Burn the Ships

May 4, 2013 Leave a comment

I know this isn’t exactly unexplored territory (no pun intended), but I thought I’d draw your attention to the story of Hernan Cortes, when he landed in what would later become New Spain (Veracruz, Mexico) amid the hostile indigenous populations.  The story goes that his men, all five hundred or so of them, were clamoring to turn back, to go back to Cuba — a nucleus of early Spanish colonies in the New World — from whence the expedition set forth. They had begun to factionalize and become mutinous when Cortes ordered all the ships on which they had arrived to be burned or scuttled, leaving the expedition no choice but to move forward through an unconscionably strange land full of hostile, even cannibalistic natives.

ships

Some acts of history become metaphor for deeper human activities.  Examples include the Trojan horse, the Marathon run, the Titanic and other events that, because they resonate deep within the archetypal imagination of human experience, become mythologized and metaphorically appropriate for a range of human endeavor.  Cortes’s actions in 1519, just a few decades after Columbus’s expedition, represent just such an event. From time to time every one of us has a sink or swim moment, a point of no return, a fight or flight situation in which it becomes necessary to move forward or fall by the wayside.

Sometimes forward is the only direction possible; but it’s also a representation of faith in the outcome of conquest. Confidence in the nobility or inevitability of certain goals allows us to cleave away previous concerns, monstrous appearances of adversity (such as an empire of hostile Indians) and past experiences — to place our faith in a higher order and to move the bar of our own experience and knowledge beyond preconceived human limitations — to cross the Rubicon. Obviously such gambles require an extensive amount of courage, work and faith, but the rewards can be as mountains of Gold.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw some electronic substance in this direction.

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Excerpts on Reincarnation

April 27, 2013 Leave a comment

I thought this was an interesting, thought-provoking input from a work of fiction on the scary topic of reincarnation. Although the work is not specifically about reincarnation or even religious belief, it does have certain undertones of esoteric tradition:

Note: My interest in this subject is not representative of a rejection of hierarchy—another scary topic for many.

Although he had no specific memories of previous lives, he was quite certain that reincarnation was a reality, the missing link in western philosophy and religion that would inevitably force mankind away from the bonds, stupidity and bleak bore of materialism.  There was Light to be had in the idea that death is but a transition.

The problem wasn’t just the materialists, though.  Pharisaical Christian dogmatists had been squelching the belief in reincarnation for centuries; this despite the obvious example of Elijah and John the Baptist, which is made plain right within their own holy writ!  Letting man come to terms with his own karma and miscreation, independent of the Church’s authority or indulgences, was obviously too much of a threat unto the institutional power brokers of faith and God’s Will.

Forgiveness for the burdens of conscience of past misdeeds could only come from God through the intermediary of his beloved instrument on Earth, the Holy Mother Church—yes, that is how it has played out historically.  After the Protestant-Catholic split, a greater emphasis on individualism and independence was superimposed upon religious tradition, but many of the old dogmas remained.  They remain still.

Here are some other famous quotes on this subject, a subject I believe people should give serious consideration in an era of creeping materialism and frantic fundamentalism:

“Reincarnation contains a most comforting explanation of reality by means of which Indian thought surmounts difficulties which baffle the thinkers of Europe.”

—Albert Schweitzer

“Were an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him: It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer

“I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna.”

—Mark Twain

[One] time he was asked if he believed in an afterlife. After a moment’s hesitation he said no, that he thought there was only “some kind of velvety cool blackness,” adding then: “Of course, I admit I may be wrong. It is conceivable that I might well be reborn as a Chinese coolie. In such case I should lodge a protest.”

—Sir Winston Churchill

“As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again, you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The Celts were fearless warriors because “they wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another…”

—Julius Caesar

“Live so that thou mayest desire to live again – that is thy duty – for in any case thou wilt live again!”

—Freidrich Nietzsche

“The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others – existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.”

—Honore Balzac

“The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal.” “It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals… and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some strange new disguise.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Though I may not be a king in my future life, so much the better: I shall nevertheless live an active life and, on top of it, earn less ingratitude.”

—Frederick the Great

“I look upon death to be as necessary to the constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.”

—Benjamin Franklin

“I am in exact accord with the belief of Thomas Edison that spirit is immortal, that there is a continuing center of character in each personality. But I don’t know what spirit is, nor matter either. I suspect they are forms of the same thing. I never could see anything in this reputed antagonism between spirit and matter. To me this is the most beautiful, the most satisfactory from a scientific standpoint, the most logical theory of life. For thirty years I have leaned toward the theory of Reincarnation. It seems a most reasonable philosophy and explains many things. No, I have no desire to know what, or who I was once; or what, or who, I shall be in the ages to come. This belief in immortality makes present living the more attractive. It gives you all the time there is. You will always be able to finish what you start. There is no fever or strain in such an outlook. We are here in life for one purpose—to get experience. We are all getting it, and we shall all use it somewhere.”

—Henry Ford

“He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships become newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them died, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another.”

—Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

“I know I am deathless. No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before. I laugh at what you call dissolution, and I know the amplitude of time.”

—Walt Whitman

“No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation – in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least.”

—Robert Graves

“I’m a great believer in the hereafter, in karma, in reincarnation. It does make sense. I believe that God is not just a law-giver, but a creative artist. The greatest of all. And what characterizes artists is that they want to redo their work. Maybe it didn’t come off perfectly, so they want to see it done again, and improved. Reincarnation is a way for God to improve his earlier works.”

—Norman Mailer

“So as through a glass and darkly, the age long strife I see, Where I fought in many guises, many names, but always me.”

—General George S. Patton

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting. And cometh from afar.”

—William Wordsworth

“My life often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was an historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had been born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me.”

—Carl Jung

“Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil – coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.”

—H.D. Thoreau

“I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence.”

—Socrates

“As we live through thousands of dreams in our present life, so is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other more real life and then return after death. Our life is but one of the dreams of that more real life, and so it is endlessly, until the very last one, the very real the life of God.”

—Count Leo Tolstoy

“It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.”

—Voltaire

“It can be shown that an incorporeal and reasonable being has life in itself independently of the body… then it is beyond a doubt bodies are only of secondary importance and arise from time to time to meet the varying conditions of reasonable creatures. Those who require bodies are clothed with them, and contrariwise, when fallen souls have lifted themselves up to better things their bodies are once more annihilated. They are ever vanishing and ever reappearing.”

—Origen

“God generates beings, and sends them back over and over again, till they return to Him.”

—Koran

“All pure and holy spirits live on in heavenly places, and in course of time they are again sent down to inhabit righteous bodies.”

—Jewish historian Josephus who lived around the time of Jesus

“But I tell you, Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but have done to him everything they wished. In the same way the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands.’ Then the disciples understood that he was talking to them about John the Baptist.”

—Jesus, (Matthew 17:12, 13)

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Patrilineage and the Physical Vehicle

April 21, 2013 Leave a comment

On the threshold is a relatively new and interesting way of investigating our hereditary past.  While as before in the “Old World” authorities kept up with genealogies through meticulous record-keeping, e.g. baptisms, marriage certificates, etc., today we can gain an understanding of our hereditary lineage via genetic (DNA) analysis.  People can take a Y-Chromosome test (Y-DNA), which gives us insight into our paternal lineage (only men can take this test); or they can take a mitochondrial DNA test (mtDNA), which traces maternal lineage and can be taken by both men and women.

Whereas Y-DNA is passed on from father to son and remains relatively immutable over long periods of time, mitochondrial DNA is passed on to all children from the mother, is even slower to mutate over time and is [therefore] useful in tracing distant maternal ancestors.  This is where we get the concept of a “Mitochondrial Eve,” as theoretically all humans currently living can trace their ancestors back (over epochs) to a singular human female.

My interest in this process is purely historical.  I am interested in this process insofar as it can shed light on very ancient, indeed prehistoric population movements as well as the geologic/geographic changes implicated by those movements.  This in turn sheds light on human and ethnic origins and the processes by which lands have been settled, civilizations built and progress achieved.  It is a simple fact that slight variations (mutations) have occurred over tens of thousands of years, leaving us with the ability to backtrack human populations on the basis of single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) variations.

Now of course the science is still developing, probably in direct proportion to peoples’ willingness to get tested and thus increase the database, but it certainly does seem that our ability to cross reference genetic tests with known human migration patterns, written records and archaeological evidence is getting better and better by the year.

One word of caution I might add is that this is only relevant to evidence that can be acquired from the physical vehicle. This does not tell us anything about ‘who’ a person truly is, especially if you are one to believe that we are, as individual embodiments, much more than can be determined by the genetics of the material body. The primacy of mind over matter precludes any discrimination on a genetic basis; and the ultimate primacy of Spirit makes a study of this nature only interesting (in my mind) insofar as it helps us make sense of a prehistoric past long since discarded by the human anamnesis.

If our interest is human migration patterns, as mine is, it is widely regarded that Y-DNA (patrilineage) testing is more appropriate to that investigation, particularly among non-endogamic populations:

In most human societies, women traditionally move to their husband’s home after marriage, and these societies are thus “patrilocal,” but in a few “matrilocal” societies, men move to their wife’s home. These social customs are expected to influence the patterns of genetic variation. They should lead to a localization of male-specific Y-chromosomal variants and wide dispersal of female-specific mitochondrial DNA variants in patrilocal societies and vice versa in matrilocal societies. 1

If we are to assume that migration patterns are, and have been, primarily driven by conquest and the efforts of war, plunder and territoriality, it stands to reason that Y-DNA data would be a more pertinent analysis in helping us to determine such movements.  This is certainly true in the case of Viking raiders, Spanish conquistadors, or tribal invasions where permanent settlement was achieved primarily by means of conquest and the subsequent intermarriage with indigenous populations.

In the case of Latin America, we might then hypothesize that there is a greater matrilocality, where mtDNA results would be more consistent with genetic trends associated with pre-Columbian populations (Native Americans) and/or land bridge migration chromosomal patterns, while Y-DNA results might be more likely to yield a Y-DNA haplogroup associated with Western Europe and the Iberian Peninsula, particularly in areas where European settlement was more highly concentrated.  Thus, a sizable portion of Mestizo populations in the Western Hemisphere are likely able to trace genetic patrilineage to Eurasian, Celto-Iberian Y-DNA haplogroups.

HaplogroupsMap

Less variation among mtDNA regional haplogroup results in the Western Hemisphere is considered to be indicative of greater matrilocality when taken in a pre-Columbian, Native American context.

y-dna_haplogroups_europe_genetic_map

R1b is the most common haplogroup in Western Europe. It is consistent with paternal lineages bore of the ancient Celts.

Haplogroup_I-borders

Note that “I” haplogroup (Proto-European) is more highly concentrated in Eastern Britain and Northern France, in regions commonly associated with Viking, Norman and Danish (Angle and Saxon) invasions. Subclades of “I” in Northern Europe are consistent with Nordic populations obviously, while differing subclades of the same haplogroup can be found in Southeastern Europe.

Haplogroup_R_(Y-DNA) (1)

Clearly demonstrates a greater incidence of R haplogroup (Western European) in South and Central America where European colonization was more highly concentrated.

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Obscurantism and Libertarian Mysticism

March 19, 2013 Leave a comment

I’ve noticed a certain tendency among various libertarian hives to adorn their philosophy with a certain carnal mysticism which hides itself in senseless obscurantism. For as long as there has been an elite, mankind’s learning has been separated into the exoteric and esoteric mysteries. Obviously the latter was limited to those initiates who had proven themselves trustworthy to hold the secrets of the higher mysteries of nature and enter the inner adytum. Those in the outer fold could not yet be trusted and thus had to remain separate from the elite. We see this human behavioral pattern in almost every cumulative discipline to greater and lesser degrees.  images

My concern, though, is when people attempt to masquerade their illogical, probably drug-induced reasoning as esoteric mystery or higher knowledge. This is pure vanity, for if this obscurantism were of any worth whatsoever, it would gladly bring itself into the light of day and be clear and concise. Anyone who has come to true knowledge will, like Prometheus, endeavor to share the Light and Fire with his fellow man, since it is exactly this type of charity and selfless service that would allow him to enter the adytum in the first place.  Knowledge and moral virtue are inseparably linked.

More often than not, these hives are feeling around in the dark, moving every which way without an anchor point in reality. Their obscure language is designed to conceal their underlying uncertainty and make it appear as if they are initiated into the higher reasoning when they’re really just macheteing through imagined jungles of their own creation. Anyone who cannot trace their untraceable deductions and inferences is as the uninitiated. Granted, not everyone who uses obscure language and difficult logic is lost, but I write this as a warning to those who may come across these word sorcerers. The most important knowledge will be very clear and even self-evident, so be not dismayed by the charlatans and pretenders.

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The Epics

January 17, 2013 Leave a comment

Trojan-Horse

The Fall of Troy

Although most of us have been taught fragments of Homer and Virgil throughout the duration of our education, there appears to be a lack of emphasis on these timeless classics later on in life, even in academic curricula. Certain masterpieces are truly as living, breathing works of art. As you read them, they kind of kindle a spark in the heart, igniting powerful mental and maybe even metaphysical faculties that would have otherwise remained dormant. Surely the masterpieces of Homer and Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil) are such works, as well as the vast bulk of Plato’s dialogues, whose worth often evades haughty contemporary minds within our watered-down institutions of “higher” learning.

Tales of the fall of Troy or the adventures of Aeneas and Odysseus are narrated in such a way as to educate us in a manner very rarely emulated in other works of any time period. It is as if timeless, universal knowledge is coded into the very words of these works or the visions and activities they represent. It comes as no surprise to us, then, that it is these creations that have survived the ages, through myriad cataclysm man-made or otherwise. While we do not now attribute occurrences in nature to temperamental gods and goddesses, the maha quality of these narrations opens up the eye of consciousness to possibilities greater than that which can be compiled by sense perception alone.

Many have the misguided belief that the books in the Bible are the only written texts with any kind of living spark within them. Quite the contrary, dear friends. There are many texts which transmit specific elements of wisdom and power for the mind. While there definitely should be discernment regarding that which we consume at a cultural level (i.e. it’s probably best not to become cultural garbage disposals), I believe we must work not to limit ourselves with the dogmatic notions of old. For a vastly rewarding literary experience, might I suggest you crack open the works of these ancient masters. You might be surprised by what kind of intellectual awakenings transpire.

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My Political Philosophy in a Snippet

December 1, 2012 6 Comments

People often attribute this series of quotes to Abraham Lincoln. Not so. The actual author was William Boetcker (1873–1962), an American religious leader and influential orator.  The following comes from a pamphlet Rev. Boetcker published in 1916 entitled The Ten Cannots:

tumblr_m7bwltfHVi1rplcnao1_r1_500

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Obama Phones in Ohio

October 1, 2012 1 Comment

In the wake of a recent video in which Mitt Romney frankly discusses the 47% of Americans who do not pay income taxes, and the obvious political implications of government dependency, a video has surfaced that is symbolic of that very reality.  The video is almost post-apocalyptic:

Obama promises free things from government; recipients of this patronage reward him with unqualified political support. When the money to pay for these things runs out — and it always does — the recipient class becomes riotous and agitated. We see this riotous agitation in Europe in the wake of the austerity measures, which have become necessary both as a result of banking malfeasance and the unsustainable entitlement and pension regime characteristic of European states.

This is reminiscent of the Cloward-Piven strategy toward democratic socialism.

It is unsustainable.

Recent Development October 8, 2012:

From the Washington Free Beacon: ObamaPhones Profting ObamaDonors

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