A Voice from the Mountains
5th February 2015, 09:19
This is just a kind of moment in time when a lot of things are rolling around in my head, and I want to plant the roots of a clear expression of them while they're fresh in my mind.
The United Sates today in many ways resembles the ancient Roman Empire after its glory days. And not only are the same patterns clearly repeating themselves, but even the same sorts of ritualistic cults are still around to see it all, and I don't think it's necessarily a coincidence.
Roman Republic: A constitutional republic with three balancing powers (executive consuls, a Senate, and a popular assembly).
Roman Empire: The same republic, except now, after a string of military campaigns subjugating people across most of the known world, the "executive branch" is effectively a dictator that calls all the shots by himself.
The citizens are fat and happy for a while but eventually the system begins to "rot" from the inside out, due to wealth being hoarded by the rich and a deterioration of culture.
Sound familiar?
Now I'm going to university as a history major, and in my studies we are taught four general categories of reasons why the Roman Empire ultimately collapsed: economic reasons, political reasons, religious reasons, and "Germanic invasions." (This Germanic invasion bit is actually pretty interesting when you take the King Arthur "legends" into account, for example, and even moreso when you consider all the praises the Greeks were giving to the Celtic cultures, but that's another thread.)
What I want to focus on here instead is the third cateogory of reasons given, the religious reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire.
The basic idea is that Rome came to power on the back of Greek rational thought, that elevated an individual's own rational thinking over religious superstitions as practiced in Middle Eastern cults since the dawn of known civilization in that region. Alexander the Great went through Greece on a massive military campaign that smeared this rational way of thinking all over the Middle East, turning Greek philosophy towards ideas of a "world community" or "world government" that was ultimately fulfilled when the unstoppable machine that was the Roman military conquered all of these areas and brought them under common rule.
There are two ways of looking at the transformation that happened to this underlying rational Greek philosophy during the next two centuries or so, but either way you look at it, it involved Christianity, Mithraism, and other mystery schools imported from the Middle East.
1) The "traditional" way of looking at this: These mystical/spiritual/religious cults totally corrupted the pure and logical Greco-Roman ways of thinking, leading the empire to spiritual and literal chaos.
2) The overly left-brained way of trying to rationalize and analyze everything at the expense of intuition and human emotion had exhausted itself and was just as ripe for failure as every other aspect of the Roman Empire had become. The move to transcendental mysticism was the "logical" way of moving forward.
The way that we look at this issue is interesting because -- it's also where we're at again today! We're at what looks to be the end of a long scientific/technological spurt that has exhausted itself and is coming into conflict with new ways of moving forward that integrate thoughts and areas of human experience that are by definition unscientific, as they are totally subjective and spiritual or mystical ways of moving forward.
Of course the catch is that we can't afford to abandon our left-brain thinking and technology as we move in this direction, or else, we can take a lesson from history and just look at the entire Dark Ages. We have to move forward and take this with us. Ultimately we did move forward, immensely, partly (I believe) because monotheistic religions like Christianity, Islam and Judaism were actually more fertile soils for scientific development than the early pantheons of Greece, Babylon, etc. were. I'm no proponent of any kind of fundamentalist religious thinking and yet even science looks for a single source for all of creation, even if it's the "big bang" or a "unified field theory."
This takes us to Mithraism. The mystery school or cult of Mithras is the one you might remember from Zeitgeist if I'm not mistaken, where Mithras is said to have been born on December 25 (just like Jesus!) and came to save the world from evil, but also judges your soul after death to determine if you go to eternity or not. There were tons of mystery cults like this that came out of the Middle East, where, frankly, I think most people were still residually brainwashed from what amounted to Anunnaki enslavement until around 4000 - 3000 BC or so.
Despite whatever its origins may have been, this cult sought what would have been equivalent to psychedelic experiences. Some of these ancient mystery cults did seek psychedelic experiences, and used hash and opium and lotus or whatever else was available to them in order to induce an altered state of consciousness, while seeking unity with the source of creation. And they practiced "magical rituals" -- where by "magical" they mean ceremonies that allow them to go into altered states of consciousness and experience a union with either some particular deity or else the source of all of creation.
Christianity entered the Roman Empire on this same wave of mystery school importation, and was a "competitor" with Mithraism for the hearts and minds of the populace, or so the story goes. Christianity ended up being adopted officially by the Roman Empire before it was ripped asunder by the Goths and Celts and other tribes. What the Romans did with Christianity was far from the original roots of the religion, and ended up just being used to reinforce the idea that the emperor was God on Earth (not too much different than the Pope really) and that you'll look to him for authority.
Anyway this could all be tied together into a more concise package if it wasn't so late and I could dedicate more time here, but here's where I'm going in general with this. First of all, everything, including history, is a tool to help us. Seeking to unite mystically with the source of creation is good (as far as I'm concerned at least), but codifying religion and using it to further subjugate others, not so much. And technology and logic are also good, but they also shouldn't be used to subjugate our ways of thinking.
We seem to have been struggling with creating a balance of these two things (left-brain vs. right-brain struggles apparently), all without allowing either of the two to become used as a tool to force people into servitude or serfdom, for over 2500 years by now. And we're coming up on the part of the wave where, last time this happened, it was pretty disastrous, lol.. Maybe not as bad as Atlantis is you give credibility to that, but still not a good step forward. But it doesn't have to be like that this time. We're more aware of the situation, we know the tools at our disposal and hopefully we've learned all the old tricks "they" use by now.
:wizard:
The United Sates today in many ways resembles the ancient Roman Empire after its glory days. And not only are the same patterns clearly repeating themselves, but even the same sorts of ritualistic cults are still around to see it all, and I don't think it's necessarily a coincidence.
Roman Republic: A constitutional republic with three balancing powers (executive consuls, a Senate, and a popular assembly).
Roman Empire: The same republic, except now, after a string of military campaigns subjugating people across most of the known world, the "executive branch" is effectively a dictator that calls all the shots by himself.
The citizens are fat and happy for a while but eventually the system begins to "rot" from the inside out, due to wealth being hoarded by the rich and a deterioration of culture.
Sound familiar?
Now I'm going to university as a history major, and in my studies we are taught four general categories of reasons why the Roman Empire ultimately collapsed: economic reasons, political reasons, religious reasons, and "Germanic invasions." (This Germanic invasion bit is actually pretty interesting when you take the King Arthur "legends" into account, for example, and even moreso when you consider all the praises the Greeks were giving to the Celtic cultures, but that's another thread.)
What I want to focus on here instead is the third cateogory of reasons given, the religious reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire.
The basic idea is that Rome came to power on the back of Greek rational thought, that elevated an individual's own rational thinking over religious superstitions as practiced in Middle Eastern cults since the dawn of known civilization in that region. Alexander the Great went through Greece on a massive military campaign that smeared this rational way of thinking all over the Middle East, turning Greek philosophy towards ideas of a "world community" or "world government" that was ultimately fulfilled when the unstoppable machine that was the Roman military conquered all of these areas and brought them under common rule.
There are two ways of looking at the transformation that happened to this underlying rational Greek philosophy during the next two centuries or so, but either way you look at it, it involved Christianity, Mithraism, and other mystery schools imported from the Middle East.
1) The "traditional" way of looking at this: These mystical/spiritual/religious cults totally corrupted the pure and logical Greco-Roman ways of thinking, leading the empire to spiritual and literal chaos.
2) The overly left-brained way of trying to rationalize and analyze everything at the expense of intuition and human emotion had exhausted itself and was just as ripe for failure as every other aspect of the Roman Empire had become. The move to transcendental mysticism was the "logical" way of moving forward.
The way that we look at this issue is interesting because -- it's also where we're at again today! We're at what looks to be the end of a long scientific/technological spurt that has exhausted itself and is coming into conflict with new ways of moving forward that integrate thoughts and areas of human experience that are by definition unscientific, as they are totally subjective and spiritual or mystical ways of moving forward.
Of course the catch is that we can't afford to abandon our left-brain thinking and technology as we move in this direction, or else, we can take a lesson from history and just look at the entire Dark Ages. We have to move forward and take this with us. Ultimately we did move forward, immensely, partly (I believe) because monotheistic religions like Christianity, Islam and Judaism were actually more fertile soils for scientific development than the early pantheons of Greece, Babylon, etc. were. I'm no proponent of any kind of fundamentalist religious thinking and yet even science looks for a single source for all of creation, even if it's the "big bang" or a "unified field theory."
This takes us to Mithraism. The mystery school or cult of Mithras is the one you might remember from Zeitgeist if I'm not mistaken, where Mithras is said to have been born on December 25 (just like Jesus!) and came to save the world from evil, but also judges your soul after death to determine if you go to eternity or not. There were tons of mystery cults like this that came out of the Middle East, where, frankly, I think most people were still residually brainwashed from what amounted to Anunnaki enslavement until around 4000 - 3000 BC or so.
Despite whatever its origins may have been, this cult sought what would have been equivalent to psychedelic experiences. Some of these ancient mystery cults did seek psychedelic experiences, and used hash and opium and lotus or whatever else was available to them in order to induce an altered state of consciousness, while seeking unity with the source of creation. And they practiced "magical rituals" -- where by "magical" they mean ceremonies that allow them to go into altered states of consciousness and experience a union with either some particular deity or else the source of all of creation.
Christianity entered the Roman Empire on this same wave of mystery school importation, and was a "competitor" with Mithraism for the hearts and minds of the populace, or so the story goes. Christianity ended up being adopted officially by the Roman Empire before it was ripped asunder by the Goths and Celts and other tribes. What the Romans did with Christianity was far from the original roots of the religion, and ended up just being used to reinforce the idea that the emperor was God on Earth (not too much different than the Pope really) and that you'll look to him for authority.
Anyway this could all be tied together into a more concise package if it wasn't so late and I could dedicate more time here, but here's where I'm going in general with this. First of all, everything, including history, is a tool to help us. Seeking to unite mystically with the source of creation is good (as far as I'm concerned at least), but codifying religion and using it to further subjugate others, not so much. And technology and logic are also good, but they also shouldn't be used to subjugate our ways of thinking.
We seem to have been struggling with creating a balance of these two things (left-brain vs. right-brain struggles apparently), all without allowing either of the two to become used as a tool to force people into servitude or serfdom, for over 2500 years by now. And we're coming up on the part of the wave where, last time this happened, it was pretty disastrous, lol.. Maybe not as bad as Atlantis is you give credibility to that, but still not a good step forward. But it doesn't have to be like that this time. We're more aware of the situation, we know the tools at our disposal and hopefully we've learned all the old tricks "they" use by now.
:wizard: