Having conceived that nothing is impossible to you, consider yourself immortal and able to understand everything, all art, all learning, the temper of every living thing. . . . Collect in yourself all the sensations of what has been made, of fire and water, dry and wet; and be everywhere at once, on land, in the sea, in heaven; be not yet born, be in the womb, be young, old, dead, beyond death. And when you have understood all these at once – times, places, things, qualities, quantities – then you can understand God. (Hermetica, trans. Brian P. Copenhaver, Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Mynga Futrell starts a little journey in today’s entry, Worldview Diversity. From there, check out the research results summarized in George Bishop’s paper, What American Really Believe, at secularhumanism.org. From the same site, biologist Richard dawkins weighs in on The Improbability of God. Perhaps belief is more complicated? Step next to Anil Mitra’s Intriguing, Being, Mind, and the Absolute. (This long paper is an example of a class of speculations on what underlies a worldview; the class: “Knowledge has an aspect as relationship… and another aspect as being”.)
Is the problem that religion itself has become too simplistic? Tom Cheetham’s article, Within This Darkness:Incarnation, Theophany and the Primordial Revelation suggests this is true. Or, have we lost touch with troubling psychological aspects of religious experience, aspects at once suggestive of altered states of consciousness, and/or, psychosis and schizotypy. Isabel Clarke: Psychosis and Spirituality. finding a language. Alternately, perhaps psychology in the religious sense is merely the cosmos directing awareness back to itself? See: Donivan Bessinger’s The Pleromatics Project.
Maybe it’s a philosophical problem (?); “The complete “I” or self is indeed this physical entity plus the world-containing and world-representing soul.” (Robert Bolton)
Alternately, the basics escape most. ” There are two paths after death. One is the path of the god, the solar path, which leads to the dwelling of the immortals. The other is the path of the ancestors, the lunar path, which leads to dissolution and Niflheim, the house of the chthonic deities. Failing the trial in the afterlife brings the second death. However, initiates do have the possibility of turning their demon into an immortal “body of light.” Their souls are united with Brahma.” (Jules Evola)
Of course, it depends what you mean by ‘basics’. “But when mystics speak of the divine, they are not speaking of some supernatural, supreme being who rules the workings of the universe; they are talking of the world within.” (Peter Russell.) Does this world transcend personal psychology? “The waking state comes and goes, but the Witness is ever-present.” (Ken Wilber). Is it all just too, surpassingly, simple? (Aleister Crowley).
If a person comes to be awake, what do they awake to? “It is a ladder…” (Gurdjieff)
??? Is the jar full? (Nasruddin)
