limits are reached, they are, in a sense, swallowed whole by a larger faith. As if our view of God and scripture is being pushed to be "repotted" from time to time, and if it has been a long time since we've experienced such earthquakes, we may even be overdue.

And along with "nested," i would include words like "unfolding," and "blooming." Like how a cross section of a flower's path of growth presents an opening into greater fullness that reaches out in all directions..."linear-multiplied"…and expansive in a way that includes the "gold" of all previous ways, yet does not include their limits.

I personally find comfort and wisdom in knowing that wherever i think i am with my faith...it is only temporary…and necessary as such….so i am less-disturbed when the cracks start to show...and more freely able to walk through the fires of humiliation without shame...private or public....but especially private.

Like an over-arching "faith in the developing nature of faith."

Thanks, Gen-2...i appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

where do i want to go with it?

in light of historic developments sketched-out in the original post, and in my experiences bringing it up in doctrinal context, i feel like starting with the questions i posed...or something like them.

Thanks, Roy

Seems to me this topic is very much worth raising...as it touches the root cause of many things, including religion, Christianity, and PFAL. Also seems safe to assume that it is the least-friendly topic of them all...especially now, in our days of "invisible death" and "death denial." As if the most insightful is also the most avoided.

While i'm not into pushing people over edges they are not ready for, there does seem a point when at least pointing to the edge seems an appropriate way to find out who is ready, especially since all are being pushed that direction, anyway.

Wondering...anyone have thoughts/feelings about how to talk about it when the majority of cultural and social attitudes are conditioned to avoid or resist it?

And is it even possible for someone to point out how far from this context we seem to have drifted...doctrinally and practically...without attracting some form of hostility?

...or simply chasing everyone off?

Holy kisses

a note to say thanks in general...still not sure how to respond...or if

facing my own limits, friends...and perhaps the interpersonal costs of hypertext

sorry if unclear...i trust everyone can find their own way

great opening article, btw

i think Waysider presented some valid and nourishing questions in post #27

well, i tried to contribute, Roy.

but sadly...insults, sarcasm and innuendo seem like the default way to handle the hot edges of disagreements around here...and elsewhere.

good luck Christians...sincerely

oops...slipped and hit add while drafting a first sentence...sorry

Yep.. and there is no more terror..

Glimpse.. ha..

its more than that..

but.. we knew all of that, didn't we..

the closer I get to the *end*.. whatever that is.. the clearer everything becomes..

well said...like waking up from a temporary/necessary amnesia

Seems to me the folklorist is onto something. Not only does it seem worth calling folklore...but is likely more valuable and practical to the world as folklore. Which includes the re-telling of stories, celebrating seasons and holidays, rites of passage for stages of life, cultivating wise sayings, words and songs for suffering and transformation and such. Basically, a living language for the development of our moral imagination…vessel and container for all aspects of the human experience.

The depths and degrees of our inability to hold it as folklore seems related to our inability to see the very vital and essential role of folklore, in general. And the depths and degrees of our inability to let it be the folklore it is seems related to the violent and abusive distortions, misapplications and misfires of history and today...and likely tomorrow. As with most ancient religious texts...they become more informative the more we are freely able to let them be folklore and compare them to the rest of the whole of art and language history. As if they clarify each other quite well.

Also seems that despising God for this or that is not only not wrong, but more like an ordinary part of how some wake up to the severity of our condition. Even the Psalms give voice to such things. And one's inability to hear such a lament is one's own limitation. There are psalms for that too.

if nothing else, Roy...the tone of it can sure go "shhhhhhhh" real quick

i wonder if the grim reaper gets creeped out by that a lot

Dave Arneson, the inventor and co-author of Dungeons & Dragons took Foundational PFAL about a year or so before D&D was published in the fall of '74. He faithfully practiced abundant sharing, and 10% of the royalties he made off of D&D went to HQ. It was no small piece of change! In the tens of thousands per year. The people at HQ knew him. Whenever they came to the Twin Cities, Arneson got invited to the parties "regular" believers didn't even hear about. They were all buddy-buddy to his face, including Wierwille himself, but then they turned around and excoriated D&D as the work of the devil in their classes.

wondering...i follow a board-gaming blog by Er!k Arnes*n on About.com

anyone know if they are related?

if the psalms were originally written to be sung by those who are suffering and dying...it could be that jesus was actually singing the words of the psalm that expressed what he was feeling in those moments before his death.

that one feels it was somehow wrong or invalid thing for Jesus to say (or feel or think) may be a sign of their own inability to touch, hold and handle the very real and valid feelings we experience in the face of suffering.

as if a tribe is in the deepest kinds of trouble when their eldest are the first to run from fire and shadows.

rich thread...touches so many things...many points being raised that are familiar to me...

...existential theologies...midwifery for each end of life...memories of birth experience as a death...notions of a "transmigration bardo committee"...waking up from spiritual amnesia and remembering...types of pain and fear besides physical in light of dying...radical changes in attitudes towards death and dying in recent history, religious and otherwise...

Roy, your opening post reminds me of a psalm...full of eye-opening inquiry...and perhaps even cause for anyone to reconsider the meaning behind some of the metaphors of the epistles.

here is a link to my post on your other "death" thread...seems related.

what a gem, Roy

i can no longer help but wonder if what the brothers grimm are pointing to here is perhaps closer to the original meaning behind the biblical "thief in the night" type warnings.

much like a notion in the fields of aging and hospice...that one does well (for everyone) to avoid "doing our all our homework in the 11th hour"

as if the original context and living application of the metaphors involved a calling and devotion to "dying well" and the very real effect that this alone has on aging and the development of the moral imagination.

is it possible we have replaced the profound wisdom of the very real "arts" of "dying well" with the literalization and perpetuation of mere supernatural hero myths?

if so, is this the kind of scriptural distortion that leads to destructive misuse...mostly for simply "missing the vital point" and all its correlating fundamentals?

...

a pattern...

last night i went to an event where neighboring christian and muslim communities met to debate their different views of easter and the resurrection.

as usual, both the christian and muslim leaders presented and debated mostly only over matters of translation, evidence for supernatural, right interpretations, etc....

when the microphone was passed around for some Q&A, i simply asked something like, "are either of you aware of the rich histories of life and practice in the "arts of dying" that are associated with both sacred texts and religions?"

both more-or-less said "no"...and changed the subject back to the supernatural and such.

talked a bit more with each of them in the afterward social, clarified a bit more about how the "arts of dying" included things like stages of life, aging, hospice, grief, storytelling, friendship, music thanatology, community for caregivers, etc...yet both leaders confirmed that they were still more or less oblivious to what i was talking about...one of them even seemed very NOT-interested.

also met an "ex-christian" lady in the audience whose friend died a month ago...she seemed as unaware of these "arts" as much as the presenters were.

but she told me her story of her friend and her passing, and that she recognized what i was pointing at in spite of it being more-or-less absent from her previous christian doctrine and practice (which sounded a lot like a cousin to pfal/twi)

i suggested she revisit and recontextualize the role of scripture in light of all this...even as a way to heal the wounds of what may simply be a profound misunderstanding...and maybe even redeem the scripture of her life.

brainfixed, if i may say...as a student of dying and hospice history, when i read your post and the way you describe your experience, i cant help but feel that your interests are somewhere at or near the flames of "original religion" as i currently understand it.

i feel kinda lucky to have you with us...and i really hope you post more of your story somewhere as you see fit.

thanks for showing up...and for blowing the trumpet.

for what its worth...

on behalf of all that is "monk-style," i only ask that you look a bit more into the lives of monks and nuns and the history of monasticism before comparing it all to twi. monks and nuns can be likeminded without being legalistic.

in fact, most monks and nuns i have known and worked with over the years since twi not only defy the simple comparison, but may be the perfect kind of person to can help some ex-twi recover their christian roots or otherwise heal their view of God. the overwhelming majority of judeo-christian text and history contains monklike lives and experiences.

the original awesomeness of the fugit-like experiences may even have turned out more monklike had twi not come along.

just sayin

thrilled to know you are enjoying reading Spinoza, Roy. Einstein stood on his shoulders.

and Cman, i cant help but recognize such mindfulness all over the Bible. In fact, the author of that article wrote a book called "Living Buddha, Living Christ."

according to concordances...the word for "old men" (who dream dreams) in both Joel and Acts, simply means "elder."

...which also seems to go with what i have said about dreams being more important as we age

some quotes from a dream journal i once helped make...

Dreams are illustrations…from the book your soul is writing about you.

~ Marsha Norman

We can be the curates or curators of our own souls, an idea that implies an inner priesthood and a personal religion. To undertake this restoration of soul means we have to make spirituality a more serious part of everyday life.

~ Thomas Moore

If I were sitting here describing a dream…there’d be a certain look on your face. And I know what that look means because I feel it myself—recognition. The pleasure of recognition, a bit of rescue work, so to speak, rescuing the formless into form.

~ Doris Lessing

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the head, and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

~ Aeschylus

Tradition teaches that soul lies midway between understanding and unconsciousness, and that its intrument is neither the mind nor the body, but imagination.

~ Thomas Moore

I believe that dreams are true interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them.

~ Montaigne

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

~ John Steinbeck

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

~ Elias Canetti

We have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions.

~ Carl Jung

If we believe the Bible, we must accept the fact that, in the old days, God and His angels came to humans in their sleep and made themselves known in dreams.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Just as a burning fire inherently exudes heat, the unconscious inherently generates symbols…The unconscious speaks in symbols, not to confuse us, but simply because it is its native idiom.

~ Robert Johnson

Dreams say what they mean, but they don’t say it in daytime language.

~ Gail Godwin

The unconscious had developed a special language…symbolism… inner work is primarily the art of learning this symbolic language of the unconscious.

~ Robert Johnson

A dream is a microscope through which we look at the hidden occurrences in our soul.

~ Erich Fromm

To me, dreams are a part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive, but expresses something as best it can, just as a plant grows or an animal seeks its food as best it can.

~ Carl Jung

Dreams are the voice of our instinctive animal nature or ultimately the voice of cosmic matter in us. This is a very daring hypothesis, but I’ll venture to say that the collective unconscious and organic atomic matter are probably two aspects of the same thing. So the dreams are ultimately the voice of cosmic matter. ... The dream strange to our rational mind.

~ Marie Louise von Franz

Even in the most sophisticated person, it is the primitive eye that watches the film.

~ Jack Nicholson

Every dream comes in the service of wholeness and the effort to harmonize interior and exterior life…and render feelings and emotions, thoughts, sensations and intuitions into metaphoric/symbolic forms.

~ Jeremy Taylor

The dream is a conversation between man and God.

~ Mahomet

I was not looking for dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

~ Susan Sontag

There are more things in heaven & earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

~ William Shakespeare

As we wander even further into the materialist desert that our civilisation has become, our dreams are the only oases of spiritual vitality left to us. They represent our primordial habitat, our last wilderness, and we must protect them with as much fervour as the rain forests, the ozone layer, the elephant, and the whale.

~ Anthony Steven

Although working with thoughts and feelings can be helpful in many situations, it may not be enough when someone faces serious, life-altering events and the questions they raise. It may be even “less enough” when someone faces death. At such times, people often find that reason and the problem solving activities of waking consciousness offer few answers and little comfort. In contrast, many believe that dreams approach the question of mortality - indeed, all the major questions of life - from a much different perspective.

~ Janet Muff

Personal opinions are more or less arbitrary judgments and may be all wrong; we are never sure of being right. Therefore, we should seek the facts provided by dreams. dreams are objective facts. They do not answer to our expectations.

~ C.G. Jung

I have dreamed in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.

~ Emily Bronte

the dreamer and his dream are the same…the powers personified in a dream are those that move the world.

~ Joseph Campbell

A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.

~ The Talmud

Hear my words: If there is a prophet among you, I the Lord make myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream.

~ Numbers 12:6

dreaming also has the potential to become more and more vivid as we near the end of our life...or with practice

...and they also tell us a lot of things about physical illness

a people who are somehow taught to avoid "dreaming well"...end up like those cats

just look around

avoiding dreaming is like avoiding breathing

of course i do

I'm just trying to figure out why some Christians like those in TWI make such an issue out of it and defend it and others do not.

me too. and i cant help but assume that any effective figuring out of such things cannot happen without at least touching and handling the even hotter and more troubling aspects of it all...which is more than some have agreed to, or seem willing to want or allow. Has me wondering again if the most direct and unsanitized answers, whatever they may be, are not always the most appropriate for everyone, or for all occasions.

reminds me of this, from Roy's heads or tails thread:

The Call of Cthulhu (Weird Tales, 1928)

I. The Horror In Clay

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

while i am no longer able to fully agree with any "either-or" type reductions, i also cant help but agree that the two options offered by lovecraft are alive and well and have never left the table.

thanks for the books, Steve

and i cant help but nod in all the same directions

to add...

it seems to me that most ancient scripture is not only NOT invalidated by such, but able to become more valuable and practical as we discover more and gain better insight into more and more likely contexts of their creation.

i even suspect that this may have even been a large part of the insight behind the original Christian experience that was so world-shakingingly significant...as if partially a story of an attempt to recover some real sense of the original jewish wisdom and practice from the many natural distortions that simply come with having ancient history.