Lately, I keep having to stab my hand to keep from getting involved in old controversies. When I read lies, spins and inaccuracies on the web, it usually gets my dander up. This is expecially true if those lies or spins refer to me directly or indirectly. But I'm learning I have to go against the tide "side-ways" -- because it is a tide.
If I respond directly to the people spreading the lies and spins, they will spin my responses into "slander of the dharma" and accuse me of spreading lies and spins. But if I don't respond to them, these same people spread narratives about what has happened that are simply untrue. I'll go to my grave with a narrative about the split between SGI and NST that neither NST nor the SGI will admit. Both sides are convinced that they are 100% right and everybody else is 100% wrong and prefer to substitute myth building for history anyway. At the very best they put critics the influenced by the"king devil of the sixth heaven terms." Mostly, they simply stick to a message...
What the heck. They are only wandering down the same road our ancestors trod when they created Christianity, Islam and some incarnations of Buddhism and Judaism. The reason I prefer realistic histories is that there are plenty of myths for people to follow already. Why invent new versions of old ones? If one is going to build a new mythology, the very least one can do is to build a mythology that embodies the lessons learned and institutional wisdom of the past and doesn't just recreate Ozymandias or the Jesus Christ Myth anew. But what can I say? I'm just praying that we don't get to the stage where people riot and burn the libraries, the books and the librarians, the way they did as the Roman Empire declined from within.
I'm now convinced that that is how most religious movements get established. The founders are usually interested in a narrow band of truth telling, goals, and remonstrations against the former order of things. Usually their followers turn them into world conquering Kings, and their "opponents" into incarnations of the Devil himself. Sometimes the founders play part of that role themselves. Nobody is perfect. Turning an imperfect person into a perfect myth only destroys whatever truth the person was meant to impart. It doesn't really spread anything but lies and spinning heads.
Unfortunately, nobody ever let a little thing like reality get in the way of a good archetypical myth. And what is really ironic is that all the parties to a good fracase (both the English meaning and the Spanish false cognate meaning) so enjoy a good story that they will often create mirror tales. They often know better, but get such a kick out of the fight (english word Fracase) that they don't care if the result is a failure (Spanish Word Fracase=failure). They may be false cognates but they refer to the same process and result.
One can see traces of this in linguistic survivals. Somewhere in the ancient past there was a great conflict between the Indo-Iranian speaking Ancestors of the people who lent their language to most of India and Persia. You can tell this in their Gods and Demons. Ahura (God(s)) versus Devil (Indo-Iranian) versus Asura (Devil(s)) versus Deva (Gods) in India. I figure the ancestors of the Brahmans had a massive blow-up about religion.
The stories get changed, and the parties get to fighting, and any variants on the stories get lost or buried. Heaven help the honest historian in such a situation. When the Roman Empire fell apart it was in the middle of such a "recasting" of religion.
When Christianity went from the religion of Roman Slaves (initially mostly Jewish Roman slaves) to the language of Roman Slavers, Constantine recast the religion around the Trinity and started years of internecine warfare. There had already been quite a bit of warfare among Christians, but the personal God and God-man Trinity concept never took very well among people who understood the bible in Greek. Constantine thought he was combining the "best" of Judaic ideas, Mithraic, and Pagan ones, but he was just creating a monster and turning Jesus into an Anti-Christ.
The concept of a "personified Godhead" was foreign to the language or Aramaic or Hebrew. It had to be enforced by force. Alternative texts; (not just Gnostic texts, but a whole host of alternative versions of the New Testament, (the "old testament" had been thoroughly redacted and finalized 500 years earlier), were deliberately destroyed. We only know this because the Jewish Community of Egypt so loved their books they used to bury them in "Genizah" or graves as if they were dead bodies, and they did this with Christian books as well as their own. Nag Hamadi was a Genizah.
After Constantine, nearly three centuries later, Justinian tried to enforce "orthodoxy" with an inquisition in what is now Syria, Jordan and Israel/Palestine, he succeeded in creating a reign of terror that only succeeded in paving the way for Moslem invaders. Better to live as "Dhimmi" under Moslem rule than be burned at the stake under Christian. Meanwhile a fracase (both meanings) between Zoroastorian and Mithraism made Iran vulnerable to Islam too. Islam might have swept the world, but shortly after the Prophet died there was a fracase between the adherents of "Ali" and the founders of the first Dynasty of conquerers.
In all these cases the "fracases" between people have labelled themselves as being about doctrines and truths, but have been in fact about power, followers, and dominance. In most of these cases neither side has been entirely right or entirely right -- but both sides have tried to convince their followers that they were so.
The trouble is that in order to convince naive people that they are 100% right and their opponents are 100% wrong, somebody has to be demonized, lies have to be told, the storiest spun into twisted caracatures (I'll correct the spelling later) of their original content, and basically the spinners have to lie. This means that in the history of religion Mara has won about 80% of the battles and truth 20%. With those odds no wonder people suffer so.
Chris
Posted by cholte at September 27, 2006 04:56 PMTwo people are looking at a lit candle.
One sees a glow around the candle, the other doesn't. The one that sees the glow thinks he is special because he sees the glow, and the one who cannot see the glow thinks the glow in only in the imagination of the other person.
REALITY: THERE IS NO GLOW.. However..
One of the parties has cataracts and actually really truly sees a glow, however only people with faulty eyes can see this magical glow. People with healthy eyes, or that are blind will have no idea what in the world this glow is.
Every religion has its own GLOW.. DaiGohonzon, God, Priests, Sr Leaders, Angeles, Nichiren, etc, etc,.. some with cataracts see the glow, and then again there are those with healthy eyes..
Have I helped you, I hope I have not upset you,
Bruce
There is no "glow?" or is there?
There are three realities to life. The Material reality is that evanescent but very "real" existence that we are part of for a short time and that defines "us" as beings. The phenomena our eyes describe as a "glow" is often a very real effect of light passing through the hot gasses of the flame.
To deny this reality leads only to death and misery of physical causes.
Then there is the "inward reality". Which is mostly psychological. Is what happens in our minds any less real for it being optical illusion, dream, vision, or the workings of wild chemicals? The "glow" we perceive is a magic thing. It is the magic city of the story of the travelors, when the body is dying we see a bright glow opening up and taking us to realms we never experienced before. Is that actually so? We don't know. It may be an artifact of the minds wiring breaking down or it may not be, but it provides our lives some succor from the terrible hot reality of death and suffering. Not making use of the magic of the mind only invites misery, depression, sociopathy and a feeling of isolation.
And then there is the intersection of the two. The things that truly are mysterious. We can no more know the reality of what came before or what comes after. All we perceive is a shared reality. That shared reality is fantastic, real, creative, and transcient. That shared reality gives us confidence that if one person sees a glow, we might be able to too. It allows us to build those magic cities, and live in them. It is the human realm we live in, and it is neither entirely "of this world" nor entirely spiritual or psychological.
Being real about life means neither dismissing the "glow" nor being naive about what it is.
Chris