Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)
Determinism in Mystery Religion
Contents
Kouros Mystes' theory of Fate and
Hellenic religion
Ancients didn't believe in free
will, used entheogens constantly
Classic poetry flows from ecstatic
determinism
Website:
Eleusinion
-- Celebrating the Rebirth of Hellenic Paganism
Kouros
Mystes
http://www.angelfire.com/moon/syriktes/hall.html
The
Rebirth, And What We Mean by "Hellenic Reconstructionist Paganism"
Polytheism
and Politics
The
Mysteries
The
Elements of the Anthropos: A study of the Human Being on All Levels
Concerning
Cosmology: A Preliminary Reconstruction of Hellenic Cosmology
Forms of
Devotion
Discussion
Group
Links
---
Web
Memorial for Hypatia of Alexandria
Inspiration
from History: A Moment of Truth for Pagans
---
"Nine
Insights into Modern Pagan Ethics and Theology" by Kouros -- Concerning:
Animal
Sacrifice
Death,
Virtue, and Afterlife
Syncretism
The
Nature of Mind
Fate and
Free Will
The
Nature of the Gods
The
Institution of Sacrifice
The
Great Father Gods
The
Desire for Union
---
link:
Virtual Temple of Hecate
link:
Virtual Temple of Pallas Athena
link:
Complete Online Encyclopedia of Greek Mythology and Divine Beings
Concerning
Fate and Free Will
By
Kouros Mystes
http://www.angelfire.com/moon/syriktes/es5.html
--
>>The
idea of a single “God" being consciously and meaningfully in charge of
every aspect of reality is part of a very Christian worldview. It has no place
in authentic Paganism.
>>Fate
is the concept that replaces "God's Plan" in the Old Pagan Religions-
and Fate is not an intelligent, plotting force in the way we think of those
terms- Fate is the unstoppable movement of reality itself, that ultimate cause
which ordains all following causes- and the Gods themselves are subject to it.
If Fate has intelligence, or volition, it is quite above our ability to cope
with it. The web of fate would be the quadrillions of interlocked and
inter-affective forces that are occurring simultaneously, and which present the
"gridlock" of forces from the quantum level up to the level of
universes (That great tapestry or twisted threads being 'spun' by the Fates or
the Moriae) that make up the very basis of your sentient experience as you read
this very letter.
>>Some
of the Gods have special insight into the tapestry, and can predict Fate, or
seem to have an inner-knowledge of it's workings, but I believe that all beings
on the Daimonic level of experience (like the Gods) have that ability to a
lesser or greater degree- and mortals (like Oracles) can achieve that same
ability, albeit to a very limited, mortal degree.
>>Some
believe that the Magna Mater, the Mother of Men and the Gods, and all things,
has the power to change Fate; or perhaps that She embodies it in some great
way- I personally believe this myself, but it is far from a universal idea.
Either way, I understand how much you are turned off by the Judeo-Christian
"God's in Charge" idea, trust me. But don't connect Paganism (or our
wise Pagan ancestors) to that.
>>Our
[pagan] Gods are part of Fate- immersed in the system, almost- just like we;
They must “bow” to Fate and Necessity, just as everything must- but they (the
Gods) have perceptive abilities above and beyond ours, giving them a godly
experience of Fate, while we get the mortal experience.
...
>>The
reason why you see a conflict between Fate and free will is because you don't
realize how intimate and pervasive Fate really is- and the fact that your
personal choices and decisions are occurring WITHIN the system of Fate, not
outside of it. Every choice you make IS fated- that is, it carries the force of
fate- but it is NOT pre-determined. There is no pre-written future sitting up
ahead of us- FATE is the occurrence of NOW. It's the reality NOW. It's the
configuration of forces NOW. Fate does not exist in the “Future” because the
future does not exist.
>>Only
a present moment of eternal becoming or unfolding exists. The past can be said
to exist as a part of the present- the past flows into the present and becomes
a part of the present moment, in both the manner of the cumulative nature of
mortal memory, as well as in deeper, more transpersonal ways. The Past/Present combination
is all that exists, and it eternally “becomes” or changes, based on what forces
act on it, and have always acted on it.
---- end
of excerpts from Kouros Mystes ----
At least
Mystes is focused on the right issues, even if he underestimates and misreads
Hellenistic religion, and omits mixed wine (visionary plants; opium, cannabis,
mushrooms, datura, henbane) from the home page.
I advocate
a far stronger and more overwhelming view of Fate, leading to peak religious
experiencing of needing rescue by a god mechanically and artificially lowered
onto the stage. The future timelessly
exists. This super-coherent and simple
view (and experiential mode) kills the power of egoic steermanship, causing the
most intense ego-death experience and desperate, transcendent prayer to leap
out of the system.
Here is
where transcendent religion begins, but especially where intense experience
begins: not ego death as a revelation of sure and absolutely certain truth, but
rather, ego death as the ultimate climactic experience.
________________________________
>Website:
>Eleusinion
-- Celebrating the Rebirth of Hellenic Paganism
>Kouros
Mystes
>http://www.angelfire.com/moon/syriktes/hall.html
Michael
wrote:
>>>At
least Mystes is focused on the right issues, even if he underestimates and
misreads Hellenistic religion, and omits mixed wine (visionary plants; opium,
cannabis, mushrooms, datura, henbane) from the home page.
Kouros
Mystes wrote:
>>I
don't think I am mis-reading anything. I am reading what is there. I am fully
aware of the use of Entheogenic substances in the context of the Mysteries- and
my private work deals at length with it.
>>However,
that is not to say that I think that hallucinogens and the
"ego-death" experience you are talking about was the heart and root
of the whole Hellenistic world's religious experience. It was more complex than
that.
>>>I
advocate a far stronger and more overwhelming view of Fate, leading to peak
religious experiencing of needing rescue by a god mechanically and artificially
lowered onto the stage.
>>This
is a good metaphorical view that can be used to build a technology of ecstasy.
>>My
view of Fate is already overpowering- nothing ever "escapes" it, or
at least not as most people imagine the escape. Fate is the context of everything,
the consequence of the All. Only Fate is truly omnipotent. The ancient writings
make it very clear that even the Gods have to deal with Fate. Getting outside
of this system is the territory of the Mysteries, and again, more private
writings.
>>>The
future timelessly exists.
>>To
say that something timelessly exists means that it is not subject to change,
and nothing that exists in any meaningful sense is not free from the force of
change. If you wish to use "timeless" to mean
"transcendental", then we are talking about a reality that cannot be
grasped, much less talked about, nor can we assign the reality of things like
the "future" to it.
>>I
prefer to think of the future as not existing at all- only the moment does.
>>>This
super-coherent and simple view (and experiential mode) kills the power of egoic
steersmanship, causing the most intense ego-death experience and desperate,
transcendent prayer to leap out of the system.
>>Yes,
But the Cosmos cannot be leapt out of. Even if you pierce the Door of Night and
move beyond, you are still in the Cosmos, just in a new, perhaps
"transcendent" way that we cannot really fathom.
>>However,
setting yourself up for the POSSIBILITY of transcendence by using models such
as "leaping out of the system" is a reality, and is the only way to
orient the mind to the Daimonic.
Michael
wrote:
>>>Here
is where transcendent religion begins, but especially where intense experience
begins: not ego death as a revelation of sure and absolutely certain truth, but
rather, ego death as the ultimate climactic experience.
Kouros
Mystes wrote:
>>An
experience, any experience, has a beginning and an end, making it not the
ultimate thing itself, but another mortal thing. Have you ever considered that
what you call "ego death" is in reality something much more?
_________________________________
Kouros
Mystes wrote:
>>An
experience, any experience, has a beginning and an end, making it not the
ultimate thing itself, but another mortal thing. Have you ever considered that
what you call "ego death" is in reality something much more?
Ego death
is more than the temporally bounded experience of the intense mystic altered
state. Ego death is both a series of
temporally bounded experiences (visionary plant sessions) and the new mental
worldmodel thereby established and learned, involving systemic revision of the
mind's core conceptions of time, self, control, will, agency, and world.
A
postulated ego death that is more than an experience with a beginning and end
and a resulting new mental worldmodel wouldn't fit with ancient religious talk
of perfection and regeneration.
Initiation is a series of sessions, limited in time, resulting in a
memory of the peak insights and also a lasting changed mental worldmodel.
Any other
view of religious ultimates would have to be endlessly complicated and
therefore ineffective. Ego death is a
finite, temporally bounded and delimited experience of timelessness, within
time, revealing fundamental new perspective during the sessions, a new
perspective which is then generally retained throughout subsequent periods of
both ordinary-state and mystic-state consciousness.
Any other
theory of ego death must be endlessly complicated and therefore ineffective and
different than the classic, simple, routinely attainable conception. What is mortal is the egoic freewillist
conception of self, time, and world; this conception is metaphorically burned
away, leaving an imperishable, stable, and lasting worldmodel instead,
allegorized as immortality, perfection, maturity, completion, divinization,
sainthood, and becoming a magus/magician, or miracle worker.
http://www.egodeath.com
-- the only simple and comprehensible theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience. The only essence, paradigm,
origin, core, fountainhead, and ultimate goal of religion is the use of
visionary plants to routinely trigger the intense mystic altered state,
producing loose cognitive association binding, which then produces an
experience of frozen block-universe determinism with a single, pre-existing, ever-existing
future. The return of the ordinary
state of consciousness is allegorized as a transcendence of Necessity or cosmic
determinism. Myth describes this
mystic-state experience. Initiation is
classically a series of some 8 visionary-plant sessions, interspersed with
study of perennial philosophy. Most
religion is a distortion, corruption, literalization, cooptation, and
missing-the-point overcomplication of this simple, standard initiation system.
Ken Wilber
and other scholars have subtle speculative theories about how ancient man's
consciousness was different -- for example, in ancient Greece. But more than anything, it comes down to two
closely related things:
1. They
didn't believe in freewill; they saw right through that delusion and ego death
was common, standard and integrated into their worldmodel.
2. They
used entheogens all the time. We are
not far from understanding anew, if we consider that whenever they say
"wine" or "mead", they mean powdered psilocybin mushroom
beverage or another visionary plant, such as henbane.
Both of
these are enormous paradigm shifts in our understanding of religion and
sociopolitical consciousness -- particularly when considered together as
one. The constant, very frequent use of
entheogenic "wine" prevented an egoic-thinking based sociopolitical
consciousness and psychology from developing.
We can be
grateful to the official Christian church for suppressing entheogens and
repudiating Augustine's weak acceptance of freewill, and its insistence on
taking freewill seriously even while attempting to retain transcendent
determinism. The Church did, through
force of power and suppression of entheogens, what is logically impossible: in
effect, insisting on both genuine metaphysical freewill moral agency and
transcendent determinism.
We've been
a society mainly of what the ancients would say is deluded and psychically
dirty, impure children -- a society dominated by the uninitiated
consciousness. You know that feeling of
being an independent modern freewill agent -- modern consciousness? That's the result of taking freewill
seriously even into adulthood, and eliminating genuine initiation which is
initiation into the consciousness of no-free-will, which reshapes the mental
worldmodel. We are a global society of
minds that are, for the most part, unshaped by contact with transcendent mental
dynamics.
These
individual points I have posted before, but today when continuing to read
Burkert's book Greek Religion, it struck me with full force as an enormous
paradigm shift, a kind of major breakthrough.
I previously read books that either treated "Greek myths", or
treated "Hellenistic mystery-religions". Even Luther Martin's book "Hellenistic Religion" omits
too much myth and omits all the rest of culture though every aspect of Greek
culture was directly linked to religion.
Our modern mistake is to consider Hellenistic "religion" as
something isolated from other areas.
Greek
Religion
Walter
Burkert
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674362810
The book
has many entheogenic egodeath metaphors -- "wine" is everywhere, and
mythic metaphors are everywhere. For
example: The two girls in the sacred
mountain sanctuary opened the basket lid, and what they saw so frightened them,
they fell over the edge to their death.
Even if
the "wine" was only entheogenic a minority of the time, it was
clearly thought of as entheogenic all the time, and the whole culture was based
on the idea and influence of entheogenic wine, which is to say, based on
no-free-will.
Now that I
have studied mystery-religions, myth, religious experiencing separately, I
picked up Burkert's book for the second time and this time, it all makes sense,
based on the key assumptions: that "wine" means effectively
"psilocybin beverage" (and they always were drinking
"wine"), and that they -- the adults -- didn't believe in freewill.
First I
asked entheogen scholars to try discarding the historical Jesus assumption and
framework of thinking and try the benefits and potentials of a no-literal-Jesus
framework of thinking. They have made
that step. Next, I have a less moderate
proposal that is far more than they ever signed on for: not only did they use
entheogens secretly in some mystery-religion initiations once in a lifetime,
but rather, they used entheogens more like constantly, all the time, every
day.
Entheogens
were totally integrated and not only that, but were the very foundation of not
just mystery initiation, not just religion, but every aspect of war, sacrifice,
religion, psychology, philosophy, literature, marriage, banquets, festivals,
travel, sports, politics, and every other aspect of culture. Just as modern atheist sobriety and the
ordinary state of consciousness is our touchpoint and reality basis, their
touchpoint and reality basis was entheogenic "wine".
>>What
was your objective in posting Devo's lyrics "Freedom of Choice"?
>>Is
Devo still under the illusion of FW?
>>These
lyrics are useful as an example of thinking under the "free" will
illusion. The sentiment of this poem
could not be more incorrect.
Such
lyrics are pointedly, startlingly, blatantly and manifestly incorrect, to a
studied and experienced extent. Devo is
not still under the illusion of metaphysically free will. In general, the Rock or Classic Rock
mystery-religion is authentic, leading practitioners into an intense
experiential insight of no-free-will.
I have not
yet surveyed Devo's lyrics systematically for allusions to mystic altered state
experiential phenomena and experiential insights, but several themes jumped out
at me during years of researching such allusions in Rock lyrics.
High
poetry naturally is centrally concerned with the problematic nature of freedom
of will; the classic purpose of poetry is to express the mystic-state
experiential insight of no-free-will.
Classic poetry is ecstatic poetry, grounded in and flowing forth from
the intense mystic altered state of consciousness -- the realm of experiencing in
which the freewill delusion fatally collapses, leading to freedom of a type
that can only transcend determinism rather than denying determinism.
The
experienced mind moves through the fullest possible experience of determinism
and complete intellectual comprehension and prehension of determinism (vertical
timeless chains of causality as well as horizontal in-time chains of
causality). When the mind moves through
the fullest experiential insight of determinism, this means conceding and
affirming the ineluctable reality of determinism.
Upon
passing out of and beyond that experience, the mind can be said to
"transcend determinism" -- but in a way, by definition, that affirms
cosmic determinism. The result is the
truly classic position of hard determinism, which is not modern hard
determinism (which is limited to familiarity with the ordinary state of
consciousness), but is a superset of modern hard determinism (horizontal
in-time causal chain determinism), with the addition of mystic-state
determinism (vertical timeless hierarchical chain-of-being causality).
Devo's
song Freedom of Choice is a mockery of the idea of freewill. Devo probably used visionary plants
(cannabis and LSD) per the standard Rock religion, which is a modern authentic
experiential mystery-religion leading many Rock lyricists and other Heavy Rock
practitioners to discover the completely problematic status of free will.
Similarly,
the song Free Will by Rush must be read as a mystic-state problematization of
naive free will -- it was written after the lyricist was intimately familiar
with the intense mystic-state experience of no-free-will, so Free Will is a
post-determinism or transcendence-of-determinism song, not a naive advocacy of
freewill as the noninitiates among the Rush fans assume.
After all,
3/4 of the verses in the song Free Will clearly state and express and assert
the classic determinist position: A planet of playthings, we dance on the
strings, of powers we cannot perceive.
De-evolution
can be read as an expression of the standard inevitable path of cognitive
development: the child develops into a young adult, who develops and evolves
their thinking and increases their experiencing and reflection to the point
where the freewill mode of thinking gives way; the lower, freewill-styled self
evolves up to the point where it becomes absurd and collapses out of its own
essential incoherence and self-contradiction.
The mind
then enters a mode other than the modern, individual, responsible, self-moving,
moral freewill agent; the mind evolves beyond modernity, and this evolution can
be portrayed in a way that mocks the modern project of infinite development of
the independent individual. Mocking
freewill is a common stance for those who have overcome, and who have seen the
absurdity of taking the convenient illusion of metaphysically freewill
seriously and literally.
Rush
dedicated the album 2112 to the genius of Ayn Rand, which is a mockery first of
all, in addition to praise -- a highly qualified praise. It is dedicated to the protective guiding
angel or spirit that is *over* Ayn Rand the advocate of modern individualist
consciousness. Two cheers for the power
of the individual freewill agent!
The
Classic Rock song Freedom of Choice naturally would serve well for analysis of enlightenment
themes. Using one's freedom of choice
leads through the maze in the mind to the problematic, catastrophic collapse
into self-control seizure, most unwanted by the lower self but most beloved by
the higher self.
a victim
of collision on the open sea
nobody
ever said that life was free
sank,
swam, go down with the ship
but use
your freedom of choice
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