(1)Hi, This is Leo Volont. Welcome to my Four Part Series “Creating a Better God”. For this Blog, let’s talk about Religion. Have you ever wondered whether perhaps the reason why there are so many Atheists is because Atheism seems so plausible, that is, because so many people see no clear signs of there being a God. But the real problem may be that they’re looking for a God without knowing what to look for because there’s some mistaken conception of God that’s misleading them. Or maybe they’re looking in the wrong place or if it is the right place, well, maybe they wouldn’t know a God if they saw One. But to be fair to everybody, they’ve been told where to look and they’ve been told what to expect. So the problem isn’t with them but with the info they’ve been working with, that the Religious Traditions that have come down to us are somehow screwed up.
(2)So, let’s start by taking
a look at those Traditions. The West even
now is still under the influence of Classical Greek Philosophy where God is
envisioned as a collection of all positive absolutes – All Powerful, All
Loving, All Knowing, and All Decisive.
This seems okay at first glance, but becomes problematic in its
implications. For instance, we can infer
from the Omnipotent Will criteria that all events have meaning and purpose, and
therefore that all is as it should be, at least from the Divine perspective, because His Will should never be wrong, right?
But, yeah, because of that ‘best of all
possible world’s’ thinking, Rich people can justify and entrench their
privileges as Divinely bestowed, while also concluding that God must have
reasons of his own for hating the poor and deliberately subjecting them to
misery. The Poor themselves not wishing
to suppose that God is their avowed Enemy, well, they instead suppose God is
either testing them with moral challenges or building their character by
providing them with a kind of resistance training. But even the most miserable and devout among
us, will conclude that their God has been relentlessly against them, and that certainly
can’t make any sense to them given their optimistic and charitable religious
beliefs. A generalized Crisis of Faith
must emerge, shouldn’t it? We saw such a
Crisis emerge as the 100 Years War coincided with the Black Death and then Europe
has remained cynical and the French rude ever since. So, yes, most people would now be skeptical of
an All Powerful Best of All World’s God.
(3)But then we should ask
ourselves how the “Best of All Possibly World’s” argument ever got so much
traction to start with. It persisted up
until Modern Times, didn’t it? Well,
aren’t our objections based largely on moral grounds where we would suppose God
would have too much decency to impose a Divine Order that had such a high
proportion of Might Makes Right in it?
Then the flip side of that same argument in regards to the Weak is, well,
that to make the strongest chain it is necessary only to eliminate the weakest
links, and that the Weak and Poor don’t require all the superfluous effort
required to bring them up to parity so much as they only need to be excluded in
order to make for a Better World. I
don’t believe it personally but it is nonetheless true that the Herd only needs
to be culled of its Old, its Lame and its Stragglers to be made perfectly
Healthy, right? We were presupposing a
God of Goodness and Mercy but where’s the logical imperative for that
assumption? God, as the Ancient World envisioned,
might have originally been a very pragmatic and unsentimental God, and that the
theological stipulation for an Infinitely Loving God may have just been a
recent times interpolation, trying to jam a Modern square peg into a
Classically round hole and we find that it just doesn’t fit.
(4)Also, we need to recognize
that the West largely held onto ancient Barbarian Pre-moral assumptions. If you can remember, the Greeks defeated the
Persians and that victory has cost us all dearly because the Persians were
actually the more Civilized and Moral of the two powers. So in the West the idea of Might Makes Right,
an intrinsic part of the Barbarian Ethos, well, it’s been baked into our
cake. So those grounded in Western
Thought and Traditions would interpret the “Best of All World’s” Doctrine in
terms of “May the Better Man Win”, wouldn’t they? The Best of All Possible Worlds would be the
Strongest, not the Nicest. Then we have
the old scriptural aphorism “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God” which
to us sounds counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? We would have said “love”, wouldn’t we? But ‘fear’ rings truer to the Barbarian Western
ear where God is not so much Good as He
is Awesome.
(5)So, yes, the West with it’s inherent
Barbarism has us stymied us far as Religion is concerned. We can’t show that
their God isn’t the Real Deal. We can
only insist that we wouldn’t like that God very much. But then we might suspect that a breakdown
in the General Consensus can’t be an especially good thing for the case of
there being a God. In all of God’s
Absolutes by Definition, well, shouldn’t there ought to be an “Infinitely
Popular” or “Absolutely Likeable” or at least a “Totally Believable”? Yeah, the lack of a consensus is a real problem
for the Western God.
Well, This is it for Part
One. In Part Two we will look at the
problems involved with the Transcendental God of Mystical Experiences. If you
want to do some homework, read up on it with William James’ 1905 Classic “Varieties
of Religious Experience”, the first and last time that Science has looked at
Religion and Spirituality. It’s free online.
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(6)Hi everybody, this is Leo
Volont for Part Two in the Series “Creating a Better God”. In the first section we discussed how the Absolute
All-Everything God, with its deep roots in the Barbarian Ethos, was found to be
morally problematic. Now, in addition to those purely cognitive
philosophical-theological problems, well, in this section, we will have
spiritual mystical problems to deal with too.
Well, you think I would be deliriously happy to have any kind of even
quasi-objective support for a God that comes with a significant consensus, that’s
to say, a consensus that is not too dismissably small. But the Truths the Mystics come bearing are
not that welcome and we almost wish we could shoot the messengers. You see, the Spiritual and the Mystical
Visions coincide more with the Barbarian Ethos than we would at first
intuitively suppose, you know, we would tend to regard mysticism and
spirituality favorably because all those nice sweet New Age People are so ready
to vouch for it. (oh! to know more about
Mystical experiences, their content as well as their causes, see William James’1905
Classic “Varieties of Religious Experience” . It is available free on line).
(7)So let’s look at Mysticism
in some detail. There have been very
strong and persuasive traditions of Spiritual Religious Mysticism, with people
actually going into very effective trance states where they received
overwhelmingly powerful impressions, which are difficult to refute because we
can largely simulate them using psychedelic hallucinogenic drug cocktails. Yeah, I’ve repeatedly heard on line of people
having Full Kundalini Awakenings, but somehow it was only a coincidence that
they were tripping their azzes off at the time. But we also know that there have been many “clean”
occurrences. And nobody can count the
number of documented psychotic episodes that would have been counted as
Religious Experiences if they had happened outside the Psych Wards.
(8)These Mystics tell us of a
God of Oneness, a Transcendental God, so high and aloof that He or It is
frankly above caring about the distinctions between Good and Evil. We need to understand that in the Oneness,
well, half of everything is Bad!,right?
The Oneness of Yin and Yang is a Blessing and a Curse. Also, the
Transcendental God is not providential! Being
Immutable, Unchanging, even All Loving, is another way of saying God is Happy
with the way things are. If you Love
Everything then you Love nothing, right? If YOU, as a tiny dot in God’s Great Universe,
don’t like it, well, you need to get with the Big Picture where you can
understand how little YOU matter. Look at the Hindu notion of Samsara which
holds the World to be “illusory”, a word that has always puzzled me in that
context, and so I think they’ve always meant to say “insignificant”. To the Transcendental God the World, and you
in it, doesn’t matter.
(9)Well, yeah, that might be
God, but it’s no God we would be looking for, right? I’ve met enough Mystics who got that
Transcendental Experience and were One with that Transcendental God and, well,
it just doesn’t seem healthy. They stop
caring about everything just the same way their God has. THEY become
Transcendental too. No distinctions
matter any longer and, this is something nobody wants to say out loud,
but it is impossible to keep them out of sex, drugs and money scandals. To them the Rose Garden is the equal of the
Sewage Drainage Pit, and they may even like the sewage better because of the greater
intensity of the undifferentiated experience, you know, if Quality no longer
matters then Quantity takes over. Experiential
Magnitude is the only differentiation they have left. For them it is like Flies to Poop. Recognizing the social proprieties is beneath
the Transcendentalists. Perhaps they are
morally worse than most active Criminals, Gamers and Perverts who at least make
some effort to sidestep detection and they’re conscious enough to control for the
consequences and results of their actions. Yes, if anything good can be said of
hypocrites it is that they know what’s expected of them and they pay
Righteousness at least the homage of trying to fake it. But the
Transcendentalist is indifferent and will thoughtlessly lead his or her entire
flock into embarrassment by association, and every Cultist I know has been repeatedly
through the routine of denying accusations against their Gurus which they’d
never forgive in themselves, their friends or another Devotee.
(10)So, yeah, the New Age
Movement is enamored with the Transcendental Model of Religion, but all of its
excesses make the general public squirm with discomfort, even repulsion. So, again we have a breakdown of consensus.
Nobody wants to think of God as some kind of a Sicko Freak, unless, of
course you are some kind of Sicko Freak.
Anyway, this necessity for
dumping the Transcendental God helps us to understand the reasons why the Zoroastrian
Persians, under the guidance of Zarathustra, lowered the aim of their Religious
Ambitions down a notch from the Highest Oneness to the next level down to where
the Dualist Material Universe split between Light and Darkness, Good and Evil. And they chose the Good. “Go towards the
Light” was a phrase that first appears to us in the Persian language. Humans were not always Moral. Persians invented that. It’d be good to remind everybody that the Three
Wise Men, the Magi, they were Zoroastrian Persians.
Well, that was it for Part
Two. In Part Three we will talk about
the Issues of Dualism, and word about Astral Projection.
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(11)Hi everybody, this is Leo
Volont with Part Three of the “Creating a Better God” Series.
So, yes, as discussed
previously, the Persian Dualist Model of Religion gives us our belief in Goodness
and Light as opposed to Darkness and Evil.
But the Dualist Vision has it’s problems too. Moral-Religious Revelations have not been
consistent. What was Good in the 8th
Century BC doesn’t seem good enough now.
It seems that Social Morality evolves.
Apparently Goodness is not so much a Perfection as a Process. So it
might be necessary to throw over the assumption that God must be Eternally Perfect,
that is, Perfect from the Beginning. But perhaps we can sooth over our hesitations
with some philosophical casuistry. We
can explain that God is indeed “Perfect” but within the context of Eternity’s
other reach, that is, pulling in all of Future Time. We can say that God takes Forever
to become Perfect. So in our Real World
Temporal Terms we have a God whose ‘perfection’ mostly exists as an innate
potential.
(12)Now in regards to the
idea of a God in process, a God of potential, well, the idea really hasn’t been
around long enough to gather up much of a consensus, so perhaps we still need
to argue the cause before deciding. But
what can the argument be for an idea that previously saw no place, no
possibility? Well, I’m thinking that
perhaps the most basic assumptions that we held previously were wrong, and that
the opposite must likely be true. So
what was the most basic assumption?
Well, wasn’t it that God was the Creative Element? Just look at what we got: “In the Beginning
God created the Heavens and the Earth”.
In Greek Platonic Philosophy we have the Spiritual Logos or ‘Word’ being
the first and primary reality before the Material. The whole idea behind Shamanistic Magic is
that ‘Magic Words’ evoke the objects they name. Everywhere we look in the
Superstitions of Metaphysics we see the finer etheric principles being the
creators of the denser coarser
material. All Creation has been said
to be Top Down.
(13)So yes, in striving for
some kind of a Reality Check on this, let’s ask ourselves what influences what? Does Thought influence Matter or does Matter
influence Thought? Well, isn’t it
easier to suppose that the massive solids of the World can more easily effect
the insubstantial ethereal wisps of quasi-nothingness then to believe it’s the
other way around? It seems likely we
have been looking at this Theology completely in reverse, seeing cause and
effect in mirror image, supposing that the Spiritual was the Creative Element, that
God, the Core of Spirit, was the Ultimate Creator, when, quite actually, the
Spiritual has all along been the created product of the Material. It’s the substance which influences the
spiritual and not the other way around.
It is our Brains which make our Thoughts, not our Thoughts that make our
Brains, right? We’ve been looking at
our Universe upside down. We had a Tree in
front of us and mistook the leaves for the roots.
(14)And we are really lucky that
we were wrong. You see, what happens to
the barren dry Metaphysics of Materialism once we find that Spirituality and
Moral Idealism is the Tree that grows out of Materialism’s once pessimistically
dank and worldly Roots, but as it rises with the sap from root to trunk becomes
morally transmogrified and that God and the Angels may be the Flowers that bloom
among the Leaves that brush up against the Sky of our Endless Dreams and Possibilities? Under the Old System of Things we piled up
all moral responsibility and dumped it at the feet of our God, and if we
couldn’t always sing his praises we could at least heap upon him all the
blame. But now with God and Spirituality
being a Process that starts in the Material, with Humanity, well, the roles become
reversed, right? It would seem that Moral
Responsibility would revert to us. Yes,
it would be one heck of a burden. But at least then it’d be in our power to
make things better.
(15)Oh, but we can’t
completely dismiss Mystical Metaphysics.
Anybody who’s ever Astrally Projected knows that there’s some kind of a
Spiritual Body, so how do we account for it? The Old Wisdom has it that our bodies are of
recent production but our souls are eternal, even if we do not remember. The Hindus and Buddhists would pile on Past
Lives, which we also do not remember.
But maybe our material bodies are our point of origin. Perhaps our Bodies are seeds to our Soul. So
could the Spirit live past the body’s demise? But you might say that if the
Spirit isn’t material then its Nothing and Nothing doesn’t exist. Good point.
But, well, we can’t really stipulate that the Spirit is necessarily immaterial
because even Science now is a bit mystified in regards to the extent of Matter. For instance, there is something called “dark
matter”. It’s calculated to comprise 85%
of the gravitational mass in the Universe, but where is it all? Perhaps it could be entwined in its own
complex set of dimensional resonances or whatever. For all we know our Material Life Entity
could have a nexus linking to a Spiritual Dimensional Resonance that exists in
some kind of Dark Matter, perhaps something of a parallel universe. And when our bodies die in this Universe we
continue on as a Spiritual Outgrowth in the Realm one next over. It would
account for the puzzling inconsistencies we find in the Astral.
(16)For example, once when I
was in Korea I had a projection. I
wasn’t staying in much of a Village at the time but the Train Station opened up
on a nice square and so I flew on over to visit it. It was late at night and nobody was there but
the Square was the same as always except with this one big difference, that in
the center was now a bronze statue of a Medieval Korean Warrior on a Horse. Later I
told my Korean friends about it. Well, they
were surprised and told me there used to be such a Statue but when the Japanese
occupied Korea 70 some years before they had pulled it down. It seems the Warrior had been a Korean
General who had humiliated the Japanese in battle centuries before but the
Japanese are great at holding grudges. But on the Astral side of things, that
Statue still stands tall.
Well, this is it for Part 3
and Part 4 the Final Section is next. There I discuss the possibility for
Humanity’s developing a Social Moral Collective Consciousness.
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Hi everybody, This is Leo Volont and this is Part Four, the
final part of my “Creating a Better God” Series.
(17) I once read an amusing,
if blasphemous, anecdote that goes back to one of the earliest Civilizations,
the Sumerian. It seems that one citizen
had discerned a paradox. On one hand the
Sumerian People were being asked to offer valuable sacrificial offerings to
their God. But then they were also being
asked to pay that God homage, worship, devotion, adoration and respect. In effect their God was at the same time begging
while expecting the People to be the ones to do the bowing. So there written on one of those small clay
tablets they used was the thought that if God had to beg his food like a dog,
and then God should be whipped and taught to do tricks for his dinner just like
any other dog. You know, perhaps there’s
a hint of truth there so let’s stay with that Mesopotamian metaphor for a while,
that is, comparing God to Man’s Best Friend.
What if God really needed to be trained, cultivated and nourished – not
being seen at his best unless treated as a cherished pet and given a certain
degree of discipline and character formation? Already in the 3rd video of this
series we established that We are God’s creators and not the other way around,
but now we will look into what that job of Creation might entail.
(18)You know, we couldn’t
really expect much of this Divinity if left to its self? Remember that since the Universe must’ve once
had a starting point in Time, well, how could a fresh brand new Divinity, formed
up from out of bare rock, know anything of the kind of Social Moral issues we
would confront today in trying to raise up a Life Organization as complicated
as a Civilization? Left to itself
wouldn’t the Dog just remain a Wolf?
But, yes, with this new
intuitive insight we have of God and Religion being a formative ongoing project,
well it may help us to better understand our Religious History and our own
Religious Current Events. When a
Civilization can get together in a common prayer and a common religious Vision,
then, in a sense, Divinity solidifies.
With so many people thinking similarly, the Collective Consciousness
crystallizes a Divinity expressive of the People’s Moral Consensus. The Divinity created is a Collective Phenomenon.
(19)But what happens when
Barbarism and Rugged Individualism reigns?
What happens when education breaks down and all unifying culture
collapses in skepticism or just plain ignorance? Well, if there ever had been a Divinity, then
the Divine simply evaporates away, dying a little more as each generation pays
less and less heed. Yes, each individual
may have his own Religion and his own sense of Divinity, but without the
Multiplier Effect of Common Communal Belief, then each person’s separate Divinity
is too small to matter. It is like a
hundred million batteries that if wired together would out-surge a lightening
bolt, but just one little single cell
battery by itself isn’t enough to run a toy.
(20)But in Ages and Cultures
that had a great degree of Religious Unity and Intensity, then a certain amount
of Power was communicated into the Spirit World and that power became
manifested in Saints who found a way to tap into it. And then there were the much acclaimed Spiritual
Apparitions and Visions, supported by a sizeable public consensus, which are
probably best compared to condensations of Ethereal Plasmas. Or, if we are hesitant to attribute any
quality of Matter to the Spirit, then we can stipulate that these
manifestations of Spirit are a phenomena of Consciousness – that these Divine
Apparitions may consist in the quasi-substance of what we would otherwise call
Delusion or Hallucination – you know, the Substance of Dreams, of Visions, the
Spark that gives Substance to our Intuitive Flashes. Remember, Delusions and Hallucinations are
objective in the sense that they arise of themselves, outside of our power or
ability to consciously design or fabricate them. So we shouldn’t confuse Hallucination with
Imagination which is self-guided and willful and no more revelatory than if we
were talking to ourselves. So we can say
that Imagination comes from the shallowest part of ourselves. Visions come from the deepest, and there they
may very well be linked to the Collective.
(21)But if we accept that the
Spiritual is secondary to the Material then there are serious Theological
consequences to such thinking. First, we
can decide that the Polytheists were right, or more right then the Monotheists. The Truth is that there probably was a
contest between competing non-transcendental “Gods”, that is, between the
Spiritual Visions of competing peoples.
The Greatest God would be that God with the greatest sum total of
collective intensity supporting it. But
such “Gods” would not necessarily be mutually exclusive. The top of Mount Olympus was like a Country
Club Estate with new members like Hercules and Theseus moving in all the time. The
Polytheist Nations each had a Pantheon of Gods and from Country to Country it
became understood that certain Gods described so similarly that it became
generally assumed that they were the same Divinities going by different names. For instance the Greek Ares was Rome’s Mars
and then we have the couplets of Athena - Minerva, Artemis - Diana, Aphrodite –
Venus and the list goes on. Heck, I even
had a Dream of Artemis-Diana. To find
out more about it see my video “The Faculty of True Discernment”.
(22) Yes, at that most
extreme level where ‘God’ becomes thoughtless and unmodified, you know, just pure
unelaborated spirit, the Transcendental God we were talking about in Part Two,
well, yes, that ‘God’ would have a certain sameness. After all, how many different ways are there of
describing Nothingness? But also, at this level, as stated before, God
would be providentially useless, or worse than useless, as in the Buddhist
sense of encouraging nihilism by rewarding the pursuit of those who value
nothing in this Wonderful World of ours.
Buddha had said “Desire is the Source of all Suffering”. Well, is that supposed to be a Religion with
any kind of moral guidance? Really, the
Desire Buddha would stomp out is also the well-spring of all that is good and
beautiful, isn’t it?
(23)So, yes, we must remember
what our Mesopotamian friend said 4 or 5 thousand years ago, that God is our
Dog and if we are to feed Him then he needs to learn to do a few tricks and be
useful to us. That means that Religions
need to be useful. A Religion that gets in our way needs to be cleared out
of the way. And People need to be useful
too, if not to others then at least to themselves. Useful to some Ideal, some Art, some
Thing. The Ultimate Meaning of Life may
just consist in making things better than the way we found them. The Unifying Ideal that brings us together may
be more than just loving each other but loving what we do, you know, a
Humanity’s striving for Excellence in every facet and then appreciating each
other for having achieved it.
(24) In the same way that particles of iron
dust are lined up and made coherent by the invisible influence of a magnet, so
we can envision so many billions of individual persons being made into a
Coherent Civilization by means of a compelling deterministic collective undercurrent
that animates all of our thoughts and feelings. But such a collective impulse can only gain
sufficient force through an overwhelming public consensus and the power of Mass
Belief. The more we can all agree in our
Moral Vision, the more coherent our Collective Divinity will become.
Does this mean that Religion
is of our own creation and not a matter of Divine Revelation? Well, yes and no. I believe our Collectively
Created Vision would in time crystalize in the Astral Spiritual Realms as an
objectively accessible Collective Consciousness, and that in an Age to come our
Young People will have Dreams and Visions of Ideals we still have yet to place in their Way.
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