The Riddle of the Virgin

[Note: this is not the metaphysical meaning of the Virgin parable, just the likely general origin of the allegory it presents; the metaphysical teachings are much deeper and complex than this. I'm presenting the simplest explanation first, so people can begin to see the underlying thinking of these authors, which was NOT to confuse everyone, but provide metaphors for the hidden spiritual realm that they could understand, we're talking about primitive, uneducated people here.]


The Riddle of the Sphinx

This story is from Greek mythology. The Sphinx would accost all travelers, and ask this riddle, and the visitor would either be allowed to pass by or would be killed.


The riddle:
What goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening?

The answer:
Man – who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs once grown, and walks with a cane or walking stick in old age. Oedipus answered this correctly, and the Sphinx destroyed itself.

OK, so this last part is a stretch – most elderly people I’ve known either still walked fine, or were in a wheelchair or walker, few used a cane. I sometimes use ‘hiking stick’ when hiking, especially in the mountains, where the “third leg” provides more stability, especially when going down steep slopes.

I must be stupid, I still don’t get the point of this parable – when you answer correctly, what have you learned, if anything; where is the spiritual teaching? This is almost like a child’s game riddle: what’s black and white, and ‘red’ all over? This is based on a misspelling, becoming a phonetic riddle only, you can’t write it down without giving away the answer: “read all over”, which they say is “a newspaper”, but why not a book, or even the Bible?

The Riddle of the Virgin

The riddle:
What brings forth life without sexual procreation?

The answer:
The earth. Without anything but the sun, the earth gives life to all the life we’ve discovered thus far in the entire universe: cellular organisms, plants, animals, mankind – all exist only because the sun shines on the earth. The earth does nothing but receive the life force, which is considered a feminine aspect, while the male aspect provides the life-giving seed that the feminine receives. Therefore, the model for the Virgin Mary story is “Mother Earth”, which, even as Gaia, the earth-based philosophy, is always feminine, never masculine.

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed the correlation between “sun” and “Son”, of God? The Son gives us “life everlasting”, and the sun gives constant life to the earth. Sun worship not only preceded most religions, but the Emperor Constantine, who is given credit for the compromises that allowed Christianity to succeed, was himself a worshipper of the sun god, or Sol Invictus; he only confessed to Christianity on his death bed, just in case. His flag had Sol Invictus on it, and later the cross was added to the other side to appease the Christians in the Holy Roman Empire, who threatened to destroy the empire by having it split into religious factions.

Remember that in Biblical times people weren’t reading anything, there were no books available to the public, so all this was passed on orally, Socratic discourse (question and answer) taught people the meanings, and people were more savvy back then about parables, metaphors, hidden meanings. Nowdays, we’re so spiritually illiterate and rooted in the material world that we need everything spelled out for us, and we think that if it’s written down, it represents a real life event that actually happened in history. I doubt that the public at large can even define “metaphor” or “allegory”, much less understand all these in scripture. Can God have really intended that scripture be so confusing, so obscure in meaning, so baffling to the common man?

The earliest 'deity' we've discovered is Woman - about 50,000 yrs ago, cave paintings were made that show a woman, an arrow pointing to the moon, then a pregnant woman, then a woman and her baby. This was seen as "the creator of life", so women were worshipped first, and the cave painters obviously understood the cycles, controlled by the moon's phases. It's unclear if the painting is homage to a goddess, or simply an observation about nature being 'explained in pictures'. As the only female object of worship in the west, it seems likely that the Virgin Mary is a tribute to or holdover from this concept. Later, the bear emerged as a "god", likely from nomadic hunter-carnivores, who saw the bear as king of his realm, with no formidable opponent. Sun worship came after all of these, and was the religion of Egypt before the exodus. Now we worship the "Son of God", rather than the creator of the universe.

"I go unto the Father, for the Father is greater than I" - John 14:28

"The servant is not greater than the master; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him." - John 13:16

Enlightenment, or Cosmic Consciousness

I had a "white light" experience at age 22 while meditating.. I had been meditating for years before that happened.. it seemed to suddenly grow outward from a center and enveloped all my vision and everything became timeless.. after awhile, I gradually came out of it (the meditative trance), and a stray dog everyone knew in Athens named Fred was at my screen door.. I went outside and told Fred to lead me on a walk and he took me to a Lutheran church that I'd never seen that was open all night, and we watched the sun rise through the stained glass windows from the altar..

Psychologists call this "Cosmic consciousness", named by Canadian criminal psychiatrist Dr. Edmund Bucke in a book of that title in 1900.. until then it had just been known as "a religious experience" - they call it that because you're aware of all life outside your body and feel a connection to the universe - apparently the "connection of all life" is the theme of the film AVATAR, which I haven't seen yet..

This led to the term "enlightenment" (Seeing the light), and is why we show halos in art - I believe it's the state experienced in meditation by Gautama Buddha. In psychedelic days, the euphemism for this was "The White Rabbit", hence the Jefferson Airplane song title.. seeking it was known as "chasing the white rabbit".

In Bucke's book, it was rare but seen throughout history, had happened to both him and friend poet Walt Whitman - Bucke theorized that it's the capability in the dormant part of our brains that's is becoming more active as we evolve, as he saw it becoming more and more common in his era..

There's a perfect description of it in John Fowles novel "The Magus", and a scientific series of articles on it in "The Highest State of Consciousness".. it's described in the Bible, happening to Saul (Paul) in the desert, and to Luke while meditating on an altar..

I've often thought this is what is represented by the cross, as one "crosses over" from the material to the spiritual. I believe it either represents this or the leaving behind of the material body and emerging as a spiritual being, which may or may not represent actual physical death in this incarnation. Otherwise, the cross is nothing but a Roman device of torture, and would not have such prominence as a decoration in everyone's lives. I personally have three: a medieval metal Celtic cross, a modern painted enamel one from El Salvador, and a graphic print inspired by a medieval design.

Long Distance Healing

[This was a reply to someone who asked "how does distance healing work?"]

Remote or long distance healing is how people can be healed that are not sitting in front of you. You channel 'incorporal healers' (angels, whatever you want to call them, but two healers NOT in bodies, one for external healing, one for internal) toward whoever needs it. All you need is a name and location, the healers you channel do the rest. The less the "corporal healer", that is me or you, does, the better.

The main job of the healer (in a body) is to get the energy directed to the right being, and NOT get sick themselves, by running the energy through themselves and back into the earth, a technique called "grounding". Shaman who take SMOKE into their mouths are risking taking on the bad energy themselves - not a good technique.

These are ancient Chinese techniques, thousands of years old. There's nothing new in the Bible at all, just repetition of stuff that had been going on around the world for centuries. There were many wandering healers in the old testament even; my favorite was surrounded by "dirt and flies" from not bathing, was the model for "Pigpen" in Peanuts!

You can feel energy in your hands if you pretend to "hold" an invisible basketball, you'll feel air pressure in each hand - that's the energy of the body's aura you feel - 90% of us can feel this, a few can't, so we can nearly ALL be healers. Healers move their hands through a person's aura, or the body's energy field (which can be seen in Kirlian photography) and can feel lumps or hot spots where bad energy resides, and move it out of the aura. The hands have their own energy nodes that allow you to feel energy in others.

It takes years of practice and training, and you have to be able to meditate first, that's how you discard the bad energy from yourself. You meditate first to prepare yourself, then ask for the healers, you always get two, then you can begin. Self-healings work the same way, you just activitate or turn up your own internal healing energy, called "kundalini", or "coiled", which is at the base of your spine, ready to be activated.

This is shown by the medical "caduseus", an ancient Greek symbol of healing (see graphic), the serpent winding up the staff, which is the spinal cord. This is not only ancient but well understood by doctors as well. The image should have the serpent crossing the staff seven times, once for each energy center in the body (survival, sexual, nervous or solar plexus, heart, throat or communication, third eye or pineal gland, crown or God-consciousness - shown by a halo in artwork for "enlightened", or the actual crown worn by kings, showing their closeness to deity). Sometimes shown with two serpents, I believe this represents energy "coming and going", as you run energy through your body this way, just like food. You bring new, healing energy into your body, and flush out the older, diseased, foreign energy out of your body - this is how basic self-healing works. Over 55% of the AMA members now agree that we heal ourselves; this is the method.

I've had this work personally to
(a) save one man's foot from being amputated by doctors, he/we healed it without their help, they did nothing but wait, b/c they couldn't get the permission to cut off the infected foot (pretty drastic solution, all they can often think of doing). When he got out of the hospital, he personally found and thanked all six of us who had done the healing in a circle (group) for added strength, without being told who was there! He said he saw us all, and knows what we each did.
(b) fix another person's undiagnosed bladder problem that baffled doctors - three days after a long distance healing, it "mysteriously cleared up", in his words
(c) lessen much pain in several others, almost daily, such as cancer, migraine, post-operative pain.
(d) help heart attack victims immediately, usually by thinning their blood.

It doesn't always work obviously, and the "healee" has to want and accept the healing (they almost always do, who wouldn't? perhaps someone suicidal or terminal). However, it never hurts, usually works well enough to make it worth the effort (a side effect in the healer is usually yawning, from the energy expended! you're also relaxed from meditation), and the healings only take about 5-15 minutes. You can do them often; when training, I did thousands, often 20-30 per night, in three hour classes.

Jesus said "all these things I do you will do and in greater numbers", yet some refuse to believe that only ONE being ever can do any of this. THAT is lack of faith, and skepticism, not religion. How many doctors, nurses, therapists, scientists have done actual healings since the "age of enlightenment"? The evidence is right in front of us on a daily basis. In the middle ages, even mid-wives were being burned for "lessening God's pain of childbirth", so all healing was actually banned by the church on penalty of death! (Finding a real doctor was next to impossible as they were also burned.)

Once you can teach something that works, then it's a "science", yet the source of this one is faith (belief that something will work), which implies "religion" - so it's really a combination of the two. On an episode of Nova on PBS, they had a computer monitor a woman's ovarian tumor, which shrank when a healer in another room gave her a healing without even knowing the problem! All caught live on film, with a computer monitoring the results, while the doctors said "this would be a miracle drug if any worked this well and this quickly".

Meditation experts have been measured scientifically, and able to produce pre-sleep alpha waves in their brains in 10-15 minutes, and many can produce theta waves, or the equivalent of R.E.M. sleep (the deep stage that produces dreams), in 15 minutes. It helps to meditate often throughout the day, even if just a few minutes. Its not "mind over matter", but mental development itself, achieved through proper technique and years of practice. It the hidden power of life that does not come easily, nor through artificial means.

Many believe we are learning to use the inactive parts of the brain, which certainly can be seen in the Lazarus parable, if applied to mental powers. Some call this "psychic", deriving it from the Greek psyche, for soul, and say its not a mental science but one of the soul sciences; for me, that's hard to define and the route one takes is definitely using the mind to still the body and the senses, which is my definition of meditation. [Another post will follow to explain the difference between prayer and meditation, for those that are new to meditation.]

"Science without religion is lame, but religion without science is blind" - Albert Einstein

Basic Self-Healing Techniques

Basic Meditation exercise for running energy and self-healings

[These are ancient Chinese techniques brought to the U.S. in the 50's, and taught to tens of thousands at the Berkeley Psychic Institute, in several cities, our was in Palo Alto, next to Stanford U. The courses were filled with high tech workers and scientists. They are called psychic healings, energy healings, aura cleansings, self-healings. A Vietnamese woman told me they are used there as energy healings; Vietnam was settled by Chinese invaders around 900 a.d. Holistic healings and martial arts came from Taoism, one of the world's oldest philosophies still in practice]

When you mediate (which is clearing your head of thoughts, images, nervous energy, and may take years of practice to attain and most will give up trying):

1. Center yourself inside your head, eliminate all images that flow thru - you can imagine a door you send them thru and close it

2. Imagine your aura (energy field) only being about 2-3 feet away from you, egg shapes - we spread them out to our relatives and loved ones and our body energy is dissipated; when you bring it in, it gets more concentrated around yourself. One more thing about the aura: when you bring your it in, imagine that all connections to others are now severed or broken - this is usually family (these will come back later, unless you don't let them, its ok and natural, we even have them to spirits of the dead sometimes and need to break those too). These are called either 'cords' or 'etheric threads' -- all things leave these after coming into contact - if thin or weak enough they break on their own, if not they're strong and more binding

3. Imagine a grounding cord or pipe running down your spine and into the earth - let your 'bad' or negative energy flow down this and back into the earth (molten rock and magma, can handle it)

4. Imagine new or clean energy coming down from the sun or stars through your head and into your body - some say this is the halo in religious art, the energy they're drawing from the "cosmos" - this will help rejuvenate the lost/bad energy you dump

5. Imagine this new energy flowing down your spine then out to all your extremities, out through your hands and feet - these are the bodies energy centers - so hands are used for healing, feet are used to connect to the earth energy - the “Crown chakra, exemplified by the crowns on kings (crown of thorns on Jesus to mock this) shows the open chakra at the top of your head receiving this cosmic energy - Light of God, christians would call it (no fundamentalists, healings are not the "work of the devil" – clueless)

6. Do this 5-15 minutes if you can, that's long enough - yawning is natural, its psychic energy being released. When done, imagine your aura refilling with all your energy thats lost or dissipated - this gives you a closing burst of energy I guess; I think the term "collecting yourself" in the west describes this.

All this will at least help, though its hard to maintain concentration at first, hence all the classes on meditation and healing. Try to regularly do 15 minutes morning and night, you'll lose lots of tension, the others will feel better around you too. Do short sessions when stressed – I stopped my programming work a couple of times daily and in five minutes my stress was relieved, sometimes I'd go to the institute and get healings from others; someone was there all day to provide those for free.