Eso’s Chronicles 167

Forbidden Death (10/1)
© Eso A.B.

How dare the Dalai Lama let the Tibetans immolate themselves, when he like the Pope goes from conference to conference telling everyone that he has abandoned the idea of a free Tibet, and will be satisfied with Tibet as an autonomous territory?

Washington Post writer Sally Quinn rightly chastises the Dalai Lama for not telling the Tibetans to stop their nonsense of self-sacrificing their lives for a free Tibet ruled by their own sacred King. After all, the Dalai Lama says he will be satisfied with autonomy within China. Or is he secretly hoping that there will be so many Tibetans who immolate themselves that China will change her mind and that then he will be able to once more be a king with the privileges of a Western dictator?

Ideas such as self-immolation and self-sacrifice have long been abandoned by an ‘enlightened’ West. Ever since the beginning of the 20^th century (perhaps even longer), Washington, DC has been exporting a superior culture covered with the shiny shellac of freedom. It is not surprising that the American ideology of freedom on behalf of greed has at last come to criminal institutions “too big to be prosecuted”.

However, the leadership in Washington has many centuries of precedence in the Pope of Rome, who has been a point man for capitalist tactics for almost a thousand years. It began with ideas of St. Paul that he as a convert to neo-Christianity could live outside the laws of the Old Testament http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident_at_Antioch . The argument centers on whether certain Gentiles who converted to neo-Christianity needed to observe the Jewish dietary laws and circumcision for males http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistle_to_the_Galatians .

As the last link to Galatians indicates, there were neo-Christians who believed that the Christians did not have to observe the Jewish Bible, but should write their own Testament. This became known as “legalism” or legalistic Christianity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_(theology) .

While the argument of the meaning of the latter interpretation continues to this day, the very fact that it exists weakens the argument on behalf ot the ultimate prevalence (rights of the subjective) mind.

The following quote from the last link above:

“The words 'legalism' or 'legalist' do not occur in the Old or New Testaments. Legalism's root word, "law" (Greek nomos), occurs frequently in the New Testament, and sometimes connotes legalism. In 1921, Ernest De Witt Burton stated that in Gal. 2:16, "nomou is here evidently used ... in its legalistic sense, denoting divine law viewed as a purely legalistic system made up of statutes, on the basis of obedience or disobedience to which individuals are approved or condemned as a matter of debt without grace. This is divine law as the legalist defined it."

The reason why ‘writing’ a new text of laws is important is because it sets a precedent for Law as a product that may be manipulated according to circumstances. In short, Paul’s argument is an argument for a “faith” determined by a changing word (Prince of Mafia as Chief Judge), rather than an Act of self-sacrifice that never changes and is determined by a “faith” in one’s inner subjective faith; or what this writer has called “law of not-violent terror”, in effect the law as inspired by God.

In other words, for Paul the Word, while beginning with such lovely words as ‘love’, ‘peace’, and ‘grace’ may end up with a law in which these words are replaced by the word of a ‘mafia prince’ turning the law to his interests. In imagistic terms, the ancient ritual of ‘circumcision’, which likely originated when man wore no clothes and a circumcised man was readily observed, has been replaced by a man where circumcision is permanently hid from view and no longer has social significance.

Today God (embodied in Chance) has arranged social circumstance in a particularly curious way. He-She has created an unprecedented ‘potential’ for unprecedented acts.

For the second time in the history of the Catholic Church, due to the retirement of Pope Benedict, there are two Popes in Rome. I say two, because the first bishop and Pope is said to have been St. Peter, one of the twelve disciples of Jesus, who is also God. The mythology of the Catholic Church asserts this to be so. Having once been embodied in a mythical office, can it be unbodied with ‘retirement’? If it can, then does that not amount to betrayal of office that is believed to be more than office?

While no Pope has ever immolated or self-sacrificed his life while in office, the very possibility that it is never an impossibility, raises interesting questions.

Let us imagine that Pope Francis immolates himself on behalf of humanity, because he is inspired by a vision brought by Jesus, in which Jesus tells him that he agrees with scientists that science has gone ‘too far’ and that in cooperation with the banks it is destroying planet Earth’s environment beyond repair http://www.prurgent.com/2012-01-19/pressrelease220510.htm . As the link informs us, neither human kind or any Pope has taken the warning issued in 1992 seriously, and it is now forty-five (45) years since the original warning was issued by the Club of Rome in 1968.

In any case, I believe that the sudden and unexpected self-immolation of Pope Francis would cause quite a sensation, and for at least a month headline writers could go without their thinking hats. Indeed, the sensation would be even greater if Pope Francis first told of his vision to retired Pope Emeritus Benedict, and it was Bishop Ratzinger who then immolated himself on the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican Plaza. I wonder what Sally Quinn of the WP would write then?

It is for certain that Pope Francis (the replacement for the retiree, the Pope imitating the betraying apostle Peter) has begun his term in office badly. What man, but one obsessed by “legalisms” would more than five hundred (500) years after the fact canonize 800 Christians beheaded in 1480 by Muslim soldiers of the Ottoman Empire http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22499327 . It is not only a pathological act by a neo-Christian, but one that potentiates violent reaction. It is Catholic hubris gone nuts and celebrating (a toh to Max Keiser) the turning of humanity into a brainless chicken at last: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmLywMXvknA

The question now facing everyone (Sally Quinn including) is whether the retired Pope, who like Peter has betrayed Jesus the Bogomil/Christ at the cock’s crow once, will awaken to his act and celebrate his 97^th birthday by putting a match to the superego of the West and his alleged successor from Argentina, who would, I am reasonably sure, be happy to ‘disappear’ Bishop Ratzinger if he could  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22064929 .

Eso’s Chronicles 166
History As Parabox (9)
© Eso A.B.

The West—and by now the East as well—are constructing our civilization from the glaze of a superego. This process has a life of over a thousand years. The Superego is a creature that is not alive, but is an icon of icons, a negative “artifice of eternity” (W.B. Yeats) created by governments during our historical period best described as a parabox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evmonek8_bw.

The icon of icons, the monster which the populations of Earth sees when waking in the morning and going to bed in the evening are not images ordinary artists dare to portray. The only ones - who successfully portray the superego are untutored and naïve teenagers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3I7Et9lG2g .

We may wish to ask ourselves why the Western Superego echoes back to the West as a Japanese monster or Godzilla?

The answer is surprisingly simple: the Western Superego is a monster because the wise men of the Western world project it by means of an ineffective word. The wise men of the West speak of love, of love thy neighbor, of love thy neighbor as thyself. While such love may happen in the secrecy of private life, it never happens in public life. Why does love not project itself in the public light?

Here the answer becomes complex. The Japanese child when born, comes into the world and is immediately put into a Zen Budhist straightjacket http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKHvPkGqfuU . A child born in the West is, to the contrary, put in a straightjacket inside a babel of words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__AhDt9TA_Q , and the result is about the same as that of Zen: a blank mind before mind came into existence, but once in existence, it immediately goes into overdrive.

For example: Because ‘loving my neighbor as myself’ may also mean that I love myself to such a degree that when I see my neighbor suffer and endure a life that I am sure that I would not want to endure, I express my love by killing myself in protest over his-her suffering. That is to say, by my death I hope to cause the creator of the cause of my neighbor’s suffering to desist from causing him-her and me further pain. Nothing could be more direct and plainer.

Of course, the creator of pain may (and usually does) ignore me and simply shrugs shoulders. At which point another person may intercede, both, on mine and my neighbor’s behalf. However, if such an intercession has no results, then there begins a game of chess grounded on the premise that my neighbors, who see my sacrifice as ineffective, form an attitude of rejection of the individual who causes the pain and orders (in the name of sanity) such an individual expelled from the community. If the expulsion of the violent one is rejected, and to the contrary initiates further aggressive behavior from him-her, then physical punishment (up to capital punishment) may be in order.

It is at this juncture of self-sacrifice unto death and capital punishment for daring to disregard the dictates of the superego that the battle over the kind of civilizations we live in ensues. Will humankind decide that civilization henceforth will proceed according to law, which is backed by capital punishment, even the outbreak of war, or will capital punishment continue to be exercised—until the enforcer of the ‘love thy neighbor’ civilization declares him- herself willing to sacrifice his-her life to put an end to that civilizations nonsense?

The last is best illustrated by imagining Stalin, the heir of the Soviet Revolution, announce that he will leave his post of “General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party” by dying a sacrificial death. Had it occurred to Stalin to do so, he would most likely have had a chance to continue the Revolution by popular demand no less. In this instance, none who had suffered as a consequence of his leadership could argue that he had endured less sacrifice than the public.

The survivors of the Revolutionary ordeal would be proud over having been privileged to be part of the Revolution; provided, of course, that Stalin was followed by a leader equally dedicated to leadership through self-sacrifice. Several post Stalin names come to mind: Khrushchev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin; also the Pope, Dalai Lama, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Xi Jinping, etc.

Unfortunately, self-sacrifice has fallen out of favor. Elsewhere, I have suggested that its disregard is traceable not only to personal fears of death or cowardice, but to the imposition on the mind of a meme of fear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO70ZjZ0wrw , which for obvious reasons holds self-sacrifice in low esteem. One such fear is the fear of death itself.

When and how the fear of death began is now beyond tracing. However, it is not difficult to imagine that it may be the result of fear of torture and death by slow torture.

Some will protest that fear of death is natural to consciousness itself. This raises the question of whether a fearful consciousness is not a consequence of deliberate emotional unbalancing and a deliberate creation of schizophrenia http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/schizophrenia/DS00196 . Such a fear may result when a safe environment is destroyed and causes one to discover one’s self unprotected. An illustration of this exists in Genesis 3:7, where Adam and Eve not only discover themselves naked, but where their condition is aggravated by a description of nakedness as sinful. Instead of nakedness causing Adam to get an erection and fondling Eve and Eve tempted to pet the erection and her fondler, they try hide from each other, because both are a priori enlightened that too much ‘multiplying’ will lead to overpopulation and murder. Because the implanted sense of guilt becomes so great, neither Adam nor Eve dare imagine themselves playing games in which ‘penetration’ is avoided as a matter of a radically different perspective on sexual enjoyment.

Perhaps sometime in the future when the fear of death is overcome, we will be able to engage our minds in discovering how it came about. At this time, however, it will suffice to point out that not all human beings have been fearful of death at all times. For example, at the Hindu festival of Juggernaut http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggernaut , pilgrims are known to have sacrificed themselves to this God of relentless forward movement of their own will and without anyone urging them to do so.

At the same time, there should be no doubt that the neo-Christian-led cult of fear of death was in the early days of the cult enforced by the execution of the practitioners of self-sacrificial death. True, the neo-Christians justified their actions by claiming they were stopping child sacrifice, for which I agree there is no justification. However, there are no studies of whether the sacrifice of children, animals, and prisoners was perhaps not begun at a time when an older civilization had come under attack of an age cynical about the nature and purpose of death, and sacrifice of others than one’s self was a consequence of a later and secondary cause.

Such an attack on death is traceable to an age that preceded neo-Christianity or was somehow conflated with it. Re: “The pre-Christian religions of the Germans and Celts conflated capital punishment with human sacrifice. Criminals condemned for different classes of offenses were sacrificed to different gods by different methods, among which were drowning, hanging, buried alive and the sword (Ward 1953). A similar differentiation is visible among the executions that are such a prominent feature of British and European history: hanging for commoners, beheading for nobles executed for treason, and burning alive for heretics and witches.”*

Still, death as a key personal freedom is vociferously denied by governments addicted to life in the post natural urban desert. This is illustrated by an article by Sally Quinn in the Washington Post of May 11, 2013 http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/the-dalai-lamas-compassion-disconnect/2013/05/10/076bc91a-b8d5-11e2-b94c-b684dda07add_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines .

Ms Quinns question: “Isn’t self-immolation the very antithesis of what Buddhism is about?” speaks volumes on behalf of fundamentalist neo-Christian conceits. It comes with the ID tags of a superego trapped and dead in an inverted parabox.

*Felix Padel, The Sacrifice of Human Being, Oxford, p 368.

(To be continued.)