Financial Times Article on "Closeted" Atheists

[Gosso]

While we're all thinking outside the box here, have any of you heard of astrotheology, a field that theorizes that most religions have their origins in astronomy?

In The Power of Myth series, Joseph Campbell goes a little into the similarities between myths and religions throughout all cultures.  He suggests that the reason for this is that we all share a 'collective unconscious' that drives us to realize similar things about ourselves and the Universe.  We then take this knowledge (likely gained through extensive meditation or psychedelic drugs) and then create myths that can be told to hopefully transfer this knowledge from generation to generation.  Unfortunately over time the message can become distorted, and then you end up with our current day Religions.

Carl Jung was the first to propose the collective unconscious; this is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

For Jung, “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”?.[1]

So, it's possible that our 'collective unconscious' has a strong desire to understand the cycles of the Earth and night sky.  Then this drives the myth makers to incorporate these cycles into our myths, which then sometimes become religion.

[lazyboy]

Here's a quote to ponder on the nature of the self:

"... the true nature of the self is appearance and emptiness inseparable, beyond the fabrications of existence, nonexistence, and whatever else we might think it to be."

The Sun of Wisdom, Teachings on Nagarjuna's fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way
by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso

[Tortoise]

There is obviously a lot of uncertainty that is part of the human condition that religion seeks to find answers to that has nothing to do with outer space.

One may not want to be so quick to dismiss the idea that the human condition may have something to do with astronomical cycles. That supposed connection is the basic tenet of astrology, of course. But various other theories in different areas of inquiry (history, psychology, theoretical physics, etc.) also assert that there is a fundamentally cyclical nature to reality. I'm just starting to read the book The Fourth Turning that you recommended recently, and one of its central ideas appears to be that history--rather than being random or linearly progressing--has an important cyclical component.

If there is something fundamentally cyclical about the universe and our lives in it, then is it so far-fetched that there might just possibly be deep connections (not necessarily causal, but perhaps influential) between celestial cycles and human events?

One of the ideas that has been percolating in theoretical physics recently is that the universe may be inherently "holographic" in the sense that its global structure is related to local structure at various scales of space and time. (See, for example, The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot.) This resonates with the hermetic concept of correspondence between man and nature: "As above, so below."

So, it's possible that our 'collective unconscious' has a strong desire to understand the cycles of the Earth and night sky.  Then this drives the myth makers to incorporate these cycles into our myths, which then sometimes become religion.

To me, this just begs the question of why the collective unconscious exists in the first place, and why we are connected to it. If indeed something like the collective unconscious exists, doesn't it possibly imply a deep connection between humans and the larger cosmos?

[BearBones]

To me, this just begs the question of why the collective unconscious exists in the first place, and why we are connected to it. If indeed something like the collective unconscious exists, doesn't it possibly imply a deep connection between humans and the larger cosmos?

Perhaps not just a "deep connection," but one and the same. Separateness (implied in any connection) is artifact, an illusion, a construct of the human brain with its inherent limitations of sensory perception and intellect, tendencies for strong ego identification (self vs other), and classical education to view all things dualistically (e.g, light vs dark, form vs emptiness, right vs wrong, good vs evil, human vs divine).

[MediumTex]

There is obviously a lot of uncertainty that is part of the human condition that religion seeks to find answers to that has nothing to do with outer space.

One may not want to be so quick to dismiss the idea that the human condition may have something to do with astronomical cycles. That supposed connection is the basic tenet of astrology, of course. But various other theories in different areas of inquiry (history, psychology, theoretical physics, etc.) also assert that there is a fundamentally cyclical nature to reality. I'm just starting to read the book The Fourth Turning that you recommended recently, and one of its central ideas appears to be that history--rather than being random or linearly progressing--has an important cyclical component.

I didn't mean to dismiss it at all.  I was just suggesting that the things to which we ascribe meaning tend to be the things that are either useful or intriguing to us, whether they originate in outer space, inner space or somewhere else.

As far as cycles in the world of human beings, our connection to the crop cycle ensures that many of our cultural and spiritual cycles are going to ultimately be tied to astronomical cycles.  There are, however, other cycles in human affairs that are not tied to astronomical patterns such as the cycle of human life, and the cycle of the rise and fall of civilizations.

[Gosso]

To me, this just begs the question of why the collective unconscious exists in the first place, and why we are connected to it. If indeed something like the collective unconscious exists, doesn't it possibly imply a deep connection between humans and the larger cosmos?

I suppose it is possible that everything in the cosmos including our own planet are a part of the collective unconscious.  This would mean that on some level everything is connected, and that there may be some sort of communication between everything.

But really I have no idea.  Maybe Humans were not meant to answer such questions, and if we did would it mean anything to us?  Although I might be giving up to easily. 

[stone]

The Nobel prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr is a modern day example of someone who made some worthwhile contributions despite being mad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.

In his own words, he states,

    I later spent times of the order of five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis and always attempting a legal argument for release. And it did happen that when I had been long enough hospitalized that I would finally renounce delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research. In these interludes of, as it were, enforced rationality, I did succeed in doing some respectable mathematical research. Thus there came about the research for "Le problème de Cauchy pour les équations différentielles d'un fluide général"; the idea that Prof. Hironaka called "the Nash blowing-up transformation"; and those of "Arc Structure of Singularities" and "Analyticity of Solutions of Implicit Function Problems with Analytic Data".
    But after my return to the dream-like delusional hypotheses in the later 60's I became a person of delusionally influenced thinking but of relatively moderate behavior and thus tended to avoid hospitalization and the direct attention of psychiatrists.
    Thus further time passed. Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.[3]

[Gosso]

The Nobel prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr is a modern day example of someone who made some worthwhile contributions despite being mad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.

Stone,

Very true.  I have no idea what you must have gone through, and I am glad you are back to normal.  But I think it was Terrence Mckenna that said that many cultures highly value the mystic or "crazy" person that lived by himself on the outskirts of the village.  They both feared and admired him, since they believed he was connected to some greater source, and that this same source would destroy the normal person. 

Here is an interesting 10 minute Youtube clip of Mckenna comparing schizophrenics to shamans.  I had to laugh at all the footage of the hippies dancing around.

[Tortoise]

Yes, some people suspect there is a link between creativity and mental illness, but it looks like that link hasn't necessarily been firmly established yet. Anecdotally, it does seem that a disproportionate number of the most creative people in history have displayed psychotic or bipolar behavior some of the time.

On the left-brain side of the spectrum, there is some evidence of a link between mathematical aptitude and autism:

Abstract

Autism is a severe childhood neuropsychiatric condition with a substantial genetic component. At the cognitive level children with autism are impaired in the development of their “folk psychology”?, whilst they are normal or even superior in the development of their “folk physics”?. We predicted that if their parent shared this cognitive phenotype, then they should be over-represented in engineering as an occupation. This prediction was confirmed. Both fathers and grandfathers of children with autism were found more than twice as often in the field of engineering, compared to fathers and grandfathers of other children. This link between autism and engineering may throw light not only on autism itself, but ultimately on the genetic basis of two essential human abilities: “folk psychology”? and “folk physics”?.

Source: http://www.autismresearchcentre.com/doc ... gineer.pdf

Although autism is more of a neural disorder than a "mental illness" per se, I still find it interesting that on both sides of the mental spectrum--right-brain/artistic and left-brain/mathematical--the rate of occurrence of various mental abnormalities appears to be higher than in the general population.

[stone]

autism is more of a neural disorder than a "mental illness" per se,

Tortoise there is some evidence that at least some cases of mental illness have a mundane nuts and bolts type cause:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 7407008975
Disrupted-In-Schizophrenia 1 Regulates Integration of Newly Generated Neurons in the Adult Brain

Here, we investigated roles of Disrupted-In-Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1), a schizophrenia susceptibility gene, in adult hippocampal neurogenesis. Unexpectedly, downregulation of DISC1 leads to accelerated neuronal integration, resulting in aberrant morphological development and mispositioning of new dentate granule cells in a cell-autonomous fashion. Functionally, newborn neurons with DISC1 knockdown exhibit enhanced excitability and accelerated dendritic development and synapse formation. Furthermore, DISC1 cooperates with its binding partner NDEL1 in regulating adult neurogenesis. Taken together, our study identifies DISC1 as a key regulator that orchestrates the tempo of functional neuronal integration in the adult brain and demonstrates essential roles of a susceptibility gene for major mental illness in neuronal development, including adult neurogenesis.

[Gosso]

Actually now that I think of it, my favourite musician, Matthew Good, suffers from a bipolar disorder.  It took a long time before he was properly diagnosed and we were very close to losing him:

The following summer, Good planned to spend several months in Europe to write a book. However, just a few days into the trip, Good found himself overwhelmed emotionally, experiencing what he described as the "absolute worst manic episode" while visiting friends in Bristol.[16] He returned to Vancouver, moving into his parents' home. While there, Good began to find himself with an increasing dependence on Ativan. One night, Good was discovered unconscious and rushed to the hospital, having taken upwards of forty Ativan tablets and suffering an overdose. During a brief stay in the hospital's psychiatric ward, to which he willfully committed himself,[3] Good was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.[17] The genetic illness was traced back to his mother's side.[16] Recalling past events and stages throughout his life, he has described the diagnosis as a relief, adding "it was like finding the final pieces of the puzzle."[16]

It sounds horrible saying this, but he wrote some of his best music at the height of his illness, and he even acknowledges this.  Here is one of his most popular songs called Apparitions (EDIT: I finally found a good version of Weapon, if the link doesn't work in US then try LINK).  I have heard his albums thousands of times, yet it never gets old...very few musician have that effect on me.  Fellow Canadians will have heard of Matthew Good, but he refused to expand into the US/Europe because of his anxieties brought on by the illness gift(?).

[MachineGhost]

"This is not what I had in mind.  I was trying to tell you to essentially turn away from institutional and bureaucratic religion and you have built a bigger organized religious apparatus than I could have ever conceived. 

I was trying to tell you to be kind and loving toward one another, while recognizing that none of you is perfect, and what you have done is used religion as a pretext for war after war after war.

I was trying to tell you that the peace in your own heart and soul comes from direct experience of that which is transcendent, and you have instead turned over to all manner of hucksters the job of guiding you to truths that are very simple to access on your own.

I was trying to tell you that the path to enlightenment requires one to understand the limited ability of worldly things to create lasting happiness, and you have instead built the largest churches in the world around the idea that God will express his pleasure with his people by essentially making them more worldly by allowing them to accumulate possessions as evidence of his favor."

Buddha more or less said the same thing.  And I don't believe he even claimed to be divine like Jesus, but the same thing occured with his followers.  The core message is now lost to a bunch of mysticism and rituals.

The real problem, I suspect, is people using religion as a heurisitic in lieu of critical thinking and the scientific method.

MG

[MachineGhost]

While we're all thinking outside the box here, have any of you heard of astrotheology, a field that theorizes that most religions have their origins in astronomy?

It's pretty interesting that a heterodox field like that has a formal name now.  Before the Rational Age, astronomy and astrology were the one and the same.  I am pretty sure the first civlization, Sumeria, is the mother source.

We tend to laugh at astrology now because the charting methods being used are not what was used by the ancients eons ago, it has all devolved into "pop psychology".  But I do suspect that astrology is correlation, not causation.  Cycles are part of the fundamental nature of the universe.  It is just a circle, after all.

Has anyone seen the movie "pi"?

MG

[BearBones]

Buddha more or less said the same thing.  And I don't believe he even claimed to be divine like Jesus, but the same thing occured with his followers.  The core message is now lost to a bunch of mysticism and rituals.

Would have to disagree with 2 of your points here. First of all, I am sure that some lunatics out there have claimed the Buddha to be divine, but this was not a claim of the Buddha or his monk followers. Second, the teachings of the Buddha (the Dharma) are fairly well documented in the various sutras. At least this has been my experience.

Some branches of Buddhism have become rather adorned with myth and ritual, as you noted. This is what humans do, sometimes for the better, many times for the worse. And it is interesting to hear how Joseph Campbell describes such mythologies, which are not to be taken literally (although some do, I suppose) and which bear striking semblance to the myths and rituals of other "religions" (in quotes, because Buddhism does not deal with the notion of God).

[Gosso]

I was reading through Aldous Huxley's Wiki page and discovered something very strange:

Media coverage of Huxley's passing was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day, and the death of the Irish author C. S. Lewis, who also died on 22 November. This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley.

John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley all died on the same day!  It's almost as if God called a meeting of three of the best minds in their field--The Three Wise Men.  This is one of the strangest coincidences I have ever seen.  Plus it involves the most famous death in history, although Jesus might have JFK beat there.  Maybe it was a glitch in the Matrix?

[MediumTex]

I was reading through Aldous Huxley Wiki page and discovered something very strange:

Media coverage of Huxley's passing was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day, and the death of the Irish author C. S. Lewis, who also died on 22 November. This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley.

John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley all died on the same day!  It's almost as if God called a meeting of three of the best minds in their field--The Three Wise Men.  This is one of the strangest coincidences I have ever seen.  Plus it involves the most famous death in history, although Jesus might have JFK beat there.  Maybe it was a glitch in the Matrix?

Oh wow.

I thought Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson dying on the same day was the weirdest.

Here is a list of strange same day deaths (the trio mentioned above looks to be the only time something like that has happened):

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/25995

[Gosso]

Oh wow.

I thought Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson dying on the same day was the weirdest.

Here is a list of strange same day deaths (the trio mentioned above looks to be the only time something like that has happened):

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/25995

Okay, I have had this rattling around in my head all day...here it goes!!!

I'll admit it's a little more strange that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4, 1826, EXACTLY 50 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.  Since no one else is saying it I will...these guys have got to be time travelers or aliens (I'm being half serious, but it is also possible I'm losing my marbles).  This is so bizarre!!  It's almost like they made a deal with 'God' that if they got the Declaration of Independence signed that they would have EXACTLY 50 years to hang out on Earth and enjoy all the wonders of this planet or time period.  Maybe this is blasphemy to you Yankees, but in my world this makes too much sense to simply dismiss.

If there are any math whizzes out there, could you please calculate the odds that both my brother and I would die on my birthday??  Then multiply this by the population of the world at the time, or maybe more given how important these two individuals were?

Well, I am now slowly rocking back and forth in the corner of my room with a tinfoil hat on my head.  I have gone too deep!!

[MediumTex]

Oh wow.

I thought Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson dying on the same day was the weirdest.

Here is a list of strange same day deaths (the trio mentioned above looks to be the only time something like that has happened):

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/25995

Okay, I have had this rattling around in my head all day...here it goes!!!

I'll admit it's a little more strange that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4, 1826, EXACTLY 50 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.  Since no one else is saying it I will...these guys have got to be time travelers or aliens (I'm being half serious, but it is also possible I'm losing my marbles).  This is so bizarre!!  It's almost like they made a deal with 'God' that if they got the Declaration of Independence signed that they would have EXACTLY 50 years to hang out on Earth and enjoy all the wonders of this planet or time period.  Maybe this is blasphemy to you Yankees, but in my world this makes too much sense to simply dismiss.

If there are any math whizzes out there, could you please calculate the odds that both my brother and I would die on my birthday??  Then multiply this by the population of the world at the time, or maybe more given how important these two individuals were?

Well, I am now slowly rocking back and forth in the corner of my room with a tinfoil hat on my head.  I have gone too deep!!

And to think you probably just came here because you wanted to learn a little more about the Permanent Portfolio.

[Gosso]

My bad for derailing placing this thread in a time machine, loading it into a shotgun and firing it through the Matrix.

I still think we have some more stones to overturn.

"This is not what I had in mind.  I was trying to tell you to essentially turn away from institutional and bureaucratic religion and you have built a bigger organized religious apparatus than I could have ever conceived. 

I was trying to tell you to be kind and loving toward one another, while recognizing that none of you is perfect, and what you have done is used religion as a pretext for war after war after war.

I was trying to tell you that the peace in your own heart and soul comes from direct experience of that which is transcendent, and you have instead turned over to all manner of hucksters the job of guiding you to truths that are very simple to access on your own.

I was trying to tell you that the path to enlightenment requires one to understand the limited ability of worldly things to create lasting happiness, and you have instead built the largest churches in the world around the idea that God will express his pleasure with his people by essentially making them more worldly by allowing them to accumulate possessions as evidence of his favor."

Buddha more or less said the same thing.  And I don't believe he even claimed to be divine like Jesus, but the same thing occured with his followers.  The core message is now lost to a bunch of mysticism and rituals.

The real problem, I suspect, is people using religion as a heurisitic in lieu of critical thinking and the scientific method.

MG

I find the similarities between Jesus, Krishna, and Buddha fascinating. There is the theory out there that Jesus actually travelled into India and other parts of Asia during the "Lost Years" from the time between being a teenager to his baptism.  He essentially went on a spiritual pilgrimage and studied with all the great teachers of the time.  I haven't reviewed all the evidence, but it does make a whole lot of sense.  For me this increases the credibility of the teachings of Jesus -- the only problem is separating what he taught with what was added by the Church (I know I still need to read The Thomas Jefferson Bible).

Here is a one hour documentary on this topic called "Beyond Belief - Jesus In India" (The Stephen Colbert interview at 13:30, is pure gold!).  The documentary also covers the Gnostic texts found in 1945, and Jesus not dying on the cross but rather survived and fled to Kashmir, India.  I guess this is possible, but to me it doesn't really matter that much, since it doesn't impact his teachings.

[Gosso]

here is an interesting movie on astrology, astrotheology, symbolism, myths, Christianity  and The Entheogen Theory of Religion http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kyQOeiY11RA#!   

I now have a strange desire to play Super Mario...



I really liked the video, it did a good job of breaking down the origins of Christianity.  It makes a lot of sense that the early Christians would have borrowed from many of the myths at the time, and then combine them to create a new "unifying" religion.  This ties in nicely with my current reading of Joseph Campbell, where he breaks down what the myths and religions are actually telling you about life.  Campbell sees Christ as a metaphor for the person/soul rather than a mushroom, but it's possible there could be a dual meaning.  I'm not 100% buying the Eater and Christmas relation to mushrooms, but it's possible.

This is such a fascinating subject.

[Gosso]

i thought Easter was a bit of a jump, but the shaman to Santa stuff lined up so well it makes me wonder....
i enjoyed the astrotheology at the beginning, it made some new connections i wasn't aware of, some of the other information i have picked up from a variety other places (including reading Allegro), but it is nice to see it all brought together in a smooth coherent way, something my brain cant do with the mishmash of things i have run across over a long number of years,

with most symbolism/myth it is almost a prerequisite to have multiple layers of meaning for each different audience, i would be surprised if there were only two...

True...you could also interrupt the story of Jesus to mean that he was the only literal Son of God 

The death and resurrection might also symbolize a society dependent on agriculture.  The seed is "killed", buried in the ground, and then is reborn to give life to the people.  This is a very common motif throughout many agricultural societies.