For those of us who forgot our church history there is a link under the title above to a site which explains the concept of the Apostolic Tradition. In my earlier post today: "Taboo: Trump Card of Ego-Obfuscation," I made reference to an important passage in the Course where Jesus points out that the ego system may be fool proof, but it isn't God-proof. We might as well keep that in mind in another April fools' day reflection.
One of the fundamental modes of operation of the ego in creating its own substitute "reality" in order to replace and repress the Memory of Heaven, is the inversion of the relationships between form and content, or more generally cause and effect. We continually see in the history of shifts in perception - think of Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" - how viciously the ego defends itself against anything that challenges its perceptions, and its "truths." Never to be defeated however the ego always insures its own continued relevance by co-opting the new models once they become inevitable in popular opinion. We keep fooling ourselves that this time we've really found the truth, which is an evident manifestation of the fact that none of these truths are ever true, but only another justification of the ego's point of view, which needs to be modified to support the reality of the ego in order to be accepted by the orthodoxy.
Thus the very process of canonizing various newer truths which come to replace old truths in the course of time, entails their reformulation in terms which do not only not threaten or question the ego, but suitably reinforce its hold on power. In other words revolutions never change anything except appearances, which can fool us a while longer.
In light of the above we should go back and review the events of the time of Jesus in Palestine, and the recorded histories about that. The fundamental divisions that arose almost immediately was about the question if his teaching was for Jews or Gentiles, and the only correct answer is of course either both or neither, for he clearly transcended these categories in teaching of a Kingdom NOT of this world. It was Paul and others who followed - and Paul in particular had a pervasive influence on New Testament literature since he wrote before even the canonical Gospels were recorded, who evolved a theology which made the crucifixion central, and the related teachings of the eucharist, and the resurrection (of the body) as a future event.
In other words the way to render Jesus and his teachings harmless, emphasis was put on the life of his body, and the crucifixion, which were hateful events in and of themselves, and not on his teachings of love, which were sort of mangled in the process. The resurrection was re-explained as and event of the body, not of the mind. In the process the emerging mythology proposed Peter as the founder of the Catholic church, and reinterprets Jesus' saying to him that he should become a rock on which his "church" could be built, as about the physical world and actual buildings and congregations. And so Jesus' very universal teachings are turned into specific teachings pertaining to time and place, to some people not others, and another world religion (to be) is born.
Meanwhile in the absence of the teacher, who by interpreting only his bodily, earthly life as real, and not his message, the apostolic tradition is now the vehicle of succession for the substitute teachers, the popes. And the focus is now shifted from Jesus' teachings and the contents of his message to the people who claim to be his authorized representatives, and who legitimize themselves by dint of their very interpretation of his teachings. And so a very worldly process of form now comes to take the place of Jesus' early call to the apostles to "leave" the world and follow him. And again also this should not be (mis)taken literally. As the Course frequently points out it is about our investment in the things of the world, not about doing them or not doing them. The shift which the miracle represents is the birth of a present solution of spirit, of peace, to take the place of a future expectation of salvation, which the world always holds out, and which is by definition always illusory, since it is the child of thinking that the causes of the absence of peace in the present are in the past and therefore by definition are exempted from any real hope of change. Hence the last section of the last Chapter of the Course has the title: "Choose Once Again," for this is the most crucial teaching of the Course, that if we choose for the present, we can make another choice, instead of continuing to act out our role as a victim of our past.
Thus the miracle is the choice for God, and leaves alone the foolish choice for the ego, which we made too long already.
Copyright, © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.
Exploring ACIM in context of Abrahamic tradition.
"Questioning every value that we hold," with new readings of old familar terms
Exploration of biblical lore as metaphor, honoring the spirit of Johan Willem Kaiser, whose work was to lead me to recognize the authorship of the Course.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Cognitive Dissonance as a Defense against Truth
Under the title of this article you will find a link to some information on Cognitive Dissonance, at a site called www.learningandteaching.info. I will quote the salient opening paragraph:
quote
Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it to develop so that we become "open" to them. Neighbour (1992) makes the generation of appropriate dissonance into a major feature of tutorial (and other) teaching: he shows how to drive this kind of intellectual wedge between learners' current beliefs and "reality."
unquote
Throughout the Course Jesus uses cognitive dissonance in the active sense of the second half of the paragraph above as a constructive educational tool, while the ego uses it as a defense against what he is teaching in the sense of the first part of the paragraph above, quite along the lines of the original observations of Leon Feistinger.
The ego uses cognitive dissonance in the same way as the cult members in Leon Feistingers original research, i.e. to reinterpret contradictory information in such a way as to validate its model of reality. The "ego" of course in that sense is just such a cult, devoted to the untruth of the separation. Ken Wapnick in seminars and in his books has given the example of lucid dreaming where we half hear the real phone ringing in our room, but cope with it in our dream with an episode that involves a ringing phone, so that we never wake up and pickup the actual phone. In this sense then Christianity in making Jesus into a figure in the dream, and validating the world of duality, of time and space is the ego's way of explaining Jesus away. The use of cognitive dissonance in the Course is designed to show us how untenable that position is, through experience (non-dualistic), not through argument (dualistic), as the ego would have us do.
The many ways in which Jesus uses cognitive dissonance is by using familiar theological idiom from the Christian tradition in non-"traditional" ways, suggesting that he actually meant something else. Secondly he addresses us as "you," and we all start out studying the Course thinking that he is talking to us as individuals. Slowly however the dissonance grows because it is clear in various places such as the "Dreamer of the Dream," that he is not, and thus it begins to dawn on us that he is addressing us as what we are, the Son of God, or more precisely he is addressing our ability to change our mind (meta-noia) and choose the "present" memory of who we are over the seeming reality of who we think we are (ego/individuality), which then leads to increasing dissonance and discomfort in our lives as we resist this realization, and try to hang on to who we thought we were instead of who we really are, as Jesus is making us realize.
One of the most salient examples perhaps of how this works comes up in people's experiences with lessons such as Lesson 94, "I am as God created me." If one attempts to do those lessons at all we soon see the ego squirming and hollering it must be a lie, when the entire point of the lesson is that we start to shift our understanding, and our identification from the false self of individual existense, to our true selves as sons of God, and once we change our mind about that the lesson also starts to make sense.
Along the way we come up with many defenses, from the ridiculous to the sublime, including such things as teaching others ACIM, which is an excellent defense against learning it ourselves, and a huge temptation to make ourselves important in other ways. We can become influential teachers of the Course and other such nonsense. Or we can develop a special relationship with the Holy Spirit, and become HS groupies, hearing voices and telling others what to do, when evidently the central concept in the Course is that a messenger should realize that the teaching is meant first for himself, not to mention that it is never about behavior in the world. The point here is always that from the standpoint of individual consciousness we must project what we deny, and in this case this can take the form of denying that our own choice for the ego is a problem (and one that can be fixed, since the solution is also present in our mind), and attacking others for their choices for the ego is a perfect way of doing that, and the Course makes a handy weapon. It used to be even better when it was in three volumes.
Teaching the Course is clearly meant to be doing what it says, and therefore teaching by example, and teaching it in the formal sense is a side show from that point of view. The Course needs neither defense, nor explanation, it is complete in itself. Obviously however many of us can get help along the way from various teachers who may be a little more advanced in their understanding of the Course, and there is nothing wrong with that either. As the Course itself implies when the memory of who we are comes back to us, both the Course, its worldly teachers, as well as the Inner Teacher from the introduction (Jesus) become irrelevant, for in remembering that we are the Son of God, we will realize that Jesus was merely there as a symbol, as one who remembered before we did, and who could therefore lead us on the way home.
In the world, one of the many forms the teaching activity takes is the doing of translations, and this has happened under the leadership of Ken Wapnick, and of necessity -- since he does not and could not know all these languages -- his effort must focus on helping the translators with their understanding. Content comes first, and is then expressed in another medium, in this case a language. Approaching translation purely as transformation of one language into another without regard to content would lead to hilarious errors. However to the extent that translation is de facto impossible, and always limited in its ability to duplicate an exact parallel of the original, including all the word plays, etc., this is an endeavor that must be approached with a great deal of humility. And we should take the outcome with a grain of salt, and direct our attention to content, not form in our attempts to learn the material in another language.
My attention was recently drawn (again) to some issues in the Dutch translation, which I can appreciate, since Dutch is my native language. Harmen Kooremen is doing a lot of work on the semantic structure of the Course and has an interesting way of documenting that, which very much looks into the consistencies and inconsistencies in the usage in the Course. As a result of his work he has also been documenting tendencies in the translation to be excessively creative in Dutch, and thus sometimes lose the fact of the deliberate use of words in the original. Some of his comments are very interesting, and while it would not serve here to discuss the details, it occurred to me, as I was reading some of his articles recently on a Dutch ACIM list (ACIMNed on yahoo), that the issues he raises are equally important in English, because they are a reflection of our own difficulty in hearing what the Course says, and that the message really is as simple as it is. The temptation in teaching the Course in the formal sense is always in thinking that our understanding is a powerful contribution to the truth, or in this case that our translation would be such.
The way of the Holy Spirit would be to realize that we as individuals do neither teach nor translate, but perhaps we may be channels for the sonship to remember who we are. That is the only attitude which can, should, and undoubtedly would guide the process towards a successful translation, but it would not surprise me if some of the translators in Dutch or any other language, would over time see a need to revise the language as the appreciation for the semantic and didactic purpose of the original English text becomes clearer and clearer in their own minds. The only sane advice to any reader ould be to try and read the English text at least some of the time, if you can at all.
In some other way, in reflecting on this whole process, I also found a lot of help in my work in translating Mark from the Greek, which has prompted a lot of reflection of how translations happen. It is in essence of course the "opening of the understanding," as related in Luke 24:45 which the risen Christ performs to the Eleven which is the shift from form to content which occurs in us if we truly follow Jesus in leaving the world of duality and form, and starting to "know" (gnosis!) the non-dualistic reality which he teaches us. And it is only from this standpoint of content, not form, that there is any hope for any sort of translating or teaching in the world, in which we could be of service to others.
Copyright, © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.
quote
Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. It therefore occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas, and it may be necessary for it to develop so that we become "open" to them. Neighbour (1992) makes the generation of appropriate dissonance into a major feature of tutorial (and other) teaching: he shows how to drive this kind of intellectual wedge between learners' current beliefs and "reality."
unquote
Throughout the Course Jesus uses cognitive dissonance in the active sense of the second half of the paragraph above as a constructive educational tool, while the ego uses it as a defense against what he is teaching in the sense of the first part of the paragraph above, quite along the lines of the original observations of Leon Feistinger.
The ego uses cognitive dissonance in the same way as the cult members in Leon Feistingers original research, i.e. to reinterpret contradictory information in such a way as to validate its model of reality. The "ego" of course in that sense is just such a cult, devoted to the untruth of the separation. Ken Wapnick in seminars and in his books has given the example of lucid dreaming where we half hear the real phone ringing in our room, but cope with it in our dream with an episode that involves a ringing phone, so that we never wake up and pickup the actual phone. In this sense then Christianity in making Jesus into a figure in the dream, and validating the world of duality, of time and space is the ego's way of explaining Jesus away. The use of cognitive dissonance in the Course is designed to show us how untenable that position is, through experience (non-dualistic), not through argument (dualistic), as the ego would have us do.
The many ways in which Jesus uses cognitive dissonance is by using familiar theological idiom from the Christian tradition in non-"traditional" ways, suggesting that he actually meant something else. Secondly he addresses us as "you," and we all start out studying the Course thinking that he is talking to us as individuals. Slowly however the dissonance grows because it is clear in various places such as the "Dreamer of the Dream," that he is not, and thus it begins to dawn on us that he is addressing us as what we are, the Son of God, or more precisely he is addressing our ability to change our mind (meta-noia) and choose the "present" memory of who we are over the seeming reality of who we think we are (ego/individuality), which then leads to increasing dissonance and discomfort in our lives as we resist this realization, and try to hang on to who we thought we were instead of who we really are, as Jesus is making us realize.
One of the most salient examples perhaps of how this works comes up in people's experiences with lessons such as Lesson 94, "I am as God created me." If one attempts to do those lessons at all we soon see the ego squirming and hollering it must be a lie, when the entire point of the lesson is that we start to shift our understanding, and our identification from the false self of individual existense, to our true selves as sons of God, and once we change our mind about that the lesson also starts to make sense.
Along the way we come up with many defenses, from the ridiculous to the sublime, including such things as teaching others ACIM, which is an excellent defense against learning it ourselves, and a huge temptation to make ourselves important in other ways. We can become influential teachers of the Course and other such nonsense. Or we can develop a special relationship with the Holy Spirit, and become HS groupies, hearing voices and telling others what to do, when evidently the central concept in the Course is that a messenger should realize that the teaching is meant first for himself, not to mention that it is never about behavior in the world. The point here is always that from the standpoint of individual consciousness we must project what we deny, and in this case this can take the form of denying that our own choice for the ego is a problem (and one that can be fixed, since the solution is also present in our mind), and attacking others for their choices for the ego is a perfect way of doing that, and the Course makes a handy weapon. It used to be even better when it was in three volumes.
Teaching the Course is clearly meant to be doing what it says, and therefore teaching by example, and teaching it in the formal sense is a side show from that point of view. The Course needs neither defense, nor explanation, it is complete in itself. Obviously however many of us can get help along the way from various teachers who may be a little more advanced in their understanding of the Course, and there is nothing wrong with that either. As the Course itself implies when the memory of who we are comes back to us, both the Course, its worldly teachers, as well as the Inner Teacher from the introduction (Jesus) become irrelevant, for in remembering that we are the Son of God, we will realize that Jesus was merely there as a symbol, as one who remembered before we did, and who could therefore lead us on the way home.
In the world, one of the many forms the teaching activity takes is the doing of translations, and this has happened under the leadership of Ken Wapnick, and of necessity -- since he does not and could not know all these languages -- his effort must focus on helping the translators with their understanding. Content comes first, and is then expressed in another medium, in this case a language. Approaching translation purely as transformation of one language into another without regard to content would lead to hilarious errors. However to the extent that translation is de facto impossible, and always limited in its ability to duplicate an exact parallel of the original, including all the word plays, etc., this is an endeavor that must be approached with a great deal of humility. And we should take the outcome with a grain of salt, and direct our attention to content, not form in our attempts to learn the material in another language.
My attention was recently drawn (again) to some issues in the Dutch translation, which I can appreciate, since Dutch is my native language. Harmen Kooremen is doing a lot of work on the semantic structure of the Course and has an interesting way of documenting that, which very much looks into the consistencies and inconsistencies in the usage in the Course. As a result of his work he has also been documenting tendencies in the translation to be excessively creative in Dutch, and thus sometimes lose the fact of the deliberate use of words in the original. Some of his comments are very interesting, and while it would not serve here to discuss the details, it occurred to me, as I was reading some of his articles recently on a Dutch ACIM list (ACIMNed on yahoo), that the issues he raises are equally important in English, because they are a reflection of our own difficulty in hearing what the Course says, and that the message really is as simple as it is. The temptation in teaching the Course in the formal sense is always in thinking that our understanding is a powerful contribution to the truth, or in this case that our translation would be such.
The way of the Holy Spirit would be to realize that we as individuals do neither teach nor translate, but perhaps we may be channels for the sonship to remember who we are. That is the only attitude which can, should, and undoubtedly would guide the process towards a successful translation, but it would not surprise me if some of the translators in Dutch or any other language, would over time see a need to revise the language as the appreciation for the semantic and didactic purpose of the original English text becomes clearer and clearer in their own minds. The only sane advice to any reader ould be to try and read the English text at least some of the time, if you can at all.
In some other way, in reflecting on this whole process, I also found a lot of help in my work in translating Mark from the Greek, which has prompted a lot of reflection of how translations happen. It is in essence of course the "opening of the understanding," as related in Luke 24:45 which the risen Christ performs to the Eleven which is the shift from form to content which occurs in us if we truly follow Jesus in leaving the world of duality and form, and starting to "know" (gnosis!) the non-dualistic reality which he teaches us. And it is only from this standpoint of content, not form, that there is any hope for any sort of translating or teaching in the world, in which we could be of service to others.
Copyright, © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Taboo: Trump Card of Ego-Obfuscation
In the first paragraphs of "The Laws of Chaos," (ACIM:T-23.II) the Course discusses the ego's strategy of obfuscation, in establishing a "hierarchy of illusions," in which "some are more valuable and therefore true." It is important to understand here that to the ego both the good and the bad are valuable, for anything that denies the oneness of spirit serves the ego's purposes.
As much as Religion in the true sense is the process of the sonship gathering itself unto itself, and re-uniting through forgiveness, so Religions are the worldly substitute that seek to enact the laws of chaos, make them sacrosanct, and to establish both sin and virtue in the world. In that sense moral codes of society are but an outflow of the same thought process, just leaving God out of it, which is simply the next step in the logical evolution of the ego thought system.
Taboos are enacted by the ego, and usually dressed up in religious overtones, in order to criminalize - literally or morally - certain behaviors, and thereby to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that behavior is important and that behavior makes us sinful, thus serving to deny the fact that "sin" is merely a judgment, which can be reversed on appeal by bringing it to a Higher Court, the court of the right mind, or the Holy Spirit as the Course expresses it in Chapter 5, as follows:
- Quote
Being afraid, you do not appeal to the Higher Court because you believe its judgment would also be against you.
Unquote (ACIM:T-5.VI.4:7)
- Quote
You need not fear the Higher Court will condemn you. It will merely dismiss the case against you. There can be no case against a child of God, and every witness to guilt in God's creation is bearing false witness to God Himself. Appeal everything you believe gladly to God's Own Higher Court, because it speaks for Him and therefore speaks truly. It will dismiss the case against you, however carefully you have built it up. The case may be fool-proof, but it is not God-proof. The Holy Spirit will not hear it, because He can only witness truly. His verdict will always be "thine is the Kingdom," because He was given to you to remind you of what you are.
Unquote (ACIM:T-5.VI.10:passim)
In other words the fear ("being afraid" in the first quote), which keeps the guilt intact is the fear that the Holy Spirit is right, and that we would be sinless indeed, for if so, the ego did not happen, and that is the last thing the ego wants us to hear. So rather than appeal the case, which would mean to choose the miracle, we refrain from doing so, preferring the devil we know (guilt, the ego), over the Holy Spirit we don't want to know as children of the ego.
The method of this obfuscation is always to criminalize, ostracise, or declare taboo certain extreme forms of the ego's acting out, and thereby to support the notion that only these extreme forms of the behavior are problematic, and implicitly to establish the overall ego behavior as normal and socially acceptable. The truth however, which the Course would have us see is that these extreme forms are merely that - extreme forms of a consistent behavior pattern, which IS the problem. And thus the outlawing of only certain forms of the behavior "help" us in seeing the problem outside ourselves, and never to recognize it within. So much for the logic of the ego system. Evidently this is what is meant by the observation that it is foolproof, not God-proof, for only a fool would believe the ego for very long.
It could be helpful to look at just a few examples of this behavior in practice. In the end it is really hilarious how the ego methodology is so simple and repetitive and easy to see through, if we allow ourselves to do so with the help of the Holy Spirit (otherwise we'd feel more guilty, not less). The purpose is always separation, and merely leaving heaven is not enough, for that keeps the memory still close, so then the belief in differences in the world becomes the next distraction, in order to keep us completely wrapped-up in the hierarchy of illusions. The obfuscation serves always that one purpose: to firmly fix the attention on a problem outside of ourselves, outside of our mind, where it can not be solved.
Thus MURDER and the taboo against it serves to distract the attention from the fact that the ego thought is itself a thought of murder, the murder of the oneness of Heaven, the murder of God.
And the taboo agains ADULTERY serves to hide the fact that the entire ego thought system is adulterous in the spiritual sense, for it betrays who we are (our true Self as Spirit), and has us seek outside ourselves for salvation - and it makes no difference if the paths we pursue are sinful or virtuous in the eyes of the world. In fact the virtuous paths often make for an even better disguise.
The taboo against PROSTITUTION seeks to disguise that the ego system in its entirety rests on our willingness to prostitute who we are, to who we are not (the ego), and taking as our reward the phenomenon we call our "life," our ability to live as a seeming individual separate from our Source.
The taboo against GAMBLING in that light is nothing but obfuscation of the ego's proclivity to tempting faith, as it reveals in the temptations in the garden, challenging Jesus that if you are God's son, why don't you jump from the top of the temple and see what happens. The ego always chooses an uncertain faith over the certain peace of who and what we are in truth.
The taboo against STEALING is again nothing but a veil over the fact that the very ego thought that we could steal a piece of the the sonship and have it to ourself (the false, ego-self, that is).
The taboo against WAR (excepting of course "just wars," which we relish) is again nothing but an easily recognized attempt to throw a veil over the ego's war against God, which is the very basis of its existence.
The taboo against SLAVERY serves as a veil over the fact that the entire ego system rests on our own enslavement to a false master (the ego), who keeps us firmly enchained in the thought system of sin, guilt and fear.
The taboo against ADDICTIONS, merely another form of slavery is the same, for the very basis of the ego system is seeking salvation outside of ourselves, in the form of something we think we do not have, ignoring the fact that this perception rests solely upon our willingness to identify with the ego's thought system that we are a separate self, outside of the wholeness of the sonship.
BLASPHEMY is another interesting example because of course only the ego's projected angry God would even mind anything we say at all, while the true God who created us as spirit and does not even know that in our deluded mind we think we are here and separated from him, and he would only love us since he would not even hear words at all.
MAGIC is yet another taboo, which merely obfuscates the fact that the entire ego thought system is nothing but magic, since it rests in its entirety on the reversal of cause and effect, and on our willingness to believe in the ego's upside-down hypothesis that we can change the cause by meddling with the effect.
The taboo agains SUICIDE in particular is interesting since it protects the foundation of the ego thought system, namely the ego IS the thought of killing off the whole, the Self we truly are so we could exist as an individual. Declaring suicide a taboo is again a wonderful way of denying altogether that this is where the ego system has its origin.
Another interesting taboo is S&M, which is a clear manifestation of another ego defense strategy, which is then treated as a taboo, and a problem, but secretly cherished and protected, to wit:
"
Sin shifts from pain to pleasure, and again to pain. 2 For either witness is the same, and carries but one message: "You are here, within this body, and you can be hurt. 3 You can have pleasure, too, but only at the cost of pain." 4 These witnesses are joined by many more. 5 Each one seems different because it has a different name, and so it seems to answer to a different sound. 6 Except for this, the witnesses of sin are all alike. 7 Call pleasure pain, and it will hurt. 8 Call pain a pleasure, and the pain behind the pleasure will be felt no more. 9 Sin's witnesses but shift from name to name, as one steps forward and another back. 10 Yet which is foremost makes no difference. 11 Sin's witnesses hear but the call of death.
" (ACIM:T-27.VI.2)
Once we begin seeing these connections, the spiritual origins of much Biblical symbolism also becomes much clearer. The original meanings of all these taboos are about our spiritual being, the behavior in our mind, which we CAN change, and not about the world of time and space, where we inevitably cannot change the past, only reinforce it, by keeping the guilt alive (doing justice and other virtuous ego-endeavors!). The world then reinterprets these spiritual principles and turns them on their head to apply them to the world of time and space and to bodies and behavior in that world, which is now our subtitute reality for Heaven, and in doing so these concepts become reinforcers of guilt, and guardians of the ego's thought system of sin, guilt, and fear, instead of guidelines showing us that we can change our mind about the world, as the Course would have us do.
As a corollary to all this we would have to say that taboos do not protect the sacred but rather protect the profane, and thus turn all of religious scholarship on its ear. That is perhaps the true April foolsday insight hidden in this material. Properly understood from the psychological insights of the Course it is totally clear that all of these taboos serve only the function of hiding from view what the ego system is upto. The are the guardians of the egos obfuscation of the substitution of truth which it represents.
It is at this point in the conversation that we should always be mindful that none of these reflections are intended to suggest that in the world we should not abide by the rules of engagement, and enforce them if that is our role. What this is about is not taking that too seriously either way.
Copyright, © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.
As much as Religion in the true sense is the process of the sonship gathering itself unto itself, and re-uniting through forgiveness, so Religions are the worldly substitute that seek to enact the laws of chaos, make them sacrosanct, and to establish both sin and virtue in the world. In that sense moral codes of society are but an outflow of the same thought process, just leaving God out of it, which is simply the next step in the logical evolution of the ego thought system.
Taboos are enacted by the ego, and usually dressed up in religious overtones, in order to criminalize - literally or morally - certain behaviors, and thereby to establish beyond a shadow of a doubt that behavior is important and that behavior makes us sinful, thus serving to deny the fact that "sin" is merely a judgment, which can be reversed on appeal by bringing it to a Higher Court, the court of the right mind, or the Holy Spirit as the Course expresses it in Chapter 5, as follows:
- Quote
Being afraid, you do not appeal to the Higher Court because you believe its judgment would also be against you.
Unquote (ACIM:T-5.VI.4:7)
- Quote
You need not fear the Higher Court will condemn you. It will merely dismiss the case against you. There can be no case against a child of God, and every witness to guilt in God's creation is bearing false witness to God Himself. Appeal everything you believe gladly to God's Own Higher Court, because it speaks for Him and therefore speaks truly. It will dismiss the case against you, however carefully you have built it up. The case may be fool-proof, but it is not God-proof. The Holy Spirit will not hear it, because He can only witness truly. His verdict will always be "thine is the Kingdom," because He was given to you to remind you of what you are.
Unquote (ACIM:T-5.VI.10:passim)
In other words the fear ("being afraid" in the first quote), which keeps the guilt intact is the fear that the Holy Spirit is right, and that we would be sinless indeed, for if so, the ego did not happen, and that is the last thing the ego wants us to hear. So rather than appeal the case, which would mean to choose the miracle, we refrain from doing so, preferring the devil we know (guilt, the ego), over the Holy Spirit we don't want to know as children of the ego.
The method of this obfuscation is always to criminalize, ostracise, or declare taboo certain extreme forms of the ego's acting out, and thereby to support the notion that only these extreme forms of the behavior are problematic, and implicitly to establish the overall ego behavior as normal and socially acceptable. The truth however, which the Course would have us see is that these extreme forms are merely that - extreme forms of a consistent behavior pattern, which IS the problem. And thus the outlawing of only certain forms of the behavior "help" us in seeing the problem outside ourselves, and never to recognize it within. So much for the logic of the ego system. Evidently this is what is meant by the observation that it is foolproof, not God-proof, for only a fool would believe the ego for very long.
It could be helpful to look at just a few examples of this behavior in practice. In the end it is really hilarious how the ego methodology is so simple and repetitive and easy to see through, if we allow ourselves to do so with the help of the Holy Spirit (otherwise we'd feel more guilty, not less). The purpose is always separation, and merely leaving heaven is not enough, for that keeps the memory still close, so then the belief in differences in the world becomes the next distraction, in order to keep us completely wrapped-up in the hierarchy of illusions. The obfuscation serves always that one purpose: to firmly fix the attention on a problem outside of ourselves, outside of our mind, where it can not be solved.
Thus MURDER and the taboo against it serves to distract the attention from the fact that the ego thought is itself a thought of murder, the murder of the oneness of Heaven, the murder of God.
And the taboo agains ADULTERY serves to hide the fact that the entire ego thought system is adulterous in the spiritual sense, for it betrays who we are (our true Self as Spirit), and has us seek outside ourselves for salvation - and it makes no difference if the paths we pursue are sinful or virtuous in the eyes of the world. In fact the virtuous paths often make for an even better disguise.
The taboo against PROSTITUTION seeks to disguise that the ego system in its entirety rests on our willingness to prostitute who we are, to who we are not (the ego), and taking as our reward the phenomenon we call our "life," our ability to live as a seeming individual separate from our Source.
The taboo against GAMBLING in that light is nothing but obfuscation of the ego's proclivity to tempting faith, as it reveals in the temptations in the garden, challenging Jesus that if you are God's son, why don't you jump from the top of the temple and see what happens. The ego always chooses an uncertain faith over the certain peace of who and what we are in truth.
The taboo against STEALING is again nothing but a veil over the fact that the very ego thought that we could steal a piece of the the sonship and have it to ourself (the false, ego-self, that is).
The taboo against WAR (excepting of course "just wars," which we relish) is again nothing but an easily recognized attempt to throw a veil over the ego's war against God, which is the very basis of its existence.
The taboo against SLAVERY serves as a veil over the fact that the entire ego system rests on our own enslavement to a false master (the ego), who keeps us firmly enchained in the thought system of sin, guilt and fear.
The taboo against ADDICTIONS, merely another form of slavery is the same, for the very basis of the ego system is seeking salvation outside of ourselves, in the form of something we think we do not have, ignoring the fact that this perception rests solely upon our willingness to identify with the ego's thought system that we are a separate self, outside of the wholeness of the sonship.
BLASPHEMY is another interesting example because of course only the ego's projected angry God would even mind anything we say at all, while the true God who created us as spirit and does not even know that in our deluded mind we think we are here and separated from him, and he would only love us since he would not even hear words at all.
MAGIC is yet another taboo, which merely obfuscates the fact that the entire ego thought system is nothing but magic, since it rests in its entirety on the reversal of cause and effect, and on our willingness to believe in the ego's upside-down hypothesis that we can change the cause by meddling with the effect.
The taboo agains SUICIDE in particular is interesting since it protects the foundation of the ego thought system, namely the ego IS the thought of killing off the whole, the Self we truly are so we could exist as an individual. Declaring suicide a taboo is again a wonderful way of denying altogether that this is where the ego system has its origin.
Another interesting taboo is S&M, which is a clear manifestation of another ego defense strategy, which is then treated as a taboo, and a problem, but secretly cherished and protected, to wit:
"
Sin shifts from pain to pleasure, and again to pain. 2 For either witness is the same, and carries but one message: "You are here, within this body, and you can be hurt. 3 You can have pleasure, too, but only at the cost of pain." 4 These witnesses are joined by many more. 5 Each one seems different because it has a different name, and so it seems to answer to a different sound. 6 Except for this, the witnesses of sin are all alike. 7 Call pleasure pain, and it will hurt. 8 Call pain a pleasure, and the pain behind the pleasure will be felt no more. 9 Sin's witnesses but shift from name to name, as one steps forward and another back. 10 Yet which is foremost makes no difference. 11 Sin's witnesses hear but the call of death.
" (ACIM:T-27.VI.2)
Once we begin seeing these connections, the spiritual origins of much Biblical symbolism also becomes much clearer. The original meanings of all these taboos are about our spiritual being, the behavior in our mind, which we CAN change, and not about the world of time and space, where we inevitably cannot change the past, only reinforce it, by keeping the guilt alive (doing justice and other virtuous ego-endeavors!). The world then reinterprets these spiritual principles and turns them on their head to apply them to the world of time and space and to bodies and behavior in that world, which is now our subtitute reality for Heaven, and in doing so these concepts become reinforcers of guilt, and guardians of the ego's thought system of sin, guilt, and fear, instead of guidelines showing us that we can change our mind about the world, as the Course would have us do.
As a corollary to all this we would have to say that taboos do not protect the sacred but rather protect the profane, and thus turn all of religious scholarship on its ear. That is perhaps the true April foolsday insight hidden in this material. Properly understood from the psychological insights of the Course it is totally clear that all of these taboos serve only the function of hiding from view what the ego system is upto. The are the guardians of the egos obfuscation of the substitution of truth which it represents.
It is at this point in the conversation that we should always be mindful that none of these reflections are intended to suggest that in the world we should not abide by the rules of engagement, and enforce them if that is our role. What this is about is not taking that too seriously either way.
Copyright, © 2006 Rogier F. van Vlissingen. All rights reserved.
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