02-17-2010, 11:41 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-17-2010, 11:44 AM by Questioner.)
Cyclops, those passages perfectly speak to me. Thank you so much for bringing them forth here. One of the comforting concepts of the Law of One is that in this density, we won't fully be able to express either love or wisdom; and that's OK. I really appreciate your finding those quotes that shine a loving light on the situation.
Colorado, I like to think in an analogies that often pop up in my mind in the form of pictures or stories. As I read your post, the picture popped up in my imagination that intellectual ability can be compared to the contents of a workbench toolbox, or kitchen equipment. Intellectual tools can make it easy and even fun to separate ideas into their component parts or recombine them.
Just like tools can be used to chop up veggies, or to clamp wood together while the glue sets, the intellect can divide and assemble concepts.
Emotions are like the addition of heat or cold to the process. A great set of knives is useful in the kitchen, but no substitute for a stove or a fridge when that's what you need! A shop might have every type of pliers known to man. But if it can't add the heat of a soldering iron or welding torch, some processes can never get completed. One who despises emotions as an integral part of human experience is like a blacksmith or ceramics shop where no ovens are allowed. Not much of value will get built there.
Wisdom is the ability to choose what ingredients are healthy and to prepare a healthy meal using whatever tools are available. A great cook could make a good enough meal in a mediocre kitchen. A great carpenter could make a good enough desk using a so-so workshop.
Either creation would be easier to make with good tools. But someone who spends all day sharpening the kitchen knife and never uses the knife to make a healthy meal with love is just a fool.
It is very healing for me to be able to share my story, because a primary rule of dysfunctional families or any unhealthy situation is that you're not allowed to acknowledge the reality of what's happening. I hope that something here will inspire or help other people in their own journeys.
For the next part of my story to make sense, I need to say some things about a lady named Mary who was not in my family, although my parents invited her in.
Mary said some extraordinary things about herself.
She said that she had the one and only, totally unique in human history, unprecedented revelation of the mind of God. Before her revelation, nobody really understood the mind of God. Jesus kind of knew the mind of God and used this knowledge to heal, but, she said, it really wouldn't have mattered if he'd never lived. As for the rest of the Bible, it was mostly metaphorical and only Mary knew how to decode its real meaning.
Since the one and only way to know the mind of God was through her revelation, there were some things nobody else needs. You'd never understand God with your own mind, so any attempts of your own at reason, logic and thought were useless. Except to realize that your thoughts were useless and Mary's were divine. You'd never reach God on your own, so any Bible study, prayer, meditation or other spiritual techniques or teachings without her help were useless.
Your own emotion or intuition would only mislead you, except to feel certain that Mary provided you with the unique truth. If it seemed to you that your own experiences contradicted Mary's teachings, the only contradiction was that you stubbornly clung to your own misunderstandings rather than Mary's words.
No other teachers needed or tolerated, of course.
Mary provided a new definition for prayer, which was to agree with your mind that Mary's words were the perfect explanation of the mind of God.
Now Mary said there was an important result that would come from your learning to pray in this right way. The moment you understood enough of her words to agree that she was perfectly right, all your problems would instantly go away. Every illness, sickness, injury, infection would instantly become perfectly whole. Every problem or confusion would instantly be resolved.
Only one problem would remain, because of the nature of free will: some people would still be unaware of the truth, or hostile towards it. Some people would still be so ignorant that they aren't aware of Mary's words. Not to worry, the enlightened had no responsibility to these people living in darkness. Mary's words were available to them when they were ready to not be ignorant any more.
Despite being informed of Mary's words, some people would choose to be wrong with self-centered disregard for God's ultimate truth, available only through Mary. These people would continue to suffer, and make people around them suffer, until they gave up their foolish and wrong mistakes of believing that anything other than Mary's words could save them.
So your own enlightenment, which consists of agreeing that only Mary is enlightened, could not solve the problem of people unaware or opposed to the truth. But it would make it impossible for any of those people to have any negative effect on you.
Mary's words caused quite a sensation of publicity and controversy. They got her kicked out of mainstream Christian churches, so she founded her own church.
This church had an elected board that served only at her whim; her word was law. How could it be otherwise since nobody else had the revelation? The church never made an accounting of its finances. What did that matter since Mary's every decision was perfectly in accord with the mind of God? But that wasn't the end of the controversy.
By the way, the healing and resolution of problems did not involve any responsibility towards other people. There was no responsibility to be kind, loving, good, or even just try to be nice. No responsibility to make any choices about who one would serve, or any actions to serve them. No ethics beyond agreeing that Mary knew the mind of God, therefore one's own problems should disappear by now. Just study Mary's words until you realized they were right and they healed you.
If you couldn't figure it out on your own, the Church offered ways to pay for additional help in the form of other people to remind you of Mary's words until you realized they were the ultimate truth. Mary, of course, never had any reason to apologize, since she had no mistakes and no misunderstandings. She even knew what other people were thinking and what their motivations were for disparaging the ultimate revelation, and if they claimed something else about themselves, they were lying or confused.
Some of the leading journalists and commentators of the time investigated Mary's background. What they found was not flattering. Mary's teachings were not only not unique and unprecedented, they were largely plagiarized from, and rewritten by, others far more adept at words than she was.
Shortly before her revelation, her mentor died. Her mentor had similar teachings about healing, but didn't claim any unique role in history. He acknowledged that he wasn't the only one teaching principles about God's mind as the source of healing. Her mentor was someone she used to favorably discuss a lot, but suddenly she stopped mentioning him at all. Her mentor entrusted to her the manuscript of his unpublished book before he died. Not just passages, but entire pages of her textbook were outright plagiarism of his work. The editor for her book said he turned a nearly incoherent rambling mess into some semblance of structure.
Mary claimed that her revelation arrived when she was at death's door for a medical disaster. She said the arrival of the revelation instantly healed her completely. Her doctor at the time publicly claimed that she wasn't all that bad off. He said her condition and progress of treatment continued throughout that time without any spectacular improvements.
At least three investigators wrote book-length studies exposing her entire life, before and after the revelation, as totally consistent with the manipulations of a psychopath. These books, including at least two by the best-known and most-respected authors of the day, painted unflattering pictures of someone who was, at best, deluded with psychotic grandiosity and mental confusion, and, at worst, one of the most evil deceivers who ever lived.
None of that deterred the faithful. After Mary's death, they continued to have their unique form of church service at which Mary's hymns were sung, and Mary's texts were read in the order published by the mother church. The faithful read the same texts at home daily, using a blue chalk pen and movable number tabs sold in a kit with Mary's book by the church for this purpose to show which of her words to contemplate this week.
What more could anyone add? No need for any lesser mind to prepare a sermon, to comment or observe, to counsel. No need to have marriages or funeral services. No need for anything but to believe in her words, be healed, and to hell with the rest of the world until they figured out that all they needed was faith in Mary.
For those children too young to comprehend Mary's brilliant and poetic words, all their parents had to do was to believe on their behalf and the children would be perfectly healed and free of any problems, except that they might later choose to leave behind this perfect faith.
Two of my parents' favorite authors were Mark Twain and Willa Cather. Yet somehow, their exposes of Mary Baker Eddy, and the New York Times reports of how her Christian Science cult was untrustworthy, were never read by my parents. Of course, for people as brilliant and as right as they were, they had no choice as adults but to try to make Mrs. Eddy their own source of all spiritual wisdom.
How convenient for people as clever as my parents that ultimate truth didn't require anything but being clever enough to recognize it. No need or use for pesky limitations like feeling emotions, being compassionate, offering kindness to "the least of these," or having any responsibility for one's own spiritual evolution.
One of my current tasks is to untangle the crazy nonsense of Mrs. Eddy from the crazy nonsense of my family's immaturity. Either one by itself is a pretty bad hairball. Together they are a knot that shuts down rational thought, emotional awareness, intuition or self-determination on the part of those caught in the tangle.
And that's what I was taught as I grew up. To even put it in words is as challenging as trying to describe what it feels like to see the color of the sky. It was simply all there was, obviously, no matter how uncomfortable I was with it.
My own belief now is that there have been a few actual healings experienced by people devoted to Christian Science. I believe those came about because of the nuggets of spiritual wisdom that were plagiarized and misrepresented by Mrs. Eddy. Those nuggets would have been more nutritious if received from the original sources, before they were fried in the indigestible crazy juice of her insane self-promotion.
It gets worse before it gets better, but this part of my story is long enough for now. I'd welcome any comments. I'll continue my story over the coming days.
Colorado, I like to think in an analogies that often pop up in my mind in the form of pictures or stories. As I read your post, the picture popped up in my imagination that intellectual ability can be compared to the contents of a workbench toolbox, or kitchen equipment. Intellectual tools can make it easy and even fun to separate ideas into their component parts or recombine them.
Just like tools can be used to chop up veggies, or to clamp wood together while the glue sets, the intellect can divide and assemble concepts.
Emotions are like the addition of heat or cold to the process. A great set of knives is useful in the kitchen, but no substitute for a stove or a fridge when that's what you need! A shop might have every type of pliers known to man. But if it can't add the heat of a soldering iron or welding torch, some processes can never get completed. One who despises emotions as an integral part of human experience is like a blacksmith or ceramics shop where no ovens are allowed. Not much of value will get built there.
Wisdom is the ability to choose what ingredients are healthy and to prepare a healthy meal using whatever tools are available. A great cook could make a good enough meal in a mediocre kitchen. A great carpenter could make a good enough desk using a so-so workshop.
Either creation would be easier to make with good tools. But someone who spends all day sharpening the kitchen knife and never uses the knife to make a healthy meal with love is just a fool.
It is very healing for me to be able to share my story, because a primary rule of dysfunctional families or any unhealthy situation is that you're not allowed to acknowledge the reality of what's happening. I hope that something here will inspire or help other people in their own journeys.
For the next part of my story to make sense, I need to say some things about a lady named Mary who was not in my family, although my parents invited her in.
Mary said some extraordinary things about herself.
She said that she had the one and only, totally unique in human history, unprecedented revelation of the mind of God. Before her revelation, nobody really understood the mind of God. Jesus kind of knew the mind of God and used this knowledge to heal, but, she said, it really wouldn't have mattered if he'd never lived. As for the rest of the Bible, it was mostly metaphorical and only Mary knew how to decode its real meaning.
Since the one and only way to know the mind of God was through her revelation, there were some things nobody else needs. You'd never understand God with your own mind, so any attempts of your own at reason, logic and thought were useless. Except to realize that your thoughts were useless and Mary's were divine. You'd never reach God on your own, so any Bible study, prayer, meditation or other spiritual techniques or teachings without her help were useless.
Your own emotion or intuition would only mislead you, except to feel certain that Mary provided you with the unique truth. If it seemed to you that your own experiences contradicted Mary's teachings, the only contradiction was that you stubbornly clung to your own misunderstandings rather than Mary's words.
No other teachers needed or tolerated, of course.
Mary provided a new definition for prayer, which was to agree with your mind that Mary's words were the perfect explanation of the mind of God.
Now Mary said there was an important result that would come from your learning to pray in this right way. The moment you understood enough of her words to agree that she was perfectly right, all your problems would instantly go away. Every illness, sickness, injury, infection would instantly become perfectly whole. Every problem or confusion would instantly be resolved.
Only one problem would remain, because of the nature of free will: some people would still be unaware of the truth, or hostile towards it. Some people would still be so ignorant that they aren't aware of Mary's words. Not to worry, the enlightened had no responsibility to these people living in darkness. Mary's words were available to them when they were ready to not be ignorant any more.
Despite being informed of Mary's words, some people would choose to be wrong with self-centered disregard for God's ultimate truth, available only through Mary. These people would continue to suffer, and make people around them suffer, until they gave up their foolish and wrong mistakes of believing that anything other than Mary's words could save them.
So your own enlightenment, which consists of agreeing that only Mary is enlightened, could not solve the problem of people unaware or opposed to the truth. But it would make it impossible for any of those people to have any negative effect on you.
Mary's words caused quite a sensation of publicity and controversy. They got her kicked out of mainstream Christian churches, so she founded her own church.
This church had an elected board that served only at her whim; her word was law. How could it be otherwise since nobody else had the revelation? The church never made an accounting of its finances. What did that matter since Mary's every decision was perfectly in accord with the mind of God? But that wasn't the end of the controversy.
By the way, the healing and resolution of problems did not involve any responsibility towards other people. There was no responsibility to be kind, loving, good, or even just try to be nice. No responsibility to make any choices about who one would serve, or any actions to serve them. No ethics beyond agreeing that Mary knew the mind of God, therefore one's own problems should disappear by now. Just study Mary's words until you realized they were right and they healed you.
If you couldn't figure it out on your own, the Church offered ways to pay for additional help in the form of other people to remind you of Mary's words until you realized they were the ultimate truth. Mary, of course, never had any reason to apologize, since she had no mistakes and no misunderstandings. She even knew what other people were thinking and what their motivations were for disparaging the ultimate revelation, and if they claimed something else about themselves, they were lying or confused.
Some of the leading journalists and commentators of the time investigated Mary's background. What they found was not flattering. Mary's teachings were not only not unique and unprecedented, they were largely plagiarized from, and rewritten by, others far more adept at words than she was.
Shortly before her revelation, her mentor died. Her mentor had similar teachings about healing, but didn't claim any unique role in history. He acknowledged that he wasn't the only one teaching principles about God's mind as the source of healing. Her mentor was someone she used to favorably discuss a lot, but suddenly she stopped mentioning him at all. Her mentor entrusted to her the manuscript of his unpublished book before he died. Not just passages, but entire pages of her textbook were outright plagiarism of his work. The editor for her book said he turned a nearly incoherent rambling mess into some semblance of structure.
Mary claimed that her revelation arrived when she was at death's door for a medical disaster. She said the arrival of the revelation instantly healed her completely. Her doctor at the time publicly claimed that she wasn't all that bad off. He said her condition and progress of treatment continued throughout that time without any spectacular improvements.
At least three investigators wrote book-length studies exposing her entire life, before and after the revelation, as totally consistent with the manipulations of a psychopath. These books, including at least two by the best-known and most-respected authors of the day, painted unflattering pictures of someone who was, at best, deluded with psychotic grandiosity and mental confusion, and, at worst, one of the most evil deceivers who ever lived.
None of that deterred the faithful. After Mary's death, they continued to have their unique form of church service at which Mary's hymns were sung, and Mary's texts were read in the order published by the mother church. The faithful read the same texts at home daily, using a blue chalk pen and movable number tabs sold in a kit with Mary's book by the church for this purpose to show which of her words to contemplate this week.
What more could anyone add? No need for any lesser mind to prepare a sermon, to comment or observe, to counsel. No need to have marriages or funeral services. No need for anything but to believe in her words, be healed, and to hell with the rest of the world until they figured out that all they needed was faith in Mary.
For those children too young to comprehend Mary's brilliant and poetic words, all their parents had to do was to believe on their behalf and the children would be perfectly healed and free of any problems, except that they might later choose to leave behind this perfect faith.
Two of my parents' favorite authors were Mark Twain and Willa Cather. Yet somehow, their exposes of Mary Baker Eddy, and the New York Times reports of how her Christian Science cult was untrustworthy, were never read by my parents. Of course, for people as brilliant and as right as they were, they had no choice as adults but to try to make Mrs. Eddy their own source of all spiritual wisdom.
How convenient for people as clever as my parents that ultimate truth didn't require anything but being clever enough to recognize it. No need or use for pesky limitations like feeling emotions, being compassionate, offering kindness to "the least of these," or having any responsibility for one's own spiritual evolution.
One of my current tasks is to untangle the crazy nonsense of Mrs. Eddy from the crazy nonsense of my family's immaturity. Either one by itself is a pretty bad hairball. Together they are a knot that shuts down rational thought, emotional awareness, intuition or self-determination on the part of those caught in the tangle.
And that's what I was taught as I grew up. To even put it in words is as challenging as trying to describe what it feels like to see the color of the sky. It was simply all there was, obviously, no matter how uncomfortable I was with it.
My own belief now is that there have been a few actual healings experienced by people devoted to Christian Science. I believe those came about because of the nuggets of spiritual wisdom that were plagiarized and misrepresented by Mrs. Eddy. Those nuggets would have been more nutritious if received from the original sources, before they were fried in the indigestible crazy juice of her insane self-promotion.
It gets worse before it gets better, but this part of my story is long enough for now. I'd welcome any comments. I'll continue my story over the coming days.