Religion as Defense Against God

"You have to break past the image of God to get through to the connoted illumination. The psychologist Jung has a relevant saying: “Religion is a defense against the experience of God.” The mystery has been reduced to a set of concepts and ideas, and emphasizing these concepts and ideas can short-circuit the transcendent, connoted experience.

"An intense experience of mystery is what one has to regard as the ultimate religious experience.

"… You have to go past the imaged image of Jesus. Such an image of one’s god becomes a final obstruction, one’s ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith."

~ Joseph Campbell

From The Power of Myth

1988

Number 5 ~ WAITING

Waiting. If you are sincere,
You have light and success.
Perseverance brings good furtune.
It furthers one to cross the great water.

Waiting is not mere empty hoping. It has the inner certainty of reaching the goal. Such certainty alone gives that light which leads to success. This leads to the perseverance that brings good fortune and bestows power to cross the great water.

One is faced with a danger that has to be overcome. Weakness and impatience can do nothing. Only a strong man can stand up to his fate, for his inner security enables him to endure to the end. This strength shows itself in uncompromising truthfulness. It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized.

This recognition must be followed by resolute and persevering action. For only the man who goes to meet his fate resolutely is equipped to deal with it adequately. Then he will be able to cross the great water ~ that is to say, he will be capable of making the necessary decision and of surmounting the danger.

Time Acceleration

The topic of "time acceleration" fascinates me to no end. In that spirit, I offer this 3-minute clip featuring the thoughts of Terence McKenna, who studied time acceleration from several vantage points, but most notably from the perspective of the I Ching.

I still puzzle over whether time ~ as in the space/time continuum ~ is in fact speeding up, or if time only seems to be passing by more quickly due to the phenomenal rate of change we're experiencing. The catalyst, of course, would be technology and its ability to process information at ever-faster speeds, which would create the sensation of time accelerating. I don't know the answer.

If you're unfamiliar with the late Terence McKenna, he was something of a phenomenon. To sum him up, here's the opening paragraph to his Wikipedia entry:

Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000) was a writer, public speaker, philosopher, psychonaut, ethnobotanist, art historian, and self-described anarchist, anti-materialist, environmentalist, feminist, platonist and skeptic. He was noted for his knowledge, and the ability to articulate his knowledge, of the use of psychedelics, metaphysics, plant-based entheogens, and subjects ranging from shamanism, mysticism, hermeticism, neo-platonism, biology, geology, physics, astrophysics, media theory, linguistics, poetry, historical and civilizational timelines, the theoretical origins of human consciousness, psychedelic phenomenology, and his concept of novelty theory.

I want to thank the insightful Colorado astrologer Melody Scott Zindell for posting this a while ago on her blog, which is where I spotted it.