Re: Brad is that you on the bike?..Mick is that you in the basket?
stark raving brad
location: over here. no, over HERE. HERE!!! sigh. you dummy.
listening to: experience, strength, and hope
registered: 2002.05.16
posts: 1638
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actually, that's your elbow. you never could tell the difference.
fortunately, i passed the afternoon reading Joseph Campbell whilst PBS ran
Deepak
Chopra specials in the background.
Campbell: The idea of Buddha consciousness is of an immanent, luminous awareness that
informs all things and all lives. We unthinkingly live by fragments of that consciousness, fragments
of that energy. But the religious way of life is to live not in terms of the self-interested intentions of
this particular body at this particular time but in terms of the insight of that larger consciousness.
(cut to Carl Jung smoking a pipe, who then says "Religion is a defense against the experience
of
God.")
Campbell: You have to let go of the imagined idea of Jesus. Such an image of one's god
becomes a
final obstruction, one's ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner
of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are
prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind.
But you mustn't live in terms of your own ego system, your own desires, but in terms of what
you
might call the sense of mankind - the Christ - in you. You have to identify yourself in some
measure with whatever spiritual principle your god represents to you in order to worship him
properly and live according to his word.
Moyers: In discussing the god within, the Christ within, the illumination or the awakening that
comes within, isn't there a danger of becoming narcissistic, of an obsession with self that leads to a
distorted view of oneself and the world?
Campbell: That can happen, of course. That's a kind of short-circuiting of the current. But the
whole aim is to go past oneself, past one's concept of oneself, to that of which one is but an
imperfect manifestation. When you come out of a meditation, for example, you are supposed to end
by yielding all the benefits, whatever they may be, to the world, to all living beings, not holding
them to yourself.
You see, there are two ways of thinking "I am God." If you think, "I, here in my physical presence
and in my temporal character, am God," then you are mad and have short-circuited the experience.
You are God, not in your ego, but in your deepest being, where you are at one with the nondual
transcendent.
so, yes, my l'il arsemaster, it appears we are related after all. oh, the shame.
S
stark raving brad
(view)
actually, that's your elbow. you never could tell the difference.
fortunately, i passed the afternoon reading Joseph Campbell whilst PBS ran
Deepak
Chopra specials in the background.
Campbell: The idea of Buddha consciousness is of an immanent, luminous awareness that
informs all things and all lives. We unthinkingly live by fragments of that consciousness, fragments
of that energy. But the religious way of life is to live not in terms of the self-interested intentions of
this particular body at this particular time but in terms of the insight of that larger consciousness.
(cut to Carl Jung smoking a pipe, who then says "Religion is a defense against the experience
of
God.")
Campbell: You have to let go of the imagined idea of Jesus. Such an image of one's god
becomes a
final obstruction, one's ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner
of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are
prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind.
But you mustn't live in terms of your own ego system, your own desires, but in terms of what
you
might call the sense of mankind - the Christ - in you. You have to identify yourself in some
measure with whatever spiritual principle your god represents to you in order to worship him
properly and live according to his word.
Moyers: In discussing the god within, the Christ within, the illumination or the awakening that
comes within, isn't there a danger of becoming narcissistic, of an obsession with self that leads to a
distorted view of oneself and the world?
Campbell: That can happen, of course. That's a kind of short-circuiting of the current. But the
whole aim is to go past oneself, past one's concept of oneself, to that of which one is but an
imperfect manifestation. When you come out of a meditation, for example, you are supposed to end
by yielding all the benefits, whatever they may be, to the world, to all living beings, not holding
them to yourself.
You see, there are two ways of thinking "I am God." If you think, "I, here in my physical presence
and in my temporal character, am God," then you are mad and have short-circuited the experience.
You are God, not in your ego, but in your deepest being, where you are at one with the nondual
transcendent.
so, yes, my l'il arsemaster, it appears we are related after all. oh, the shame.
