Everything Is...

By Xoic · Mar 9, 2022 · ·
  1. [​IMG]

    Apparently the image is from a movie, or a game or something. I just needed something with the word Everything, preferably followed by Is. This was as close as I could find, but it's pretty perfect, because there are mushrooms all over it. Whatever the picture is from is probably very close to what I'm using it for.

    This is about the gnostic revelation I had many years ago. I described it in this post:
    Ever since then it's been something I think about frequently, my life's riddle that I try to unravel. I'm doing it through most of this blog in fact. If it's too TL;DR for you, the revelation I received is that every sentence we utter, or write or think, is an imperfect attempt at The Ultimate Sentence, which is Everything Is.

    I felt like (or did this occur to me later?) the statement was unfinished, like it needed another word. And it seems perfect that that word wasn't revealed to me, it was left for me to ponder endlessly. This is what makes it a life's riddle. It's a gap I need to close. And of course there are countless different ways to close it.

    My friend says it should be Shit. At times I tend to agree.

    But (surprise surprise) I usually tend more toward
    God or Love. They're interchangeable—it means the same thing either way, depending on your conception of God I suppose. Since mine is very esoteric, they're the same thing.

    More recently the thought occurred to me, Everything Is could also be seen as a somewhat different formulation of
    I Am—God's statement. If He created everything from Himself, from the pure love that He's composed of, then they mean the same thing. It's as if in the beginning only Love existed, in a jumbled chaos, then it formed into God, who then breathed the World into being from It/Himself. Or maybe it makes more sense to say Everything Existed in a jumbled Chaos, but God was made of Love and breathed It into the Chaos, turning it into the World. Sorry about all the capitals, it makes it all kind of too fancy, doesn't it. And if I'd follow my line of reasoning through to Its logical conclusion, then I'd have to Capitalize Every Word, Because (sorry, I can't keep Doing That) ultimately Everything Is God. Everything. Including You and Me. So I can officially stop capitalizing. Consider it implied in everything I write or say.

    Anyway, just wanted to share this, because it's some progress I've made in unraveling my riddle and I had never mentioned it before.
    Set2Stun and Bone2pick like this.

Comments

  1. Xoic
    Overarching Meaning

    All my more minor quests in life—trying to figure out how to write, to do animation, to draw and paint—they're all nested inside the big one, the Everything Is riddle. Somehow that one, even when I'm not specifically thinking about it, is always there.

    So really this does give my life a sense of overarching meaning.

    I also sometimes wonder if I lost my fear of death during the revelation. I always assumed that was when I started to practice Stoicsm, because a big part of it is to continually ponder the fact of your mortality, and everyone's mortality, in very realistic terms, and little by little death loses its sting.

    I did that, but come to think of it death didn't have that much sting for me even in the beginning. They say if you have a revelation or a moment of enlightenment under the influence of a hallucinogen, that it removes your fear of death and gives you a sense of ongoing meaning or purpose. It's also supposed to make it easy to quit bad habits like smoking or other addictions. I can't say, I had none at the time and still don't.
  2. Xoic
    Here's a part of the revelation I haven't written about anywhere

    (just because it would have made my description too long and unwieldy). I can do it here, thanks to my approach of using Comments for commentary. It's pretty nifty, it allows me to keep my main topic tightly focused in the top post and then add digressions and peripheral ideas underneath. In fact it allows for what Jung calls circumambulation, thinking all around an idea.

    Included in the statement Everything Is is the notion that only Things belong to the category Everything. Example, unicorns don't exist, so they aren't things. Therefore they would go into the category Nothing does not Exist (or Nothing Is Not). Non-things have no existence. This all seemed impossibly exciting at the time, it had deep cosmic meaning. Maybe it really does, but in our usual limited left-brain awareness we just aren't capable of seeing it.

    However, the idea of unicorns is a thing—it definitely exists.

    I went through stage after stage of thinking like this, rising up through layers, until I arrived at the idea, not that Everything Is (that itself isn't the revelation) but that every sentence we say or write or think is an incomplete attempt at the Ultimate Sentence—Everything Is. All things exist. Because anything that doesn't exist isn't actually a thing, see? You can just keep going like this.

    Thoughts like this were going off like popcorn in my head, and my excitement was continually mounting. I had goosebumps all over. Then the Ultimate Sentence was revealed to me and it all faded back to normal. It probably only took about 5 minutes, but it felt like half an hour or more. In a way it felt like an eternity.
  3. Xoic
    But I was left with the idea that my revelation was cut short, that one more idea remained:

    What Is Everything?

    This is the part I'm left to ponder throughout my mortal existence.
      petra4 likes this.
  4. Xoic
    Everything's Alright

    yes, everything's fine
    And it's cool and the ointment's sweet
    For the fire in your head and feet
    Close your eyes, close your eyes
    And relax, think of nothing
    tonight​

    These are lyrics to the song Everything's Alright in Jesus Christ Superstar. Strange that it begins with a version of Everything Is and includes the idea of relaxing and thinking of nothing. Is that a reference to meditation? I mean the bolded part—close your eyes, relax, think of nothing. It could definitely be, though it's weird that Mary would be saying it to Jesus, because it was his teaching to her, according to the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. But then she also taught it afterwards.


    Just try to get this one out of your head. Good luck with that! :p
  5. Xoic
    And when I say Everything Is God, including You and Me, I don't mean it in The Wrong Way. I don't mean I Am God. Not in any literal way, and I'm saying whatever it means, it's true for everyone.

    When Jesus was baptized, the dove flew down and entered his breast. If you understand the dove as the Christ, as Christ-consciousness, then it wasn't really him. It was something inside him, something divine, that was activated in that moment. And according to the Eastern traditions (like early Christianity) it's something inside all of us that lies dormant, but that we can access through practices like meditation and prayer.

    Of course none of us are Jesus, nor can we be. He was a perfect man. Born of a perfect woman, with God as his true father, in a way that can't be true for any of us. We're mortals, descended from the lineage of Adam and Eve, imperfect and immersed in sin. But because of Jesus' sacrifice, we now have access to the Christ consciousness inside. At least this is my understanding. We need to purify ourselves of sin, aim toward the virtues, and use techniques like meditation prayer and fasting to activate it. Maybe a micro dose once or twice to turbo-charge the process. Apparently psychedelics were widely available and commonly used, always as part of a religious ritual, in ancient times and in shamanic/indigenous practices even today.
  6. Xoic
  7. Xoic
  8. Xoic
    About a couple of the posted videos

    I re-watched the video I linked to in the top post, about hallucinogens and the Eleusinian Mysteries. At one point toward the end I believe, Professor Ruck mentioned that he had gone into psychology in University, but was told that's the study of the sick mind. That's not true for Jung, or for certain other branches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, based on Stoicism—they're specifically designed to maximize mental health (but of course Jung has never been taught in colleges). But I like that he said the Humanities is where you learn about the healthy human mind, especially classical literature I think.

    On the Nature of Sin
    And the last video I posted just above, the Jonathan Pageau one about the symbolism of eating, fasting, and meat, explains that nothing is a sin in and of itself. It's all OK as long as you're still in control.* It only becomes a sin when you lose control and get drawn into compulsion or addiction. The problem with the sins is they pull you down to your lowest animal nature and make you lose touch with the spiritual. I suppose you need to develop the feel for when that's happening.

    * I should add, it's all OK as long as you remain in control and don't 'choose' to overindulge. You do need to keep indulgence to a reasonable minimum.
  9. Xoic
    Maybe it could be said that

    Compulsive behavior is the only real sin?

    Not sure, just trying the idea out to see if it sticks. It requires some pondering.
  10. Xoic
    And maybe what I'm doing is wrestling with God

    I'm struggling to come to a real understanding of the great life wisdom we call religion. What it really means, how the symbolism works, how to make use of it in your life. Jordan Peterson began this (for those of us who weren't religious to begin with) with his Biblical lecture videos, and then John Vervaeke continued by delving deep into what Awakening Experiences are and how to achieve them in his Meaning Crisis videos. Now it's up to each of us to pursue the quest on our own, to figure out in ever greater detail what all the stories mean, what wisdom is concealed in their depths, and to how to live it.
  11. Xoic
    Religion is the greatest of the Humanities

    Being precisely the study of the healthy human mind and the well-integrated human life.

    It focuses on moral behavior and how to struggle with the things that disturb morality (known as the sins). Science doesn't focus on those things at all—by its own definition it can study only the physical world. It works not with moral truths but with physical facts. Vital and necessary stuff, but even science needs to be under the guidance of morality. That means religion overarches all, including science.

    It's the top of the hierarchy of wisdom. It needs to be properly understood. We've completely lost the understanding of it in modern times, and the vast majority of 'leaders' and politicians love the fact that we have no guidance in moral matters. It makes us sheep easily led to the slaughter.
  12. Xoic
    The best way I know of to continue that study into what religion really means and how to make use of it is to

    Study Esotericism

    Every religion has a 'secret code' at the heart of it, sort of like The DaVinci Code, only real. This is why The DaVinci Code is so compelling, because we can sense that to some extent it's true—religious stories have always used symbolism, in the same way dreams do, because symbolism is the language of the unconscious, of the archetypes. And the unconscious is where religion emerges from.

    If you learn how to interpret them, your dreams and fantasies are sometimes religious revelations. When important things are happening in your life turn to your dreams, learn how to interpret them. Go to Jung for this. There are a few great books on Jungian dream interpretation.

    And for esotericism scour YouTube and the internet in general. Loads of great information out there. I've been posting some of my favorites throughout this blog. What you're looking for is esoteric interpretations of religious stories.
  13. Xoic
    Wow!! There are a bunch of books on Jungian dream interpretation! I just checked Amazon. Some must be new, or at least I had never run across them before. Not sure I ever searched with that specific combination of terms. I picked up several, some on kindle some not.

    The more you understand about the symbolic language of dream interpretation, the better you'll be able to understand religious symbolism—they're basically the same since religion emerges from the unconscious (or we connect to it through the unconscious... )

    Here's a book going into exactly that topic:
  14. Xoic
    Just discovered an author who writes about all the stuff I've been discussing on the blog lately. I'm just gonna link to his author's page:
    Just scrolling through you can see he deals with all my favorite topics—Jung, Mystical Christianity, dreams. There's even a book called The Man Who Wrestled with God!

    When you're ready a teacher appears. Or when you do enough searching on Amazon. :cool:
      petra4 likes this.
  15. Xoic
    John Sanford is me with 50 years more experience

    At all this stuff. Not only is he into exactly the same things I am (and has been since the early 70's at least) but he's worked out an integrated system involving all of them. There's a slight incompatibility issue between Individuation and Christian Mysticism, because Individuation involves integrating your shadow (accepting your inner darkness) whereas Christianity involves purging it. This is something I've been trying to figure out and leaning toward Individuation. It sounds like he's found a way to reconcile them that's centered on Individuation—he seems to use a somewhat modified approach to Mysticism.

    Now I need to get the rest of his books and get to some real studyin'. It feels like up till now I've been searching for my way and now I've found it. Or at least I'm very close. This also feels like confirmation that the intuitive choices I've been making (in terms of what path to walk) have been the right ones.
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