Change my mind

Treading as softly as I can because I don’t want to jump down your throat :smiley_cat: but this forum is NOT a cult, people are welcome from ALL faiths and viewpoints, provided they keep their chill when meeting people who they don’t agree with.

I can literally think of nothing worse that it becoming a “problem” for someone to show individuality, and for some form of conformity, maybe under a mask of “we’re all victims and have to think alike” to start to emerge.

I said the same in response to a thread by Asbjorn only recently here and I stand by that.

@telgega - the chaos magick concept of belief being its own force in magick kind of rules out someone proving you wrong, the use of “subjective synthesis” - synthesising subjective immersion in a belief for a period of time - is also a magickal concept.

You’d probably be more likely to be argued out of Catholicism by a dogmatic Catholic who wants to pick apart your practices than by one of us! :stuck_out_tongue:

But I have more on the topic, below…

Except OP has the longest running and most focused working thread on here, with lots of good feedback from people… :thinking:

Okay here’s my argument against RHP as I understand that to be defined here and posted my experiences here:

It seems to be the case that all life in our cosmos tends over time towards more freedom, more complexity, and more power both for the individual, and for its species; and towards more variety of territory, experience, and also, more opportunities to increase new lifeforms with the same DNA, or with advanced changes classed as evolution.

Living beings do not spontaneously degenerate their genetics nor restrict the spread of offspring, limit their freedoms, shun novelty, or refuse power and conqest of new territories.

RHP beliefs tend to emphasise conformity of belief, which dictates the entire internal landscape from what is experienced as desirable and disgusting on an emotional level, through to fine intellectual analysis:

  • either in the Abrahamic branches in terms of one body of the faithful under God and seeking the eternal peace of Paradise, with a strong focus on policing both themselves and one another in adhering to one, single, unified understanding of how this can be done;

  • or in the east, towards an even deeper merger back into the godhead, releasing all personal individuation, by accepting a guru as the model of a perfected “self-realised” person whose actions are considered superior to one’s own instincts and normal society, and which must be emulated as far as possible in order to attain the tresults the guru has attained.

These are actions towards less life, less power, less complexity, and less individuality, and are not found in natural patterns - I see them as akin to the way some animal species will reabsorb a fetus that isn’t developing well enough to survive birth.

If God/Source/Parashiva etc JUST wanted eternal bliss, no “suffering” and no separation, “it” could have refused to create individuated life, like an author who wants to write novels, but can’t bear to inflict uncertainty, loss, and mishaps on their characters. A kind of Anti-R.R.Martin!

Likewise, if all God wanted was a heaven where sin was both undesired by its denizens, and impossible to commit, why not simply create endless heaven, and nothing less?

But this didn’t happen, plainly, so we’re left with ideas about a Fall, whether the Garden of Eden, or the concept Brahma lusted after his daughter… they all say manifest life was basically someone’s mistake.

That matches the pathology of shaming oneself and others, of hating life and not feeling entitled to totally revel in it, and the linked attempts to avoid pain and experience that characterise various damaging mental states, including depression - but I don’t just take this from my own experiences but from observations of the world around me, including other people’s mental and emotional malaise.

If the world, if LIFE, is a mistake, a fallen state, why ever try to do anything except kill people who haven’t agreed with you (Abrahamic) on this, or leave them to their miserable fate whilst renouncing everything in hopes of getting back to harmony (eastern)?

Both on a gut level, and also based on the patterns of all life described above, and common logic, I don’t believe these things to be correct, YES I believe we are all “within the mind of the All” BUT we’re here to flourish, not to try and crawl back inside the mythic womb of Union, and cease ourselves out of existence as individuated beings.

If the Source even had a “should” of any kind, it appears on our level of reality to be about seeking more life, more power, and more freedom, as ourselves, and not in attempting to self-erase, or escape.

That is my objection to the RHP, first and foremost - that it’s basically anti-life, because it reveres a state other than embodied life as ultimately superior and to be sought, often by methods that infringe on the rights and freedoms of other living beings.

Unlike the infringements on other lifeforms created by hunting, gathering vegetable food, or by the many species which farm or corral a different being for food or other resources, these infringements in the name of faith have no certain boundaries – a wolf will stop when he’s fed himself, and his pack, and maybe buried some prey for later; a man will stop clearing a forest once the need that drove it is met, but the only killing we see as both indiscriminate and potentially unceasing is motivated by idealism, often simply by the suspicion that someone, somewhere, is thinking wrongful throughts (a concept which has reached its apotheosis in cultural marxism, and the policing of the thoughts of others).

This kind of idealism finds its natural outlet in religion, which surpasses individual madness and can convince entire societies to commit atrocities because they are the right thing to do - see, the Stanford Prison & Milgram experiments for why this is uniquely dangerous.

Going back to the apparent desirability of manifest life, even the fact spirits enjoy possessing people, sharing offerings, inhabiting idols, and so on, seems to indicate this 3-D world isn’t such a terrible place to be.

Physical reality, to me, “just is” and getting used to it, learning to make it a bit nicer and master siddhis and so on, seems to me a good use of it, instead of trying to come up with 1,000 workarounds of how a perfect being fucked up, and will damn people to hell or endless rebirths of suffering for really minor things.

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