In the beginning…
In the End Times…
In these times we live in…
Our opinions are brought forth regarding all of them. Opinions we have learned to cultivate from the best of literature, the best of history, the best of divine inspiration, the best of interpreters of these things and also the worst of all of them. The debate continues. So does the acrimony and fanaticism. What can protect us from becoming overrun with it when it achieves critical mass?
When something happens which is not explainable by means we can identify, or objectively understand how to become a cause of, we consider it magic. We encourage children to believe they can be magical, we claim that they are, we enjoy the belief that magic can appear to conquer our difficulties; while we openly ridicule anyone who claims or can even demonstrate that they are in some way magical, or that they reside within the influence of magic, or that the experience we share needs to be interpreted within a ‘magical’ context. We find ourselves subject to historical and political opinions about what kinds of magic we can ‘permit’ in our lives and the extent to which we can take it literally.
When magic appears in a person’s life, we place labels upon them according to the nature of their influence on us and the fears we carry. We call them angels and demons, we call them witches, wizards, sorcerers, mystics, lunatics, criminals, and saints; perhaps we paint them with the personalities of historical characters from religion and mythology. We test them for satisfaction of our expectations of a character from existing myths, or for the appearance of events required to satisfy a prophecy.
The mistake in all of this is to place more importance on the satisfaction of our beliefs and expectations than the truth of our shared experience.
There are many ‘scriptures’ which begin: “In the beginning…” A problem with this is that the earliest of these known to archeology were created within the last twelve thousand years or so; but the history of humanity, and life itself, is considerably longer. There are many problems with any belief in those three words. Meanwhile, all of these ‘scriptures’ presume a time-frame of the spirit of God, and all of spirit itself, as eternal – from a time with no beginning projected forward to a time with no end. In response to this, we preserve ‘prophecies’ which make projections of the events and personalities populating narratives of ‘the End Times’, while we make no end of debate over meaning and the extent to which we are to believe or disbelieve anything specific about any of them.
If we find ourselves within an experience which sufficiently resembles any number of prophecies, a social conflict inevitably appears. We live in a culture of skepticism and empiricism, while we also live in a culture which protects religion politically. Within a time which resembles prophecy, a belief in the religious significance of our experience is both attacked and defended by not just atheism but also religion itself. A device of science and social-will among secular interests which might contribute to such a circumstance may also be used by all parties to discredit its religious significance, to the extent of tragically ignoring what truth might still be found in it. Meanwhile, the momentum of a belief in prophecy may consume and destroy any more subtle growth in wisdom which might otherwise be discovered in the experience.
Any conflict between social events and an expectation tied to beliefs or ideologies which we defend becomes a lever which influences emotion and behavior. Because of the differences among us as individuals and as members of schools of belief, these conflicts can become amplified and our emotions and behaviors can become further distorted. In a time where we suddenly find ourselves in an experience we can interpret as magical or prophetic, these conflicts can become dangerously amplified again. All of this demonstrates the need to closely examine our beliefs and ideologies in light of what we strive for in protecting them.
There are many sources which discuss Love and Fear as the prime polarities of emotion. We can easily place Love and Fear at opposite ends of a rubber band in our imaginations, then stretch it out and place ourselves and each other somewhere within the area we have imagined, which then becomes the wellspring of our behavior and personality. There are those of us which find passion in defense of either extremity within ourselves and each other, while others defend a balance between them with equal passion. The relative presence or absence of passion now becomes a ‘y-axis’ in a description of our emotion, behavior and personality. Meanwhile, we could extend a ‘z-axis’ through time, and interpret the personalities and evolution of ourselves and each other through trends among oscillations of these aspects of emotion and motivation.
This serves as an example of the beginnings of an epistemological methodology which I began describing as Domain Theory almost two years ago. For better or worse, it became popular to debate Domain Theory within a context of rhetoric which was tortuously polarized, while the debate was over-laden with an ever-growing mountain of boiling, steaming issues beyond reasonable limits of discussion; and I became enslaved to the resolution of the entire discussion on pain of death. To this day I have not become able to escape the debate anywhere I have been able to go for any length of time. The answer I present to this, which people persist in ignoring, is that Domain Theory has absolutely nothing to do with rhetoric, and the entire discussion is a dangerously irresponsible and disgusting insult to the opportunities which led me to begin developing it. Meanwhile, within the advance of a telepathic social-reality, I have become able to guide people into becoming almost-safely accustomed to the experience, so now I have a duty to step past that particular issue and resolve the social awareness of something which people have dangerously misinterpreted.
We can say that emotion influences behavior. We can also say that beliefs of all kinds influence both. If our experience suddenly challenges our beliefs, then as human-animals we do have the irrational ability to choose to defend either our beliefs or our experience. This choice then aggregates into our social will and behavior. It obviously becomes necessary to defend ourselves and each other within a context of adaptation. We find ourselves needing a way to parse changes in our social-contract and beliefs in order to prevent the creation of a massacre. That need is the spirit in which I began looking into “Domains of Belief,” and ways of interpreting ‘populations’ of influences within a personality, a community, a culture and a juxtaposition of any and all of them. A body of rhetoric applied to such a body of considerations is unable to draw conclusions at all, to say nothing of ones which can be trusted. The bulk of considerations shatters the effectiveness of rhetoric.
Whether religious or secular, we each carry idealizations of the personalities of God, angels, demons, prophets and others within our various mythologies and histories. These idealizations begin from sources as various as scriptures, the writings of many through history who claim to have channeled them, and comparative and fanciful writings which may have any of a number of reasons for having been created. What we often ignore is a few basic facts of history: writers are strange people, and so are leaders and other interests who make it possible for histories and mythologies to be published. A further observation can be made of writers and artists who have used neuro-toxic materials in writing and art throughout history. The visions of prophets and dreamers can also be interpreted in the context of neuro-toxicity. Put simply, writers and artists get high, they can be superstitious and fanciful, and often they just don’t know that they have been poisoning themselves. Meanwhile, it is documented that leaders from every culture have had political motives for either championing or stifling religious beliefs and writings. Stories within religion have become gathered from oral-histories which began before the creation of written language, and then curators of these stories tacitly accepted the natural tendency of these stories to become distorted through generations of retelling.
Prophecy is a special case within scriptural sources. Consider a person who may be considered divine, or heretical, or at least a subject of discussion, who begins telling people of a dream which describes the distant future. What means would the dreamer have to experience and interpret such a dream? If personalities which are already known from history are included, what assurance would a future population have of the authenticity of the subsequent experience? History teaches that people are skeptical of the experience of prophetic personalities and events, and conflict always appears. Another confusing aspect of prophecy has to do with a few properties of prophetic dreams.
A prophetic dream, by its nature, is a communication among dreamers which passes through time. A dreamer observes a dream or a number of dreams passed back through time from one or a number of dreamers. The experience of life is different for such “dreamers from the future”, as is the personality which interprets their experience through dreams; while a prophet in the distant past likely doesn’t possess the language to describe what they find in a dream accurately. It becomes an obvious fallacy to expect to be able to interpret a prophecy in literal terms. Many prophecies also mention a secret which a prophet might protect in the retelling of their dreams. I would suggest that for a future population to make various presumptions about life based on a prophecy, the purpose of prophecy is fulfilled within those presumptions. Meanwhile, if the prophecy stands as a warning of difficulties which human nature would inspire someone to defend themselves within, the prophecy might stand as a warning against allowing a certain outcome as much as it might stand as a statement of destiny.
All of these influences contribute to our individual and social experience and response to living in what we perceive as prophetic times. Meanwhile, we are left to compare the bubble-gum cards of mythological personalities with the names and social-network profiles of people who become thrust into the roles of those mythological personalities. It is our presumptions which protect a tension and the mechanisms of conflict associated with prophetic times.
In the End Times…
In these times we live in…
Our opinions are brought forth regarding all of them. Opinions we have learned to cultivate from the best of literature, the best of history, the best of divine inspiration, the best of interpreters of these things and also the worst of all of them. The debate continues. So does the acrimony and fanaticism. What can protect us from becoming overrun with it when it achieves critical mass?
When something happens which is not explainable by means we can identify, or objectively understand how to become a cause of, we consider it magic. We encourage children to believe they can be magical, we claim that they are, we enjoy the belief that magic can appear to conquer our difficulties; while we openly ridicule anyone who claims or can even demonstrate that they are in some way magical, or that they reside within the influence of magic, or that the experience we share needs to be interpreted within a ‘magical’ context. We find ourselves subject to historical and political opinions about what kinds of magic we can ‘permit’ in our lives and the extent to which we can take it literally.
When magic appears in a person’s life, we place labels upon them according to the nature of their influence on us and the fears we carry. We call them angels and demons, we call them witches, wizards, sorcerers, mystics, lunatics, criminals, and saints; perhaps we paint them with the personalities of historical characters from religion and mythology. We test them for satisfaction of our expectations of a character from existing myths, or for the appearance of events required to satisfy a prophecy.
The mistake in all of this is to place more importance on the satisfaction of our beliefs and expectations than the truth of our shared experience.
There are many ‘scriptures’ which begin: “In the beginning…” A problem with this is that the earliest of these known to archeology were created within the last twelve thousand years or so; but the history of humanity, and life itself, is considerably longer. There are many problems with any belief in those three words. Meanwhile, all of these ‘scriptures’ presume a time-frame of the spirit of God, and all of spirit itself, as eternal – from a time with no beginning projected forward to a time with no end. In response to this, we preserve ‘prophecies’ which make projections of the events and personalities populating narratives of ‘the End Times’, while we make no end of debate over meaning and the extent to which we are to believe or disbelieve anything specific about any of them.
If we find ourselves within an experience which sufficiently resembles any number of prophecies, a social conflict inevitably appears. We live in a culture of skepticism and empiricism, while we also live in a culture which protects religion politically. Within a time which resembles prophecy, a belief in the religious significance of our experience is both attacked and defended by not just atheism but also religion itself. A device of science and social-will among secular interests which might contribute to such a circumstance may also be used by all parties to discredit its religious significance, to the extent of tragically ignoring what truth might still be found in it. Meanwhile, the momentum of a belief in prophecy may consume and destroy any more subtle growth in wisdom which might otherwise be discovered in the experience.
Any conflict between social events and an expectation tied to beliefs or ideologies which we defend becomes a lever which influences emotion and behavior. Because of the differences among us as individuals and as members of schools of belief, these conflicts can become amplified and our emotions and behaviors can become further distorted. In a time where we suddenly find ourselves in an experience we can interpret as magical or prophetic, these conflicts can become dangerously amplified again. All of this demonstrates the need to closely examine our beliefs and ideologies in light of what we strive for in protecting them.
There are many sources which discuss Love and Fear as the prime polarities of emotion. We can easily place Love and Fear at opposite ends of a rubber band in our imaginations, then stretch it out and place ourselves and each other somewhere within the area we have imagined, which then becomes the wellspring of our behavior and personality. There are those of us which find passion in defense of either extremity within ourselves and each other, while others defend a balance between them with equal passion. The relative presence or absence of passion now becomes a ‘y-axis’ in a description of our emotion, behavior and personality. Meanwhile, we could extend a ‘z-axis’ through time, and interpret the personalities and evolution of ourselves and each other through trends among oscillations of these aspects of emotion and motivation.
This serves as an example of the beginnings of an epistemological methodology which I began describing as Domain Theory almost two years ago. For better or worse, it became popular to debate Domain Theory within a context of rhetoric which was tortuously polarized, while the debate was over-laden with an ever-growing mountain of boiling, steaming issues beyond reasonable limits of discussion; and I became enslaved to the resolution of the entire discussion on pain of death. To this day I have not become able to escape the debate anywhere I have been able to go for any length of time. The answer I present to this, which people persist in ignoring, is that Domain Theory has absolutely nothing to do with rhetoric, and the entire discussion is a dangerously irresponsible and disgusting insult to the opportunities which led me to begin developing it. Meanwhile, within the advance of a telepathic social-reality, I have become able to guide people into becoming almost-safely accustomed to the experience, so now I have a duty to step past that particular issue and resolve the social awareness of something which people have dangerously misinterpreted.
We can say that emotion influences behavior. We can also say that beliefs of all kinds influence both. If our experience suddenly challenges our beliefs, then as human-animals we do have the irrational ability to choose to defend either our beliefs or our experience. This choice then aggregates into our social will and behavior. It obviously becomes necessary to defend ourselves and each other within a context of adaptation. We find ourselves needing a way to parse changes in our social-contract and beliefs in order to prevent the creation of a massacre. That need is the spirit in which I began looking into “Domains of Belief,” and ways of interpreting ‘populations’ of influences within a personality, a community, a culture and a juxtaposition of any and all of them. A body of rhetoric applied to such a body of considerations is unable to draw conclusions at all, to say nothing of ones which can be trusted. The bulk of considerations shatters the effectiveness of rhetoric.
Whether religious or secular, we each carry idealizations of the personalities of God, angels, demons, prophets and others within our various mythologies and histories. These idealizations begin from sources as various as scriptures, the writings of many through history who claim to have channeled them, and comparative and fanciful writings which may have any of a number of reasons for having been created. What we often ignore is a few basic facts of history: writers are strange people, and so are leaders and other interests who make it possible for histories and mythologies to be published. A further observation can be made of writers and artists who have used neuro-toxic materials in writing and art throughout history. The visions of prophets and dreamers can also be interpreted in the context of neuro-toxicity. Put simply, writers and artists get high, they can be superstitious and fanciful, and often they just don’t know that they have been poisoning themselves. Meanwhile, it is documented that leaders from every culture have had political motives for either championing or stifling religious beliefs and writings. Stories within religion have become gathered from oral-histories which began before the creation of written language, and then curators of these stories tacitly accepted the natural tendency of these stories to become distorted through generations of retelling.
Prophecy is a special case within scriptural sources. Consider a person who may be considered divine, or heretical, or at least a subject of discussion, who begins telling people of a dream which describes the distant future. What means would the dreamer have to experience and interpret such a dream? If personalities which are already known from history are included, what assurance would a future population have of the authenticity of the subsequent experience? History teaches that people are skeptical of the experience of prophetic personalities and events, and conflict always appears. Another confusing aspect of prophecy has to do with a few properties of prophetic dreams.
A prophetic dream, by its nature, is a communication among dreamers which passes through time. A dreamer observes a dream or a number of dreams passed back through time from one or a number of dreamers. The experience of life is different for such “dreamers from the future”, as is the personality which interprets their experience through dreams; while a prophet in the distant past likely doesn’t possess the language to describe what they find in a dream accurately. It becomes an obvious fallacy to expect to be able to interpret a prophecy in literal terms. Many prophecies also mention a secret which a prophet might protect in the retelling of their dreams. I would suggest that for a future population to make various presumptions about life based on a prophecy, the purpose of prophecy is fulfilled within those presumptions. Meanwhile, if the prophecy stands as a warning of difficulties which human nature would inspire someone to defend themselves within, the prophecy might stand as a warning against allowing a certain outcome as much as it might stand as a statement of destiny.
All of these influences contribute to our individual and social experience and response to living in what we perceive as prophetic times. Meanwhile, we are left to compare the bubble-gum cards of mythological personalities with the names and social-network profiles of people who become thrust into the roles of those mythological personalities. It is our presumptions which protect a tension and the mechanisms of conflict associated with prophetic times.
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