flowperson

We Are ALL Immigrants ! flow...

Sorry OA, but the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. That's where spiritual beliefs come from. It's been that way for thousands of years, and that, together with observance of this universal phemomenon in all of nature is where all religions came from in the dim past; not from contemporary, nihilistic viewpoints that only, in the end, engender and promote fear and loathing. I respect your right to think what you think and believe what you believe, but there are likely more believers that would disagree with your viewpoint than agree with it. Find and read the book I mentioned above. You might surprise yourself. WF2k I agree with much of what you say. Life and death are a continuum, and there are movements from one side to the other, but they are both part of a larger whole which is the holy consciousness and the realms of light and darkness. flow....

Welcome. I suggest reading through some of the threads to orient yourself. Things are a little quiet lately, but it'll pick up someday. Until then, it's good to have you here and have fun ! flow...

Creepy or not, there are enough older and far richer cultures that had formalized beliefs in such things for there to probably be a certain amount of truth to it all. As I have mentioned elsewhere here, the earliest nomadic cultures of Eurasia always had a group shaman whose duty and talents were to interact with the spirit world on behalf of the community in order to fulfill obligations that others simply could not fulfill. Drumming and chanting by the community usually accompanied such shamanic activities. Mircea Eliade, in his book, The Sacred and the Profane, goes to extensive lengths to describe the process by which things of the spirit world are almost immediately profaned by our realities when such things enter into human communties and institutions. Furthermore, the great civilizations of Egypt held beliefs that each person had a shadow and a double, the "ba" and the "ka". The shadow followed them around and sort of served as the dark side of one's existence, but vanished after death. The "ka" existed as pure spirit and existed after the death of the body and the disappearance of the "ba". The tombs of wealthier citizens always included food and drink for the "ka" to sustain itself while in the tomb, and many tombs had small doors in them that allowed access and egress for the"ka" after burial. In present day Serbia, families sometimes build their vacation cottages in family cemetaries so that later generations might commune with the spirits of their ancestors. And in ancient Anatolia (Turkey today) families buried the dead under the floors of their mud brick homes to help maintain familial ties across the generations. Creepy...maybe so. But accepted by many for thousands of years nonetheless. But having recently lost my Dad who was cremated, I believe that I breathe him in from time to time, and I fondly hold his memory close to me within my heart as did the Hebrews and the Jews after them. Yes John, I also believe that quantum physics and quantum complimentarity have a lot to do with all this. And with this all in mind, perhaps the meaning of the cross has to do with symbolizing hidden, up and down and back and forth movement of spirit. The Bible tells us in no uncertain terms that the satanic spirit moves that way under the earth (the upsidedown cross ?) And, while it is not specifically stated, as such, one might presume that rightsideup crosses above ground symbolize movements of the divine spirit among us all. flow...

John, Welcome to the group. Newbies are always welcome. I thought your observations on the meaning of the cross were very well written and meaningful, but my personal opinion is that the meaning goes much deeper and more profound than we see on the surface of things. I'll save further comments for another time. Anyway, have a good time and it's not always so quiet here. Around the holidays we got downright noisy. flow....

MOW: From what I've read here over the past year, you are an accomplished musician, and rhythm will come naturally to you on the dance floor. Just gaze into her eyes, smile, and move your feet without thinking about it too much. The rest will probably happen automatically. Let us know how it turns out. flow....

" Choose Life."....something a being named God said somewhere back there in the past. flow....

AR You should add long and strange to modify your trip statement as it may pertain to me and my doings. I take it as a compliment,THANKS !! Flow....

Hmmmmm.... sometimes practice doesn't approach perfection. As someone once said here doing the same thing over, and over, and over, and over again without ever changing anything in a positive way is a good definition of insanity. About the only thing that really improves with practice is musical performance and the creation of graphic or written works of art. One could probably include trade skills in this also. Obsessive-compulsive human behavior patterns are not healthy if they do not yield positive results in the future. I believe that we were all made that way from the beginning. It's part of our basic design. Besides, wasn't Darius some sort of Persian leader-dude in the ancient days? flow....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sloan_Coffin_

w2k You are a very intelligent and wise human being, even if your looks aren't so hot. WELCOME TO THE BOARD ! flow....

If you haven't visited the NY Times website recently, this is an excellent time to do so. I highly recommend an op-ed column by Elaine Pagels on the Judas Gospel which appeared on April 8th, and an excellent essay by Gary Wills concering Jesus and politics which appears today, April 9th. http://nytimes.com/ flow....

The National Geographic Society has a website devoted to the new Judas Gospel, and the site even includes a pdf download of the translation in english. Here 'tis: http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/index.html flow....

des I don't think that the UCC ad is judgemental of other denominations per se. I believe all of the fuss erupted because there are even UCC churches where the button pushing episodes are more true than not true. I believe that the reaction was more due to a fear of the exposure of hypocracy within the denomination's ranks, than due to an assumption of the UCC's judgementalism directed towards other denominations. I make this observation as a person who was a member of several UCC churches over my lifetime until a few years ago. flow....

To me it's all pretty simple, and I've studied and researched these matters for some time now. There is reality, and there is illusion. Despite what some may advocate, physics and computation are intimately involved with the creation of both, especially at the quantum levels. For over a hundred years now, there has been a war going on to convince us that illusion is reality, and that reality should be ignored. This dichotomy of warfare has taken center stage the last forty years or so, especially since 1968 when certain leaders of new ways of addressing reality were brutally slaughtered through cartoonish acts before our eyes. And yes, it is my belief that physics was involved in that also. It is this reality that is behind the surface illusions that we are treated to in the commercial media each second, hour, day, week, year, and it is slowly destroying our ability to collectively hold real, heartfelt beliefs over time. Two weeks ago I watched my Dad struggle with double pneumonia. I knew that it was serious, and several cartoonish and illusory episodes at the hospital convinced me that the powers that be had determined an unfavorable outcome. I prayed that this very talented and humorous 90 year-old musician, who was still joking with the nurses, who had lived a full life and had been loving and supportive to all those that he touched with his life, not be made to suffer for the benefit of those whose lives are dedicated to creating destructive illusions for their selfish enjoyment and benefit. Two days later he had a severe coughing episode and he left us suddenly. My prayer was answered Let us not confuse belief with watching and believing cartoonish presentations that are always short-lived and transitory, leaving us with emotional voids that we attempt to fill and satisfy with our addictive behaviors. Only real people that are connected through love and understanding can overcome this modern plague that is slowly tearing us all apart. That's why I choose to contribute to this group. Scientific studies cannot prove belief. Only shared-personal experiences can. flow....

HOOORAAAAYYYY!!! APPPPPLAAAUUUSE !!! flow....;

I've been following articles on the web that announce the publishing of a new gospel. The Gospel of Judas seems to be Gnostic in content and composition, and it appears to be from Greek origins. The following descriptions give some general information on this event that's supposed to occur early in April. flow.... Judas in the spotlight By Stacy Meichtry Religion News Service NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART / AP To many Christians, Caravaggio's 1602 painting, "The Taking of Christ," is one of the most dramatic moments of their faith — the kiss of Judas and the arrest of Jesus Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. The first translation of an ancient, self-proclaimed "Gospel of Judas" will be published next month, bringing to light what some scholars believe are writings of an early Christian sect suppressed for supporting Jesus Christ's betrayer. If authentic, the manuscript could add to the understanding of Gnosticism, an unorthodox Christian theology denounced by the early church. The Roman Catholic Church is aware of the manuscript, which a Vatican historian calls "religious fantasy." Scholars who have seen photos of the brittle manuscript say it argues that Judas Iscariot was carrying out God's will when he handed Christ over to his executioners. The manuscript's owner says he has cut a deal with the National Geographic Society to release an English translation with a multimedia splash after Easter. Monsignor Walter Brandmuller, chief of the Vatican's Committee for Historical Science, calls it "a product of religious fantasy" and said it would have no impact on church teaching. A tattered document Brushed onto 31 pages of papyrus in Coptic, an Egyptian script, the manuscript is tattered after centuries beneath the sands of Egypt and decades on the gray market. According to Mario Roberty, a Swiss lawyer who owns the manuscript, the document, known as a "codex," has undergone restoration and translation by a team of researchers headed by the Swiss Coptic scholar Rodolphe Kasser. Roberty would not discuss the contents of the codex, but scholars have already begun to anticipate its findings. Working from photos of the codex, Charles Hedrick, a retired professor of Coptic studies at Missouri State University, has translated six pages into English, including the codex's title "The Gospel of Judas." Some of the passages echo New Testament descriptions of Christ's arrest, recalling how Roman authorities aimed to "seize [Christ] in the act of prayer" and how Judas "took some money and he delivered [Christ] over to them," Hedrick said. Judas aids in the arrest of Christ, he said, but "Judas is not a bad guy in this text. ... He is the good guy and he is serving God." Hedrick and other scholars say the codex was produced in the fourth or fifth century and reflects the traditions of a second-century sect of Gnostics, a community that believed true spirituality derived from a self-knowledge, or "gnosis." As early as A.D. 178, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, a heresy watchdog of the early church, targeted the community. "They produce a fictitious history ... which they style the Gospel of Judas," Irenaeus wrote in "Against Heresies." William Klassen, author of "Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus?", considers the manuscript an asset to ongoing scholarly efforts to rehabilitate Judas' historical image. Many scholars believe Judas — whose name literally means "Jewish man" — was a victim of anti-Jewish slander that pervaded early Christianity in its struggle to break from Judaism. Withholding judgment But other scholars are withholding judgment until the manuscript has been publicly authenticated. Michael White, director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at the University of Texas, said that may prove difficult. "They have to file artifacts of that sort with the government's archaeological oversight board," White said. According to Roberty, documentation is unavailable because the codex was smuggled out of Egypt before he purchased it in 2001. "The manuscript itself was illegally exported because it had been stolen in Egypt," Roberty said, adding that he planned to eventually return it to Egypt. James Robinson, a retired professor of Coptic studies at Claremont Graduate University, vouched for the document's authenticity based on his experience in trying to purchase it as early as 1983. "I don't know of any scholar who thinks this is fake," said Robinson, who is not involved in the National Geographic project. He has never seen the manuscript firsthand, but he arranged a meeting in 1983 between Stephen Emmel, a Coptic scholar at the University of Muenster in Germany, and John Pedrios, a Greek dealer who was negotiating its sale. Emmel said then that he was able to authenticate the codex as a genuine fourth- or fifth-century manuscript but that the meeting ran too short for him to say whether it contained the gospel. Reached by phone in Cairo, Emmel confirmed his report but declined to say whether the manuscript he saw decades ago is the forthcoming gospel. "I can say that the thought never crossed my mind that it was anything but a genuine Coptic papyrus codex from the fourth or fifth century," he said. BC-Gospel of Judas,0762 The mysterious "Gospel of Judas" won't tell us anything about Jesus' infamous disciple, an expert predicts NEW YORK — An expert on ancient Egyptian texts is predicting that the "Gospel of Judas" — a manuscript from early Christian times that's nearing release amid widespread interest from scholars — will be a dud in terms of learning anything new about Judas. James M. Robinson, America's leading expert on such ancient religious texts from Egypt, predicts in a new book that the text won't offer any insights into the disciple who betrayed Jesus. His reason: While it's old, it's not old enough. "Does it go back to Judas? No," Robinson told The Associated Press on Thursday. The text, in Egypt's Coptic language, dates from the third or fourth century and is a copy of an earlier document. The National Geographic Society, along with other groups, has been studying the "Judas" text. The society said Thursday it will release its report on the document "within the next few weeks" but didn't specify whether that would come via a book, magazine article or telecast. Robinson has not seen the text that National Geographic is working on, but assumes it is the same work assailed by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons around A.D. 180. Irenaeus said the writings came from a "Cainite" Gnostic sect that jousted against orthodox Christianity. He also accused the Cainites of lauding the biblical murderer Cain, the Sodomites and Judas, whom they regarded as the keeper of secret mysteries. National Geographic's collaborators on the translation and interpretation of the text include its current owner — Mario Roberti's Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Basel, Switzerland — and the Waitt Institute for Historical Discovery in La Jolla, Calif. Rodolphe Kasser, formerly of the University of Geneva, is the editor. Robinson writes that the journey of the text to Switzerland was "replete with smugglers, black-market antiquities dealers, religious scholars, backstabbing partners and greedy entrepreneurs." In the process, Robinson fears, the fragile text may have been mishandled and parts of it lost forever. Robinson is an emeritus professor at Claremont (Calif.) Graduate University, chief editor of religious documents found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, and an international leader among scholars of Coptic manuscripts. He says the text is valuable to scholars of the second century but dismissed the notion that it'll reveal unknown biblical secrets. He speculated the timing of the release is aimed at capitalizing on interest in the film version of "The Da Vinci Code" — a fictional tale that centers on a Christian conspiracy to cover up a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. "There are a lot of second-, third- and fourth-century gospels attributed to various apostles," Robinson said. "We don't really assume they give us any first century information." A National Geographic response said "it's ironic" for Robinson to raise such questions since for years "he tried unsuccessfully to acquire this codex himself, and is publishing his own book in April, despite having no direct access to the materials." National Geographic said it practiced "due diligence" with scholars "to save the manuscript before it turns to dust and is lost forever" and that everyone involved is committed to returning the materials to Egypt. In "The Secrets of Judas," a HarperSanFrancisco book on sale April 1, Robinson will describe secretive maneuvers in the United States, Switzerland, Greece and elsewhere over two decades to sell the "Judas" manuscript. He writes that he was approached about purchasing a group of manuscripts in 1983 and arranged for colleague Stephen Emmel, now at the University of Muenster, Germany, to meet in Geneva with go-betweens for the owner. Emmel got a glimpse of the text but didn't know it was the "Gospel of Judas" till years later. He was told the original asking price was $10 million but it could be obtained for $3 million, an impossibly high figure for the interested Americans. From there, Robinson traces a twisted sales trail through years and continents to this year's impending release. Emmel is now a member of the National Geographic team along with other former students of Robinson, who hopes his colleagues will be pr Gospel of Judas has Church worried By IAN GALLAGHER 13mar06 THE Gospel of Judas - said to be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of modern times - is about to be published amid explosive controversy, Britain's The Mail on Sunday newspaper revealed yesterday. Scholars have translated 26 pages of a crumbling ancient text that purports to tell the story of Jesus's last days from the perspective of Judas Iscariot, a man reviled for almost 2000 years. Sensationally, the manuscript portrays him not as a villain but as a hero and Christ's favoured disciple. It claims to repeat conversations between the two men and shows that in betraying Christ, Judas was fulfilling a divine mission. The Mail on Sunday has interviewed experts involved in the project and has established that, according to the gospel, Christ instructed Judas to betray him with the words: "You will become the apostle cursed by all the others. Judas, you will sacrifice this body of man which clothes me." In another hugely significant section of the manuscript, Jesus tells Judas: "You will become the thirteenth, and you will be cursed by the other generation and you will come to rule over them." The papyrus document dates back to the 4th Century, but is believed to be a translation of a Greek text written in AD 187. Most Biblical gospels are thought to have been written between 50 and 80 years after Christ's crucifixion. Some sources have indicated that as well as conversations between Christ and Judas, the gospel also contains another "surprise" which will be revealed when the full contents of the manuscript are unveiled in Washington on April 6. Some sections of the Church fear it will challenge many of Christianity's most deeply held beliefs. It has already been labelled "dangerous" by one Vatican scholar. Written in Coptic, the ancient language of the Egyptian Christians, the document was discovered in a tomb in Egypt in the late 1970s. Since then it has passed through the hands of various antiquities dealers and for 16 years lay disintegrating in a bank vault on Long Island, New York. Tests have shown its authenticity as an ancient text is beyond doubt. But controversy will focus on the reliability of the account it presents.

Ummm...MOW, are you telling us to get busy ? But I understand what you're saying. I think it has something to do with some sort of phenomenon that is working in society to separate and isolate those of us who have a liberal or progressive bent. It first became noticeable to me beginning in 1986 when George I turned the word "liberal" into a profanity with his "L Word" comment that he used over, and over,and over, and over, and over, and over, and over...well you get the picture I think. I don't think it has anything to do with liberals and progressives enjoying sex any less than conservatives. Correct me if I'm wrong. flow....

I would suggest looking in your area and support shelters that serve to help abused and/or battered women and children. From what I have discovered this is a growing problem just about everywhere one looks in the land, city or rural, and is reflective of how our lifestyles are being altered and squeezed by the relentless pace of material pursuit. flow....

DD: Assuming that there may have been advances in scientists' understanding of wave-particle systems over the past 70 years, you may wish to consider what is really happening out there today (see below). Other than that, what did you find to be appealing or interesting about Mr. O'donnell' 95 ideas ? I found them to be refreshing and sensible. flow.... Quantum bits help yield some computer ESP By Greg Kline Thursday, March 2, 2006 E-mail Story Printer-friendly If you don't ask somebody a question and they give you the answer to the question you were thinking about asking but didn't, you might mark it down to an odd coincidence, or to ESP. If your computer is on and you don't run a Google search and you still get an answer, you might think a hacker has taken over the machine, or a cyber-savvy poltergeist. But University of Illinois researchers are attracting attention for showing how to get an answer from an algorithm – a formula for performing a certain task on a computer in this case – without actually running the algorithm on the computer. Physics Professor Paul Kwiat and graduate student Onur Hosten aren't attributing their results to clairvoyance or to a ghost in the machine, however. The phenomenon, called "counterfactual computation," stems from the oft-bizarre physics at the quantum level, where atoms and other basic particles live, which sometimes seems like the paranormal stuff of an X-Files episode. "It's as though it did run even though it didn't," Kwiat said of the results of the experiment by Hosten, which appeared in the journal Nature last week. The problem involved searching a simple database of four entries and identifying an entry the researchers had flagged, the purpose of the algorithm. But the computer that didn't run the algorithm and still yielded an answer wasn't at all like the one on your desk. This computer consisted of an array with a laser, lenses, mirrors and other equipment in Kwiat's lab, designed to produced and manipulate particles of light, or photons. One law of quantum mechanics, called "superposition," says properties such as the spin of an electron or the polarization of a photon can be in a range of different states at once down at the atomic and subatomic levels. In classic computing, computers work by combining zeros and ones into coded instructions that tell the machine what to do. But those "bits" can symbolize only a single thing at a time, a zero or a one. Quantum bits, called "qubits," made, say, by having a photon polarized one way symbolize a one and another way a zero, can be all combinations at once because of superposition. In theory, that would allow every combination to be processed simultaneously, making everything work exponentially faster for some types of problems. Which has a lot of researchers looking at the technique, among other things for computing muscle-hungry cryptography and code-breaking routines. Meanwhile, superposition also is at the root of the experiment by Hosten. In essence, he sets photons to run and not to run the search algorithm and sends them through the array, which includes a region where the data is held. The way the mirrors are set up sometimes prevents the photons from passing through that area and running the algorithm. In fact, when a photon beats the system and passes through the data it's considered undesirable in this context, because the researchers are trying to get an answer without doing so. Because of superposition, some of the photons blocked from the data come out as if they had passed through it and run the algorithm, while others come out as if they hadn't. Capturing the state of the particles thus allows the UI researchers to infer information about the data as if it had been searched. "You can go through sequentially and exclude the different answers without ever running the program," Kwiat said. If that runs counter to anything you've experienced, well, that's why they call it counterfactual computing, and why the quantum world can be weirder than any Dali painting. The UI experiment is a good way of examining quantum principles but pretty much a nonstarter as a practical method of quantum computing. The apparatus already is unwieldy and scaling it up to do any more than working with a simple database would make it worse. But some of the ideas the UI researchers have for preventing photons from running the algorithm might be useful for error correcting in quantum computing in general, a key issue in making the technique useful, Kwiat said. Besides Hosten, graduate students Julio Barreiro, Nicholas Peters and Matthew Rakher worked on the study, which was funded by the federal Disruptive Technologies Office and the National Science Foundation.

There are foot washing rituals carried on at the highest levels of the roman church. As I mentioned on another thread sometime ago, this might stem from ancient beliefs that demonic or underworld spiritual influences enter humans through their feet, especially so when it comes to their effects upon women. So there is some substance behind the act. flow...

MT: It is my opinion we should check this guy's undershirt to see if it has a big "S" on it. Wonderful stuff ! Thank you so much for posting this. flow....

JAM Welcome !! There's not much going on here today. It tends to run in spurts once in a while. You'll find lots of sympathetic people here who have been through similar circumstances to yours, or worse. We are all searching. I would suggest reading some of the past threads to get a flavor of the voices here. Good luck to you on your quest. flow...

AR: So good to have you back. Yes, you are correct and the overall effect is overwhelming and humbling. The color of the containers is a dull red reminiscent of the red ochre color that is so prevalently used in the art forms of the ancients. Also the form of the containers, stacked as they are in the framework of the structure housing the exhibit reminds us collectively that all we are, all we have been, and all we will be is contained within the boxes that we identify with living within universal time constraints. After all, shipping containers are used to send stuff from one time and place to another. With that in mind, there is a story circulating on the web of a recently discovered 4'x5' picture on a wall in China of a dancing male and female couple that is rendered in iron oxide and human blood. Much of the picture is composed of red hand prints. The video sequences seen in the exhibit featured many such male-female dancing depictions in differing environments; entirely submerged under water, partially submerged in rivers, etc. I viewed such depictions as a metaphor for the sexual energies that propels our journeys through time. flow....

Perhaps I over-generalized, but the statements in the thread that I posted in here seemed to lean towards a preference for John. I didn't mean to diminish the importance of the other books though. IMO there is a general longing among progressives for newer interpretations to the stories of Jesus that make more sense to them in light of the world they live in. My belief is that progressives are searching for novelty, not for degrees of satisfaction with what has seemed to always be. Hence, the importance of questioning in our quest. It could be that John meets more of these novelty wishes since its content meshes with the mystical and dualistic tendencies of today's world more than the others IMO, but then we're both splitting hairs on this one. I don't believe the authors of the Synoptic Gospels had nanotechnology in mind while writing the stories, but then I could be wrong about that. flow....