--- In [email protected], "curtisdeltablues" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> "As Bart Simpson would say..."Didn't do it!..Can't prove it"! :-)" > > Great reference choice! (both equally innocent!) The guy's dead, the > kids are safe, we're just talk'n. I was a big fan of his work way > back in the day. I think his theories on race were right out of > Mississippi or Buchenwald now, but enough with my hater-aid > perspective. > > Here is a blast from the past that you will get I'll bet...Geoffrey > Hodson's Kingdom of the Gods book. That little gem with the > paintings of the devas he claimed to see really blew my mind a > million years ago. The Yes! bookstore in D.C., remember? It makes > me want to make a sprout-avocado sandwich and wash it down with a > mango lassi while reading some little Theosophical Society pulp > fiction while feeling scandalously "off the program"! I used to > soak up the Theosophical and Rosicrucian books and then hit Charley > Lutz (then an MIU trustee) with a million questions. No regrets, > good times, completely out of my mind!
I think we all got out of our minds, but in different ways. Me, I was never into the flashy stuff, or the full-of-devas and -angels and -flowery stuff like the stuff that was in the Theosophical Society books. Sim- ilarly, I was never into the books about Hindu gods and goddesses and the cosmic hanky-panky and warfare going down between them. It just didn't float my boat...no interest in it at all. This doesn't mean that I wasn't out of my mind in other cult ways, just not in that one. Predilection, and all that. Now, in retrospect, I realize that my predilection has *always* had a lot to do with the "special" thing that I've been rapping about lately, and my aversion to it. My idea of a good story about Hindu gods and goddesses was Roger Zelazny's "Lord Of Light," with all of the gods as normal, everyday people who had given themselves (technologically) the powers of the Hindu gods, but were still normal, everyday people with normal, everyday petty egos and petty problems. Into their midst comes Sam (short for Mahasamatman), the Buddha figure, who is a total charlatan, and who knows it. And yet one of his followers, a former assassin who was sent to kill him, becomes enlightened *anyway*, through one-pointed belief in the charlatan Sam. Go figure. *Much* better story IMO, again because there is no pedestalization involved. I've never understood the desire to put one's spiritual teachers and spiritual forebears up on a pedestal and tell/make up stories about how great they were, and how "special" they were. Because, as I've said, the higher the pedestal their followers put them on, the further *away* from their followers the pedestalized teachers are, and the harder it is for the followers to imagine that they could ever achieve the things that the teachers-on-a-pedestal achieved. It seems completely counterproductive to me. I'm more comfortable with dudes like the Buddha, who made the point over and over and over that he *wasn't* special, and that neither were his followers. They were all equal -- cut from the exact same cloth -- no differences between them at all except that one of them had realized what had always already been present for all of them, and the others hadn't...yet. In one of my earlier raps on this subject, I asked if anyone here could *explain* to me why they enjoy this process of putting the teacher up on a pedestal and considering him or her "more than human," "special," an avatar. You all *know* that it's going to happen with Maharishi, and soon. I'm still waiting. If anyone feels like giving it a shot, I'd really appreciate it, because I still don't understand the phenomenon, and the desire to do this. I've *never* understood it.
