God loves me.

reply to post by bb23108


As Einstein once said, if you can't explain it to a five year old, you don't understand it yourself. If I need a dictionary for you to ask a simple question, then maybe I'm not the one with a problem. Perhaps you're trying to trick me into evading the question, but the fact that I keep asking you to clarify says I'm not going away.

Think beyond this presumption of God as Other. If God is not a separate entity, but is the Reality in which we all arise, does your argument hold up? It does not in my opinion, but I already know my opinion, and was asking for yours.

Again, that is not the Judaic belief. If I were to take that into account, there would be no argument at all. The fact is, Judaics are not in support of your idea, so it's kind of irrelevant, right?

reply to post by bb23108


Are you having difficulty using the quoting function? Because my replies seem to have found their way into space usually reserved for your responses to quotes.

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
reply to post by bb23108

 

Are you having difficulty using the quoting function? Because my replies seem to have found their way into space usually reserved for your responses to quotes.

I was, but it is fixed now on the prior page.

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
Again, that is not the Judaic belief. If I were to take that into account, there would be no argument at all. The fact is, Judaics are not in support of your idea, so it's kind of irrelevant, right?

I understand now that it may be irrevelant to you and your argument, but I asked the question because you seemed to be dismissing the Divine altogether with your responses. I also posted several times on this thread about how the Reality I am describing is what Jesus also apparently spoke of - so not necessarily irrelevant to Christians.

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
reply to post by bb23108

 

As Einstein once said, if you can't explain it to a five year old, you don't understand it yourself. If I need a dictionary for you to ask a simple question, then maybe I'm not the one with a problem. Perhaps you're trying to trick me into evading the question, but the fact that I keep asking you to clarify says I'm not going away.

LOL. Have you read your op in your sig to any 5 year old? How did they do?

reply to post by bb23108

I understand now that it may be irrevelant to you and your argument, but I asked the question because you seemed to be dismissing the Divine altogether with your responses. I also posted several times on this thread about how the Reality I am describing is what Jesus also apparently spoke of - so not necessarily irrelevant to Christians.

Well, taking a leaf from your book - please post it again.

Additionally, most Christians do not describe it the way you do. Your descriptions and explanations have a distinctly new age taste, which is definitely not Christian.

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
Well, taking a leaf from your book - please post it again.

Okay, here it is from several pages ago on this thread:

Originally posted by bb23108
reply to post by NewAgeMan
Given Jesus is attributed with saying "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" - and given he used the word "all" - I can only feel that he was teaching that such Love is the case in Divine Communion in which nothing is held back. "All" means everything - utterly surrendered to the Divine. In such Communion, the process that is the ego-I is undone. How else could such Love even be possible?

In such a Graceful Blessing, the ego-I is shown to be the moment to moment unnecessary gesture of separation away from God, and no longer animated in any such love-embrace with the Divine. As soon as the ego-I is re-animated, that Communion is gone! What is so love-blissful is to actually let go of all the separation, fear, contraction, unlove and to recognize Reality Itself.

And Jesus is also said to have confessed "I and my Father are one". This statement seems self-explanatory.

Jesus instructed that one should "Love your neighbor as yourself". This is only possible if we realize that we are all already one in Reality. Jesus did not say "Love your neighbor as you love yourself", but to love your neighbor AS yourself - because we are not separate!

Even in human love, when one is truly in love with another person, there is no longer a sense of separate self in those moments of fullest feeling. Boundaries are gone, there is simply the love-bliss of our inherent oneness..

reply to post by bb23108


To care about others with complete disregard for yourself is tantamount to emotional suicide. You will not care what happens to you. How is that conducive to survival? We're not spirits, we are material vessels. Unless you don't care if you die?

The key is balance. Learning how to serve others while also serving yourself. I wish to control my own life so that I can master such a practice. If I am always devoting myself to someone else, I will never learn what makes me happy.

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
Additionally, most Christians do not describe it the way you do. Your descriptions and explanations have a distinctly new age taste, which is definitely not Christian.

It is certainly true that most Christians do tend to assume God as the Great Other - and to the extent that they do this, your argument is a valid one to present. But God as the Great Other (Super-Entity) is NOT what Jesus was advocating - so it is not some New Age re-interpretation.

Here is another post I made elsewhere, thanks in part to a quote the op of this thread we are on now posted:
Jesus had mastered and transcended the earth realm via the Indivisible Divine Spirit Light above. He understood that the earth is just one realm, and that what is senior is above this realm. Having realized the Divine Light that is above this world, he confessed being one with the Father because such realization is absolute absorption in God. He also was Master to his followers and blessed and initiated his disciples with the gift of the Divine Spirit Light. He understood that God is not the Great Other that the Old Testament presumed, but God the Father and he are one. He also taught that no one is separate from God as illustrated in this quote:

John 17:20-26
New International Version (NIV)

20 “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

24 “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

25 “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. 26 I have made you[a] known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

The authority Jesus speaks of is his being able to transmit the Divine Indivisible Eternal Light of God to all who prepare themselves with real devotional surrender to God and through loving all beings as oneself - i.e., living in accordance with his two great commandments:

30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’[a]

31 The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Jesus walked the earth as Spiritual Master, not as some Great Other that was going to magically cure everyone's problems. Man has created the idea that God is the Great Other, but Jesus demonstrated and granted non-separation from God through his Blessing and initiation into esoteric practices regarding the Spirit Breath and Light.

Such was his authority and mastery over the conditional realms of earth and heaven, and his message is essentially an esoteric message relative to God as the Light above, and how to prepare the body-mind for this reception through love. Unfortunately, the esoteric aspects of Jesus' great message were mainly driven underground by the Romans when Christianity became their official religion. Hopefully, more and more Christians can re-discover these esoteric gifts their master revealed for all.

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
To care about others with complete disregard for yourself is tantamount to emotional suicide. You will not care what happens to you. How is that conducive to survival? We're not spirits, we are material vessels. Unless you don't care if you die?

Again, you are making the assumption of "Other". Jesus said to love others as oneself - he did not say to only love them and not oneself. In my prior post, I tried to show how Jesus was teaching non-separation of all arising in the Divine.

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
The key is balance. Learning how to serve others while also serving yourself. I wish to control my own life so that I can master such a practice. If I am always devoting myself to someone else, I will never learn what makes me happy.

Yes, balance is very important - without real equanimity of the whole body-mind, what is spiritual is much less accessible because the physical body-mind is all that tends to be noticed. When the body-mind is balanced, free of the droning noise it is always up to with endless unnecessary thinking, craving to fulfill desire, etc., etc., then the spiritual aspects of life can open up - and the seniority of what is always and already prior to the body-mind (consciousness-light-love-bliss) can be revealed.

Real spiritual life does not seek to exclude the body-mind - in fact, the beginnings of spiritual life necessarily must take the body-mind totally into account and completely responsibly. That is what Jesus' two great commandments are about - to turn the whole body-mind to what is Prior (God) which gracefully allows the body-mind to become more and more balanced. On this foundation, spiritual life more readily awakens - and Jesus would then initiate serious practitioners into the Light above, etc.

reply to post by bb23108

Again, you are making the assumption of "Other". Jesus said to love others as oneself - he did not say to only love them and not oneself. In my prior post, I tried to show how Jesus was teaching non-separation of all arising in the Divine.

Ah...okay. However, the materials from which your information is taken give just as much reason to judge as they do reasons to love.

That is what Jesus' two great commandments are about - to turn the whole body-mind to what is Prior (God) which gracefully allows the body-mind to become more and more balanced. On this foundation, spiritual life more readily awakens - and Jesus would then initiate serious practitioners into the Light above, etc.

Worship is the practice of self-repression in honor of that which is perceived to be worthy of exaltation. I believe that we should strive to be as great as that which is exalted - if we admire something, we should emulate it to the best of our ability. Strive to achieve equality, rather than 0 and 1 relationship where the finish line is forever out of reach due to our perception of it.

reply to post by bb23108

It is certainly true that most Christians do tend to assume God as the Great Other - and to the extent that they do this, your argument is a valid one to present. But God as the Great Other (Super-Entity) is NOT what Jesus was advocating - so it is not some New Age re-interpretation.

To that extent was the only intention of my argument. The rest of what you say, I agree with - but contextually, it is out of place concerning the popular beliefs of Christianity. Those are what I take contention with, and are what I continue to debate.

Jesus is love and we are love, so to love Jesus is to love one's self as love itself and from that context of the unconditioned ground of being and becoming, the egoic structure is dissolved and then we come into the presence of the life eternal (undying love) which is prior to an objective, conditional reality and the faulty notion of a separative self, and in the new domain of all possibility we are set free to freely love as we are loved.

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
Worship is the practice of self-repression in honor of that which is perceived to be worthy of exaltation. I believe that we should strive to be as great as that which is exalted - if we admire something, we should emulate it to the best of our ability. Strive to achieve equality, rather than 0 and 1 relationship where the finish line is forever out of reach due to our perception of it.

Your definition of worship is true in terms of conventional or false worship. In another words, if the one who is worshiping is assuming an "Other" (Great or otherwise) it is not true worship because it is already assuming separation, unlove. True worship is only possible when inherent non-separation is recognized - i.e., real love. In this recognition, worship is spontaneous, heart-felt devotion to That which is Reality Itself, not just a bunch of fake ceremonialism in the hopes of getting something or being relieved of some responsibility.

Originally posted by AfterInfinity
reply to post by bb23108

 

It is certainly true that most Christians do tend to assume God as the Great Other - and to the extent that they do this, your argument is a valid one to present. But God as the Great Other (Super-Entity) is NOT what Jesus was advocating - so it is not some New Age re-interpretation.

To that extent was the only intention of my argument. The rest of what you say, I agree with - but contextually, it is out of place concerning the popular beliefs of Christianity. Those are what I take contention with, and are what I continue to debate.

So you are saying you agree that the parts of the Bible that I am quoting do support the argument that the source/founder of Christianity was not teaching that God Is the Great Other?

reply to post by bb23108

So you are saying you agree that the parts of the Bible that I am quoting do support the argument that the source/founder of Christianity was not teaching that God Is the Great Other?

To be perfectly honest, I don't care what you quoted. Historically speaking, there's far more evidence supporting the possibility that Christianity is an amalgamation of a dozen pagan, wiccan, and polytheistic religions that had expanded and evolved over the centuries...which were consequently stomped out to erase their role in the development of modern Christianity. Constantine himself said that the majority of the Bible comes from other religions that were butchered, and select pieces chosen to create one consolidated religion to prevent all future wars in the name of any god.

Leaders of Christianity today do not support the idea of your "Great Other". To the, there is one god and one god only - the master of the universe, the beginning and the end. There is nothing higher. I don't agree with this, as I don't believe in gods. I believe in natural laws that might be considered divine, but not conscious entities ruling the universe.

reply to post by AfterInfinity

And to be honest, it doesn't matter to me what the roots of Christianity actually are. As I said on your thread "Love vs. Tyranny":

Whether the individual named Jesus existed in person or not doesn't dismiss the essence of the teachings associated with the one called Jesus. Those teachings are ageless and still relevant to this day - at least to the degree that people understand and truly practice them.

When the teachings of Jesus are considered, especially in terms of their esoteric nature, it does seem that such a person, appearing and working as spiritual master, did indeed exist. There is just too much wisdom in specific esoteric terms in his teachings for me to feel a group of ordinary men wrote all of this up.

reply to post by bb23108

And to be honest, it doesn't matter to me what the roots of Christianity actually are. As I said on your thread "Love vs. Tyranny":

My contentions are concerned with fundamental and traditional beliefs, not your claims. Your arguments are considered new age, and are irrelevant to the point I've tried to make.

reply to post by bb23108


I would think you'd be interested in the Christian gnostic texts. They reinforce the idea Jesus believed in this 'indivisibility'.

What Jesus believed is to me largely erroneous, I am more concerned with what the majority of Christians believe.

Originally posted by Lucid Lunacy
reply to post by bb23108

 

I would think you'd be interested in the Christian gnostic texts. They reinforce the idea Jesus believed in this 'indivisibility'.

Right, and unfortunately they were driven underground due to the esoteric nature of their message - i.e., basically were eliminated from mainstream Christianity from the beginning by the Romans because ecstatics in God had (have) no usefulness in the government's control of society!

Originally posted by Lucid Lunacy
What Jesus believed is to me largely erroneous, I am more concerned with what the majority of Christians believe.

I am not sure what your point is here.