Well, since the subject has come up again, let me tell you what my further research has turned up. I'm reminded of a comment an acquaintance made, how a person with an above average IQ and little formal education didn't have much of a chance in this world. The state of historical knowledge and education in this country is absolutely appalling. And without that background in Middle Eastern history, a person doesn't have (much of) a hope of deciphering the issue of christianity. There is an artificial barrier called AD and BC which effectively marks a division between two histories, breaking the linearity of the story. The city of Alexandria in Egypt was built in 332-331 BC by the Greek architect Dinocrates on the order of Alexander the Great, who personally marked the outlines of the city's walls. Alexander died of malaria at Babylon in 323 BC without ever setting foot in his city. After a brief power struggle, the Egyptian portion of his empire was taken by his general Ptolemy, who ruled from Alexandria. His son, Ptolemy Philadelphos, first established the Museum (Hall of the Muses) in the royal district in 283 BC, which also quartered the library. Philadelphos also sponsored over 100 scholars who lived and worked at the Museum/library, recruited from all over the Mediterranean world. After this, Alexandria became the intellectual Mecca of the ancient world. Ptolomy I (Soter) had a desire for a god that could be worshipped by both the Greeks and the Egyptians, as a social glue to hold his "kingdom" together. According to Plutarch, Soter literally dreamed up the image of a new god, the image of which was carved at Sinope, and moved to Alexandria. It was introduced to the Greeks as Hades, and the Egyptians as Asar-Apis (Osiris), or Serapis. Both were quite content with the new composite god. (The important thing here is the acceptance and popularity of a completely new "deity", which was obviously a composite, the making of which set the precedent for the mixing, refining and unifying of various mythos for the cohesion of a diverse population.) The rites and worship were greatly modified to resemble those of the Egyptians, but quickly accepted by both. Later, a branch of the Museum's library was housed at the Temple of Serapis. In 250 BC Asoka the Great of India dispatched hundreds of Buddhist missionaries to the world at large. Unquestionably, some of the more astute Buddhist theologians found their way (all expenses paid) to Alexandria, and contributed Buddhist principles to the general philosophy/theology of the Museum. In addition, the Museum/library attracted many philosophers and theologians from all areas of the ancient world, including Greek, Roman, Jew, Indian Buddhist and Persian Zoroasterist. All perspectives (including the Bhagavat Veda story of Chrishna Jezeus Pitar, the "pure essence of the Father) were given a hearing, all were held to be of some value, and all were thrown into the mixing pot for a kind of "Unified Theology Theory". In this same atmosphere, the Theraputes/Essenes thrived. Descended from Pythagoras, keeping his precepts of healing, respect for life, vegetarianism, and avoiding both material goods and money. We know of their lifestyle from Philo of Alexandria. Josephus writing at the end of the 1st century tells us they were experts in foretelling the future, believed the soul was immortal, and were numerous both in Judea and throughout the Empire. Pliny the Elder, also writing in the 1st century, tells us the common people came to the Essenes in great streams and masses.

Now, the speculation begins.

At this point, history goes dark. There is no record of what became of the Essenes, nor the Theraputes of Alexandria. This appear to be the result of a series of Imperial orders of a handful of Roman Emperors.

* Diocletian (284 - 305) ordered all Christian writings to be found out and destroyed. * In 364 Emperor Flavius Jovianus ordered the burning of the Library at Antioch. ("it was at Antioch they were first called Christians.") * The reign of Theodosius (379 - 395) saw vicious persecution of "pagan" religions, their temples destroyed and their priests murdered. * In 448, Theodosius II ordered all non-Christian books be destroyed * In 556, Emperor Justinianus orders the notorious inquisitor Anantius to go to Antioch to find, arrest, torture and exterminate the last Gentiles of the city and burn all the private libraries.

So, the fanaticism of some of the Emperors and many of the Popes had effectively erased the pagan roots of Christianity. However, a few clues have remained in the writings of the Church Fathers themselves.

We are warned in the Synoptic Gospels (which Irenaeus identified as Gnostic in their origin) "do not cast your pearls before swine" and by Clement of Alexandria that "not all knowledge is for all men." This clearly indicates a theological system with both exoteric and esoteric teachings.

We also see Irenaeus claiming that the Master (which may or may not be the Jesus of the gospels) lived into the time of the Emperor Trajan, 96 - 118, and we see Paul/Saul breaking with Peter or the Ebionites in Jerusalem over the extending of the teachings to the Gentiles. These two reports indicate the "teachers", Irenaeus and Paul/Saul, were not fully initiated into the theology, one not knowing the Master was an allegory of Krisahna, the other not knowing the esoteric teachings were not to be given freely to all comers, who plainly did not have the background nor mental conditioning to use the knowledge. So we have of the blind leading the blind over a cliff, those with little knowledge puffed up thinking they are wise. Who was it that said "ignorance always parades itself as wisdom"?

So, I guess that's RELIGION 102. There is no documentation for the evolution of the Essenes into the Christians, because the Wonderful Church Fathers assisted in the destruction of anything they could find that would point out their synthesis of Hindu, Zoroasterism, and Egyptian mythos, claiming the allegory as literal history, holding fast to the power and wealth they had received from Constantine in 314.

Epiphanius (315 - 403), Bishop of Salamis, writing in the second century, says:

"They who believe on Christ were called Iessaei (or Essenes) before they were called Christians. These derived their constitution from the significance of the name Iesus (Jesus), which in Hebrew signifies the same as Therapeutae, that is, saviour or physician."

I believe that just about cinches the case, Joe Friday....

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

Answers

Okay, first things first: yes, I'm responsible for the assemblage of the above. Second, now that we (me) have destroyed the validity of the divine origin of christianity, and debunked the christian Bible as literal history, and shown the Judaic god to be ever-changing rather than consistent, I have to ask:

Is there a designer for our human existence? Is there a plan, ergo a planner? Is there something special about this spark we call "life"? Is this "collective unconscious" something higher than a subtle, electro-magnetic interaction? Does it really matter?

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

...At this point, history goes dark...

Perhaps, but the leads and clues keep popping up. Archeology keeps digging up the most intriguing things. Part of a plan? Or not.

Seems as if the digs at Qumran, et. al., lead to some intriguing possibilities.

Qumran, Essene, Dead Sea Scrolls Discussion Board - for scholarly discussion concerning the Essenes, the Qumran Community, the Dead Sea Sectaries, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Masada and New Testament personalities.

http://qumran.com/qumran/

Is there a designer for our human existence? Is there a plan, ergo a planner? Is there something special about this spark we call "life"? Is this "collective unconscious" something higher than a subtle, electro- magnetic interaction? Does it really matter?

Or is it a design team... and were all part of it?

Donno. Sure doesnt appear random. Anyone who as touched the cooling body of a loved one who has passed, has no trouble realizing the spark that animated their spirit, has departed. Too many people also come back with consistent themes running though their personalized near death experiences (NDE), and tell us of their adventures... on the other side. It would behoove us to not ignore the obvious.

Diane

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

Me to - I had my NDE in 1983, returned a little pissed off. I stil have a hard time rationalizing the experience. Was it just a side effect of a dying brain trying to save itself? Is there a "spark" beyond the Bose-Einstein condensates Tom loves so much? Is there a subjective afterlife?

It seemed real. Of course, a schizophrenic's halucinations all seem too real to them, also. Which are also the product of a malfunctioning physical brain.....

little help please....

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

"Is there a "spark" beyond the Bose-Einstein condensates Tom loves so much?"

What???? Maybe we're talking about another "Tom" here. I'm the one that doesn't subscribe to "The Janitor's Dream" of needing terribly exotic stuff imported to explain phenomena ("...consciousness is located in the quantum indeterminacies between atomic subparticles..." bah-humbug).

I think we've got a problem that might be nicely settled when we encounter an alien species (different planetary lineage) in terms of NDE's.

I subscribe to the Jungian line of argument about archetypes. To my way of understanding, the same organ simularities that will allow drugs to work across human beings will mean that we're gifted with the same structures supporting our psychic activities. NDE's all seem to have in common some serious trauma to the support system (otherwise it wouldn't be a "near death" kind) and for us all to share the same sort of dying responses seems no more far fetched than Kubler-Ross's cycle of Denial-Anger-Bargaining...etc. And unfortunately, no amount of collecting of further experiences are going to get us out of this trap (though there have been some experiments with rats or rabbits that say that during an NDE when attacked by a raptor one of the last things their bodies do is flood with endorphins -- analogy to human peacefulness aspect of NDE?) if we're conversing with others of human lineage.

Now - we once we have the chance of interviewing someone with a different lineage - maybe we can get some perspective on the question.

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

"Is there a designer for our human existence? Is there a plan, ergo a planner? Is there something special about this spark we call "life"? Is this "collective unconscious" something higher than a subtle, electro-magnetic interaction? Does it really matter?"

Why posit a designer if self-assembly can yield as adequate an explanation? There strikes me that there are two arguments for a designer - one is the watchmaker analogy which says that something this complex needed a designer, and the second is the goodness of fit - something that fits this well must have had an overseer. Both seem to be answerable from what we are making sense of these days from self-organizing systems and evolutionary dynamics (respectively).

Entities can be purposeful without a "plan" in the sense of a grand plan. I'm thinking that the confusion between purposeful (think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, people start with basics and when they are satisfied, move onto "higher" needs) and "purpose" in a mission sense makes us look for a planner.

As far as "collective unconsciousness" goes - when I first encountered the term I took it as an ongoing, vast repository of information that could be dipped into - "collective" as in "pooled". These days I think that "collective" is better read as "shared among" as in "common heritage". Something that again emerges from our common structure, not from some telepathic pooling of "information" - whatever that might be outside of some living being. (And for what its worth, I it was my readings of the writings of the coiner of the term that made me modify my interpretation.)

And yes it really does matter. It's like living in a giant library and being oblivious to all the stories therein. Finding fellow readers is a delight to the spirit.

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

Hi Tom, thought you'd fallen off the planet or something....

"I subscribe to the Jungian line of argument about archetypes. To my way of understanding, the same organ simularities that will allow drugs to work across human beings will mean that we're gifted with the same structures supporting our psychic activities. "

Organ similarities...........same structures........

peaches and nectarines.

I'll agree with "similar psychic activities", if it were offered. However, similar implies room for deviants (not those deviants), and that seems to me to be the case. Most psyches are firmly rooted in the physical world, but there are minds that fall off the chart, their activities have very little to do with those of the majority.

The schizoophrenic.

The yogi.

CIAs remote viewers.

That damned Kreskin.

Also, I don't think the same abilities and talents exist in everyone. Not everyone can be a rocket scientist. Not everyone can be a burger-flipper. Many people from time to time get the feeling something is about to happen, or they're being watched. Not everyone experiences it on a daily basis, but some do.

What's the diff?

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

Ken - I did fall off the planet - and landed in this group.

I certainly agree about the differences in abilities, competencies in those abilities, and all the things people can do that can't be explicated yet. Strikes me that that's what shuffling the genetic deck grants us (hurrah for sex!) So for sure we're going to get a spread on whatever spectrum you measure. Take the organ level, alcohol metabolism as an example. Some people's livers just go on and on. Others get cirrhosis. I think Dave might be able to say something about us being a "wild" genetic species. So the same for behaving supported by the brain as an organ.

Schizophrenia is interesting because, as in engineering, you can learn about how things work a lot from observing how they don't work. The regularities of context loss in schizophrenic behaving must imply all kinds of things about "meaning" making. The paranoid versus catatonic schizophrenic responses map nicely onto a "fight" or "flight" response respectively (except they would be invoked when you're not allowed to either fight or flee) and the hebephrenic (sp?) schizophrenic that renders everything a joke also is dealing with an intolerable context demand.

Bateson described an experiment to drive a dog into "mental breakdown". First you train the dog to recognize a context as demanding a certain response, such as pushing being placed in a cage and being presented with an oval. If the oval is longer vertically, the dog is to press one bar. If the oval is longer in the horizontal dimension - the dog is to press another. If the dog errs, or if the dog doesn't press a bar, it gets a mild shock. (Doesn't hurt the experimenter at all. I have a sense if the experimenter was wired in series with the test animal we'd get a lot more elegant experiments, but that just shows my sympathies.) After the dog is familiarized with this task, you then incrementally flatten the oval into a circle and present it to the dog. As the oval approaches a circle, the dog shows more and more stress, until at some point where it doesn't know how to answer, it then goes into some form of collapse.

So - we don't need languaging to drive someone crazy, nor mental functioning as high as human. Probably possible that it comes in at the level that there is enough mental functioning to support "play". For an animal to distinguish "play" from the real thing (say a mock attack) it has to be able to support meta-distinctions: communications about communications. Once you have that you have the basis for social coordination, cultural passing on of technique, etc. I think it cuts in at the level of mammals, though Dave would comment better.

Anyway - lots going on in the body we don't have words (or models) for yet. I thought that was one of your interests?

Do you have anything on CIA remote viewing? I had originally heard of it as KGB remote viewing. I had always placed it under urban legend file. Certainly strikes me as the sort of disinformation any intelligence agency would love to spread ("We're watching you...") but given success rates of intelligence community I wonder.

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

remote viewing

ouch - I was going to pull up a few sites before I leave for the day, but the number of "hits" is just overwhelming. I think this is a good start: SRI CIA RV

Also, the Ingo Swann pages document the initial stages of the CIA / military connection to remote viewing.

But, I've got one for you (maybe it should be over in metaphysics, but...) At lunch today, I was driving along, beside a truck. I'd let my mind go relatively blank, just shutting down "the world". A thought popped up, that if the driver of the truck wanted to change lanes, he couldn't see me. Still mentally "blank"... I slowed a bit. 3 - 5 seconds later, the truck comes over, while I was still at the center of the truck.

Now, did my consciousness run ahead of real time? Did i receive a signal of some type from the driver that he intended to change lanes? Precognition? Living a life outside the chart?

good night all.....

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2000

Ken - link was truncated, but found rest when popped into view source mode in browser.

Perversely glad that I'm not the only one having trouble posting links...

Thanks,

-- Anonymous, March 30, 2000

Oy...some site.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy...."

-- Anonymous, March 30, 2000

Just a quick aside...

Does the government fund remote viewing exercises? Yes. This I know for a FACT after meetings at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) back in the early eighties. (Somewhere between 1982 to 1984).

One time I was meeting with the V.P. of Communications, Paul Shay, about the North American Society for Corporate Planners society we both belonged to (strategic planning). After the meeting--and to this day I dont know why--he asked me to remain while the others left. He ducked out to his office and returned with two large binder containers about 4-5 inches thick, marked Confidential. He proceeded to pull out pictures of some computer imaging enhancements done on something that later became known as The Face on Mars.

He proceeded to share with me that the government, the DOD? as I fuzzily recall, had contracted with SRI for about $50,000 to study the anomoly that appeared in two photographs of a 70s Viking-Mariner fly-by of the planet Mars. SRIs charter was to determine if there was something to it. They did it in two ways:

1) They collected a group of experts, each coming from their own expertise--archeology, biology, medicine, geography, etc.--and they held an online conference where they each shared their knowledge about what the photographs could be revealing. An online transcript of those discussions was about 3 inches think. The upshot was... We dont know, we need to go back and look.

2) SRI also conducted remote viewing experiments with leading viewers of the day. As I recall, Ingo Swann was part of that effort. The transcripts of those sessions were also included in his files. One I remember quite clearly, was a simultaneous remote viewing experiment with four people. In a sealed envelope were the coordinates fo the planet Mars. Each of the psychic viewers held their unopened envelope and was asked essentially the same question... We believe about 1.5 to 3 million years ago a race of beings left something here. What was it and where is it? The transcripts illustrated the different ways each viewer arrived at essentially the same conclusion... Its us.

Paul, after explaining some of this to me, handed me both binders and said, please take it home and study this. I want someone on the outside to know about it. The agreement was, that I could not copy anything, Which I honored. He also wanted me to show it to a few other people that might understand. Which I did.

It was some of the most fascinating reading Id encountered to date, and impacted me in later ways to become pre-disposed to recognizing that things arent what they seem. I returned the material to Paul.

A couple years later, when Paul had left SRI, he gave me copies of the pictures and a few of the remote viewing transcripts, which I hold to this day.

When I asked him what had happened (by then some authors who had been part of that online discussion team, Richard Hoagland and Randy Pozos, had introduced their published books) Paul said the governement had cancelled the project... because they could see no commercial viability to continuing projects relating to the planet Mars.

Go figure. Right.

Diane

(Look forward to perusing that site, Ken).

-- Anonymous, March 31, 2000

Gulp.

Okay, now both Ken and Diane have connections to Ingo Swan.

Ingo Swan does remote viewing. Both Diane and Ken tacitly accept reality of remote viewing.

Diane hints at undisclosed personal knowledge of angels and ufo's, and indicates while not reluctant to disclose, now is not the time.

Ken keeps nudging towards quantum references.

Diane even suggests that Ken proffer a description of his NDE. Ken gives it due consideration, but time is not ripe yet.

Ken posts a thumbnail history of destruction of Christian lineage of spiritual writings.

Diane posts a personal experience that suggests intervention of a sort that can traverse interplanetary distances over a million years ago.

And even though our tv hasn't been hooked to cable or airwaves for over a decade now, I am familiar with the phrase "...the truth is out there..."

And my left palm is tingling...

You guys recruiting or something?

-- Anonymous, March 31, 2000