[Krimel] Isn't the belief system there to guide the believer on a path towards an original experience of their own?
[Arlo] Ideally. All too often its there to reify its power. This is the line between esoteric and exoteric, and we see the vast, vast majority of those being "guided" by a Church to be given exclusively the exoteric view. Indeed, the single largest growing "Christian" church in America is not only vocally exoteric, its agressively anti-esoteric. The "radical Islam" that we are told to fear shares this agressively anti-esoteric approach to Mystical Awareness. Manly Hall wrote several great treatises on mystery traditions throughout the ages, and one common point he finds is that the esoteric awareness was reserved for an "initiate" group, with the idea that the hoi poloi would always be too sheep-like, too weak, too unable to handle the esoteric wisdom, and so the stories served a two-fold purpose. First, they functioned as metaphor to point those wise enough to get the Mystery in a Quality direction, and second they enabled a power-base by which the majority could always be controlled, or at the least "opiated". But again, the other issue here is exclusiveness (I think Ron mentioned it). Apart from the exoteric force of the bulk of modern theism, it creates walls that the Mystic would never build. "God stories" are PART of the Mythos, they are not self-contained, all-in-one stories. The Gnostics knew this and used not only multiple "god stories" to point the way to the Void, but non-god stories as well. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
