Posts Tagged blessing
Like Jacob Wrestling the Angel, in Your Switch to Sedentary Life You Confused Divine Assistance with Evil: “You Saw Difficulties … Deprivations, and Pain as to Be Avoided Instead of as the Blessings of Divinity.”
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, philosophy, psychology, science, spirituality on September 24, 2013
With Sedentary Ways, Humans Began Wrestling Their Angels, Say Planetmates in the Thirteenth Prasad: Resisting Divine Assistance and Roots of the Apocalypse Today
The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Thirteenth Prasad. Breaking with Divinity, Resisting Divine Assistance
Planetmates Release The Thirteenth Prasad
Nomadic to sedentary switch was significant for two reasons with long-term dire consequences for all Earth Citizens including you.
Duck is First Consciousness at The Thirteenth Prasad.
"You saw difficulties, obstacles, even struggles, deprivations, and pain, as to be avoided instead of the blessings of Divinity, who through these means directs, teaches, and guides us...."
The Thirteenth Prasad – Breaking with Divinity
This drastic switch from nomadic to sedentary life ways was significant for two crucial reasons, each with dire consequences for the long term of all Earth Citizens, including yourself:
The first crucial reason is that the ending of your nomadic life meant a near total break with Divine Providence—whose purposes are twofold:
First and foremost the continued perfect direction and guidance of lives towards the growth and life ways that are optimal to each Earth Citizen, as determined by the Divine, what you call God –
For by Divine Guidance all Earth Citizens in Nature are led to their ultimate fulfillment and spiritual progress through the exigencies of what you call fate but what is actually the Divine Hand of Guidance and benevolent Teaching. Hereafter, with your crazed, backwards thinking, you would determine your ends, and would resist Divine attempts to assist you.
You saw difficulties, obstacles, even struggles, deprivations, and pain, as to be avoided instead of the blessings of Divinity, who through these means directs, teaches, and guides us in lives to where we end up ever closer and more understanding of our rootedness, rather, identity with the Divine.
Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema
What follows is a video of a reading of The Thirteenth Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.
The issues highlighted in the commentary relate to further separation from Divine Providence—a product of our desire to obsessively control—to reframe life as a pursuit of avoidance of exigencies, obstacles, and pain instead of the way seen by Planetmates wherein all these things are embraced as Divine teachings/guidance of a very personal and loving kind.
“The Thirteenth Prasad” From The Great Reveal by The Planetmates – the audiocast
The link above takes you to the audio-only version of my commentary on The Thirteenth Prasad, exactly as is in the video. Click on the link to go to the the audio site, or you can listen to it here using the audio player below.
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=qqrgzdtgkk
Image of The 13th Prasad. “The Great Reveal” By The Planetmates: “Resisting, Defying Divine Assistance”
Paraphrase/ Summary/ Abstract of “The Thirteenth Prasad” — by SillyMickel Adzema
Your change from nomadic to sedentary lifeways had two significant effects on your species, each of which have been instrumental in creating the apocalypse emergency facing you and all other Planetmates today. The first effect was that of severing your connection with the Divine, what you call God, to the point of near total separation. As your Michelangelo painted it, you and the Divine touch the end of a fingertip.
This is about right, and quite the fall from grace from what had been and the way it is for ALL other Earth Citizens. Divine Providence serves all Planetmates in two major mays.
The first of these is the continued—continued from the womb and birth—the continued perfect direction and guidance of our lives toward the growth and life ways that are the best, as determined by God or the All That Is, for our ultimate fulfillment and spiritual progress. The Divine Hand guides and teaches us along perfect pathways through the exigencies of what you call “fate.”
We see difficulties, obstacles, struggles, deprivations, and pain as the teaching tools of the Benevolent Teacher, guiding us toward lives where we end up ever closer and more understanding of our rootedness and, eventually, even identity with God.
Whereas, because of your crazed, backwards thinking and your insistence on trying to control your own destinies—however much more difficult that would be since you resisted and even defied Divine Assistance—you did all in your power to avoid the Divine lessons brought to you through the adventures and exigencies of life—what you call hardships and suffering.
So, your radical separation from the Divine caused you to mistake always the Divine lessons and blessings for evil, for wrongness. In this way you guaranteed your failure in the game of life; as a species your cumulative failures you piled one upon another as if they were progressive achievements, not the increasing web of disaster that is reaching its culmination today.
Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Fourteenth Prasad: Eating the “Apple,” Defying Divine Assistance
Return to The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Twelfth Prasad: Husbandry and Sedentary Ways – Enslavement of Earth Citizens
To Read the Entire Book … on-line, free at this time … Go to The Great Reveal from The Planetmates
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
A Re-Visioning of “Civilization” in Light of Impending Apocalypse … Prometheus Made us “Civilized” … And Doomed: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 13
Posted by sillymickel in activism, allegory, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality, uniqueness on May 26, 2012
Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Thirteen: On Defiance, Alienation from Nature, “Civilization,” Apocalypse, Marxism, OWS, and Ayn Rand
Will “Progress of Man” Be Humanity’s Epitaph?
All of the “achievements” of “civilization,” these increases of control over Nature, are traditionally seen as the “progress of man,” the advance and evolution of humans. On the brink of ecocide and
humanicide as we now are as a result of these developments, we have a unique vantage point for re-visioning these changes. Are these vaunted human “achievements” so great if they lead to species annihilation, species suicide, as is becoming increasingly likely?
We now continue to look into these questions. And the very next thing we see is that even the myths from ancient times give us evaluations and prognoses on us that are surprising in light of our current rationalizations of ourselves as a species.
Defiance, Alienation from Nature,
“Civilization” … Apocalypse
Defiance = Birth Pain = Separation From the Real
Other aspects of the Prometheus and Eden myths fit with the interpretation I am making of it: Stealing fire/ eating the apple/ eating meat is the great act-out of the primal birth pain we created for ourselves by standing upright. It was a defiant act against Nature and Universal harmony, but it set us on the human path of being distinct from all other species. Without real access/ connection to the Real, we created substitute realities—culture, structured societies, status, language and writing, power relations, and abstract creative products. [Footnote 1]
Prometheus Makes Us “Civilized” … And Doomed
Fitting with that, Prometheus is given the central role in making humans distinct from all species, creating humanity, in giving defining attributes to humans to set us apart from all species and these are said to be fire and all the civilizing skills.
Prometheus is credited with, not only securing meat, fire, and all ailments and troubles (with Pandora), but also with bringing civilization and all its components of science, agriculture, mathematics, medicine, art, and literature…fine things no doubt, but all being aspects of control of Nature, opposition to the natural, abstraction and alienation from the divine, and not harmony with it or balance in relation to it.
And only now are we beginning to understand the price that comes with these, as indeed we are suffering the penalties allotted Adam and Eve, Icarus, and Prometheus for their over-reaching and hubris. We are nearing the end of the slide into apocalyptic oblivion that Prometheus, Adam and Eve, and Pandora set us on (poetically speaking).
The Answers
But within these myths lie the answers to our dilemma as well. These products of the consciousness of billions of previous humans—added to and refined over the millennia—prophesize the
apocalypse looming before us, but these
tensions cannot exist in myth except being inextricably entwined with the very means of their release and resolution. So they lay before us the way home for us as well; and they predict our redemption and how it will happen. It is to this we now turn.
Before looking at the resolutions of the uniquely human apocalyptic dilemma we have created, let me address something that is no doubt on many readers’ minds.
How Promethean “Heroism” Set Off Our Slide Into Alienation and Apocalypse … His “Rebellion” Was an Abomination, Not a Blessing
I know you are not used to hearing the Prometheus myth interpreted as a defiant act not a heroic act. It is never compared with
the defiant acts portrayed in the Eden or Icarus myths as I am here doing. Icarus is rightly said to be a tragic example of hubris or failed ambition, high-flying ambition. In Eden, Adam and Eve defy the sole divine commandment. But they can all be seen as acts of over-reaching, certainly as acts of hubris. And in all of them punishment follows the selfish act; there is karmic retribution for upsetting the natural or divine order.
Prometheus Is a Criminal Not Heroic Figure…On Over-Reaching and Hubris
But remember that hubris and over-reaching was actually the earliest understanding of the Promethean act. It appears that time, understandably—as it does—provided a rationalization of the defiant act. [Footnote 2]
As with everything else—language, culture, hierarchical society, and the like—humans turn their faults into achievements, their crimes into heroism, their cowering before truth into brave creations of castles in the sky. So it is that the Romantic poets Shelley and Byron saw this myth as a reflection of defiance against an oppressive authority, as in their time was the Church;
French Revolutionaries saw it as a poke in the eye to the parasitic blue bloods of their age; and Marxists and other activists find inspiration in it for struggle against the suffocating prerogatives of capitalism and imperialism.
They are fine to find inspiration where they can. I submit, however, that a deeper and more currently relevant understanding is the one I am presenting here and which was the earliest understanding. And despite all the rationalizing that’s been done on it, this earlier understanding—the one making it analogous to the Eden and Icarus structures—does shine through at times. In my opinion, Mary Shelley understood its real meaning when in 1818 she subtitled her masterpiece novel, Frankenstein “The Modern Prometheus.” In it, she demonstrates a remarkably current,
postmodern theme of the dangers of human hubris, of
taking us into arenas of knowledge that we are nowhere near capable of managing … doing again, as we did at the beginning in taking from the divine the determination of life and death over the flora, fauna,
and even other humans at times, mucking with the divine order by stirring
up the forces deep within the atom and the DNA, opening more and more of Pandora’s jars, which can no longer be closed, many of them. So, yes, Shelley’s understanding is closer to my interpretation of the meaning of bringing these “civilizing arts” … In other words, they are in their essence and therefore their ultimate fruits abominations!
If my interpretation of Prometheus is still not understood and one wishes to follow Marxist, revolutionary, romantic, and modern interpretations of Prometheus as a righteous defier of injustice and heroic bringer of boons—in a way as to make him a model for our real occupy wall street and Arab Spring heroes
today—than consider why it is that the person on the extreme other side of this revolutionary ideology, Ayn Rand, uses Prometheus as a model for her ideology of rapacious
individuality, which she does in her novels Anthem and the fanatically worshipped, Atlas Shrugged. So, no. Ayn Rand’s rendering shows the myth to be, at its base, depicting the ultimate perversion of a natural benign order and a criminal defiance of
Nature—as the industrialists and polluters of today show us—and not the revolutionary overthrow of an oppressive rule, as Marxists, Romantic poets, and French Revolutionaries saw it. [Footnote 3]
Continue with Enter the Centaur: Wherein Lies Real Hope – Sixties and Millennial Generations Are Shamans for Deluded Promethean “Fathers”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 14
Return to Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12
Footnotes
1. See The Great Reveal, Chapter Thirty-Five: The Twenty-Seventh Prasad. A-mazing Cultural Maze.
2. On “time, understandably, as it does, provided a rationalization of the defiant act,” see “A Blessing for You…To Choose or Refuse”—The Great Reveal from The Planetmates: The Complete Prasads, especially
3. Regarding the glow-in-the-dark cats shown in the photo, see “12 bizarre examples of genetic engineering” at http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/photos/12-bizarre-examples-of-genetic-engineering/glow-in-the-dark-c
Continue with Enter the Centaur: Wherein Lies Real Hope – Sixties and Millennial Generations Are Shamans for Deluded Promethean “Fathers”: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 14
Return to Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
Why Humans Are the Sorriest of Species … Apocalyptic Foretellings Hidden in Myths of Eden, Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus, Cain and Abel: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 11
Posted by sillymickel in activism, allegory, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality on May 24, 2012
Kaleidoscope of Postmodern Life, Part Eleven: Prometheus, Meat-Eating, Pandora, Eden, the Apple, the Fall, Cain, Abel, and When and Why Human Life Became All About Work
Meat-Eating and Apocalypse…First Falls and Last
After writing the previous section on fire, meat, Prometheus, and Icarus, and in subsequent research into the Prometheus myth, I found there is far more connection in the myth to the eating of meat than I realized.
Also, the myth’s elements underscore the idea in the previous article that in stealing fire/ eating meat, we set off the developments that would lead to our apocalyptic prognosis today. Further, it is clear that the Prometheus myth is the Greek analogue to the Judaic myth of Eden and the Fall, which supports my thinking that the apple in the Garden of Eden represents meat—meat eating…hunting…killing of planetmates.
The Greek Fall from Grace—Prometheus
Prometheus’s Meat Trick
In the Prometheus myth, the fire stealing started with a trick that Prometheus played on Zeus. Prometheus—midway between gods and men, a Titan—gave the god two offerings from which Zeus was to choose. He gave meat and bones. Zeus chose the bones, supposedly because it was packaged more attractively. This is said to be the basis for why humans eat meat, according to ancient understandings.
Zeus—Not Amused
But when Zeus realized the
trick, he was pissed … understandably. He hid fire from humans in retribution. Subsequently, Prometheus stole the fire and gave it to mankind. But this angered Zeus even more. So, this time to take revenge, he sent the first woman, Pandora, to live with men.
Ha Ha … Very Funny, Zeus. Thanks a Lot for the Pandora
Pandora literally means “all gifts.” So it is that Pandora represents all the blessings that come with human advancement, represented by harnessing fire. But Pandora, as we all know, brings all troubles as well.
She carries a jar that, opened, releases all “evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death.”
Pandora shuts the jar but it is too late, and many of the evils had already escaped. Interestingly, what remains in the closed jar along with the rest of the evils is hope. This is a theme that I return to again and again in this book and the subsequent one, The Great Reveal, in discussing what we need to do about our dire situation: That is, turn and face it, delve deeper into it and not turn away, for therein lies our only real hope.
Eden – the Biblical Fall – Life Becomes Endless Work and Struggle
But notice the parallels with the myth of Eden. In the Biblical rendering, the eating of the apple—which I say represents eating meat—results in the end of easy existence and that from then on humans survive only through “the sweat of one’s brow.”
The Original “Leisure Society”
Sure enough, the end of the nomadic and
vegetarian existence of early humans—called the first “affluent society” because it required only three hours a day of work to garner what was needed for survival—occurs with the introduction of hunting, then agriculture, then husbandry. [The Great Reveal and Footnote 1]
Strenuous Living, Slavery to Survival
And in the Bible, we notice that immediately after Eden, the “second generation” of humans is seen working strenuously to survive as represented by Cain and Able, who were one a tiller of the soil and the other a herder of animals.
That not bad enough, but then after Cain slew Abel, like a second fall from grace God added an even greater load of hard work. Cain was told that to punish him, the earth that had soaked up the blood he’d spilled would resist aiding him in producing his crops and he and those who came after him would have strenuous work in eking sustenance from
her and a hard life in simply surviving.
As an aside, notice how whenever we talk about the deepest structures of our mind—and myths provide a glimpse into that—we see the perinatal gestalt. For the Earth here—the placenta—is no longer rich, nourishing, and helpful but, as is the case for the prenate in the late stages of gestation, is impoverished of oxygen and nutrients and less vital, less supportive of one’s continued living.
Promethean Fall – Defiance is Punished by Hard Work, Like in Eden
And the Prometheus myth also has this same sequence as in Eden and the Fall of a defiance of the ways of Nature and God followed by a punishment and suffering, but also by strenuous work as being the lot of humans from then on. For as Hesiod relates the myth, Zeus did more than take fire from humans in revenge for being tricked out of the meat that Prometheus first deprived him of (and for that you can read that humans
took from God/Nature the determination of life and death, which in our deciding to kill planetmates, we most assuredly did, see next post), but Zeus also took from humans “the means of life.”
And the consequences of this are similar to being cast out of Eden. For if fire had not been stolen…meat not eaten by humans…humans not adopted hunting, horticulture, husbandry,
as Hesiod puts it, “you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste.”
Continue with Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12
Return to Sorry, Billy Joel, But We Did Start the Fire: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning…And Its Apocalyptic Prognosis For Us Today: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 10
Footnote
1. Excerpted from “From Hunting and Gathering to Sowing and Reaping”
Cultural evolution can be defined as the process of developing the tools and skills to deal with certain challenges. Therefore challenges present the key stimulus for any kind of development. The challenge to survive as a hunter/gatherers is not inconsiderable – and early humans met the challenge for hundreds of thousands of years, without depleting their natural environment. Agriculture was invented about 10000 years ago and many of the environmental crisis we face today are directly related to this paradigm shift, from the destruction of the world’s forests in order to grow crops, to the depletion of land due to monocultural plantations, to salination and a thousand other woes.
Early humans were nomads. They roamed within a certain range. Trespassing into another group’s range could result in conflict. However, due to population limits, each group’s range was quite extensive. It is often assumed that finding food must have been incredibly challenging and time consuming, yet, research has demonstrated that in favourable habitats only an average of 3h per day are needed to collect food, plus some more time for preparation. Anyone who has ever even partially lived on foraged foods knows that nature supplies plentifully – each thing in its season. It is also a popular idea to imagine that people were moving around constantly, only remaining in one place for a matter of days. But there is no reason to assume such restlessness. It seems far more likely that people would move from campground to campground in accordance with the seasons, in tune with the things they would find in each place. And it seems reasonable to assume that they would remain in each place long enough to gather and process for transport whatever gifts Mother Nature had offered. Only in areas that are particularly hostile, such as deserts or the circumpolar regions, would frequent moving be necessary since food supplies are less abundant.
(At the 1966 ‘Man the Hunter’ conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society,” in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers living lives “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their “affluence” came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This, he said, constituted a Zen economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer)
More at “From Hunting and Gathering to Sowing and Reaping” at http://www.sacredearth.com/ethnobotany/food/civilization.php
Continue with Deep Thoughts on The Fall – On Sacrifice, Dominion Over Death, Meat, and Murder … Beginning Our Apocalypse: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 12
Return to Sorry, Billy Joel, But We Did Start the Fire: Why Humans Are So Big on Burning…And Its Apocalyptic Prognosis For Us Today: 21st Century and Its Discontents, Part 10
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
The “Unapproved and Hidden” – The First Prasad from the Planetmates: “A Blessing for You … To Choose or Refuse”
Posted by sillymickel in activism, authenticity, being yourself, Class, Culture, economics, Generations, globalrevolution, History, individualism, life, meaning, nonconform, occupywallstreet, philosophy, Politics, psychology, spirituality, uniqueness on July 29, 2013
The “Unapproved and Hidden”: In the First Prasad, Planetmates Say Our Wisest Humans Shared One Understanding – The Same Blind Spot
The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The First Prasad: The “Unapproved and Hidden”
Planetmates Release The First Prasad
I received this; they call it “The First
Prasad,” so no doubt there will be more to follow. Stay tuned. I’ll continue to update here with whatever I find out, as soon as I find out.
Primate is first consciousness at The First Prasad.
The First Prasad – “The Unapproved and Hidden”
There were always those of you, many from even the past, whose names and words you would know; these trailblazers into truth’s jungles, these gardeners of consciousness, brave, even foolhardy, deep-sea divers into the black waters of the Unapproved and Hidden of virtually all the numberless
and diverse societies and cultures existing and transforming over the course of innumerable millennia, are even better known to us.
We thought it would help if in all their reports to you–strangely enough, among all those maddeningly different ways of life, and kinds of people, and uniquely lived lives—that the one and only constant you would find among them was the hole in their understanding of the Nature of All.
Video Commentary by SillyMickel Adzema
What follows is a video of a reading of The First Prasad, with commentary, elaboration, and context, by SillyMickel Adzema.
“The First Prasad” From The Great Reveal by The Planetmates– the audiocast
The link above takes you to the audio only version of my commentary on The First Prasad, exactly as is in the video. Click on the link to go to the audio site, or you can listen to it here using the audio player below.
http://cdn.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=mvnkxchwbf
The First Prasad. From “The Great Reveal” By The Planet Mates
Pharaphrase/Elaboration of “The First Prasad”
— by SillyMickel Adzema
The second thing concerns why no culture ever did or could reveal the truth about humans as a species. We will tell you just why you cannot face, let alone know, the truth about who you are in Nature, in the grand scheme of things, in relation to all other planetmates and all other beings and also in relation to the Divine, God, the One Consciousness.
But there is one thing that these deep-sea divers into the Unapproved and Hidden never learned from us, partly because, for reasons that will become obvious as we continue, they would never truly be able to “get it,” to truly understand.
.
.
.
Continue with The Great Reveal from the Planetmates, The Second Prasad: Truth Become Invisible
Return to The Great Reveal, Keynote, Part Three: Spirit “Word” Has It
Invite you to join me on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/sillymickel
friend me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sillymickel
Share this:
Like this:
apocalypse, audiocast, black waters, blessing, blind spot, choose, culture, defining, Divine, existence, God, Hidden, hole, human, humans, ignorance, lack, Nature, ONE CONSCIOUSNESS, planet, Planetmate, prasad, puzzle, refuse, trailblazers, truth, Unapproved, understanding, video commentary, youtube
Leave a comment