the secret of eternal youth, immortality, religion’s big mistake, and more. Today from Funny God, July 12th: Eve: Okay. *Here’s* an idea. Let’s look at it keeping in mind the way it is for snakes and butterflies. Now, *there* was a hint from Nature! A hint about the way it is for all the encapsulated … all those in form. The only difference is that in the transformation between being “in capsules” and no-form states … unlike the butterfly and snake transformations … we are not capable of seeing the end result…. Jonah [interrupting]: For all we know, caterpillars can’t see their caterpillar friends after they have become butterflies and only see the cocoon left behind. They might think their caterpillar friends are dying and the cocoon they are making is a coffin! Eve: Hahaha. Okay. But, yes…. Maggie [interrupting]: Hell, but then that means the caterpillar itself does not know it is going to become a butterfly either … if it can’t see that happening to other butterflies. The caterpillar might think it *is* dying, that it is making its coffin. Then, big surprise! When it emerges from the cocoon with flashy new threads and some really cool new kind of transpo…. Well, maybe it is actually the same for us at death, too. Eve: That’s my point. *We*, humans cannot see the end result of death, which we now know is a transformation, not an end. How could we? We cannot see the soul. Well, it used to be that way, anyway. And that’s what we’re talking about is the way it’s been. And even the soul is seen as a kind of transparent form of body … like a ghost. Yet, it can’t be seen what we transform into and it has nothing to do with the body. Chervis: Yes, that’s right. What we’re finding out is that what all beings of form, the encapsulated, transform into at death is not in any time and place. So they … we … become everywhere … and nowhere … and everytime … and no time. Eve: Right! So how could *that* be seen??!! Not only that, though, but just like the butterfly and the snake, we *do* see the part that is left behind — the corpse. And we now know that it is much the same as the skin the snake sheds. It is the cocoon the butterfly leaves behind. So, how odd and demented, humans! That for thousands of years humans have worshipped … done rituals around … glorified even … essentially what are empty cocoons and snake skins, metaphorically speaking, rather than what is real and *actually* transcendent. Jonah: Even in the end times. Chervis: You finished, Eve? Eve: Finished enough…. Chervis: Go ahead, Jonah. What of it? Jonah: What Eve’s sayin’ s’got me thinkin’ about Revelations and the end times. The rising of the dead. The Catholic’s idea that people will be taken from purgatory and be brought into heaven. Literally speaking, they say that, in the end, Jesus will raise up the bodies … like even from where they are in the ground … a reason they don’t like cremation … Chervis: Yes. Jonah: The bodies themselves will be made new again or something. But anyway they will be united with their souls. Eve: It’s like religion, which is supposed to be about life, has, going back to at least Egyptians, been about glorifying death. What’s worse, glorifying the *mistaken* part of death, the corpse, the discarded snake skin, the cocoon that was left behind. Jonah: Wait a minute, though. Something just hit me! Chervis: Go ahead. Jonah: Wow. Like Gilgamesh was told by this guy who survived the Flood and actually had immortality … this Sumerian Noah-type guy … to go to the bottom of the sea and get the plant, the flower that has the secret of immortality…. Chervis: Yes? Jonah: Well, just stop there! A flower, a plant, has a secret of immortality! Let’s just look deeper at that alone! Okay, we know the plant was a boxthorn, which is kind of like a flowering bush. We know that it has berries, each of which have ten seeds … if my Wikipedia here is right, which I just looked it up on my iPhone…. Well … but it could be *any* plant … does the flower, the plant die? Does *it* ever die? Is *it* mortal? [“Of course.” “Of course it does.” can be heard scattered] Jonah [laughing]: You sure? [laughing some more] [“What’s your point?” is heard.] Jonah: Okay, well think of it now in terms of what we have learned recently about death, and what we’ve just been saying now in class. We were just saying that what we fear are the *transitions*. And we mistake that for non-existence…. Right? Okay, well each of the berries have those ten seeds. Those berries fall from the bush. Did the bush die? No, of course not. It is still alive in its present form, plus the seeds are still alive … for they each can grow into another plant. When the bush actually *is* taken away … I won’t say dies … well, does it not still exist? Those seeds still exist. Some have become plants themselves. So, did the plant die and another one, separated from it, come into being? No, right? But that’s the way we think of it. We are always focusing on what is left behind, those corpses, those tossed off skins, those cocoons.… In this case, we say the plant dies because we observe the shriveled up dry remains of what the seed was … “in its former life.” [Silent pause.] Okay, maybe that wasn’t very clear. Let’s say the plant transforms, like a snake does. Follow the journey of the seed, to make this clearer. Is the plant having “offspring” … seeds and small plants … separate from it, after which it dies? That’s how we humans think of ourselves, of course. Or is the seed continually finding ways, by growing new plants … a lot like the snake grows new skin … to keep itself alive forever. From the perspective of the seed, it transforms into a plant, which transforms into a seed, again, round and round again, endlessly, making it immortal. So the plant … every plant … demonstrates exactly what Gilgamesh said he wanted. He wanted to become young again … thriving, strong, and good lookin’ … again and again, endlessly. That’s pretty much exactly what in the book it says he wanted. And Gilgamesh was told that the plant contained the *secret* to eternal youth. Well, didn’t the plant, the flower, have exactly that quality? Did it not, in simply being itself, *demonstrate* the secret of immortality?... [ More coming…. Excerpted from a work-in-progress: Funny God: The Tao of Funny God and the Mind’s True Liberation ]
Posted on: Sat, 12 Jul 2014 12:17:10 +0000
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