Thoth
01-05-2009, 08:23 PM
Natural History Of Sin In The Bible as the Snake’s Doing*
The inner life of one with soul power is all about learning how to handle snakes.
Genesis 3 – affinity between Eve (soul) and the serpent.
The words “original sin” conventionally refer to the drama of God, Adam and Eve, and the serpent in the proverbial Garden of Eden as scripted in Genesis.
This drama, communicated in this way (through processes that bring word of The Word to consciousness), has a metaphysical ground in Gurdjieff’s schema of three brain centers of conscious function. It is the story of brain 3 internally seducing brain 2, played out by a personified snake persuading Adam’s companion Eve to eat the forbidden apple. Adam personifies brain 1, created by the ‘breath’ of God representing the higher blood of communication. This is shown by his having been given the power of naming the other creatures, enabling them to be contained in a super-ordinate relationship to each other through them, by his husbandry, which is necessary for their care as animals domesticated in human social systems. Eve, feminine personification of brain 2, manifests in consciousness through the function of desire, stimulated by two things: blood from below – flow of process through brain 2 toward 3; and by the attraction brain 2 feels toward to its completion from above -- flow of process toward knowledge of the starry sky, and whatever contains the body.
This completion comes from binding the tokens produced by the 2-3 processes to ‘higher oxygens’ available only from particular sources to brain 1, through communication. The three brain processing system, reached only through the body, outside consciousness, produces tokens through speech, writing, calculating, mapping, available for matching with texts of unknown relations.
The story of original sin, on this account, is the dramatic enactment of Eve, the Soul, succumbing to the wiles of the serpent. This texts the inner act of brain 2 switching off brain 1, switching on brain 3. Desire for higher completion is temporarily replaced by desire for lower. The story thus “squares” the external ‘gearing’ with the psychodynamic “Y” of ‘female’ ambivalence, where “female’, as in Jung, becomes the inner side of the psyche of both genders. This is a Memory of the era of mammalian overlayering reptilian brain in the evolution of species, a kind of neuro-biological inscription on the way human beings function. This allows for it to be wrongly moralized at the 4th token level, where will passes into deed.
The notion of original sin as a “stain on the soul”, refers to the silent tendency to switch off 1 for 3, substituting pleasure, arousal of the lower blood, for growth. (cf. Freud’s ‘death instinct’; Jung’s ‘laziness’; deMause’s fetal origins). The continuing record in consciousness is that this can be resisted. The felt constraint is an inner inclination, not an external demand one will receive punishment for refusing. Resistance is not difficult; it is smooth and easy. This is where free will and the teaching of grace through faith come in. Until the soul resists, in response to the higher allure of its own completion, signs for matching these functions and qualities are not produced and cannot therefore be appropriated for collective universal connections. Moralizing religionists, then religio-political entrepreneurs, pick up on and attach to this Memory template when its S* surface in public TokenSpace. That is what has happened, in spades, in contemporary TV religious dramas this Christmas. The last, best entry this morning on Fox news doing a special on Christmas snake handlers. Pictures of congregants from Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia handling large writhing, coiled bodies were thrust toward the camera, with close-ups of hands holding venomous heads, while Sean Hannity supplied factual details of the cult and its beliefs.
Exodus 4.1-5 – As proof that “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob , has appeared to you,” Moses is ordered to cast the rod “in his hands’ on the ground, where “it became a serpent, and Moses fled from it”. Then he is ordered “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail” (and he reached out his hand and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand).” The power of obeying God translates through his hands into mastery of this antagonistic force of nature. It is a power Moses delegates to his brother Aaron in Exodus 7.9f., who casts it on the ground before the Pharoah whereupon it turns into a snake that eats the snake his magicians rods turn into. This can make sense as a Memory without assuming it is a literal record. Verses 14 and 15 further instruct Moses that “the rod which was turned into a serpent you shall take in your hand.” His inner, soul power, consists in mastery of the rod, his ‘rigid designator’ (logically squared by Saul Kripke). The dynamic content of the communication here links Hands, rods, power over snakes and waters smote by it. .
Joshua 7 -- the sin of Aiken.
The old serpent, the devil, is not mentioned in this story of Aiken, but the history of sin in the Bible would not be complete without out it. His secretive theft of ‘the accursed things’ -- a beautiful Babylonian garment, two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold weighing fifty shekels – booty won in battle by all in the spirit of all, under orders not too take anything. His act was transpersonal: 7.1 “The children of Israel committed a trespass regarding the accursed things, for Aiken the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took of the accursed things; so the anger of the Lord burned against the children of Israel. This is the idea of sin as violation of their ‘social contract’, the inner bond of objective soul identity through. If the mind set of one prepared to break that bond, subordinating the mammalian to the reptilian brains, is elaborated elsewhere into life’s compartments, as an attitude, the content goes over to Mark 7.26, Jesus teaching that it is not what goes into a man from outside that defiles him, but “what comes out of a man. From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man.” The mind set of anti-communality concretized by Aiken, unconfronted and unexpunged, expands to assaults on the moral domain itself. Evoking body functions to elucidate what defilement consists in, Jesus says “Are you thus without understanding also? Do you not perceive that whatever enters a man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not enter his heart, but his stomach, and is eliminated, thus purifying all foods?” It is the evil things that ‘cometh out of a man’ that defile him, the teacher says. What comes out, in the above list, is produced by snake brain control of the soul, poisoning the collective spirit of the children of Israel.
John 3.14 – “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Christian interpretation takes this as anticipating the crucifixion, the body of Jesus Christ lifted up on the cross. The serpent’s hold on man’s soul on earth is shown by the broken body. The victory of the soul is shown in the same moment in its release from the body. The textual squaring that completes both parts of what this shows is in verse 16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Sin, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” This is the soul brain represented as a unity in all time, independent of the reptile brain. The intellectual square of this is John 3.3: “Most assuredly, I say unto you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Rebirth, repeating the original transition from fetal to post-natal origins of experience, is specifically laid out to Nicodemus, a learned man, of textual knowledge. Taking rebirth literally, he can only find it incomprehensible. It is explained: “That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I say unto you you must be born again.”
Jesus is the product of Old Testament faith incarnated through Mary (Hebrews 11). From the lower blood stock of Jesse, David’s father, textually squared in the blood of higher communication by the psalmist’s mythopoeisis, Mary’s virgin womb became the archetypal portal through which the soul passed to be born. It makes no difference to the purity of the Christian group fantasy that the same greek term translated “virgin”, as unblemished by sexuality, was also used for sacred prostitutes at Isis’s temples. This is precisely the ambiguity psychosemiotics would anticipate for a bridge term for two-tier brain functions, one for text, the other for token.
Mark 7.21
Mark 16. 18 – “They will/shall pick up snakes,and if the drink any deadly poison it shall not hurt them. They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.”
This passage comes from the Great Commission, the last words of Jesus to his disciples as recorded by Mark. All of various translation emphasizing ‘handling’; ‘picking up’ is “will pick up snakes with their hands” in the International Standard Version. This recalls Moses power to turn the writhing snake into a rigid rod by picking it up its tail. One can only imagine the inner will required.
***
The inner life of one with soul power is all about learning how to handle snakes.
Genesis 3 – affinity between Eve (soul) and the serpent.
The words “original sin” conventionally refer to the drama of God, Adam and Eve, and the serpent in the proverbial Garden of Eden as scripted in Genesis.
This drama, communicated in this way (through processes that bring word of The Word to consciousness), has a metaphysical ground in Gurdjieff’s schema of three brain centers of conscious function. It is the story of brain 3 internally seducing brain 2, played out by a personified snake persuading Adam’s companion Eve to eat the forbidden apple. Adam personifies brain 1, created by the ‘breath’ of God representing the higher blood of communication. This is shown by his having been given the power of naming the other creatures, enabling them to be contained in a super-ordinate relationship to each other through them, by his husbandry, which is necessary for their care as animals domesticated in human social systems. Eve, feminine personification of brain 2, manifests in consciousness through the function of desire, stimulated by two things: blood from below – flow of process through brain 2 toward 3; and by the attraction brain 2 feels toward to its completion from above -- flow of process toward knowledge of the starry sky, and whatever contains the body.
This completion comes from binding the tokens produced by the 2-3 processes to ‘higher oxygens’ available only from particular sources to brain 1, through communication. The three brain processing system, reached only through the body, outside consciousness, produces tokens through speech, writing, calculating, mapping, available for matching with texts of unknown relations.
The story of original sin, on this account, is the dramatic enactment of Eve, the Soul, succumbing to the wiles of the serpent. This texts the inner act of brain 2 switching off brain 1, switching on brain 3. Desire for higher completion is temporarily replaced by desire for lower. The story thus “squares” the external ‘gearing’ with the psychodynamic “Y” of ‘female’ ambivalence, where “female’, as in Jung, becomes the inner side of the psyche of both genders. This is a Memory of the era of mammalian overlayering reptilian brain in the evolution of species, a kind of neuro-biological inscription on the way human beings function. This allows for it to be wrongly moralized at the 4th token level, where will passes into deed.
The notion of original sin as a “stain on the soul”, refers to the silent tendency to switch off 1 for 3, substituting pleasure, arousal of the lower blood, for growth. (cf. Freud’s ‘death instinct’; Jung’s ‘laziness’; deMause’s fetal origins). The continuing record in consciousness is that this can be resisted. The felt constraint is an inner inclination, not an external demand one will receive punishment for refusing. Resistance is not difficult; it is smooth and easy. This is where free will and the teaching of grace through faith come in. Until the soul resists, in response to the higher allure of its own completion, signs for matching these functions and qualities are not produced and cannot therefore be appropriated for collective universal connections. Moralizing religionists, then religio-political entrepreneurs, pick up on and attach to this Memory template when its S* surface in public TokenSpace. That is what has happened, in spades, in contemporary TV religious dramas this Christmas. The last, best entry this morning on Fox news doing a special on Christmas snake handlers. Pictures of congregants from Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia handling large writhing, coiled bodies were thrust toward the camera, with close-ups of hands holding venomous heads, while Sean Hannity supplied factual details of the cult and its beliefs.
Exodus 4.1-5 – As proof that “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob , has appeared to you,” Moses is ordered to cast the rod “in his hands’ on the ground, where “it became a serpent, and Moses fled from it”. Then he is ordered “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail” (and he reached out his hand and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand).” The power of obeying God translates through his hands into mastery of this antagonistic force of nature. It is a power Moses delegates to his brother Aaron in Exodus 7.9f., who casts it on the ground before the Pharoah whereupon it turns into a snake that eats the snake his magicians rods turn into. This can make sense as a Memory without assuming it is a literal record. Verses 14 and 15 further instruct Moses that “the rod which was turned into a serpent you shall take in your hand.” His inner, soul power, consists in mastery of the rod, his ‘rigid designator’ (logically squared by Saul Kripke). The dynamic content of the communication here links Hands, rods, power over snakes and waters smote by it. .
Joshua 7 -- the sin of Aiken.
The old serpent, the devil, is not mentioned in this story of Aiken, but the history of sin in the Bible would not be complete without out it. His secretive theft of ‘the accursed things’ -- a beautiful Babylonian garment, two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold weighing fifty shekels – booty won in battle by all in the spirit of all, under orders not too take anything. His act was transpersonal: 7.1 “The children of Israel committed a trespass regarding the accursed things, for Aiken the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took of the accursed things; so the anger of the Lord burned against the children of Israel. This is the idea of sin as violation of their ‘social contract’, the inner bond of objective soul identity through. If the mind set of one prepared to break that bond, subordinating the mammalian to the reptilian brains, is elaborated elsewhere into life’s compartments, as an attitude, the content goes over to Mark 7.26, Jesus teaching that it is not what goes into a man from outside that defiles him, but “what comes out of a man. From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within and defile a man.” The mind set of anti-communality concretized by Aiken, unconfronted and unexpunged, expands to assaults on the moral domain itself. Evoking body functions to elucidate what defilement consists in, Jesus says “Are you thus without understanding also? Do you not perceive that whatever enters a man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not enter his heart, but his stomach, and is eliminated, thus purifying all foods?” It is the evil things that ‘cometh out of a man’ that defile him, the teacher says. What comes out, in the above list, is produced by snake brain control of the soul, poisoning the collective spirit of the children of Israel.
John 3.14 – “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
Christian interpretation takes this as anticipating the crucifixion, the body of Jesus Christ lifted up on the cross. The serpent’s hold on man’s soul on earth is shown by the broken body. The victory of the soul is shown in the same moment in its release from the body. The textual squaring that completes both parts of what this shows is in verse 16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Sin, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” This is the soul brain represented as a unity in all time, independent of the reptile brain. The intellectual square of this is John 3.3: “Most assuredly, I say unto you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Rebirth, repeating the original transition from fetal to post-natal origins of experience, is specifically laid out to Nicodemus, a learned man, of textual knowledge. Taking rebirth literally, he can only find it incomprehensible. It is explained: “That which is born of flesh is flesh, and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I say unto you you must be born again.”
Jesus is the product of Old Testament faith incarnated through Mary (Hebrews 11). From the lower blood stock of Jesse, David’s father, textually squared in the blood of higher communication by the psalmist’s mythopoeisis, Mary’s virgin womb became the archetypal portal through which the soul passed to be born. It makes no difference to the purity of the Christian group fantasy that the same greek term translated “virgin”, as unblemished by sexuality, was also used for sacred prostitutes at Isis’s temples. This is precisely the ambiguity psychosemiotics would anticipate for a bridge term for two-tier brain functions, one for text, the other for token.
Mark 7.21
Mark 16. 18 – “They will/shall pick up snakes,and if the drink any deadly poison it shall not hurt them. They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.”
This passage comes from the Great Commission, the last words of Jesus to his disciples as recorded by Mark. All of various translation emphasizing ‘handling’; ‘picking up’ is “will pick up snakes with their hands” in the International Standard Version. This recalls Moses power to turn the writhing snake into a rigid rod by picking it up its tail. One can only imagine the inner will required.
***