Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. – Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth ch. 4, 1988)
Section 1: Her
10
You might wonder why anyone would use a framework of symbols to organize ideas. Does the structure keep the mind from floating away into pure nonsense, or does it worsen the nonsense? Structures create difficulty, which forces people to search for the truth. There are worse ways to look for the truth. But what exactly is it that I am trying to see? I am trying to see Her.
Throughout the ages, people have looked into the fire while they think. Since starting a fire from scratch is hard, you should carry a tool. A small piece of flint will do. The tool represents the ability to set up a home anywhere, and the ancient Romans called the tool Vesta. You never know when you need her.
Sometimes, the events in a dream seem to last longer than the time outside the dream. That happens because the mind constructs images before the experience of having the idea. The 0ld Testament prophets took the voices in their head seriously.
“But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.” (Isaiah 1:20)
I prefer to play with the details. How you interpret a symbol means more than what you see. This interpretation can come hours or years later. Insights don’t always give valid information. How do you know the gods are not lying to you? They might find your beliefs funny, and perhaps visionaries lie to themselves. You can learn from lies, and even knowing you saw nothing helps improve your analysis.
The designers of early virtual reality tried to block out the real world, and their visors felt like uncomfortable scuba masks. Blocking out the world was unnecessary since most people are comfortable experiencing more than one reality. Being able to see both real and fake is fun. Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, and Carlos Castaneda used psychoactive drugs to experience an alternate reality. The drugs are unnecessary because the mind makes you believe that you saw something. The stories we tell ourselves make the insights seem real. Someone with enough awareness can watch their mind doing the editing, which is interesting.
One day, four years past my 18th birthday, while driving in the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky, something allowed the visions to make sense. Kentucky has caves with fossils of creatures born on the Earth, lived on the Earth, and returned to the Earth. All that happened millions of years ago. You might ask, why live if you die? We are a rare kind of stuff; we have the privilege to be alive. The fossils once experienced life. Was their life worth living? Did this creature have a mind that could ask such questions? The nervous system of one of these worms probably did not allow a rich philosophical view of life. They might have been able to think if they acted together as a group. If they wondered about life, did they find any answers?
John Muir saw giant Oaks in Kentucky (Muir, 1916 Ch. 1) before those old forests were cut down. Now, the trees look skinny, and Kentucky has open spaces with small towns where friendly people come up to talk to strangers. These small towns will not last forever. Eventually, the industrial culture will build over small family farms. These people will move to cities where everyone ignores strangers. Growing up in Sao Paulo, Brazil, few lived on my side of the wall. Millions lived in slums on the other side of the wall, crowded into small areas, and those on the cleaner side ignored them. We only see them working for us as servants. Walls happen when cities get too big.
Hills shaped like cones called knobs surround the Bluegrass Region. Near these hills, on large open fields, cattle graze. Crows were eating a dead bull while a few vultures rested in a tree nearby. I got out of the car to wonder what this image could teach and saw a hill rising from a flat plane. The setting sun shining behind the peak activated a desire to climb the hill. The climb will be easy since hardly any snow lies on the ground. Venus appeared as an evening star, and Jupiter seemed close to Venus. The first unusual sight happened when a white vulture passed overhead and flew behind the peak. Normally, Kentucky has no white vultures.
Sitting on top of the hill, yet saw no visions. Instead, I remembered an old one at school during a study hall class. A giant wooly bull appeared. Visions usually start with jaguars or wolves. This time, the guardian angel appeared as a living person, saying, “Life is meant to have fun. Some people can’t understand that.” My muse appeared as a beautiful blond lady with light gray eyes and asked, “Do you believe what the angel said.” In this case, the word yes unlocked many mysteries.
In a black room, nothing happened for a long time. A new door opened to the world outside. A lady with silver eyes, dressed in a black robe, walked in, holding a bundle wrapped in black cloth, and said, “We come from the father who has chosen this event. I am the daughter of the son when it destroys.” When the bundle opened, the lady became three young girls: one with red hair, one with black hair, and one with blond. The redhead sank into the floor to become the Earth. The brunette became a darkened forest full of life. The blond girl became a bright light and said, “We guided those before you. We will guide those after you.” The girl disappeared, yet the light inside everything remained. Sitting alone inside the darkened forest, wearing the black robe, the door opened. Outside was a quiet street in a busy town. The Muse walked along for a while and said the great vision would happen. Suddenly, snapping out of the vision back in school, the others in the class seemed unaware anything happened.
The great vision eventually happened each day, over several weeks, in the same study hall at the school. In this vision, life prospers once again in a world after civilization. This apparition became the foundation of all future visions. Usually, vision quests don’t produce fresh visions. Instead, I get memories of old visions, which may or may not have happened. Five years had passed since the study hall, and after assembling my ideas, the time had come to spread the word of the Sacred Grove. I began to write this book.
Section 2: The Comfy Chair
11
At nine years old, living in Brazil, my family would visit recreational camps outside the city. I was more interested in a field southeast of Paiol Grande, where farmers would leave the heads of cows. Burning piles of animal parts covered the hillside where vultures gathered, and new skulls were full of beetles. The nuns said no one belonged on the hill and wanted all the kids with the other kids. The way flesh gets eaten quickly in the tropics seemed more important than anything the nuns were saying.
While watching the Vultures, two pyramids appeared, turned over on their sides, and moved till their points touched. Then, the pyramids inserted these points into each other, and at the place where the pyramids merged, a space formed. Inside the space was a horrible thing bobbing above the surface of a sea where minds sink. The everyday world lives out there. The horrors live here. With fair warning, we could avoid this fate. Too late now; someone set the course a long time ago. I was at the door between the real and unreal, where reality is twisted.
The image inside the area where the two pyramids merged was a bitter, angry, lonely person. The prophecy came true by the age of seventeen, and the pyramids came together again. This time, inside the area, a boy had wandered off into the forest and was bitten by a poisonous snake. The boy refused to go back to civilization for help and took a lot of pride in being able to survive without medical technology. A black Jaguar walked near, and the boy sensed it. This snake bite never happened. The vision showed what my mind did.
In another instance, at a very young age, I took a walk through a place with tiny crumbling houses where people lived in extreme poverty. The school uniform made me look like Little Lord Fauntleroy. There was a wooden box full of rice, and playing with the rice was fun until one of the local kids said I should not do that since people eat the rice. The kid disturbed my fun. Suddenly, the poverty became more noticeable, producing a feeling of uselessness since there seemed to be no way to change the situation.
The kid, who was only a little older than me, acted as the boyfriend of the maids who worked for my parents. The maids all had the same boyfriend, twenty years younger than they were, who would come over to the house to collect money from the maids. One day, the kid saw my plastic model of an ocean liner and was amazed by the small details. The cheap plastic imitation seemed to make the kid happy. The rich don’t appreciate these toys; we grew up surrounded by this stuff. Someone in a privileged environment could spend the rest of their life playing video games in a comfy chair. We do not need to collect money from the maids.
I come from the tribe of the rich and beautiful while making no useful contribution to anything. No awards sit on my wall, no congratulatory certificates, no accomplishments. Perhaps those who turn against civilization failed in life, which could be true of me. Life seemed pointless. We live in a time when visions fail to fit rather than in an age when we were accepted. The muse said, “This time needs you.”
An old man said, “Those people are about to destroy themselves. I stopped them, and so will you. I’m you in the future, the greatest prophet to ever live. People in the year 3027 fear speaking our name. Virgins sacrifice themselves on altars with animated images of us. A page of our original sloppy handwriting became a holy relic hidden atop a mountain. Christianity went out of business, though in the Vatican, a Pope spends the whole day praising our name. The guardians of the Sacred Grove consider us the greatest warrior who ever lived. Mystics search their whole lives to have a vision of us.”
What delusions of grandeur I invented to cheer myself up. Some people like to imagine Morgan Freeman narrating their lives. It makes them feel like every move they make has great importance. I gave the plastic ocean liner to the kid. We are surrounded by smug people who consider themselves better than other people. They would love to punish the kid for being a pimp. They do not really care about what the kid did. They just need to hurt someone to make themselves seem big. The world is run by lesser men. We need better men.
I tried to become a better person by becoming an environmentalist. Unfortunately, a lot of rich environmentalists think that we can just let working poor people suffer to save the environment. When I was younger, I was also just as arrogant. Now I realize that Working people might actually be the solution and not the problem because working people know how to do stuff.
In the book Les Miserables (Hugo, 1862), you can read about revolutionaries who pretend to heroically fight for the poor. The truth is not heroic. Back then, spoiled rich kids would get working people to kill other working people. Today, socialists are no different. They think they can just sit around barking orders while the dirty people do all the work. The workers do not need these socialist parasites.
On the Television is Hillary Clinton standing on stage dressed like a pretty princess while the crowd cheered. This person supervised drone strikes and torture through email. So that is who the socialist bureaucracy wants you to cheer for, and the brainwashed drones in the audience clap. Some Of you might think that a world leader needs to do what Clinton did. Or do such things only seem necessary because politicians do such things? So, if the world does not need revolutionaries or princesses, what kind of better person does the world need, and how can we be that person?
Section 3: The Woods
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An older version of me went on another vision quest, and this time, I realized the world did not need me because there was no grand purpose set up for me. Thinking the cosmos will give you a purpose is the way confused people think. All these years, I had misinterpreted my visions. Instead, there was a better message, and I should have been paying attention.
My parents traveled a lot. From an airplane, the Amazon forest looked like a carpet of green stretching from the horizon to the horizon. We flew over the green for a long time until the forest stopped where bulldozers had cut down a large section. The red clay in the open area looked like blood, as if the Earth was bleeding.
The nuns at the school told the students to admire the manager of a logging company. The nuns thought Jesus manifested in the world through progress, which needs your contribution. Moreover, the nuns thought the owner who cut down the trees did the work of Jesus, and they wanted to turn the kids into that person. The forest had been there for thousands of years; people once lived in the woods, and no one had to cut it down. I told one of the mothers that I saw the Earth Bleed, and the matriarch said that I was an idiot who was wasting everyone’s time. The lumber company did evil, and the nuns were enemies of life who assumed that surrendering yourself to progress brings success. Instead, we can look for the good in the trees the nuns wanted us to destroy. Long ago, the natives turned the soil into a garden that supported millions of people (Clement, 2015), and they did it without destroying the forest.
The forest gives off the feeling of both the conditions that create the trees and the truth generated by the woods. The feeling says the Earth has a living personality. Life makes the presence grow. This thought opened an eye inside of me. Creatures in the wild grow strong while the civilized turn into pathetic weaklings. Meanwhile, Mountains, rivers, and rocks all have brutality, aggression, and intensity. The dark side will make you feel almost as if you were real. Feel primal instinct and enjoy it. This is truly sacred. Okay, so maybe this paragraph exaggerates a little. I sought hope since civilization seemed wrong; something primal must be better. The feeling in the jungle started as a fascination, which later developed into an obsession, and the obsession made it seem like more. Others have felt it; John Muir, who lived back in the days of the Wild West, had all kinds of religious ideas about Nature. Listen to Nature and hear the imminent living principle in life.
Seeing the forest cut down bothered me. Even wars are insignificant compared to the Earth’s bleeding. Looking down from Heaven, you cannot see fifty million people die, but fifty million trees being cut down leaves a visible hole. Which event concerns the Gods? The manager of the logging company wanted economic development for the Amazon region, so even the jungle contributed to civilization. Years ago, large pieces of Amazon forest remained, and there were clear skies over the jungle. Now, smoke from the burning jungle clouds the sky. One species has no right to turn the world into a wasteland. After all, the creator did not give us the land just so we would destroy it. There has to be another way.
A few weeks later, another camp had a nearby hill with a statue of Christ. The statue was similar to the one in Rio, with arms outstretched as if trying to embrace the town below. I tried to climb the hill to see the statue close up, but the hill was too steep and required holding onto the roots of trees to keep from falling. A large bull water buffalo lived inside a fence near the hill. I sat on a termite mound, watched a blackbird crawl around the bull’s back, and then noticed a trail behind the bull. The fastest way to get to the statue was through the bullpen. Jumping the fence, running across the yard, jumping the fence on the other side, the bull never followed me.
Near the statue’s base was a smaller statue. A chalk line divided the two statues as if these gods were meant to remain separate. The smaller statue resembled a mermaid. This great Brazilian Mother has many names. Some names come from Africa, and some come from the Americas. I only know a few of these names.
I remember a story about when the African Mother came to America, but I do not remember where I heard the story. The African Mother asked permission from the native Mother of the river to let people practice a cult in South America. The native Mother gave the African Mother permission as long as the Amazon remained untouched. Meanwhile, rude Christians never asked for permission when their cult invaded the land. Those Christians had no respect for other religions and were part of a civilization that built the Transamazonas Highway. This cut through the forest and allowed settlers to move in. This sinful act violated the Earth. The Catholic nuns never understood how evil their rude religion behaved.
A string of Roman Catholic rosary beads lay over the statue of The Mother. A feeling said the beads did not belong on The Mother; the beads represent Catholic authority. Then I realized the beads and the Mother could combine the good of both. Mixing Catholic symbols and other traditions is important for millions of people around the world. I should be more respectful. I was wrong to think only of the bad. I should have looked for more options. I turned around and saw what it was.
Few see the ultimate mind of the universe, though the ultimate mind of the universe sits right next to you. Open your eyes to see it. Unfortunately, every idiot assumes that the grand architect of the universe guides every word coming out of their mouths. Walking around telling everyone how their rebirth was a great experience, sounding like art fans who make art sound like something with a great purpose, yet they never seem to explain that purpose. These fans bluff us into believing art does something. Of course, we all have great expectations, yet the great vision amounts to nothing, though the vision adds to the experience of being alive.
Prophets have one thing in common: they feel a purpose or law hidden in every sacred object. The sacred exists in every object. Cultures come and go, the Earth and the Sun live much longer, and essential truths never die. After describing how the Dakota people got the Sacred Pipe, Black Elk commented.
“This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true” (Neihardt, 1932 Ch. 1)
Section 4: The Guardians
(Portrayal) 11 e1
A step is an area to step on in addition to the act of stepping, and when someone breaks instructions down into separate steps, the step becomes information. To plan correctly, we need to consider the area where the step happened and the process used while stepping. A portrait of instruction, area, and process gives us three levels in our cosmology: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The four steps at the father level represent instructions. You might want to believe the universe has a guide to tell us what steps to take, yet no such guide exists. Living in a world of holy anarchy leaves us free to make up our religion as we go along.
In the Bhagavad Gita, the Supreme Lord identifies with more than one god. The Derveni papyrus, from an old Greek religion called Orphism, hints all gods emanate from one God. In Christian myth, Angels, who are less than God, resemble the emanations. Furthermore, the Old Testament uses the plural word Elohim as a name for God, which seems strange since the Jews only have one God. The plural word originated from the children of El in the Canaanite religion. The Old Testament accuses the Canaanites of being Idol worshipers.
“The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire: thou shalt not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it unto thee, lest thou be snared therin: for it is an abomination to the Lord thy God.” (Deuteronomy 7:25)
The Jews also called their God El. The Hebrew word for eternity is Olam (Strong 5769), and El Olam means eternal God. Imagine eternity as a serpent existing where past, present, and future all exist at the same time. The ancient Greeks called the serpent Ophion, a name the Palestinian historian Eusebius thought came from the Canaanites (Praeparatio Evangelica 1.10). I skimmed through a few old books and then combined ideas to reconstruct ancient cosmology. However, the imagination connects dots in mistaken ways, so Ophion could have nothing to do with Olam unless I got the connection right.
The guardians of eternity appear in visions of four complex symbols of the four Archangels associated with the solstice and equinox points on the Zodiac. Archangels are too like God for us to conceive, and we only visualize their creatures we called Cherubim. When the ages change, the signs in the cardinal points change and each Archangel gets a Cherub and a letter for the step of the sign. Coincidentally, in our age, the four animals of the Cherubim look similar to the faces in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel.
The Archangel Michael, a deadly authoritarian, lives in the east and rules over the fall equinox. In our age, Leo occupies the east. This lion feels the influence of the Fire step where the Morning Star has become the Y Cherub. War pretends to be a horseman called The Ministry of Peace.
The Archangel Uriel, the old person, lives in the south and rules over the Winter solstice. In our age, Scorpio occupies the south. This vulture feels the influence of the Water step and the planet Earth. This E Cherub tends to stay near a high peak. The Vulture pretends to be a horseman called The Ministry of Plenty.
The Archangel Gabriel, the messenger, lives in the West and rules over the Spring equinox. In our age, Aquarius occupies the west, becoming the O Cherub. This messenger feels the influence of Venus and the Air step, symbolizing the inner reality of the future self, a picture of destiny. It can be any person, the Guardian Angel, or yourself. The Man pretends to be the horseman called The Ministry of Truth.
The Archangel Raphael, a life force, lives in the North and rules over the summer solstice. In our age, Taurus occupies the north, becoming the U Cherub. This bull feels the influence of the steps of Earth and Jupiter. Great Expectations pretends to be a horseman called The Ministry of Love.
The early Christian writer Irenaeus compared these creatures to the four writers of the Gospels (Heresies bk. 3 ch. 11). A person, a bull, a jaguar, and a vulture commonly appear in my visions. These guardians are guides who portray the way a mind protects its beliefs. Beware, the mind protects false beliefs and unconscious bad habits. While examining these concepts, don’t selectively pick information that confirms what you want to believe; the ultimate might be beyond what you see now. Remember, the horsemen are lies.
Besides, too many people try to dictate what God does. Augustine equated God with unchangeable perfection.
“With all my heart I believed you to be incorruptible, immune from injury, and unchangeable.” (Confessions bk. 7)
I prefer an imperfect God who does change. Ancient people had lots of imaginative ways of looking at the universe. Having more than one god lets people look at the world in various ways. Angels are nothing more than different angles from which to see the cosmos. Today, Christians, Jews, and Muslims claim to have only one God. The change from polytheism to monotheism did not happen at any historical time. Instead, both perspectives grew up together. In the book of Hosea, the switch from polytheism to monotheism equates with the Yahweh becoming the husband of Isreal.
“For I will take from her mouth the names of the Baals, And they shall be remembered by their name no more.” (Hosea 2:17)
Does monotheism prevent us from seeing God’s multifaceted Nature, or does it give us a better perspective? Originally, the temple design would be part of a much more complicated design. Though it would have multiple layers, each part was equivalent to the whole, and each part was a seed pattern that would grow into the whole that would somehow use the Fibonacci sequence. The design would provide a mystical answer to everything, which would be explained in the Seventeenth chapter called “The Star.” I got bored and realized it was a dumb idea. Sometimes, coincidence provides new insights, but spending too much time looking for coincidences in the shapes of symbols can distract a person from the original meaning of symbols. But, if you insist on wasting time with this, consider how each verse in Exodus 14:19-21 has 72 letters. These letters combine to form 72 names of Angels, who could be the sons of God.
“I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.” (Psalm 82:6)
These are the names of the watchers, the guardians of ideas. Consider how people get defensive when someone challenges their assumptions. People support politicians without knowing all the consequences. Consider how Joseph Stalin purged comrades who put Stalin in charge (Jones, 1997). From Stalin’s point of view, those idiots were useful. We are all guardians of bad ideas. We are useful idiots for a nonexistent God. A spiral can represent continuous development. LGBTQ people keep adding more letters to the name, and the rest of society is getting annoyed. Back in Plato’s time, people did similar annoying things. Plato didn’t want people to keep changing the truth forever, so the dialog Theaetetus has a spiral pattern that stops at seventeen steps. The Star is not hope. The spiral can become a framework to hold a progressive agenda. It is a script that crazy people read. I am glad to stop reading it.
Section 5: Ritual
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I took a few business classes to see what the greedy do. The teachers encouraged everyone to discuss how positive thinking leads to a better world. It was like a weird cult. I guess happy talk is necessary for business meetings. These trained cultists are in high demand; talkative executives make ten times more money than workers who use their hands. Successful businesses hired talkative executives, though, at the same time, failed businesses also hired these talkers.
Have you ever heard of the power of belief? All rich people have to do is imagine having what they want, and the universe will give it to them. You need to be rich for the spell to work. However, even for poor people, positive words do help. Imagine something you are thankful for and then notice how different the day becomes compared to angry days.
Let us try a positive magical activity. Stand in the middle of the temple with your left arm to the west and your right arm to the east. Touch your head and then say, “I am.” Touch your body and say, “The Kingdom.” Touch your left shoulder and say, “The Power.” Touch your right shoulder and say, “The Glory.” Put your hands together and say, “Everlasting EUOI.”
People experience more than regular water in celebrations. Both the water of life and the water of death can extend the intent of a ceremony. The water of death needs to come from a civilized source. Since the water of death gets used to purify, avoid the water of death. Instead, use the water of life in all rituals. It gets sprinkled with your wand to represent the events that make us. This water comes from a natural source. Though praying for people may seem equal to the water of life, prayer can also become the artificial water of death. Be careful if you include such idealist acts in your temple. You do not want to become civilized.
The water of life has the avatars Venus, EVO, and Helios. Store the water of life in the western part of the temple in a vase marked with the sign of Aquarius. The Water of Death has the avatars Lucifer, Zeus, and Apollo. Place the symbol of Leo on anything holding the water of death. Never sprinkle anything on any tool or talisman dedicated to the Moon. Remember, the moon’s perspective never gets touched.
Tell your personal Gods about the tools used in your rituals. You might be talking to a higher power, or you might be talking to yourself. You become the first tool. The first ritual takes place in a private place. Try to feel as much of the world around you. Honesty is essential at this stage., so try to be as honest with yourself as possible. Then, go up to a hill to tell God about yourself, and when ready to be God’s representative on Earth, say, “I am who am the creator.”
Then prepare an oil; any oil that looks like semen will do. Catholics use olive oil. Ask God to allow this oil to become God’s animating influence. Place a little dab of this oil on each of your tools to consecrate them. Remember the danger of the dagger. It is an instrument of air and reason used to purify. Apollonians use the dagger to threaten demons into submission. People who want reason to rule over everything risk turning their magic circle into a filtered barrier where nothing naturally enters. Such a person lives a pathetic, paranoid life. Instead, use the wand; it signifies a phallic symbol and the fire of creation. After consecrating the tools, bury the oil in the Earth on the hill. Then place your palms together and say, “Heaven and Earth become balanced in me. My body is the temple.” Make your temple a proper portrait of you, then place your altar in the direction appropriate for each ritual. West marks emotion. East marks reason. The father lies in the South. The Earth lives in the North.
A ceremony seems official when a priest ministers the rituals. The temple belongs to the people it serves; the people choose their priests. We could also have a tradition where a bishop ordains the priest, and if you do not like a bishop, ask a different bishop to send a priest. Parishioners are allowed to disagree with their bishops, and no one person or interest group can claim to represent the opinions of the whole church. We will have no central organization and no Pope. The Church of Holy Anarchy should be anarchy.
The priest opens the temple by identifying with the four directions. In a clockwise direction, we sprinkle the water of life. Beginning with the South, the priest says, “Heh Vau Heh,” to each direction. After completing the circle, the priest says, “It is a good day to be alive.” After breaking bread, the celebrant receives a piece, and the priest says, “Hoc est corpus,” which means, “This is the body.” The bread embodies you, your temple, the Earth, and the church of celebrants. Each celebrant can try to understand what this means in their own way. A discussion of religious subjects will occur after the bread gets passed. The ritual closes when the priest says, “Everyone may leave. Mass has ended.”
You might think only a hippie would perform these lame rituals. Wiccans seem like nice people, though their ceremonial psychological introspection makes them look ridiculous; however, these Emo Goth kids are not trying to force their religion on everyone else. The Catholic nuns would expect everyone to go to church and like it, and the nuns would try to make the kids feel guilty for not liking the Roman Catholic ritual. This intrusion made me hate the nuns and their magic act. Kids should never have to make choices they might disagree with later in life. The nuns said their way was God’s way and everyone must accept the church or lose God, so I said, “Goodbye,” and then looked into what other faiths had to offer. Even after reading about dozens of other religions, my rituals still resemble Catholic Mass because such ceremonies are the only kind I know how to do. Someone who knows more could make better rituals.
Rituals can turn water into the water of death, even if your intentions are good, so don’t let your plans fool you. Nature does not need rituals to decorate your mind. Living as part of Nature makes you the part of Nature worth protecting. Only then will you be the Sacred Grove. Since building a temple spoils the experience of Nature, the best temple would be no temple. I wrote this book about a temple we don’t need because we had to build it to knock it down.
Section 6: Faith
11
Do you think we need a God to guide us? Do you need a God to dictate your morals, agree with your opinions, support your fantasies, and manipulate the universe for you? Did you invent a God who thinks the same way you do, and then you claim to do what God wants? Muslims, who blow themselves up, have mastered the art of faith.
Suppose a politician says, “I am not a crook.” I don’t believe that politician. Suppose a preacher claims to have the word of God. What makes a preacher more believable than a politician? Is faith a solution or a problem? Imagine asking two people for directions. One thought faith showed the right way. The other had no faith and checked a map. The faithful person says maps can be wrong and is sure that only the one actual truth will show you the right way. Trust the person with the map.
In the Phaedrus, Plato claims valid understanding comes from finding the truth within the soul. I have no idea have no idea what Plato expected to find inside us. We fool ourselves too easily. Most of us have a mixture of doubts and beliefs, which may have begun in the unconscious, yet no one knows what our unconscious mind does. What if the unconscious has sexual voices hiding behind every thought and every agenda? What if the inability to deal with sexual desires makes us angry, hateful, and fearful? What if we invent moral codes to suppress desire, which creates a neurotic culture full of neurotic people? People try to fit roles that fit society, while the mind convinces us we are right for the role. I am not saying that all codes are wrong. We probably need structure in our lives.
The eye of providence portrays a God watching over the world. If this God does not care about us, we need our hands to care for our world. The two hands mirror each other and contain various tools. The thumb represents Venus. The index finger signifies Jupiter. The middle finger signifies Saturn, the father. The ring finger signifies the Sun. The small finger signifies Mercury.
In sacred names, use five vowels, A, E, I. O. U. Since the English alphabet developed from various cultures. Y and I is the same vowel in sacred names. U, V, and W is also the same vowel. In the temple, we label Venus with a “U.” On the hand, Venus gets an “A,” and Mercury receives a “U.” Switching the letters of Venus and Mercury portrays the problem of distinguishing reality from ideas.
The left hand has an impressed image of the Body Star, and the right hand has an impressed image of the Morning Star. In most rituals, the Body Star gets hung on a wall where the “I” point would hang down on the north or west walls. The Morning Star gets hung on a wall where the “I” point would point up on the east or the south wall. The Morning Star has five points of destruction to map five times every eight years when the Morning Star seems farthest from the Sun. The lines connecting the points represent the path of the Morning Star on its cycle of eight years, and point “A,” at angle IAO, maps the time when the cycle changes, which happens when a point of destruction happens near May Day.
Place your left palm in the center of the temple with all the fingers pointing in their right direction, or hold the right palm up for the fingers to portray the points of destruction. You choose which tool you use. Place your palms together to portray the union of Heaven and Earth. People find purpose and morality by living as earthlings, though faith might be useful in some situations. Just don’t blow yourself up over it or burn people at the stake. Let us try to understand ourselves, other people, and the land.
This book was supposed to end with a section about how to do religion. In that section, I was going to imitate the Catholic church. Then I noticed that even the Catholics do not understand the purpose of their own religion. Pope Ratzinger thought we were supposed to fit a bunch of theological words. Pope Francis wants us to be communists. You would think that after two thousand years, they would know what their religion is for.
In this chapter, I have sorted through the idea of belief and learned nothing, so I might as well just say what I believe. Though the universe has multiple levels of evil for the lawful to choose from, do not accept any law as a necessary evil. Look for a better solution. There is an alternative to civilization. Find a Sacred Grove to protect. No laws other than the laws of Nature happen in the Sacred Grove. The police have no authority in the Sacred Grove. Remove anyone who tries to enforce civilized laws in our grove; they want to destroy our barbarian way of life. Politely ask them to stop. You must protect your Sacred Grove to build your temple.
A close friend once said that I was not really searching for the truth. According to this friend, I think like a lawyer who manipulates the rules to avoid the truth. This friend knows me well, and perhaps they are right. Please do not have faith in this book. Reject all the silly fairy tales in this book. Really reject it. My visions might be just a bunch of delusions. The nuns might be right, and I might be wasting time. But the Sacred Grove religion is something worth doing, even if the guy who invented the idea is wrong about everything else. All talk about visions, voices, rituals, and symbols is just decoration. You do not need those decorations if you know what your religion is for.
So far, I have told you about three orders of elements: The Body, The Winds, and The Guardians. What about the fourth level of elements, where we make uncontaminated choices? There is nothing on the fourth level because all thoughts depend on other thoughts. I am not trying to create a religion that searches for faraway alternatives. You might notice that I do not mention the fifth element, which is called Ether. Ether is a point of view that can move if someone redefines the essence of the elements. For Example, suppose you don’t want Earth to be the Mother. Making such a change goes against traditional stories about Mother Earth, but in the Ether, anything is allowed.
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