Buddhism Topic continued
I saw John Kabat-Zinn on Bill Moyers' series Healing and the Mind. and there he was, crouching down next to people who were suffering from chronic pain (from cancer or injuries or other illnesses) coaching them through little bouts of pain to be with them and help them through it. He gets the patients that nobody else can heal or help, and they're at the point where it's just too bad...they have to live with whatever pain they have, and he helps them reduce their levels of pain and learn to live with it with equanimity. He didn't exactly lay hands on people and make all of their suffering go away, but you could tell from the video that he totally cares about his patients and that he can teach them ways of coping that really do give them some peace and help.

And it can be expanded from just physical pain and suffering, to any situation you're in that you just HATE and want badly to get out of but you can't. One aspect of being in that state is that when you HATE something but you're IN it anyway, the natural tendency is to struggle and fight and try to change the unchangeable, but doing it like a gerbil running in a wheel, getting tired out and going nowhere. [I'm not explaining this to you, GB, but to anyone else reading it, because I wonder how many people understand this stuff or have any direct exposure to it.]

I've been a church person for um...about 25 years...going on purpose by my own volition and not because my parents made me. Being in that mode for 25 years. And I've never really gotten good at praying. It's a dead-end for me. You're supposed to just DO it and it will get better over time. And all things of this type are learned by DOING and not reading about it. But there does not seem to be much guidance available. I did find a great book called A Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster that talks a lot about prayer and other disciplines (such as meditation and fasting and service) which you grow over time simply by DOING them over and over and over. It's just like what they tell writers to do: you have to sit your butt in your chair every damn day and WRITE, whether you feel like it or not. The payoff comes from doing it over and over repeatedly, longterm, through practice. And there's no guarantee that the practice will be good or worthwhile on any individual day even when you've gotten good at it. Anyway, Richard Foster is a Quaker, and apparently in that tradition there is a lot of silence in their meetings and people just SIT and LISTEN and WAIT for some prompting from God. They do it all of the time and it is natural. I think if I did it I would be kind of creeped out at first. Or I would have been creeped out 20 years ago. Not that anyone needs another book recommendation, but Richard Foster is also awesome (in his books) at teaching about church history almost from an experiential point of view. Like he understands what it feels like to fast for 40 days. Some of the more "woo woo" things in the Bible he has actually done or been with people who do it. Like healing by laying on hands, or praying hard for something, or asking for direct guidance from God.

The reason why I mention Richard Foster is to say that in the Christian tradition, at least the one I am immersed in, you read about a lot of "woo woo" practices in the Bible, but almost nobody today actually does any of those things. Or you can go through your whole life and never meet anybody who does any of those things, so that it seems that they only did those things right after Jesus' life and resurrection was "fresh" and that those things don't happen for the rest of us mere mortals, even though it kind of implies that it IS supposed to happen for us too.

Buddhism Topic continued more
So there is SOME tradition of people really doing private practices that change their consciousness, their lives, their perceptions, their abilities...whatever. But it's really secret in the mainstream, and you only occasionally meet people who do any of those things and you wonder how they ever picked it up.

On the other hand, Buddhism tells you how to do it and helps you with all of these funky ways of breathing and imagining pathways of energy and such. Richard Foster is the only Christian I know of who comes close do doing anything like that--explaining how to do these practices. I don't know how much of it is a placebo effect of tricking your mind into healing your body, or how much of it is purely physical. A friend of mine had a dog with cancer and took the dog to an accupuncturist, and the dog totally perked up. Amazing. That takes the placebo variable out of the equation, because the dog had no idea what was happening [other than getting a special new kind of attention, I guess]. So it must not be all about tricking your mind into healing itself.

Hmm....well, I've already admitted that I'm pretty much a universalist. I say that if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck and sounds like a duck, then it's a duck. And if you take Jesus's main commandment as the keystone element: Love God as much as you are able, and love your neighbor as you love yourself--then Buddhism seems to fit with the program just fine. They just have a lot more under the belt studying ways of calming down the mind and body. What are the 5 main principles? Non-striving, non-judging, ...can't remember the other three..."with intention"--that's a phrase that comes up a lot--good intentions...I'm not sure that there's any good reason to burn a Buddhist at the stake for heresy. People working as hard as they can to be more loving, assuming that a good part of "loving" involves having a lot of self-awareness and self-discipline an inner peace. Equanimity and Magnanimity. What's to argue with that?

Man, what a sermon. I'm going to pick up my soap box, and leave the park now. Sorry about that diversion.

Perhaps you mean chiropractor. At least that's what the dude who cracked my back was called . As to the placebo effect--that's what doctors say when they have no idea why something works . Even "tricking" the mind is, in a sense, a physical act. Matter and Energy (Spirit) are one and the same.

This leads to a form of monism (there are many). The debate on Narniaweb started when a Real Monotheist claimed that the Trinity was polytheistic and that Jesus couldn't be Divine. The Black Glove responded with a halfway decent argument about the Trinity being 3 into 1, i.e. Many into One. All equally divine. I of course took the position that we All are Divine and that TBG was arguing for a form of Monism (as I was also) rather than Monotheism. Hence a three-way debate that echoed the very debates at the dawn of Christianity. Arianism, Catholicism, and Gnosticism. How is this related to Tolkien? Other than the fact he was a Christian?

Well this really is the heart of the matter. Tolkien and Lewis's works really border on Universalism. And different Christians recognize this with different degrees. A lot of the folks at Narniaweb are very well intentioned but struggle with resolving the Pagan aspects. "No it can't be" some cry. "Lewis didn't really mean it. It's all just for art's sake." Other, more doctrinaire and "right-wing," Christians recognize all too well the Pagan aspects of Lewis and Tolkien. So much so, That they are convinced that Lewis and Tolkien are part of The Satanic Masonic Conspiracy to control mankind and seduce their children--mentally and sexually . It's amusing and yet very sad at the same time that some are so frightened by other peoples theological and philosophical ideas. They little recognize that their own religion contains many aspects that are shared with Paganism. Only more orthodox Jews and Muslims, (and the few non-trinitarian Christians) are truly Monotheistic. Christianity is, to varying degrees, Monistic, as is Paganism. Even Lewis believed that a Pagan was closer to Christianity than modern Atheism (one of the points that so raises the ire of "Fundamentalists." So I suppose this little side-track really does belong on this thread.

I'll need to get back to you on the principles of Buddhism after a quick refresher of what they are . It's been a little while since I studied Buddhism.

Gandalfs Beard

So, GB, I am continuing to read The Gnostic Gospels in little bites; not because it is hard to read, but because I keep having to stop and say, "WAIT!! Did this just say what I thought it said?" and "What does that imply?" Oh my.....

I just read a little chunk that said that the gnostics' definition or concept of "God" was one that was bigger than the "God" who was the character of "creator" in the Creation Story.

Now here's me running off with all of the implications of this idea: The Creator is smaller, like an angel below the real "God" in rank, and he jealously guards knowledge from Adam and Eve and does not want them to obtain it, hence the story of the apple-biting tragedy in the Garden of Eden. In this view, the Snake is really the hero and he is telling Eve the truth about the apple (we'll call it an apple for convenience, but we don't know what fruit it was). And the only reason why Adam and Eve get punished is because Creator is really mad that they got this access to knowledge and he doesn't want them to obtain immortality as well, so he prevents them from eating anything off of the Tree of Life. But the real "God" wouldn't do that. The reason why God in the early part of the OT seems so babyish and mean and prone to smiting people and drowning them and such is because he isn't the real one. <--Okay, that was just me running with that idea of there being a Creator who is a different lower being than the ultimate source of everything. Like mistaking Elbereth for Iluvatar.

But I actually did read that, yes? The gnostics believed that the Creator character in Genesis is not the real God--the ultimate last biggest one--and they thought that the church hierarchy or official church was following the lesser Creator god and not the Ultimate last and biggest one, and so the church was in the error of following a false idol, so to speak. They didn't have the real one, and so the gnostics did not have to follow the rules of the church because they were above them.

I mean, I think that a lot of us think this way anyway and don't realize it, but I was surprised to see that anyone ever really said it out loud like that.

Well, perhaps not "out loud" . The Gnostics were a minority. But your reading of the Gnostics is correct. And the more I find out about Lewis (and to a degree Tolkien) the more I am convinced that he held similar views. Not necessarily that of the "Demiurge" which you are reading about, but many of the other Gnostic views which are Ptolemaic in origin and the views of the inner-wisdom and the Light that are so Eastern.

Even in re-reading the Gnostic Gospels I read in small chunks too, because it takes time to absorb the information. I was pleased at how much I remembered and surprised at the things I had forgotten .

Oh, considering about your point on Elbereth and Illuvatar; it seems that Tolkien was thinking along Gnostic lines.

Gandalfs Beard

What means "Demiurge"?

Oh Sorry Otto's World, You probably haven't got to that bit yet. That is what the Gnostics called the Creator God as opposed to the Higher God. Pagel's does get to it in her book.

Gandalfs Beard

Otto's World, I FINALLY got The Discarded Image from my friend and just started reading the first chapter . I skimmed through it a bit too. Lewis seems to take pains to stress that he doesn't mean this view to replace science (but he loved this stuff so much I think maybe he was trying to appease the intellectuals of his day ).

Gandalf's Beard

Oh HOORAY, GB!! Let me know what you think of the book bit by bit as you go. I want to re-read it with you.

Well it's been a while since I've posted on this thread but I came across a work of Tolkien's I had never heard of before--a children's tale called Roverandom.

Tolkien originally came up with this delightful story in September 1925 as a means to comfort his son Michael when Michael lost his little toy dog whilst they were on holiday. Tolkien later revised, rewrote and illustrated the story into it's current form hoping to have it published circa 1937. It was finally published in 1998

It is particularly noteworthy for this thread due to the introduction written by the publisher. The publisher notes that Tolkien wrote this book while "'...still influenced by the convention that 'fairy stories' are naturally directed to children.'" He later regretted having in any way "written down" to his children

In Tolkien's Fairy Story essay (1939) he criticized the "flower and butterfly minuteness" of most depictions of Fairy Creatures at the time. The introduction to Roverandom verifies that Tolkien was engaged in a reclamation--or restoration if you will--of the original power of myth.

In other words, Tolkien was instrumental in beginning the important work of restoring the gods and beings of ancient mythology back to their eminent stature--before they were diminutized by the advent of Christianity. Many of the beings in European (from Germanic to Irish) folk and fairy tales had been "shrunk." Tall Elves had become tiny Leprechauns and Fairies. The Goddess became the Fairy Queen.

Tolkien, through his life's work, was attempting to restore gravitas to the world of Fairy and return Elves to their rightful size. In essence he was engaged in "the Archaic Revival." Though C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia were books directed at youth, they also contributed big time to the Neo-Pagan Renaissance of the 1960's up through today. Which (as I have noted previously) is ironic for a pair of writers who were Christian.

Yet there can be little doubt in the importance of the role played by Tolkien and Lewis in establishing the modern Neo-Pagan movement. Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca by themselves would have garnered little attention. It was the immense popularity of these Fictions by Tolkien and Lewis that propelled the interest of millions the world over. Even Starhawk (a prominent Wiccan) credits Lewis and Tolkien for sparking her interest in Paganism.

Gandalf's Beard