Miles Mathis has written his "credo" - a long, somewhat sprawling, but honest and probing examination of his guiding principles and assumptions.
Most interestingly, to me, this focuses on the nature of Jesus - especially in relation to an overarching theme that Mankind has been manipulated by Fear primarily, for many centuries and continuing.
(This is something I have also become convinced of - including that fear should be known as a sin.)
The essay also describes how, despite Jesus's teaching and example to the contrary; the Christian churches have all too often been co-opted as agents of this evil agenda.
I have written about Mathis before, on a couple of occasions, and my mixed feelings concerning his writings.
But when I say "mixed", I mean that there is a significant amount of very good stuff in his writings, as well as plenty that I regard as wrong. The test being that I keep returning to read his articles.
And his personality, too, seems a mixture of admirable traits, with other attributes I find off-putting. But the strengths are more important.
In this latest essay, I found a good deal to appreciate. It strikes me as an exceptionally honest and self-revelatory piece of writing; and such writings are rare, and always of considerable interest to me.
Because such writing is well-motivated, his particular current conclusions are less important to me than than a particular revelation of the process of an individual person earnestly trying to sort-out his understanding of the basic human condition.
Caveat: MM's interpretation of Jesus, Jesus's example, and Jesus's core teaching; misses-out the single most important fact - i.e. that Jesus claimed to offer resurrected eternal Heavenly life to those who followed him.
I think this is because (unlike me) Mathis is not interested by resurrection and everlasting life in Heaven, apparently because he is one of those (apparently rare) people who regard this mortal life as ultimately sufficient... He is satisfied by his life and by life in general; as it has been and is.
Of course this overall satisfaction may, or may not, survive to the end and into post-mortal existence - but it seems clear that as of now, MM has no desire for a qualitatively different way of being.
Consequently, Mathis genuinely (it seems) wants nothing more or other than to have more of the same-kind-of-thing, recurrently, forever - i.e. a continuation of the cycles of reincarnation, not resurrection.
MM himself wants repeated mortal lives, not eternal Heavenly life.
Accepting this difference of desire and motivation as real and valid; Mathis has some excellent (and clearly heartfelt) comments to make about how Men must strive to overcome fear - or else be manipulated and tormented by the powers of strategic evil...
Powers that he here calls the Phoenicians (and which I would regard as Satan and the demons, and their servants among Men).
It is, of course, necessary to "read the whole thing" to appreciate its qualities - even if some parts of the essay are at a lower level, this is a necessary part of any honest exploration.
But here are a couple of excerpts, that may whet your appetite:
**
What are people most afraid of? Death, torture, loss.
Well, of course Jesus and the other prophets taught there is no death, since your spirit lives on.
Like matter, spirit cannot be destroyed. It simply changes forms.
The Modern definition of death as a stark and final end was invented by the Phoenicians, and it was invented on purpose to scare you and control you via that fear. Jesus was among the first to counter that definition, reminding you we have no evidence for that and a lot of evidence against it.
Tribal and pre-Phoenician peoples never believed that, and it wasn't because they were ignorant savages. It was because, given everything we knew then and everything we have since learned, the default assumption was for continuance, not a final end.
*
Same for torture, which Hollywood shoves down your throat year after year to keep fear high. About half the movies now released have an nearly unwatchable torture scene.
One problem: in reality, torture isn't very successful, due to a little thing called shock. The body can only take so much pain or stress before it goes into shock.
Shock is another gift of Nature, and you can understand it most easily by again looking at animals. A zebra in the jaws of a lion almost immediately goes into shock.
What is shock? It is the disassociation of the animal from the pain. The mind separates from the body, so the pain never makes it to the brain. It is sort of like a dream state.
So in real life (not Hollywood), torture is generally more stressful for the torturer than the tortured. The torturer has to stand there and watch the proceedings, while the tortured has drifted into a dream state and doesn't even feel it.
When you watch a torture scene in a movie, it is far more stressful for you, the viewer, than it would be for the victim, because you aren't in shock. So if you think about it that way, many Hollywood movies are a form of successful, low-grade torture of the audience. And you are so messed up from a life of that, you pay for more of your own torture. I suggest you stop doing it.
*
The Phoenicians learned a lot from Jesus. . . namely how to most efficiently prevent people from developing that character. They could see that character was dependent upon being fearless, and the reverse, so job one for them became instilling fear of death and loss, and inverting everything Jesus taught.
Some of that they did by rewriting and bastardizing scripture directly, but most of it was done over the centuries by infiltration. Within a few decades or centuries they had infiltrated the Church, and in this position they didn't need to rewrite scripture. They could achieve the same thing by stressing some things and downplaying others.
They sold Jesus as the Prince of Peace to further pacify the masses, while importing a hell of tortures into the afterlife, to make sure the fear remained.
Jesus was trying to dissipate the false fear of this life, but the Phoenicians brilliantly transported that torture into the after-death, making it almost universal. In that way, even death was no escape from the Phoenician gaslighting: they could frighten you retro-actively, from beyond the grave.
Overnight, Jesus' good news or glad tidings had been flipped into an infinite future of dread and punishment, one that many Christians still believe in. The fear hadn't been mitigated, it had been magnified a thousand times, while seeming to keep Christianity.
Surely the greatest reversal in history.
11 comments:
I think he's getting the 'Phoenician' concept from Eustace Mullins' book 'The Curse of Canaan.'
There is much to think on, just from these excerpts. The disassociation thing is interesting. I guess a lot of people, who might only be in discomfort, or mild pain, *want* to disassociate, so seek out much greater pain. That would explain a lot of self-destructive behavior.
@Crosbie - wrt dissociation. It's quite a shocking passage, especially given that the mainstream secular morality is the utilitarian prevention and elimination of suffering, which relies on the assumption that suffering can be calculated objectively, which relies on its being forbidden to question the attribution of suffering (at least in reference to the inferred suffering of official victim groups). As populations, we are substantially controlled by the unchallengeable sacredness of the official calculations of suffering. It is the flip side of population control by fear.
Good news: You get to live forever
Bad news: In a horrible nightmare, and you can't ever die
H - Actually, he says - correctly IMO - that Men had (apparently) always assumed continued existence after death. There were many different ideas of how this existence would be, and usually it led to some version of reincarnation. But resurrection and Heaven were indeed the Good News, and something new.
But the idea of Hell as inflicted upon most Men, against their will and wishes, and "a horrible nightmare, and you can't ever die" was indeed "Phoenician".
Post-mortal Hell is real, but it is chosen - just as pre-mortal Hell is chosen.
Mathis doesn't go into what he personally believes on this, but the view seems broadly compatible with the more recent New Age narrative that the soul cycles between longer and more fulfilling lives in higher plane realities and brief lives on Earth.
In this view, after death, one would likely enter an 'astral' or 'mental' paradise matching the quality of one's character, then gradually journey through higher planes, until the personality had fulfilled its particular desires and returned to the perspective and memories of its higher self. The higher self, unless extremely advanced, is next interested in gathering experience in a mortal world of challenge and adversity, so it will voluntarily form a different personality to gather complementary experiences -- hence reincarnation, karma, and all that.
So the underlying question isn't "is life on Earth sufficiently satisfying" or "do you want anything better" but "do you believe the human personality has the potential to develop indefinitely, or only decades/centuries until its potential is exhausted and a fresh personality needs to be formed". To my reading, New Agers appear to want to live in a better plane of reality, but (for whatever reason) don't believe they can stay there indefinitely.
Although, perhaps I've been reading different New Age sources than you have....
@Serhei - I agree that some New Agers seem to want what you say - but I don't personally pick up that MM wants that.
Right, I agree that there is a different strain of thought that treats mortal life as the only thing real or interesting -- and any higher plane or heavenly existence as essentially instrumental to choosing the parameters for another mortal life. But the position is never stated explicitly like that -- it's a matter of reading into the assumptions that dictate what an author chooses to describe and in what detail.
Mathis might be consistent with that, if only due to the extreme interest in politics. Even his writeup suffers from this, as it veers abruptly from working to dispel despairing assumptions about man's post-mortem destiny, to exhorting readers to resist Phoenician rule for this-worldly reasons.
It's important to note the distinction between these types of optimistic/progressive views of reincarnation (cf perhaps similar to what Wm Wildblood described in 'Meeting the Masters') vs fairly neutral (cf perhaps ancient hunter-gatherers, or Mathis in this writeup) vs pessimistic/despairing (cf much of traditional Buddhism e.g. the Tibetan Book of the Dead). In some sense, it's this deeper assumption about the nature of Creation that's determinative, and whether incarnation is once or repeated is a detail whose plausibility hinges on deep assumptions about the nature of the soul vs the personality.
I'm curious as to what you'd say about the notion that there may be no qualitative difference between 'eternal resurrected life' and 'endless cycles of re-incarnation'.. ie it's all a 'matter of perspective'; if we are God experiencing himself through subjective experience then in a sense we are already living 'eternally' - there is no other possibility.
@ Michael C - The two seem qualitatively different to me!
But perhaps you think otherwise on the basis of different metaphysical assumptions - as suggested by "if we are God experiencing himself through subjective experience ". I believe a very different metaphysics.
But if what you say was true of reality, then I suppose from that POV everything is just God, so indeed nothing would be qualitatively different from anything else.
Without taking it literally, the Phoenicians are a good choice of antagonist. They apparently left so few written records we can ascribe whatever evil motivations to them we wish. That is despite them being a large and powerful civilization, and despite them having literally given us the alphabet. A Dan Brown-esque notion I have is that somewhere deep under the Vatican lie the annals of Carthage, in which their doctrines and history are written in all their awful detail!
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