Cosmos ex Natura 4: Mayan and Christian Redeemer's Blood

Maya mural depicting scenes of the creation story and,

at the center, the maize god, who crowns himself king.

To broaden the horizon we will examine one other creation story from the Maya to see how this parallels essential features of the creations processes and heroic sacrifices of other religions, particularly Christianity.

When Cortez arrived in Tenochtitlan the Aztecs marveled at the Christian religion, because its rituals of blood sacrifice in drinking Christ's blood and eating his flesh and his gruesome crucifixion as a sacrifice, by Abba the Father God so closely paralleled their own abundant blood-letting sacrifices to appease the Gods and keep the sun in orbit. Far from appreciating these similarities, the Conquistadores reacted with violence to this alien religion, in dismemberment of not only the priests but also the musicians who played at traditional rites, in a frenzied denial of their own religion's foundation in the endlessly flowing blood of the redeemer.

Early in the conquest the notorious dismemberment and slaughter

of Aztec musicians because they were celebrating a heathen festival.

Like the monotheistic world view in the older Mayan creation, there is a heaven above and an underworld below, in this case a succession like the seven layered heavens and hells of Sumeria and Babylonia:

The Mayas' religion taught that there were 13 layers of heavens above the earth. They also believed nine underworlds were below. They thought that they lived in the fifth creation of the world. The previous four worlds had been destroyed by a great flood. At the beginning of the fifth world, the gods created humans from corn.

Again we have an intelligent design scenario very much like the Elohim making the world in a number of days:

In the first stage of creation, before anything else, the world was nothing but sea and sky. Then the Maker stretched a cord across the sea and sky to create the four corners of the earth.

In the second creation, the Modeler made mountains, lakes, forests, animals, birds, and insects. Although the Maker was happy with the creations, these organisms couldn't speak, pray, keep track of time, or most importantly, show their love and appreciation by returning nourishment to the gods. Dissatisfied, the Creator Couple commanded a flood that eliminated all life on the earth so they could start over.

We now enter an era where we find messianic heros who break the umbilical cord between life and death in a severely sacrificial round very similar to Christ's crucifixion, the celebration of the Eucharist of soma and sangre and the return of the Lord in glory. This third stage is the legend of the hero twins:

The father and Uncle of the Hero twins were great ball players. Unfortunately, the court where they played caused great noise, disturbing the Lords of Death in the Underworld of Xibalba (Place of Fright). After trials set forth by the Lords, the Father and Uncle were put to death and buried under the ball court. The father's head was severed and placed in a tree as a warning to others.

As in Eden, we have the woman sent into exile over the forbidden fruit, under pain of childbirth, but unlike Eden it is a woman tricked by the father into becoming the mother of the heroes:

One day the Father called a girl over to the tree. She complied when she was asked to hold out her hand. The Father spit in her hand, impregnating her. When this girl's father found out, she was banished to the middle world of humans. She had twins who she named Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the Hero twins.

The twin heroes again challenge the Gods of darkness just as did their father and uncle:

One day they were playing ball like their father and uncle before them. Their gleeful shouts were heard down below in Xibalba. The Lords of Death were affronted. These twins were no more humble than the others. And so messengers were dispatched, summoning them to a ballgame in Xibalba.

The twins now become messianic heros in the same vein as Jesus. Like Jesus they must be sacrificed and die so that they may be resurrected from the dead to return in power. Like Jesus they must endure trials and torment to become the heroes they are destined to be:

The Twins were challenged to a series of ordeals, each in a special "house". In the Dark House they were given a torch and two burning cigars. They were supposed to return these in the morning just as they had received them. Their father and uncle had let the torch burn out, and they had smoked the cigars. But the Hero Twins knew better. They swapped a macaw's scarlet tail feathers for the torch's flame. And they stuck fireflies on the ends of their cigars. When they were sent to the Razor House, sharp blades were supposed to cut them to pieces. But they convinced the blades that their job was to cut up animals, not hero twins. And when they were sent to the Jaguar House, they distracted the tigers by feeding them bones. The Cold House they survived by locking out the cold. The Fire House didn't burn them to ashes, but only toasted them golden brown.

It was when they were sentenced to the Bat House, they made their first mistake, in accordance with their destiny. Hunahpu decided to peek outside the blowgun and see if it was morning yet. When he did so, a bat sliced off his head and it went rolling out onto the ball court of Xibalba. His brother called all the animals together, asking each to bring its favorite food. The coati brought a squash, and with the help of the gods this became a new head for Hunahpu. Meanwhile the Twins told a rabbit to hide outside the ballcourt. When the Lords of Death started the game, they used Hunahpu's head for the ball. As far as they were concerned, this made them victors automatically. But when they kicked the ball, Xbalanque deflected Hunahpu's head flying toward the rabbit's hiding place. The rabbit hopped off, and the Lords of Death thought it was the bouncing ball and raced off in pursuit. The boys got Hunahpu's head back and put the squash in its place. When the game began again and Xbalanque gave the ball a particularly energetic boot, it split open and all its seeds came spilling out. The Hero Twins had defeated the Lords of Xibalba. So the Lords of Death, with all their tricks and all their tests couldn't kill the Hero Twins.

Now the hero twins have to go to the underworld and harrow hell as Jesus did, in this case being so completely obliterated that they are ground to dust and scattered in the water, thus enabling them to reintegrate by becoming the food of the fishes:

But still the boys knew that they would have to die for their quest to be complete. They even knew how the Lords of Death would kill them. So when they were called before the Lords of Xibalba and challenged to a new and different game, they knew it was a trick. "See this oven?" said the Lords of Death. "Bet you can't jump over it four times." "We're not falling for that one," said the boys, and without any further ado they jumped right into the flames. At this point the Lords of Death made a big mistake. Instead of throwing Xbalanque and Hunahpu over a cliff or hanging their bodies in a tree, they ground their bones on a grinding stone and sprinkled them in the river.

The twins now come back to life, performing miraculous resurrections, just like Jesus bringing Lazarus back from the dead:

This was the only way that the Twins could come back to life. And come back they did, first as catfish and then as their normal selves, healing others and even being able to cut out their hearts in a sacrifice and restoring them in a resurrection from the dead. The Lords of Death asked that a dog be sacrificed and then brought back to life. And when this was done, they asked that it be repeated with a human. And when this too was accomplished, they asked the Twins to sacrifice each other. So Xbalanque dismembered his twin and cut out his heart. Then he started dancing and commanded Hunahpu to get up and join him. And when Hunahpu got up as good as new, the Lords of Death were caught up in a frenzy of delight.

Left: The Dream of Mary (Christoforo Simone dei Crocefissi) Sacrificial blood strems from her Tree of Calvary (the place of the skull). Right: Tree of the Middle Place Blood mother of the corn from the place of the skulls. At the crown of each is a bird - a Christian pelican picking its flesh for blood and a quetzal (Campbell) .

Now in a twist of turning the tables, the twins cuts the hearts out of the Gods of the underworld, overthrowing them as Jesus aspired to do, in the final conquest of Satan, who like the Gods of the underworld, led Jesus to his death, having already taunted him to cast himself from the pinnacle of the Temple, so that he might show he can save himself as the Son of God:

"Now do us!" they cried. And so the Twins sacrificed the two foremost of the Lords of Death. Only they didn't bring them back to life. And the other Lords knew that they had been defeated, and from that day forth Xibalba had lost its glory. The Twins took the head of First Father from the tree in which it hung, and they put him back together and restored him to life. They left him there in a place of honor beside the ballcourt in Xibalba.

Finally, like Jesus, the twins ascend to the heavens:

And then the Hero Twins, Xbalanque and Hunahpu, their heroic quest complete, ascended into the sky and became the sun and the moon.

Cosmos ex Natura 3: Vedantic and Buddhist Cosmologies

Images from Indus valley, including Shiva in lotus posture as

Pashupatinath - Lord of the Animals (centre)
and sacrificial images suggestive of Kali (right).

The religion coming out of the Indian subcontinent is rich and diverse, overflowing with both male and female deities and deeply absorbed in a contemplative tradition that runs back, long before the Vedas, into the Indus valley planter cultures of Harappa and Mojendaro.

It is here that one can find images of a Shivaic godhead complete with trident, sitting meditative in lotus pose, as Pashupatinath or Lord of the Animals, the shepherd king consort to the dark Dravidian planter goddess Kali-Ma, the creatrix and destructress of all beings, gorging bodies in her mouth, whose name is time, who also beckons far back into ancient roots in the fertile crescent, in chthonic deities, like Ereshkigal and whose bloodied sacrificial offerings continue to remind us of the ancient power of the Goddess, whose resurgence, spells out a newly wholesome message of female emancipation.

From these very early roots, long before the Aryans brought the Rig Veda and their own brand of worship of the warrior god Indra down from the steppes, has sprung the tradition of transcendental contemplation that has left its mark echoing through the Upanishads and lays the sacred ground for both Jainism and Buddhism as contemplative religious paths.

Shiva and Shakti, another manifestation of Kali as youthful sexual goddess, in consonance with Inana and Dumuzi of Sumeria, come to spell out one of the most sumptuous, fertile and perplexing religious cosmologies spawned by human culture.

Tantric Genesis in the deep coitus of Shakti and Shiva

In the Tantric origin, like the Eden story, everything comes down to sex, but this time sexual union is the creative source of the entire universe, for the very beginning is reality in a state of complete sexual fusion – a contemplative fusion between mind and body, in which everything is a state of holy and complete bliss.

As the partners retreat from coital union, Shakti, as the physical aspect begins to dance the dance of Maya or illusion, in which the conscious mind of Shiva now perceives all the diverse interacting material forms of reality and all individual sentient beings become fully absorbed in the separate phenomena of the complex interacting reality we perceive around us. Tragically the subjective mind thus loses sight of the cosmic unity and becomes distracted by material phenomena, ultimately becoming a plethora of conscious beings lost in egotistical engagement with the physical world.

Three fundamental attributes differentiate the Tantric cosmology from the monotheistic one:

Firstly the universe is founded on complementarity, and one in which both the sexes, both as woman and man and as Goddess and God, are integral, co-eval and interdependent, rather than a universe formed by an absolute hierarchical creator God.

Secondly the cosmology articulates clearly the root of the existential dilemma and mystery in the complementary relationship between conscious experience and physical nature, which are barely differentiated in the monotheistic description, founded on a covenantal dialogue with God and the historical trials and tribulations of human frailty in the face of God’s designs.

Thirdly, because Shiva and Shakti represent cosmological principles present in all of us, rather than separate deities aloof from fallible humanity, the contemplative quest provides us with a path back to the condition of cosmic integration, because the process can be reversed, in the first person, by the individual following the path back to the primordial condition.

The cosmos as a dream in the mind of God: Vishnu, the sustainer,
dreaming reality in the form of Brahma
appearing as a lotus emanating from his navel
overlooked by Lakshmi the faithful devoted wife.

However, this is only one of many cosmological dialogues in the Indian tradition, some of which veer as dangerously into hierarchical male dominance as monotheism itself. Alongside the Tantric origin we have the image of the entire history of the universe being a dream Vishnu is dreaming as he lies on a boat in a lake with his consort, with the phenomena of reality emerging from Brahma – a lotus blossom emerging from his navel. Vishnu also forms a trinity, called the trimurti in which Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva are creator, sustainer and destroyer.

Elephanta: The trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva reflect a similar trinity of An, Enki and Enlil of Sumeria. While Enki masturbates to fertilize the primal waters, Krishna likewise fertilizes the womb of the universe.

From an even more fundamentally patriarchal perspective we have Krishna, the ultimate male cosmokrator, cum gigolo, planting his transcendental seed into the primal chaos to give rise to the universe, in a manner reminiscent of Enki of Sumeria, who masturbated to fertilize the waters and give forth the fertility of Sumer from a purely male procreative urge.

This patriarchal fertility take-over extends to the cosmological dominance of conscious spirit over material nature. In the Geeta 14:3 Krishna (an incarnation, of Vishnu the sustainer, who forms a trimurti with Brahma the creator and Shiva the destroyer), declares to Arjuna the wisdom beyond knowledge, that the sages neither die nor are reborn when the universe is recreated, for it it is He who fertilizes the womb of the cosmos:

The eternal cosmos is My womb, in which I plant the seed,
from which all beings are born
O Prince! O illustrious son of Kunti!
Through whatever wombs men are born,
it is the Spirit itself that conceives, am I am their Father.

Moreover he declares that the law(s) of nature are fundamentally flawed:

Purity, Passion and Ignorance are the Qualities
which the law of nature bringeth forth.
They fetter the free spirit in all beings.

The Bhagavad Gita portrays the existential condition as a necessary state of holy war, even against one’s own kin and teachers, because in the midst of the battlefield, Krishna teaches Arjuna that in one’s pure unswerving devotion to himself as godhead, and renunciation from the egotistical pulls of gluttony and desire, no act in the physical world, however destructive, is sinful. In an allegorical sense of course this is a call to do battle with reality in the name of devotion to the ultimate Godhead, couched in the manner of a teaching in meditation and yoga of action.

Krishna as cosmokrator incites Arjuna to holy war against
kith and kin in the name of the indestructibility
of the sages who come to realize his true God nature.

But this is the same type of unswerving devotion that led early Christians to offer themselves to the lions rather than recant their faith and leads young Muslim men and women too today to commit violent atrocities in suicide bombings of the innocent, including women and children in the unswerving belief that this struggle, or jihad, is ordained by al-Llah and that they will immediately come to see his face in heaven, and if they are male, have the pick of fragrant virgins in paradise.

The Gita is a call to holy war even more uncompromising than those of Jihad and Crusade, because it is couched in a battle without pity or reason against one's own kin and teachers alike. It is clothed in the deception that the battle is justified, because it is couched as the jihad, or struggle, of the soul to reach the dispassionate independence of the eternal sages. This is both dangerous and a fundamental genocidal deceit, because it is the very claim Krishna is making as cosmokrator, beyond even the transient womb of the universe, that is used to justify actions which, from any natural, social, or ethical perspective, are wholly destructive to survival, to kinship, and to the passage of the generations (2:19):

He who thinks the spirit kills, and he who thinks of It as killed are both ignorant. The Spirit kills not, nor is It killed. It was not born; It will never die: nor once having been, can it ever cease to be: Unborn, Eternal, Ever-enduring, yet Most Ancient, the spirit dies no when the body is dead.

Really it is Indra the Aryan war god speaking in the guise of transcendental Krishna, so as to finesse the patriarchal mutual defection of warfare on claims of being the absolute godhead. This is clear in the running conversation (2:2):

Why yield, just on the eve of battle,
which does no credit to those who call themselves Aryans,
and only brings them infamy and bars against them the gates of heaven?

Despite Radha and Krishna being worshipped as a dyadic duo and the belief the God's power in the world comes through his consort, the dyadic complements arise only as a secondary result of the impregnation of the universe as womb vessel by the sacred seed of Krishna as Godhead, thus perpetuating the myth of male as creative essence and woman as mere earthen vessel.

Despite the followers of Krishna sometimes also perceiving him, along with other male deities, in the dyadic form of Radha-Krishna, in a pseudo-Tantric pairing that some Vishnavites believe is essential to his power, this pairing of opposites is only generated once Krishna's primal procreative force has entered the transient womb of the universe. The natural complementarity of the sexes is thus kept secondary to ultimate male power.

Little wonder then that we find followers of such movements have subservient female supplicant wives and why India is plagued by the caste system, bride-burnings, killing of the girl child and consignment of the widow to the funeral pyre, or a life of penury begging outside a charnel house on the Ganges.

At its cultural zenith, the Vedantic tradition produced the Upanishads (to sit down near), which free the Soul or atman from its bondage, in becoming one with the eternal cosmic Self or Brahman, which can be realized through the Yogic paths of devotion and meditation, forming one of the most penetrating cosmological insights about the nature of conscious experience, to which all traditions since owe a debt of gratitude.

The Upanishads free the Self from the confines of the creator deity, in a dialogue, as much with Death, as with God:

Death said: The word the Vedas extol, austerities proclaim, sanctities approach - that word is Om. ... The Self knows all, is not born, does not die, is not the effect of any cause, is eternal, self-existent, imperishable, ancient. ... The Self is lesser than the least, greater than the greatest. He lives in all hearts. When senses are at rest, free from desire, man finds Him and mounts beyond sorrow. Though sitting, he travels, though sleeping is everywhere. Who but I Death can understand the God is beyond joy and sorrow. (Katha-Upanishad 2)

Although the self is still couched in the patriarchal, we are now in a spiritual territory of sitting near the guru attaining realization, rather than violently at war with one's cousins, as Arjuna was in the Gita.

Into this rich and fertile tradition came a new innovator, who unlike many religious founders, from Jesus to Muhammad, set up a middle path, founded on peaceful coexistence and extreme non-violence, although many of his followers have also tarnished the path with intrigue bloodshed.

Buddha, having followed a path of extreme asceticism, declared a more moderate position of renunciation of worldly desire as traps of the ego, setting out a notion of mortal sentient beings escaping the shackles of a life of suffering caused by attachment to desire for worldly pleasures, possibly spanning many cycles of birth and death in an ongoing round of reincarnation, driven and affected by karma, both in this life, and across many lives.

This cycle of suffering is avoided by becoming one with Buddha nature in nirvana, which, cutting through the spiritual materialism of the objective notion of Self, is neither Self (atman - an essence of things that does not depend on others), nor non-Self (anatta - the absence of limiting self-identity in people and things), but rather the still centre of the cyclone of the turning world, in a cosmology of redemption through meditation in the abyss of conscious existence, without need for any God.

However, in addition to remaining silent on whether the world is eternal or non-eternal, finite or infinite, on unity or separation of the body and the self, complete inexistence of a person after nirvana and then death etc., Buddha also denied that the self existed or was reincarnated. Rather there is only an agglomeration of constantly changing physical and mental constituents or skandhas (form/matter, sensation, perception/cognition, volition, and consciousness, as cognizance or ground experience). Thus the concept of karmic reincarnation remains both controversial and ambiguous, being merely a self-perpetuating dynamic of transient features.

Moreover the central thrust of Buddhism, like all patriarchal religious paths, remains centered on the supremacy of the conscious condition over the transient material phenomena of samsara, or illusion, inherent in the natural world, and the source of suffering in the first place. Thus the Buddhist dharma, or path, consists centrally of renunciation of sensual and physical desires, and with them, the biological foundation of genealogy, survival, and the diversity of life.

The mortal condition is tragic and a true cause for suffering and compassion. But the viability and fertility of life and of sexual life is central to the sanctity, vitality and creative meaning of the entire process, not a condition of mere imperfection and suffering. Thus renunciation is only a remedy for the maladies of ego not a royal route to enlightenment.

Because all sentient beings are entwined in this existential condition the connectedness between us is as pivotal as our equanimity in the face of our mortality. Renunciation is merely a symptom of a need to escape obsessions, rather than an elixir of enlightenment in itself. Social interconnectedness, love and sexual engagement are just as essential as renunciation, to provide a life of ecstasy and fully-embodied meaning, health and wholeness and for the passage of life to flower anew on the planet.

Some Buddhists realize the importance of the Tantric truth of interconnectedness in the sexual rite of Yab-Yum or Father-Mother and in the Bodhisattva ideal of bringing enlightenment to all sentient beings., although the ideal of personal renunciation and the emphasis on conscious redemption over the physical wellbeing of the planet still dominates.

Buddhist sexual yoga of Yab-Yum or Father-Mother

Despite the central void of the Buddha non-self, Buddhist's do describe the cosmos just like the many layered heavens and hells common to monotheism and fertility and astronomical religions. There is a highest perfect heaven, then a lower imperfect paradise, next the human condition - a central arena for realization, then the animal realm driven by base instincts, next the hungry ghosts on the borders of hell, and finally a hell of torment. Only in the human realm can one become enlightened and escape the unholy life cycle of samsara, so the other realms become shadow lands.

There are major issues here. The universe is distorted into an enlightenment machine for humans and humans only, with the other life forms simply becoming degraded repositories of an essentially human consciousness. Sexual life and the life cycle has again become degraded to an distracting obstacle to enlightenment, manifesting the gross aspects of samsara, in a manner similar to the downfall of natural paradise and woman in the Fall from Eden, to become the bestial nature from which the base instincts of sex betray us in the eyes of God.

Renunciation impedes our relationship with nature as much as our interconnectedness. Although Buddhists are taught not to take the life of any sentient being, Buddhism tends to see all biological organisms merely from the subjective perspective, as sentient beings caught in the wheel of karma. Buddhist thinking thus tends to judge biological values of life, death and the ecology purely in terms of its effect on the karma of sentient beings in the cycle of reincarnation, not their biological importance for our survival, their beauty, rarity, or the genetic vulnerability of the organism, or its species.

Although some writers portray Buddhism as intrinsically green in its principles, and some branches of Buddhism embrace nature and its mysteries for their capacity for enlightenment, this confusion between sentinet beings and biological reality can lead to an incapacity to deal with ecocrosis, to protect rare species from highly invasive ones and to value nature as highly as consciousness. Bringing the life force back into the realm enlightenment would thus be a win-win situation.

Following chapters turn the tables on this situation, showing that we need to consider how the biological parameters defining the fertility, sanctity and diversity of life shape the nature of conscious experience and the underlying natural principles necessary and conducive to the ongoing fertility of life, before trying to formulate any religious or moral imperatives.

By better understanding the dynamics and complexity of the natural cosmological process we can realize ourselves more completely what the outlines of the existential condition must correspond to in the physical world and thus realize a truer and more meaningful understanding of the complete, whole psycho-biological existential condition encompassing both consciousness and the natural world.

Cosmos ex Natura 2: God acting in History

Memling: The Judgment

The Judeo-Christian cosmology, and with it the Muslim view, is an account of a God acting in history. One of the strongest acclamations of the monotheistic deity is that it is abstract and transcendental, neither represented by icon, nor idol, and that, rather than following the seasonal cycles of agriculture, or the indulgences of civic pride, represents a living covenental relationship with a true God of reality, who lies beyond mere images of stone.

The monotheistic cosmological narrative is strongly influenced by Genesis, which begins with two conflicting accounts, an Elhoistic sabbatical creation and the Yahwistic allegory of Eden and the Fall.

The sabbatical creation is both charming and contradictory to the natural order. The plural Elohim create heaven and earth, but the earth is primal chaos without form or void - tohu vohu. Their spirit then moves on the waters and there is light and they divide the light and darkness into day and night. Next day they devise a firmament, dividing the waters, and call it heaven. The third day they divide the waters under heaven into land and sea and install the plants. The fourth day the Elohim make the sun, moon and stars, somewhat innocently after the plants, although they did have light coming from somewhere. The fifth day they bring forth fishes and whales and on the sixth day the land animals, and woman and man 'in their likeness' – i.e. the likeness of the plural Elohim - and give them dominion over nature. So on the seventh day the Elohim took Shabbat and rested.

The Eden account is wildly contradictory to the sabbatical creation and sets up a very different sturm and drang. Yahweh having created the earth and heavens and the garden ostensibly in 'the' (one) day, is alone and lonely and generates first Adam from dust breathing life into him and later Eve out of Adam’s rib, telling them all the trees in the garden are for their use, except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The serpent then persuades Eve that the forbidden fruit is to make one wise and she persuades Adam and they eat, only to find they have become accursed by Yahweh and driven from paradise by a flaming sword to sweat by their brow under pain of childbirth. God sets man to rule over woman and curses the ground, turning it to thorns and thistles which man must conquer to survive. From this falling out, all the Pandora’s box of disease and misfortune and alienation between God and humanity ensue. The Shekhinah, or feminine face of divinity, retreats until returning as fractured shards, in the end of days.

These complementary Elhoistic and Yahwistic accounts are also faithfully copied into the Quran, despite Muhammad's claim that they were narrated directly by the angel Gabriel, and moreover recited in the Elhoistic plural:

"O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female" (49:13)

"And We said: O Adam! Dwell you and your wife in the garden and eat from it a plenteous (food) wherever you wish and do not approach this tree, for then you will be of the unjust." (2.35)

The Fall (Brothers Limbourg)

As we move through the Pentateuch, and pass from the mythical age, of Sarah, Hagar and Abraham and the founding of the tribes under the older fertility deity El, to the trials of the outsider hapiru - Miriam, Aaron, and Moses and their followers, the personality of Jehovah Adonai, or the Lord God, becomes increasingly that of a jealous patron guardian of the Hebrew faith, acting in history alongside the history of the Hebrew Israelites, locked in a dysfunctional marriage with the bride Israel, punctuated by cursing her enemies, and in turn, the bride herself, for her infidelity, in hankering towards the 'false' deities of the nations. Nevertheless Jeremiah acknowledges the people of Jerusalem said they had peace and prosperity only when they baked cakes for the Queen of Heaven, and the Asherah remained in the temple until the time of Josiah shortly before the Exile into Babylon.

The first mention of hell comes in the Christian version of Deuteronomy. Moved to jealousy, God declares "For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the lowest hell". However in the Jewish Masoretic text "lowest hell" simply reads as "nethermost parts of the earth" following the older idea of sheol - the underworld to which all living beings return. The differences are likely to be a reflection of the translation of Hebrew 'sheol' to Greek 'hades', which was a gloomy twilight afterlife, rather than the Zoroastrian fires of purification.

Later the Zoroastrian idea of the cosmic renovation of Ahura Mazda - the divinity of placing one's mind - i.e. wisdom - over Angra Mainyu, or 'destructive mentality', and with it its torments of purification of those who had succumbed to the ignorance of the 'lie', became the seed of the apocalyptic movements of the time of Jesus. The God acting in history now no longer simply hearkens from the creation to the ongoing life of the bride Israel, but this destiny now converges on the Day of Judgment, or Requital, in which there is an ultimate division between heaven and hell as the two afterlives of paradisiacal atonement with the divine, and eternal torment and damnation in the fires.

By the time of Jesus, apocalyptic thinking had entered into the end of days scenario, well-described in Revelation, marked by tumult and triage, in which heaven and hell as well as God and Satan are diametrically, and diabolically, opposed, also exemplified by passages from Daniel, Zechariah, Enoch, and Essene documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

While God is then described afresh by Jesus and some apocalyptic contemporaries, as a loving and forgiving Father - Abba, his one act of redemption is to sacrifice his only begotten 'son' to achieve this forgiveness, in the crucifixion, as a Paschal lamb exploded to apocalyptic proportions, giving rise to an ongoing blood rite of soma and sangre, which endlessly repeats this bloody murder throughout history, in a manner not unreminiscent of the Aztecs.

Yeshua's entire mission is cast in the shadow of Satan and his overwhelming in the confrontation that eventually became his violent death. In John the battle between light and darkness is the central theme being unraveled. In Luke and Matthew, Jesus is said to be tempted by Satan to cast himself from the pinnacle of the temple to show that the son of God will be saved. The whole idea of Christ and the Second Coming pivotal to the ongoing credibility of Christianity is founded on the idea of the cosmic hero returning on the right hand of Power, in an unveiling, in which a third of all living things will perish and the Lord will return to judge the quick and the dead. The New Testament is thus littered with unfulfilled expectations that Christ would return in the same generation, and increasingly born-again Hellenistic ideas of a rapture in the Day of Judgment when the faithful will levitate into heaven, leaving the natural realm of the 'late planet Earth' behind.

Signorelli Resurrection

The stark eternal division of heaven and hell is blurred by several notions. Jewish thinking refers to gehenna, or hell, as a place of purification, lasting from a year to eternity in a worst case scenario. Catholic thinking interposes purgatory as a place for the souls in grace to be prepared for heaven. Greek Orthodox thinking also opens up the possibility of apocatastasis - restoration to the primordial condition, in which good and evil are reintegrated into paradise. Muslim ideas are derived from the Jewish folklore and scripture of Muhammad's time and so the Quranic word for hell is jahannam i.e. gei hinnom or gehenna.

The Quran, as an offshoot of Jewish cosmology and eschatology, likewise traverses a scheme of God acting in history from Eden through the Fall into an apocalyptic historical unveiling in a day of judgment, accompanied by astronomical eclipses. Muhammad likewise is cast as the final of a succession of prophets from Moses through Jesus.

However the Christian and Muslim ideas of heaven are very different. The Christian heaven is apparently populated only by sexless angels, not having the need for biological reproduction in eternity, after Jesus' somewhat casual rejoinder on divorce, that those in the resurrection would neither marry, nor be given in marriage. By contrast, the Muslim paradise - jannah or garden - is bursting with seductive black-eyed houris, females whose virginity is renewed every day for the endless sexual pleasures of mankind, if their many wives were not already more than enough, although once again the need for procreative sex beyond the mortal coil, seems to have been relegated to mere social gratification.

On what happens after death and before the Last Judgment, there is little agreement among Christian traditions. Catholics and Orthodox differ in that the former believe God judges each person to heaven, hell or purgatory while in the latter they are just assigned these places until the last judgment.

Following the dogma of physical resurrection of Jesus, all souls are to be reunited with their physical bodies in the day of judgment and will then experience physical pain and pleasure, perfecting the nature of heaven and hell alike. How this can make any sense in biological terms escapes the imagination. There is also unresolved debate about whether Christ will have a thousand year millennium rule on Earth.

According to Islamic eschatology, after death, one will reside in the grave until the appointed resurrection. The sequence of events according to Muslim belief are the annihilation of all creatures (effectively a cosmic-genocide), resurrection of bodies, and the judgment of all creatures, including the jinn. Sunnis and Shia also debate the role of Jesus in the judgment, some Shia saying he will stand behind the Mahdi, the Islamic version of the apocalyptic messiah, and worship al-Llah in Mecca, while some Sunni say there is no mahdi except Isa (Jesus).

The monotheistic eschatology of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic paths is a linear causality leading from Genesis to Apocalypse in which there is little any of us can do about anything, because although we must have free-will to be able to sin, the only purpose for life and existence is to be caught in an ultimate division between slavish obedience to God's commands, along with the additional moral caveats from murder to greed and envy, resulting in eternal life in which all our desires are fulfilled, or exerting our will to rebel against this divine order, only to find ourselves in eternal torment.

The stumbling block for cosmology and our place in the universe is that, once this whole contrivance is taken on board, its entire ultimate meaning and purpose is frozen. What is the meaning or purpose of eternal damnation, or eternal heaven? What useful role could we possibly have to play in these imaginary and highly transfixed fantasies? Can any decision we might make in heaven have any effect on the cosmic order? Was the rebellion of the fallen angels and Satan and their casting out into Satan's own noir polar domain of Hell an indication that God himself is a flawed being - a dictator who stands in the way of the ultimate reality, as a legislative demiurge, Yaltabaoth, Samael (blind) or Saklas (fool), which the Gnostics accused him of being? In closer scrutiny, the whole monotheistic edifice, along with the pagan notions of the Trinity, virgin birth and physical resurrection in Christianity, is as flawed as the iconic deities that 'pagan' polytheists are accused of worshiping, as false Gods.

Even more unclear is why a God who ostensibly can create all the magical complexity of paradise, not to mention the vast and complex universe we know exists today, would use it for the menial purpose of judging sin and then condemning the good, bad and ugly alike to seemingly meaningless lives trapped in positive and negative utopias splitting the natural reality asunder into a dualistic schism that renders heaven as incomplete as hell is.

Now that we do understand the huge number of galaxies, each with billions of stars and planetary systems potentially capable of supporting life, why God would focus exclusively on the third rock from the Sun, and within it, the small company of the Hebrew tribes as his elect, lacks both credibility and cosmological sense. To focus his apparently all-too human personality traits of jealousy over whether he was followed as Yahweh, let alone as Ahura Mazda, or equally dominant and cosmic Krishna, or even as dark Shiva in Tantric consort with Shakti, as Yahweh was originally paired with Asherah, runs counter to his being a cosmological deity worshiped by all people in all cultures as an intrinsic revealed truth.

Why the entire evolution of the universe and potentially countless other living systems should be reduced to this one parochial theme of jealousy between God and a few human tribes a couple of millennia before we came to the planetary tipping-point, of scientific discovery, technological explosion, nuclear mutually assured destruction, mass extinction of biodiversity, climatic bifurcation and ecocrisis remains unresolved.

The worst feature of this cosmology is that, rather than presenting a deeper solution to the existential dilemma, it merely reproduces the all-too linear causality we associate with the physical world, with domination and submission, and the enforcement of moral codes, thus not solving the existential dilemma at all. At the same time the concept of dominion over nature leads directly to rape of the planet and its natural resources, just the sort of crisis of triage Revelation anticipates, as a form of misguided human impact.

Heaven and Hell are really a projection of the prisoners' dilemma game and its polarization between cooperative paradise and the temptation to defect and its consequences in mutual betrayal, exploded from a real and tangible social context on to the entire cosmos at large in a way which violates, insults and exploits the very natural realm God is believed to have conceived, at the same time dooming us to a meaningless role as mere pawns in a game of "do what I say, or burn forever".

Although accepting that the primal order was the God-given natural paradise of the Garden of Eden surrounding the Tree of Life, all monotheistic accounts then proceed to exert conflict and violence against the natural order in the name of dominion over nature, partly as a punishment for Adam and Eve's transgression to live by the sweat of their brow conquering the weeds and thorns of the wilderness wracked by the pains of childbirth.

Moreover, all monotheistic paths, from Eden's Fall, on to Deuteronomic Law and Muslim Sharia, set men over women, just as God is set above men. Women are thus accused of original sin as the betrayers, seducers and enticers, to be seen and not heard, to be sequestered in burqas for fear their sexuality will drive faithful men mad, or mix up the patriarchal basis of tribal inheritance, doomed to be of only half the value of a man and subject to dire penalties, such as stoning, for sexual transgression.

From this end, both sexuality, and nature, become cursed as the slime of bestial physicality, which all men need to abhor, to seek the true God in the heavens, beyond the fallacy and fallibility of the mortal coil. But this is a root violation of 'mother nature', upon whom we depend for our very survival, unlike the indulgence of belief in an invisible paternal deity, and it is a violation of the ultimate altruistic covenant of sexual procreation between woman and man as interdependent beings, each contributing a commensurate share of their genetic endowment to the passage of the generations, in which the female makes the principal investment in parenting.

Again implicit in this story of betrayal is a profound weakening of the spirit, because we all inherit the mantle of fallibility, being sinners who can only redeem ourselves, not by our own innate wisdom, nor by deep transcendental meditation, but merely by becoming effective slaves of al-Llah, or worshiping Christ as Lord of the cosmos, despite the hints from the oldest gnostic texts that Jesus himself sought to give us the keys to assuming Christ nature, and the records of early Muslim historians that Muhammad changed his mind, resulting in the satanic verses cursing the Goddess.

Monotheism, rather than offering a cosmological solution, is actually a social and cultural mechanism by which moral forces and submission to an higher power are combined, to evoke phalanx societies, which have a high degree of internal cooperation, which enables these societies to survive in crude Darwinian terms, by being more able to compete with and conquer other societies. Despite their pretenses to being under the banner of God, the merciful and compassionate, the realities are enforcement of moral codes through splitting the souls of believers between glowing accounts of heaven and dire penalties, both in this life and the imagined after-life, for any transgressor.

Richard the Lionheart beheading 2700 Muslim men,
women and children at Acre during the Crusades (Hallam).

The clash of the cultures between the Muslim and the tacitly Judeo-Christian Western world, although also accused of being rampantly materialist, exemplifies this incapacity to heal monotheism into one autonomous faith, except by conquest and submission, because of the intrinsic violence of domination and utopian supremacy implicit in all monotheistic faiths.

The history of military violence spanning the Jewish zealots from Jesus' time through to the Prince of Curls who burned hundreds of Christians at Naryan, half way from Mecca to Saba in S. Arabia shortly before Muhammad, through Christian obsessive suicidal martyrdom, bestial Crusade and diabolical Inquisition attests to this. The equally violent genocide of 700 Jewish men at Medina ordered by Muhammad for fear they might betray the Muslims, and repressive Muslim division of the world between the Domains of Islam or submission to al-Llah and Dar al Harb - the 'Domain of War', abetted by conversion by the sword, in the perceived ultimate utopian victory of Islam, as a monolith of scripture, law and state, tells the same unholy story. Endless wars and genocides perpetrated in the name of these three religions make this association clear.

We therefore need to turn to other paths, including those of the East and of diverse cultures, to see if any of these show a deeper reflection of the cosmological and existential condition, or merely represent extremes of cultural diversity in the human imagination.

Cosmos ex Natura 1: Introduction

Following on from the second to last posting, I'm going to unfold a creative blog on the idea that what we have learned from the scientific description of reality can become the foundation for a spiritual revolution that forms a tectonic ground-shift, transforming our view of religion, sweeping away many of the false assumptions, and diabolical contrivances, lurking in the hallowed cloisters of traditional religious systems.

Religious traditionalists take two approaches to science. The soft-core approach is to say science and religion are not inconsistent and can come together to give us a more complete view of reality. Both the Vatican and liberal Episopalians, as well as some Sufis, embrace this point of view in some aspects, leading for example to a greening of liberal religion. In this vein we arrive at the notion that we can live in a best of all possible worlds, where science is a description of the objective physical universe, which does not deny our capacity to have faith, and to embrace the higher realities of spiritual belief, in the conscious dimension.

The soft-core school clings to the idea that, although living with the stark reality of the covers thrown off reality, in the scientific age of the third millennium, we can continue to retain relatively unscathed treasured values such as agape or brotherly love, and even the highly pagan sacraments of soma and sangre, despite nature being a matter of tooth and claw, and science remaining uncompromising in its objectivity.

The hard-core approach, by contrast, is to champion religion in a collision course with unproven scientific assumptions which are perceived as contrary to religious scripture and bluntly materialistic in nature having no useful guidance in how to live our lives.

Evolution is a primary target and Creationism and its offshoot, Intelligent Design, claiming novelty but actually echoing from the days of Augustine seeks to finesse the scientific description with the idea that life, the universe and everything is somehow too complex and wonderful to be merely the blind groping, and pulling up by the boot-straps, of random evolution, and thus bears the imprint of a creator designer.

A second direction of assault on the scientific description is that it fails to explain consciousness or free-will and thus fails to give any adequate explanation for the meaning and purpose of sentient existence, or why we should be good people rather than violent criminals or suicidal maniacs.

Religion, by contrast has always been steeped in the description of conscious reality and the ultimate questions of morality, sin and whether there is life after death. Religions from diverse cultures from Islam, through Hinduism and Buddhism to Taoism and diverse ethnic beliefs, have different twists to this tale, including the idea from Indian philosophy that consciousness is 'finer' than gross matter and so any cosmology has to stem from primary consciousness rather than the secondary aggregates of material form.

In this blog, we are first going to look at each of the traditional views of major religions and see how well they actually address the existential dilemma in their cosmological narratives and then compare these with the difficulties and perceived limitations of the scientific description. This will then provide a more level playing field, in which the scientific description, which is already founded on the skeptical principle, as a root means of testing validity, can be compared with religious cosmological narratives based on affirmative belief, and religious narratives put to the same kind of scrutiny, rather than hiding behind the indulgence that belief somehow permits double standards, in which scripture and religion are on an unquestioning pedestal, as the revealed word of God or al-Llah which cannot be questioned by mere sentient beings.

Biblical Scholar

Consciousness, God and Apocalypse

Two comments from John in a dialogue:

Around the 2012 time frame there are kind of two main possible worlds of the many worlds that await us on earth and even Revelations in the Bible is fairly accurate about those two possibilities. There's either a rapture-like event where the planet gets access to conformal like degrees of freedom which can cause some confusion cause you can't tell left from right and there's variable physicality but it overall is supposed to offer more control over the environment and be easier on the soul. The other possibility is the everyone back in caves with a reddish cosmic disaster sky to essentilly start over again for another 300,000 year cycle.

God is and is not distinct from creation. God is a prerequisite of creation and creation is a prerequisite of God's self-knowledge. Theologians have speculated on the possibility of something existing outside God. German mystic Jacob Boehme speaks of the ungrund, a sort of primal field of all potentialities which is the source of creation. This ungrund is not however the same as God. In more modern terms, we could say the ungrund is the zero point field and God is the consciousness which mediates between this and the emergence of all which is, energy as well as matter. Nicolai Berdayev proposes that the ungrund is in fact the primordial freedom, which is then brought to form by creation. Thus freedom is in a sense more fundamental than God.

No matter how civil the gloss, there are major problems with all these prophecies of apocalypse and theories about God in the universe.

Prophecies of a final end of days remain very real in evolving world culture and the ongoing clash of world cultures, to the detriment of our future survival and that of the living biosphere. The idea of apocalypse as 'unveiling' has permeated diverse cultures, because our own cultural falling out from nature has been an ongoing process of future shock in which we have become all too aware amid war and the rumour of war that a great shaking out is occurring in which the covers are relentlessly being thrown off reality in a tumult heading for a triage of all living beings. This is as real for the Aztecs and it was for the Zoroastrians who invented the final cleansing. It culminates in a genuine explosion of knowledge of the physical universe in the scientific revolution but is still accompanied by visions of final victory of religion seen through a glass darkly in the clash of the cultures.

Nevertheless it is a male fantasy of linear history, leading inevitably to a high-noon, in which the forces of light and darkness will be set in final opposition, instead of the complementarity that begets the complex conscious condition over evolutionary time.

The actual reality is that human culture has become patriachally dominant through the formation of male coalitions we call armies, amid urbanization, and that the male idea of a history of dominance has led to the sequences of conflict, famine, resurgence and delusions of final victory of our standard-bearer we call God, in a process which has, and is, seriously destabilizing our own future viability.

This kind of linear process converging on the 'end of days' is not the way the universe comes to generate life and consciousness, which is far from linear and steeped in complementarity between chaos and order, amid many cycles of astronomical upheaval, emergence of primeaval life, birth and death amid tooth and claw among predator, prey and parasite and host, and only indirectly, almost as an afterthought, comes upon the conscious condition and the emergence of love, altruism, morality and ethics as win-win evolutionary strategies in the prisoners' dilemma game life is.

One could take a leaf out of the Tao and the Tantric origin here, in which sexual fusion is the foundation of existence, and that all forms of interaction are a fragmented form of the act of love-making, but even this has led to all kinds of God delusions on both the male and female side, as soon as the parties have retreated far enough from coitus, to enter into the scrap of relationship dysphoria, amid value judgments about the illusory nature of the physical world, as the female's degenerate and blood-thirsty lower part in the cosmic embrace.


Just as humans use the construction of machines as their prime, if very clunky idea of cosmogenesis, in the form of a 'creator God' tinkering with some Pinocchio androids to see if they will distinguish good and evil, so more sophisticated attempts to move one step higher use the organismic analogy of a living being acting in history, generally replete with emotions, of which jealousy is a prime mover and retributor of 'divine justice'.

Both the machine and personality analogies have no meaning in the wider cosmological context. There is no evidence whatever that any of the process we see in cosmogenesis, from the big bang, through galaxy formation to evolution of living organisms, or in the embryogenic process that leads to ourselves among living organisms, nor the structure and function of the human brain, ever has, or could have been, externally created by a third-party agent, rather than develop through a series of self-interactions. Neither is personality, as such, an adequate generator of complexity, but rather, like the created machine, is a product, rather than a cause, of cosmogenesis.

The entire myth arises simply because we, as agents, are having a significantly dire impact on the planet, and tend to project on to the cosmos our own mistakes in amplified form, accompanied by a wistful child-like feeling of needing to attribute the consequences of our own partially destructive activities, on to a loving, but jealous, 'father figure', who takes ultimate responsibility for our folly, while chiding us, or threatening us with hell fires of damnation, if we don't mend our ways, and give our sole allegiance to Him.

While John's ideas about God are a good attempt to rationalize these ancient delusions into a more culturally acceptable entity, they still suffer from patriarchal nemesis. Firstly, while for each of us living in our own personal condition, subjective consciousness is undeniable and constitutes 100% of our experience of reality, God is an undecidable proposition inserted into the cosmic scheme without due or just cause to provide a creation myth based essentially on manufacture.

There is no evidence whatever that the cosmos needs and inside or outside third party agent for the cosmic process to flower to the point of conscious observers or beyond into the future. The idea of creation is the gloss humans try to put on the cosmic process by analogy with tool-making. All the evidence form the physical universe is that open complex systems are self-generating or interactively generating, not created. This is abundantly clear for living organisms, despite their structurally-stable genetic foundation, which then becomes the basis for a selective process leading to complexification and consciousness. At this point, it is we who are conscious participants in the future of reality and it is we who have to learn to come to take responsibility for our choices as the living manifestation of the redemptive process.

The key question that has to be asked here is not about God, or an inserted rationale for a creator in the process, but what the role of subjective consciousness is in organismic evolution, because no brain would so completely invest in such a process unless it had evolutionary advantage. It is this that is the crucible and arena for our conscious quest, and its fulfillment, not delusions of grandeur in the third person in the name of God.

The answer seems to be that free-will, quantum uncertainty and survival are linked in anticipating situations in the real world which in terms of classical computation would be intractable in 'encounter time' because they involve an exponential runaway of possibilities. In turn this seems to have accessed a deep interconnectivity across space-time, which we now call quantum entanglement.

This brings in a second question which is the role of consciousness in anticipating future states and modifying them through the action of free-will in a way which may come to collapse the wave function of the universe and hence all the hypothetical multi-verses of prophecy, premonition and fantasy, to create the unique path we call world history. It may be that evolution simply had to resolve the computationally intractable np-hard problem of the environment by resorting to chaotic holographic processing, and found that the laws of nature because of entanglement, then open up the space-time transactional route of anticipation of future states as well.

The only evidence we have for an agent like that John suggests in the universe is the biota, for it is the biota, and only the biota, that invoke this strange and fantastic contraption stuck onto the cosmic process some of us call God. It is only through the biota that we know consciousness is manifest, and despite its seemingly ephemeral nature, tossed in the annihilating forces of the universe, from black holes to big bangs, the biota still represent the 'inevitable' sigma of interactive fulfillment of the re-interaction of the founding forces of nature and the vehicle of sentient consciousness which gives us this existential dilemma in the first place.

Where some modern cosmic theorists do come a little closer to the mark is invoking ideas of internal symmetries and symmetry-breaking processes to explain the relationships between these forces which lead to such unbounded complexity. But again the idea that God invented the octonians or the exceptionally simple group E8 is a contradiction in terms, as silly as whether God invented the real numbers, when we know they are simply an axiomatic system possessing uniqueness properties of their own.

Now back to the God delusion and we find in John's very romantic account another fatal flaw in the form of the 'ungrund' or primal field, which forms another terrible condemnation of this idea as fatally patriachal as Marduk slaying Tiamat, in that the physical, and with it the feminine, are assigned to a passive slave role in merely being the female putty in God's male hands although possessing the ephemeral attribute of 'free-will' allowing a moment of 'splendour in the grass' before God intervenes to punish us for our sins of 'concupiscence'.

Whenever we find a description of reality in which the symmetry-broken complements descend into the dominance - let alone S&M role of creator and primal chaos, we need to stop and say to ourselves that the cosmic pregnancy has been aborted by a macho fantasy.

A prime example of this kind of male fantasy are the Mayan prophecies which were all based on mechanical cogs in a cosmology which at least in Aztec formulation resulted in a universe where thousands had to be sacrificed every season to keep the Sun on its course. We can't simply pick up pieces of this mechanistic cosmology and insert them into the new age of Western culture as 'prophecies' without completely fooling ourselves in our own superstitious state about the apocalyptic condition and without doing both them and ourselves a complete disservice turning genuine cultural traditions, which should be a warning to our own gullibility and risk-taking dominance into cyborg travesties of their original form, in a new age mold the originators would smart at.

Ultimately the buck stops here. Rather than speculating on prophecies, it is us who are the prophets of doom and salvation through taking personal responsibility for our actions on the biosphere and for the futures we invoke, both through the exercise of 'free-will' in collapsing the wave function of the universe into a beneficent or invidious 'destiny', and through our future-anticipating conscious awareness.

It is through us, and our emergent compassion, that the problem of existence will become a redemptive flowering of consciousness. Consciousness is participatory and it is only when we can cast God aside and stand up for the undeniable fact of our own participation in the flowering of conscious reality, that salvation will come to the world. This is where the messiah in each of us separates from our illusion of Abba and grows up in the conscious condition to become redeemers of the compassionate mortal coil as Bodhisattvas of the natural world.

John: I don't think I disagree with you anywhere. Consciousness and physicality are one down at the smallest level and there is no 3rd party God just the individual souls that all begin/end from where all is one and one is all.

In the first comment below, Egull claims we are nothing but the pawns of creator Gods, and that any thought of free will, democracy, or any form of biological autonomy, is in fundamental error - that we are, in spite of the lack of any real evidence - living in a deterministic, nightmare universe pre-determined for all time by creator Gods. This typifies the worst in religious thinking, which, in its essence, robs us of our autonomy, and any responsibility for our actions, by making us utterly helpless husks of the religious delusion that we are nothing but slaves to God. What is all the more alarming about this point of view is that, such beliefs are not as silly as they might sound, but are shared by the world's great religions, and a vast number of people on the planet.

This demonstrates how completely the messianic awakening comes into direct collision with religion as spiritual bondage in the 'binding together' religio asserts. The messiah takes complete personal responsibility, not just for one's own fate but for redeeming the fate of the entire cosmos. By contrast, the religious follower is a helpless slave of God. The fact that these two are in collision becomes all the clearer when one realizes that Yeshua's own life and death, far from being manifest as the Son of God, cast him into the oblivion of an untimely crucifixion for blasphemy and insurrection, like all the prophetic voices in the wilderness crying before him.

Those who would martyr themselves in Yeshua's shadow, in suicide bombings dedicated to being the slaves of al-Llah, need to comprehend that such a mission is a fallacy, because Yeshua's death had meaning only because he was taking, at least in his own mind, cosmic responsibility for his own actions, and the damage done; in pitting his own will against those of the religious forces of the day; not assigning himself to the vain hope of seeing God's face in paradise, surrounded by 32 black eyed virgins, no matter how many innocents are maimed, or killed along the way.

Postcards from the Edge of Apocalypse

Apocalypse is a cosmological nightmare which brings about the very situation it is trying to avoid, each moth flying into the candle flame of self destruction, while attempting to cast the others into the furnace, if they will not submit to the divine plan.

By reifying the conflict of final struggle, apocalypse pits the forces of dark and light in an irresolvable diabolical confrontation, from which mutually assured destruction is all but inevitable.

This is an ultimate tragedy, because it sacrifices the fertility of natural regeneration for a triage of the death of life.

It is easy enough to understand the religious impulse to apocalyptic awakening, because it inflates the religious experience into an explosive cosmic coup de grace, in which all the currents of history, right from the very source, come into a cataclysmic focus, the old order is cast away as a material husk, and ignorance is sublimated in the crucible of 'cleansing fire'.

But this is also the polluted toxic fire of hell and annihilation rather than the sweet aromas and rainbows in the valleys of reflowering paradise, when to be the fulfillment of the Fall it is the Tree of Life, hidden since the foundation of the world, that is its natural inheritor.

The failure of apocalypse to give an absolute assurance of reflowering Eden leads to a realization that this whole apocalyptic dilemma has been created by religion to put a flaming sword between us and paradise for the purposes of keeping us in religious bondage.

The founding Edenic myth and its dysphoric relationship between woman and man, man and god, and human destiny is thus tainted by the intentional perversion of human nature, and cannot be trusted.


The idea of coming into a tumultuous age of reckoning is nevertheless an honest account of our free-fall from a fruitful and generative gatherer-hunter existence in the wilderness, into urban societies, rising and falling, amid war and the rumors of war, precipitating tumult, and wholesale destruction of the living biosphere.

The concept of the unveiling, throwing the covers off reality, no longer through a glass darkly, is likewise a subterranean stream-of-consciousness account of our growing awareness and scientific knowledge of the subtlety and complexity of the natural universe, from the human genome to the paradoxical conscious existential condition.

Nevertheless the apocalypse is a tainted current on the collective consciousness, driven by delusory ideals of a God of creation, jealous by the dubious 'virtue' of his desire to be worshiped alone, driving all the currents of history towards a falling out between the virtual or actual slaves of God and the infidel who choose to think, act, or believe otherwise.


In this falling out, a triage results not only of every living thing but the oceans, stars and the sky, thrusting the delusion into a cosmic frame of narcissistic and self-absorbed dimensions, rather than a redemption of the living planet from the devastating impacts of human industry and exploitation on the planets future viability, both for us and our sibling species.

The utopian dimensions of apocalypse lead towards an ultimate end-game of bluff and counter-bluff using weapons of mass destruction as pawns in the game of brinkmanship, in the name of one religious path of the one true God, or another, aiming to trick the unbelievers into a state of subservience in the domination of the planet by the one God, each of these paths hunger for, with a gluttonous 'spiritual' greed and little care for the consequences, given God on our side.

Apocalypse could be the unveiling of the bride in matrimonial reunion, healing the falling out between woman and man and the rape of the planet by humankind, reflowering of the tree of life of the generations, but it won't be, unless we break out of the tender-trap constructed by religious delusion and learn to take personal responsibility for the fate of the natural world and for our own personal part in its redemption.

This is the destiny of the messiah, of the bodhisattva, and of the compassionate benefactress once they cast off the shackles of religious oppression for the untrammeled depths of personal experience.