The Symbolism of Immortality

I’d referred to my Dictionary of Biblical Symbolism in a number of my blogs. But recently a strange thing happened. During recent weeks the sales of the Dictionary on Amazon Kindle equaled the sum total of all my other books put together. For some reason, people seem to yearn for biblical knowledge.

I find it particularly strange, as it is not an easy book. Most aspiring writers, (and this includes lovers of scriptures and scholars alike), who tackle any subject touching on the Bible, try to explain their version, their meaning of the scriptures.

I refuse to do that.

Since I insist that the bible is not a historical novel, not even a historical saga concocted by inspired scribes over the ages, but rather a compendium of knowledge on matters of consciousness, which people gathered over thousands of years, I leave it to each individual to find his or her own truth. What I do offer is a relatively short key to the understanding the symbolism, and an attempt to translate a few thousand words, which have never been translated into English.

There is a reason why the Bible is steeped in symbols.

Some time ago, a wonderful person named Emmet Fox (1886-1951), wrote a number of books in which he adamantly insisted that the Bible had been written by relatively simple people for the illiterate, simpleminded masses. As such, the need for learned scholars to explain the simple words is completely redundant. Fox went as far as suggesting a number of reasons why symbolism, employed in the Bible was necessary to protect their conclusions over the ages. It is also probable that symbolism, which seems mysterious to us, may have been perfectly obvious and understood in biblical times.

Fox’s contemporary, Carl Jung (1875-1961) asserted in his own writings, that the archetypes of symbols are ingrained deeply in our collective unconscious. Once given a key, we can all recognize them as a means to reach within our own subconscious, what the scribes called nephesh’s, or animal souls, to discover the truth.

The Dictionary (available on Amazon Kindle and on Smashwords) is intended as just such a stimulus to awaken the knowledge, which resides within all of us at the deepest levels of our psyche. Knowledge that we need to claim our immortality.

Enjoy!

The Paradise Within

I mentioned this subject before. I am still trying to reconcile our conscious with our subconscious mind. It has been said that, “heaven is within you”. Assuming that heaven is a state of consciousness, then only the subconscious and the unconscious qualify to respond to that claim. And, rightly or wrongly, I cannot but qualify the unconscious by that which is not, or at the very least which is not, as yet, manifested. By being no more than, perhaps infinite, potential.

Thus, the subconscious answers to the claim of the heaven within. Of course the religionists will object to this thesis on ‘invisible’ grounds, and the atheists on purely literary. The first group cannot make any money out of something that is within us, (they have to externalize ‘god’ to become intermediaries), and the latter on the grounds that if they cannot touch it, or smell it, or make an equation about it, no matter how absurd, they do not recognize it as real.

Well, I am free. Although it is often hard to see, there is a line between religion and science that gravitates towards sanity.

There is a peculiarity about our (physical) reality that needs mentioning. While we always remain individuals, i.e. we all manifest a completely diverse image of the reality we claim as our own, here, on Earth, we have to navigate between the countless realities created by other people, as different from ours as ours are from theirs. Such other realities are often in complete denial of our own conclusions. Hence, different religions, different political parties, interests, and even the way we regard abstract forms such as the many arts.

This helps in our learning process.

When we leave our bodies, however, be it in a lucid dream or through an OBE experience, or when we do so permanently by what people call dying, we no longer face such diverse disparities. Only our own reality prevails in all that we experience. In a way, we finally see the truth about ourselves. Thanks to the consequences of our behavior pattern and creative activity in the dualistic (physical) reality, we can finally see what we really are. Often we don’t like it much. Thus, we come back, through the process of reincarnation, to try to improve our image of ourselves.

Sometimes we succeed.

If not, well, we just try again. And again. And…

If you wish to be amused on a lighter note, you will find it in Beyond Religion II, Essay #27, Heaven. 

Primary Needs

Since I retired from my profession, I embarked on a turbulent trek in search of reality. I always suspected that our senses do not communicate the truth to our brain, our mind, not to mention to our consciousness. They don’t even seem to satisfy our emotions. Can a god be so ungodly as to allow suffering of little children? Well, nature allows it even as we do. We even practice it. Aren’t we supposed to be ‘gods’?

I found that I didn’t like the reality I’d inherited from most of my predecessors. Yes, not even from my parents. Hence, I embarked on my search.

It seems, that my readers participated and continue to participate in my search. To date, it took 14 novels, 7 non-fiction books, and a number of other publications, to show me where my readers’ needs lay. As of this blog, at least on the Amazon, they are buying exactly 3 times as many of my non-fiction books as fiction. I think my readers are missing a great deal, because my novels illustrate how my philosophy works in practice; but… I’ll take what I can get.

Of one thing I am sure. I do not, nor did I ever wish to upset the apple cart that my readers are dragging adamantly towards their grave, which many of them seem to equate with oblivion. If they continue to read my stuff, then, sooner or later, they will accept that, whether we like it or not, we are all immortal. This premise alone sets me apart from many literary shades.

Perhaps that is why people seem to search out my non-fiction books. Their hunger, their thirst, is made evident by their choices. The one consolation I can offer them is that there is no one, no one in the whole world, who will discover the true reality by reading other peoples’ books. Don’t get me wrong. The books will help enormously; I’d read hundreds, probably thousands of books. But ultimately if we don’t launch our own ship, our own consciousness, on the waters o life, the truth will elude us.

Absolutely no one can skip the journey. In many ways, the journey is all that really matters. Why? Because each one of us creates a different reality and only all of them, combined, approximate the Whole. We might overlap in our conclusions, share many traits of the heaven we are creating for ourselves, but make no mistake. We are individualizations of the Infinite, and as such it is this individuality that must add up to the Whole—not just hung on to It.

Try it. You’ll see.

Peter and Paul did it, although each of them travelled a completely different path. As you and I do. Yet… the Whole, by Its very nature, is but One. And that brings me back to my new historical novel Peter & Paul. It is heavily based on fact. Like my non-fiction. It is yours to enjoy. And for a week or two, you will be able to download it for free. 

It's almost ready

Peter & Paul, the Novel

After many threats, or perhaps promises, my new historical novel is about to be published on Smashwords. Then, after its christening of fire, I hope to present it on Amazon Kindle, for people who look down upon other means of electronic perusal. I like them all, however, you’ll have your choice.

Even when writing this novel I was surprised how many times the two principle protagonists veered from one side of the theological argument to another, only to finish exactly in the middle, perhaps in the field which Rumi stretches out, “beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing.”

This may sound absurd, yet, if we observe dispassionately the consequences of recent election in the USA, is that not precisely what must happen? If they are to accomplish anything, must not the opposing parties meet in the middle, beyond the doing right or doing wrong?

We shall see. Perhaps they’ve grown up, a little.

It seems that when we really analyze the physical reality which we call our home, sooner or later we are led to conclude that nothing in this world is real, and that if we are to find the true reality we have to reach out not so much further out, but… further in. A strange inversion of logic, yet, it is only in the centre of a Black Hole that our scientists find themselves completely helpless. Yet we, if we persist, might well find there an abundance of light.

Since we are venturing beyond the reality most of us accept as ‘real’, (my Delusions disproves that), and we are interested what ‘really’ happens in the heart of a Black Hole, read my Gift of Gamman. In it, in my novel, John Galt, or Captain Blake, if you prefer, will show you exactly what happens. He should know, he’d been there.

You might even like it!

The Question of Balance

It seems apparent that a dualistic reality cannot exist without a state that gravitates towards equilibrium. The centripetal and centrifugal forces must maintain perfect balance, or Earth would either fly into the interstellar cold of outer space, or spiral into the heart of our sun. Neither prospect seems desirable.

The same can be said of our flora and fauna. Ignoring for a moment the wonton destruction that the human kind inflicts on nature, unless the herbivores didn’t trim our flora, and the carnivores our herbivorous fauna, one or the other would overrun the Earth. Again, the nature is designed, by evolution or accident, to maintain a relative state of balance.

So much for the physical aspects of our reality.

I suspect that exactly the same laws are imposed on our non-physical state of being/becoming. Evil, in other words that which strays too far from the neutral center, must be balanced by an equal and opposite force acting in the other direction. That is to say, good is balanced with evil, evil with good.

What I am really saying is that that which some of us call God, or Lao Tsu, Tao, is in fact that which the opposites have in common.

If we accept the above premise, then the next step is to realize that, on occasion, a single “great good” could, in fact must, balance a great number of relatively “small evils”, ever assuming that both good and evil are departures from the state of balance.

Thus the few can balance the many.

However, since the vast majority of us tend to stray to one side of the great divide, it seems necessary for a relatively large number of “good” messengers to enter the human equation to restore balance. Hence, saviours, saints, perhaps great artists.

And then again, it seems to me that we are all cogs in the Cosmic Wheel, which uses us to restore equilibrium.

Those who scream the loudest about the corporations exporting jobs out of the USA, seem completely unaware that those very jobs are desperately needed in places which receive them. But, of course, to think in those terms one has to be a humanitarian, not an “americanian”. That first group is shrinking in direct proportion to the degree that “Americanians” got spoilt. I’m fairly sure the same is true of the British, the French, and a bunch of other overfed ladies and gentlemen of west European nations. And thus, unbeknownst to us, the corporations might just prove to be bigger cogs in the universal order of things.

And yet, whether we like it or not, the state of balance must, and will be restored throughout this ball of dust we all call home. Perhaps one day we shall learn that our concept of freewill is not as free as we imagined. The universal laws will not be broken.

And talking of “Americanisms” let me quote from the Foreword of my Beyond Religion III: “It seems to me that there is but one dominant purpose to the study of reality. It is exemplified in the American Constitution: The Pursuit of Happiness”. All else follows. 

The Many and the Few

It may have started with Peter and Paul, but its echoes are visible in all aspects of the human existence. The Churches, the politics, science, trade, even education, is replete with examples of the few abusing the many. No wonder the Roman Church referred to many of us as sheep, a word which was intended to symbolize our thoughts, which were to be gathered under one roof on an enlightened state of consciousness, became bastardized into a mean of controlling and exploiting human mind. My Dictionary of Biblical Symbolism serves to expose many such willful misinterpretations, which during the last 2000 years were used by the few to control the many.

BBC reports that the “estimated price tag for the US elections in November is almost $6bn (£3.8bn)”. Six billion dollars spent by the few, on propaganda, while elsewhere millions are starving. Are we all members of the same species? Are we all human? Or are the few more human, or perhaps less so, than the others.

And now that the dust has settled, at long last, the multimillionaire will return to his White House, the contender to his billions, and the many other multimillionaires will return to their well-padded seats in the Senate to get richer still. Perhaps Karl Marx was right, after all.

And now it’s back to normal. The rich will get richer, the poor will lose even what little they have. It almost sounds biblical. However, during the last month or two, I received many hundreds of messages condemning the 1% who seem to exploit and suppress the 99%. The rich v. the poor?

Mathew, the evangelist, tells us that: “the rich get richer, poor get poorer…” It is also a catchphrase used by economists trying to justify inequality. It was what Karl Marx called the Law of Increasing Poverty. Now… it rules the United States of America. Perhaps the rest of the world, too.

There is only one problem.

Mathew, in his gospel, was referring to spiritual wealth, not to dollars and cents. Unfortunately spiritual truths are not reflected in material mentality, such as understood by many retrograde multimillionaires, by the very rich who don’t even notice the poor whose spiritual wealth might well vastly exceed theirs.

To each his and her own? There is a difference. The spiritual wealth you can take with you. The material? The material wealth will rot together with the corpse of the few, and then be recycled as though the rich have never lived. After all, they didn’t. Not really.

Only now, the roles will be reversed. The few who were truly wealthy will be chosen from among the many whose wealth was not of this world. Not of this twisted, greedy, egotistical reality.

Interesting?

And before we, and I refer to the memos I received, condemn all rich people, let us remember that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, and a number of other billionaires have given away billions to help the needy and the sick. 
       No matter what the law is, we are all individuals. 

 

One Nation under What?

So it’s finally over. The elections in the mightiest nation on Earth are done with. Slowly ‘things’ will return to normal. We had all suffered hundreds of speeches, arguments, statements often filled with lies or half-lies, telling us why should this or that aspirant ought to, or remain in, the White House. Not an easy job. It has been said that only a fool would want the job—only a saint would accept it. And in all these tirades we only heard arguments on how the prospective aspirant might improve our material wealth. Not one statement that deal exclusively with our spiritual riches. Not one!

So I repeat, One Nation under What?

Apparently under the Almighty Dollar.

Most certainly not under God—whatever you or I mean by the term, or by the concept, or “Being”, or Idea, or even by that Immortal Spark within us. Not one. Not one speech dealing with improving our non-material wealth.

Sad.

There may have been a time when people cared about such things. I don’t mean the churches—they were always materialistic. I mean ordinary people. Like our grandparents perhaps? Our great-grandparents? Surely, there must have been a time when quality was more important than quantity. When we cared more about what we could give, rather then about what we could get.

“Ask not what your country can do for you…”

Remember? How many of us can, today, complete this sentence spoken only some 50 years ago. On Friday, January 20, 1961 to be precise. “What can we do for our country”, whatever country it might be? And what is much, much more important, “what can we do for humanity”. For the world we live in. Does anyone care?

Only quality has lasting power. Great art, great music, great poems, literature. Great acts of love, perhaps of sacrifice… of generosity.

The rest is transient, fluid, ephemeral. Like money or like many politicians in the Senate, or the Capitol Hill, or even the White House. Or anywhere. They come and go and only their smiles linger behind. Smiles, and often a bad taste. Thankfully, that too is transient.

Sad.

Yet we all have the potential for greatness—potential for quality that can shine for generations to come; which can enlighten the journey of our solitude. We all have that potential: every single one of us. It lies dormant within us, waiting to be awakened. And if in doubt, think of the ancient psalm, which assures us that: “Ye are gods”. “Ye”, that’s you and I. Each and every one of us.

I described one such journey that began in great solitude and blossomed to conquer the world. The book is called The Avatar Syndrome. Try it. It might inspire you to join the immortals. Like Anne did.