Well, if you want to make yourself unpopular, just tell people they don’t need their gods.
This weekend’s postings and podcast upset folks because, in my view, they are addicted to what they “know” to be true, but what is “true” is a label, or a word, upon which their identity has been built. Ergo, you point that out, you must be a bad person.
My reason for pointing out such things is simple: The Kingdom of God is within. Addictions to labels such as black and white, right and left, et cetera, project your personal power, your self, onto the label. The more invested you are in said label, the more energy you transfer to ideas and people that perhaps you wouldn’t care to spend time with. While this is obvious to me, it isn’t obvious to everyone. So why should I point that out?
Because the entire world you and I now inhabit, and all the problems inherent in that world, were built by you and I, one label at a time. This is the very genuine power every human being has, and it is the key to unlocking “America’s secret destiny.” Forget the conspiracies and the everlasting conflict . . . . and focus on the ONE THING you can control, which is what you choose to believe in. The purpose of this weekend’s podcast was to get you thinking about how you and I everyday invest ourselves into things that are inherently untrue and how, in response, the takers and the controllers feed off that. Radical? Only if you are happy with the status quo. Once you see what I’m talking about, it is a great deal of fun. A little rocky at first . . . .
I’m going to be giving workshops on dreams and dreaming in the near future. All of this — the labels and words we invest in — is related to dreaming because the great Underworld of the unconscious is where all of the labels are generated in the first place, and it is that source from which our genuine self derives its vitality, not the outside, which feeds upon our vitality. A control freak might be defined as ‘one who feeds upon another whose sense of self is defined externally.’ If you wish to fulfill “America’s secret destiny”, ponder on that for a bit.
The old Catholic Church was very much tuned into the wisdom of the Mystery Schools, when these things were more commonly known than they are now. Bishop Synesius of Cyrene was one such spokesman of the Old Ways. In his treatise on dreaming, he says:
“Mind holds the shape of things that be,’ says the ancient philosophy, and we might add that those which come into being also have a soul, since mind is to soul as real being is to becoming. No, taking the first term with the third, and the second with the fourth, and stating them in this inverse order, we shall no less arrive at the truth, following the definitions of science.
[Editor's Note: One might construe his meaning as "The mind shapes that which it holds", which is to say, "the mind creates the thing that it beholds." This would appear to be the mystery place where Quantum physics is going, despite the kicking and screaming of our scientists.]
“In this way that what we postulated will be demonstrated, namely that the soul holds the forms of things that come into being. It holds, indeed, all, but it produces only what is befitting, and it reflects as in a mirror the image, by means of which the living beings grasps those things that remain there. Therefore, as we do not understand the activities of the mind before the controlling force has announced them to the multitude, and whatever has not come to that controlling force is hidden from the living being; so then we shall not have a perception even of the forms in the first soul, before the impress of them comes to the imagination. And this very imagination seems to be a sort of life in itself, a little lower down in the scale, and having its basis in a peculiar property of nature. It has even its own sense-perceptions, for we see colors and we hear sounds, and we have an overpowering sense of touch, at times when the organic parts of the body are at rest. Perhaps this form of the sense-perception is the more hallowed. In this way we constantly enter into relationship with gods who give us counsel and answer us in oracles, and take care of us in other ways.
“So then, if any one, in his dreams, receives the present of a treasure, I shall not be at all surprised; or if a man quite uncultured should fall asleep and, meeting the Muses in his dream and exchanging question and answer with them, should become a cunning bard. This has happened in our own time and does not seem to me very astounding. I pass over the plots I have been revealed, and the number of people whom the dream in the guise of a physician has cured of illness. But whenever a dream open up to the soul a path conducting it to the most perfect points from which to view existing things, a soul that has never yet aspired, nor has given its mind to the assent,[4] it would be indeed the climax of the occult force in existing things that this dream should override nature and unite to the realm of the mind the man who has wandered so far from it that he knows not whence he has come.
“And if any one deems the way upward a great undertaking, but disbelieves in the imagination, for that even by its means the happy union may ne’er be gained, let him listen to the sacred oracles which tell of the diverging paths, after hearing, of course, the whole list of the available resources for the ascent, in virtue of which it is possible to make the seed within us grow. It is written:
[1289]‘To some he gave the revelation of the light to be a lesson, Others even in their dreams, He made fruitful with His courage.’
“Do you see? He makes a distinction between the happy possession of knowledge and its acquirement. One man learns, he means, while awake, another while asleep. But in the waking state man is the teacher, whereas it is God who makes the dreamer fruitful with His own courage, so that learning and attaining are one and the same. Now to make fruitful is even more than to teach.”
End Quote
_ _ _ _
Do not let ol’ Synesius’ Aristotelian writing style fool you. Read it slowly; let it sink in. What he says is startling, if nothing else because it would be 1,600 years before the West would once again have access to this wisdom, via a Swiss psychoanalyst named Carl Jung.
As the falsehood of our gods (shopping, phony patriotism, hatred of nonexistent enemies) dwindles into ash, you and I shall have more and more occasion to delve into these foundations of Self, which have never disappeared, though they have been obscured by our mighty torrent of labels. The truth I communicate is a simple one, but it has to pass through many filters. At times, my attempts at humor are slain by the need to believe. My question to you is, What precisely is it that you believe in? Do you even know? Or is it just habit? Soon enough you will realize the world has posed this question to you, and the labels you so loudly shout have no life in them. The life was in you the whole time.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Bruce Hanify
