Chili

Perhaps, but I am not trying to criticize anyone here but offer an alternate position to help solve a problem . . . which no doubt will lead to the next question and that is where dialogue or argumentation for the discovery of truth all about. Down the road it is called alchemy that requires base metal such as bible passages to be purified and so it is that physics come first and the historic passages are needed as the mirror image to be polished onto gold.

At least to me there is something wrong with calling talking snakes a metaphor and take the rest to be literal and therefore sometimes wrong. I would rather say that I am wrong and just leave it at that for now.

spamandham

IMHO, this is not far from Paul's message. He uses variations of 'crucify' for a spectrum of different ideas. When Paul says that he is crucified with Christ, I think he's referring to the death of the prior ego. This seems to me to be mainstream early Christianity (heh, as if), rather than gnosticism.

Chili

Jesus was crucified and was never 'addressed' as Christ until after the resurrection in Mark (Freer Logion) but not in John. So it is difficult to say that Christ was crucified except in the coloquial and Paul does that as preacher.

It was in Mat.16:16 that Peter said: "you are the messiah, son of the living God" and Jesus replied that "no mere man has revealed this to you" and on that keen insight Peter would be called "rock." So it is fair to say that no one knew that Jesus was the 'Christ' and further Jesus told Peter to tell no one.

jgreen44

from the Gospel of Thomas

3. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty."

22. Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, ...then you will enter [the kingdom]."

70. Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you."

97. Jesus said, "The [Father's] kingdom is like a woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal. While she was walking along [a] distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled behind her [along] the road. She didn't know it; she hadn't noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty."

108. Jesus said, "Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him."

Chili

Nice lines. The difficulty is that the TOK (left brain) is the enemy that must be overthrown by the TOL which makes it a non-rational event (beyond theology), and the solution is therefore a matter of faith in our own self (TOL). In the final battle the TOK and TOL are poised against each other to collide like the Titanic and the Iceberg did in history of late as shown in Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain." Nice poem, you should read along the above thoughts.

Thank you.

jgreen44

I don't know what "TOK" and "TOL" stand for but Jung referred to this dichotomy as Logos and Eros.

Logos is the Thinking function, rationalism, empiricism and all things written and legal. Eros is the Feeling function and all things non-rational. Perhaps the Old Testament represents cruel king Logos (Yahweh) and his imperfect (inhuman) Written Law while the New Testament represents Eros, Spirit, the gentle, understanding healer, the feminine principle. Note the interplay of Eros, Yin (TOL) and Logos Yang (TOK) in the following passage.

2 Corinthians 3

2 You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. 3 You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

4 Such confidence as this is ours through Christ before God. 5 Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. 6 He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

The Glory of the New Covenant

7 Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, fading though it was, 8 will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious?

MarkA

Is there any evidence from this period that the way people thought is the same as that described in this debate? Or are you using later ideas and philosophies and retrospectively attaching those ideas onto this period?

I cannot find any parallels of destroying the ego etc in Plotinus or any philosopher of the period. In any event the writers of the gospels (whoever they were) were constantly condemned by educated people of writing appaling and barely literate Greek. Hardly the writing of philosophers.

Chili

Yes yes, that is a preacher talking but true nonetheless. I use the TOK for Tree of Knowledge and TOL for Tree of Life and shortcut them with left and right brain in that same order.

jgreen44

Logos and Eros are the male and female principle, respectively; Yang and and Yin; the vertical bar and the horizontal bar of the Christian cross representing, respectively, the active and passive principles; the upward and downward pointing triangles of the Star of David. In Empedoclean thought, these are the concepts of Strife and Eros. In Greek mythology, Apollo and Donysus represent these ideas. These are basic realities, intrinsic to every person and culture, archetypes.

"The Platonic soul comprises three parts:

the logos (mind, nous, or reason)
the thymos (emotion, or spiritedness, or masculine)
the eros (appetitive, or desire, or feminine)
Each of these has a function in a balanced and peaceful soul.

The logos equates to the mind. It corresponds to the charioteer, directing the balanced horses of appetite and spirit. It allows for logic to prevail, and for the optimisation of balance.

The thymos comprises our emotional motive, that which drives us to acts of bravery and glory. If left unchecked, it leads to hubris – the most fatal of all flaws in the Greek view.

The eros equates to the appetite that drives humankind to seek out its basic bodily needs. When the passion controls us, it drives us to hedonism in all forms. In the Ancient Greek view, this is the basal and most feral state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul

As for ego death, the underworld journeys of Inanna, Heracles, Orpheus, Jesus and others are stories of ego death. The idea of ego death is probably common to all shamanistic cultures but it defintiely goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks.

"Parmenides, in turn, travels to the depths of the underworld—the world of death—and meets a goddess whom Kingsley identifies as Persephone, the queen of the dead. It is only by making this journey that Parmenides is able to learn the truth about reality and mortal opinion and return to the world of the living with his prophetic message. Thus, both Empedocles and Parmenides, like other mystics, find wisdom, healing, and eternal life in what most people suppose to be the dark and grim reality of death. As Kingsley puts it, the absolutely essential requirement for traveling this spiritual path is that, “You have to die before you die.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kingsley_(scholar)

"When all visible light is extinguished, one finds the light of the self."

- The Upanishads

And this passage from the Gospel of Thomas...

"The kingdom is like a certain woman who was carrying a jar full of meal.
While she was walking on the road, still some distance from home, the handle of the jar broke.
The meal emptied out behind her on the road. She did not realise it; she had noticed no accident.
When she reached her house, she set the jar down and found it empty."

jgreen44

Tree of Life = Eros, Tree of Knowledge = Logos

Consider this:

1 Corinthians 13:10 ...when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

In the Temple, Scripture (the Torah) stood in for something "perfect" to which the Hebrews no longer had access. That "perfect" something lost had once been located in the Garden of Eden and guarded by two cherubim. That "perfect" something was the Tree of Life. Similarly the Torah (also known as the Tree of Life) was guarded by two cherubim placed on top of the Ark of the Covenant. And as we all know, the Torah means the Written Law or Scripture. The Tree of Life, therefore, was or is the perfect thing which was replaced by an imperfect thing. The imperfect thing was the Written Law, the Torah or Scripture. The imperfect thing was a form of Logos. Mere proximity to the perfect thing, the Tree of Life, provided Adam and Eve with the original law or the perfect law. The Tree of Life is synonymous with Paul's "law of the Spirit of life". The Tree of Life is synonymous with Eros and, oddly enough, was the original Logos or Law. Originally, Eros and Logos were one.

Jeremiah 31:33

"This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the LORD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.