Re: Zeitgeistmovie -- The PM Refugees' Forum

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Date Posted: 19:35:45 09/18/07 Tue
Author: iteo
Subject: Re: Zeitgeistmovie
In reply to: Roger 's message, "Re: Zeitgeistmovie" on 12:00:14 09/17/07 Mon

Roger, It seems we have come full circle!

Here you are using logic to convince me of things that I now recognize as being beyond logic! :-)

Recall that it was you who taught me that 'logic is overrated' (and boy did that comment drive me crazy at the time) � but you were and continue to be right.

In any event, I won't get too involed in a linguistics argument. It doesn't really matter if the Latin word for Sun also means Son or even sounds the same.

When I use the Sun-Son pun, as you say, you look for the original ancient meanings, as any logically person would. I suggest that we live in a dream and things don't necessarily work in neat linear ways nor does everything have a neat cause and effect relationship. The word Sun/Son is a pun I suppose, but one that is meant to evoke meaning.

In my opinion, it falls into the realm of "synchronicity", a phrase that Carl Jung came up with to describe meaningful coicidences. You could easily argue that the rhyming of Sun/Son is merely a coicidence - so I doubt I will convince you of anything, but...

The Hindus say that our existence is nothing but "a dream of Shiva's". Buddhists teach that this world is an illusion. The Ashtavakra Gita says that this world is only imagination, or "pure consciousness".

�It is in the infinite ocean of myself that the mind-creation called the world takes place. I am supremely peaceful and formless, and I remain as such.� [7.3]

�Knowing everything as just imagination, and himself as eternally free, how should the wise man behave like a fool?� [18.7]

I'll give you a brief example of a synchronicity I experienced the day after my epiphany. I went into work as usual, and during the morning I overheard my boss on the phone say the word "apocalypse". My boss was an extremely liberal, ex-hippy who hated conservatism and never in my 7 years of working there did he ever discuss anything of a religious nature. So I couldn't believe my ears and wondered if I had heard right. After he hangs up, he turns to someone in the office and says "Hey Roger, do you think this is the apocalypse?"

I was astounded by this coincidence! But it is only due to my epiphany that I realize that synchronicities are not mere coincidences. I believe that the words Sun/Son not only rhyme, but that the rhyming is a form of synchronicity, a coincidence that has meaning. In a purely logical word, this would appear to be nonsense.

But I am now reasonably convinced that our existence and experiences are all a dream. A dream of a single consciousness that we perceive as many billions of separate individual consciousness' due to dualistic thinking. Now before you dismiss me as someone lost in his own pollyanna dream-world, please hear me out.

I planned to make this whole idea into a new post on my blog, so I thought I'd write it here first. This will be an absurdly long post and you may not even bother to read it, but hopefully you will some day.

As I stated, the eastern religions stress that this is only a dream and exists only within our imagination. Now of course I know how ridiculous this seems on the surface, but lets dig a little deeper. First, since you are fortunate enough to realize that our existence is not simply a material world with no meaning, I am willing to bet that you admit to not fully understanding our plight and perhaps why God allows suffering and evil to exist and other esoteric ideas such as this, yes? In other words, that you are not so arrogant as to assume you have our existence fully understood and you have nothing new to learn, correct?

Then, I'd bet or hope that you'd be willing to admit that there may be (even if you are unable to understand it) some validity to religous teachings that billions of people in the world believe. Teachings that managed to survive for thousands of years. Since my epiphany, I am now of the opinion that teachings that are still followed after being around for thousands of years are probably are worth investigating.

So perhaps you can agree that the idea that so many ancient teachings say that this is just a dream (and that this belief is still shared by many billions of people), should at least be considered - even if these ideas don't immediately resonate with you or make sense according to your world-view.

In regards to this being a dream, whereby synchronicities are perfectly "logical" because anything can happen in a dream that is all part of one mind, there is a book by Stephen laBerge, Ph. D., of the Standford University Sleep Research Center called " Lucid Dreaming - The Power of Being Awake & Aware in Your Dreams".

In it he quotes the experiences of people past and present who have had lucid dreams. Back in 1938, a German doctor named Dr. Harold von Moers-Messmer (who had "an unusually logical mind" according to LaBerge) wrote about his own experience with a lucid dream in a psychology journal:

"From the top of a rather low and unfamiliar hill, I look out across a wide plain towards the horizon. It crosses my mind that I have no idea what time of year it is. I check the sun's position. it appears almost straight above me with its usual brightness. This is surprising, as it occurs to me that it is now autumn, and the sun was much lower only a short time ago. I think it over: The sun is now prependicular to the equator, so here it has to appear at an angle of approximately 45 degrees. So if my shadow does not correspond to my own height, I must be dreaming. I examine it: It is about 30 centimeters long. It takes considerable effort for me to believe this almost blindingly bright landscape and all of its features to be only an illusion".

This dream, like the one I believe we are experiencing now, was so real, he had great difficulty believing it was an illusion. I suggest that our dreams are a microcosmic version of the macrocosm dream.

Now probably you too have had dreams that you thought were completely real, perhaps nightmares, only to wake up with a jolt and perhaps with great relief say "whew, just a dream". But during the experience, you believed it. you may have felt anxiety, fear, etc. Real emotions that may have even caused your physical body to sweat profusely. You've probably had dreams where you interacted with other people, people who seemed to be separate from you and had their own agendas and thoughts and feelings.

I myself have had only one or two lucid dreams. Not more than a year ago I was in a dream and it occured to me that perhaps I was dreaming. I thought about it long and hard and even tried to test if I was dreaming - and funnily enough, I came to the conclusion that no, I was not dreaming - it was real. Only to wake up later and realize that it was a dream.

Anyway, consider this just food for thought. I doubt that this will resonate with you right now, but if you've actually read this, I can only hope it acts as a seed and over time will germinate and perhaps will resonate with you some time in the future.

:::::::

On a different note, you say about the Sun and Earth being our father and mother:

>>"That's fine for you, but as a Christian, I do not believe this, or anything like it."

Back in 1963 Frank Waters had the unique distinction of being the first white man with whom the Hopi Indians shared their secrets and their myths with because they knew it was now time to share their knowledge with the world. In "The Book of the Hopi", the Hopi story of creation states the following:

��Man, fully formed and firmed, proudly faced his Creator.
�That is the Sun�, said the Spider Woman. �You are meeting your Father for the first time�

The funny thing about the Father/Mother concept is that it even holds up to logic! The Earth feeds us, clothes us, nurtures us, just like a mother. But she can do none of this without the life giving rays of the Sun: the Father/Mother motif is perfectly apt.

Now the thing I didn't realize until my epiphany is that the Sun and Earth are living, conscious, beings. Not that they think like us of course, but that they do have an intelligence, it's just that it is just very different, foreign compared to ours.

But since I doubt that even I would have believed this prior to my epiphany, I wouldn't blame you one bit if this means absolutely nothing to you.

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