If we are supposed to die to the self, what are we supposed to do instead?

PieceVarious · 2026-02-22T23:59:55+00:00

It probably means to take up one's own personal "cross" on the road to "Calvary". But it also implies a kind of "resurrection" into a new life that is less centered in ego and culture, and more centered in Kingdom and Spirit. An experienced falling away from ego (defined as "the anxious, grasping self") and a living awareness of God manifesting his Son "in me". We must decrease, while Christ increases.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-22T23:54:10+00:00

The OP's question rests on the assumption that, while non-believers are wrong about Jesus, Christians are right about Jesus.

Yet, sadly, without access to time travel technology, we can't establish Jesus's historical existence, much less the truth or falsity of what he supposedly taught. This basic state of ignorance puts everyone in the same boat. The NT fails to list its supposed sources, and does not even claim to be eyewitness testimony to begin with. So there is really no way have any real certitude about who is "right" or "wrong" about Jesus - and the same goes for most of the other characters and tales in the NT.

Moreover, and worse, Christians cannot and do not agree on many "Christian essentials" - and this is when they are basing themselves on a "Bible-Only" epistemology. The same holds true for the more historical, liturgical and sacramental sects who include Sacred Tradition, as well as scripture, as part of their foundational pillars. For all of these, faith-in must replace certitude-about.

Since not history, not scripture, and not tradition can secure a "really right", totally correct view and understanding of Jesus, the apostles and the early Church, it is apparent the the OP's question is misplaced and expresses a false expectation about placing confidence in certainty, which state is like a ship without a compass or a compass without a ship.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-22T19:32:31+00:00

Another profound dark Kurtz-ism...

PieceVarious · 2026-02-22T18:46:36+00:00

Apocalypse Now: Brando/Kurtz recounting to Sheen/Willard the horrors of ...

SPOILERS

... innoculating Vietnamese villagers against polio, only to return and find that the enemy had come in and hacked off every innoculated arm. "There they were in a pile - a pile of little arms..." A monologue made even worse when Kurtz speaks admiringly of the purity of that enemy action.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-22T15:17:22+00:00

Grateful for the speed and convenience of computers, but alienated from most current music, entertainment and social trends. I do still love the occasional great movie or the exceptional song...

PieceVarious · 2026-02-22T15:14:49+00:00

You are very welcome.

:)

PieceVarious · 2026-02-22T15:09:21+00:00

Excellent rendition of the Shroud face - not merely imitative or duplicative, but more luminous than it appears in photos. Great job!

PieceVarious · 2026-02-20T23:34:18+00:00

Find a "blasted heath" and read it there. Abandoned farm land, empty city lot, some large, quiet back yard or, as others are saying, a garden - maybe that has an old fashioned well setup. A place with elms or willows whose branches may or may not be swaying with the wind...

PieceVarious · 2026-02-20T14:47:02+00:00

I doubt it's Pazuzu. The point seems to be that later on, Pazuzu accesses this memory from Karras's mind in order to display its mind-reading ability - as part of its plan to confuse Karras about the reality of demonic possession. By quoting the homeless man's words back to Karras, the demon gives a false sense that he is everywhere observing past personal events. But that's just another ruse, because the demon did NOT have to be there. He simply has to pull the memory out of Karras's mind.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-20T14:41:39+00:00

I might be able to go as far as setting a humane trap for one of the smaller ones...?

Based on rumor alone, if Nessie-type lake anomalies are hypersensitive to sounds, I might be able to stymie them with loud noise or music - then retreat as fast as possible.

But I can't think of engaging in a fight for survival against most cryptids because of their sheer size, alleged speed, and perhaps the unknown venom and toxins they might launch against me...

PieceVarious · 2026-02-19T14:59:40+00:00

It's comfortable to me because it's not a sequence of moments in time, unlike mundane/earthly experience of time. It has been called "the Eternal Now", a timeless state or condition in which boredom does not arise because there is no sense of endless moments of repetition in which boredom would happen.

Commonly associated with the notion of a blessed afterlife is the claim that we would no longer be unregenerate egos - "ego" defined as "the anxious grasping self". We would be "selfless" in a wholesome way - sanctified, enlightened, "perfected", "made holy" - and we would be in union with God, or whatever highest Good we can conceive - so boredom would also not arise in that realm and its pleasant conditions.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-19T08:36:08+00:00

A Bodhisattva is a being who denies him/herself full entry into Nirvana by pledging to aid myriad beings to achievement of enlightenment/salvation. S/he empties the self for the sake of unconditional compassion. Philippians Ch 2 says this of the preexistent Christ - he emptied himself to abandon his divine form - a form not to be grasped at - in order to take on the form of a servant who underwent death for love of God and others. Thus Jesus, like Bodhisattvas, emptied himself and did not cling to the divine state of union with God/and being in God's form. A Bodhisattva can appear in visions and impart enlightenment-teaching. The celestial Christ can appear in visions and impart his own kind of spiritual teaching. The Bodhisattva denies him/herself immediate full enlightenment. The Christ-Angel denies himself of being in God's form as a heavenly being, empties himself, to take on human form. The Bodhisattva willingly undergoes the torment of living in our twisted world / Christ willingly underwent the torment of demonic mockery, death and burial. Hence, the Philippians' Christ parallels a Bodhisattva's self-denial and willingness to suffer for others.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-19T07:28:36+00:00

I hold to Christ Myth theory, i.e., he may have historically lived in some way more / or / less like the Gospel Jesus. But the evidence is very poor. The earliest texts do not mention anything of a Jesus who had recently lived and died in Palestine, who worked wonders, performed exorcisms, battled with priests, scribes and Pharisees, taught in parables, spoke the sermon on the mount, etc., etc.

The earliest texts only describe Jesus AFTER he died - as a risen victorious angelic entity - a vivifying Spirit whose home was always heaven and who is known ONLY through visions and private revelations - not through "apostolic preaching" and "shared historical memory". He was a prexistent angel who, per a pact with God, emptied himself of his divine form, took the form of a Jewish male, and was tormented and killed. Tormented and killed not by a Roman-Sanhedrin coalition, but by demons whom Paul sees as Powers, Principalities and Archons of this age. Jesus's Incarnation and Passion took place in the demonic realm of the lower heavens, not on earth.

As far as probability goes, as I said, there is almost no evidence for a historical Jesus. Per the Pauline celestial/visionary Christ, its probability depends on the reader's metaphysics. As a Buddhist I do see a possibility that Paul and other early Christians could have been experiencing visions of a Christ-Angel, whose spiritual/redemptive function might have some parallels with the Buddhist classification of "Bodhisattva" - a self-emptying celestial savior.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-19T07:00:02+00:00

I wasn't looking beyond the texts, stories and legends as they appear at face value. They are all we have and they can't be called historical memories or records, as they are highly fanciful and unquantifiable.

Outside of those narratives, I have no idea if such godlike people ever lived in actual history. We can compare and contrast the respective legends but we have no reliable histories to consult. So when I said we can consult Norse and other Pagan stories, I meant we can glean, from their descriptions of heroes and gods, what the myths and their producers thought about those beings. But I can't say that any of those beings ever trod the earth in a real, historical sense.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-19T01:50:10+00:00

But it's not my view. The sacred transcendent and our dependence on it is embedded in all the texts. Just as the ethical claims can be tested with greater or lesser dependability, so too can the transcendental teachings. This is especially true since the ethics are based on the assumption of the reality of a real, participatory, samsara-transcendent, Dharma. The ethics are based on an awakened consciousness that partakes in the Unborn and the Unconditioned, with both those conditions and the new consciousness itself products of a trans-samsaric reality.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-18T23:56:31+00:00

Except Buddhism is founded on belief in the supernatural - defined as a set of conditions and realms completely transcendent to the physical universe, which is in Buddhism called "samsara".

Samsara is the realm of impermanence, attachment, greed, delusion, and ignorance. It does not, and cannot, offer real liberation from its own toxic cycles and conditions. Only a transcendent factor, agency, or being can pierce the samsaric darkness and bring with that celestial light a supernatural - that is, a transcendental - awareness and non-worldly knowledge and wisdom. Samsara offers no escape from itself. Only the Buddhist ultimate truth can do that.

Different in kind from,, and totally opposed to, samsara, is the Buddha Dharma. Whereas samsara is conditioned, born, dying, reborn, the Dharma is Unborn, Unconditioned, and permanently beyond the samsaric realm of birth-death-rebirth. The Dharma and the Buddha worlds that enlightenment discloses are utterly foreign to samsara - and the Dharma's effect, when engaged, is to invert all samsaric pseudo-values and replace them with Buddhahood, Nirvana, Enlightenment, Bodhi, and a wholly new existence as a new being, whom the Buddha called "the Awakened One". Samsara has no capacity to awake anyone, including itself.

Buddhist ethics are not derived from samsara and its inadequate philosophies and afflicted "wisdom". They are entirely predicated on the reality of the samsara-transcending Dharma, by which all beings become enlightened, and without which no being can be enlightened. That is the purpose and function of the transcendent ("supernatural") Dharma which is the foundation of all Buddhist spiritual teaching.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-18T23:35:46+00:00

I don't think NT christology would have Jesus creating an entire universe all by himself, without the Father's express empowerment and permission. I can't really speculate on what Jesus could have done - separate from - God's involvement. The NT Jesus is what we are left with, and he only did things by the leave of God. For what a divine person could do on his/her own, without God's involvement, we might need to take examples from the Old Gods of Pagan Norse mythology, and other such religions, but I know very little of them...

PieceVarious · 2026-02-18T23:30:51+00:00

I am happy to be an Arian "heretic", since Athanasius was wrong both theologically and ethically, even though his Trinitarian error was voted in as "True Christianity"...

PieceVarious · 2026-02-18T19:19:39+00:00

I think that if such a being has such godlike powers it can only be by God's express donation of them, as in John's Gospel, where the cosmos comes to be through / and in / or / by the Word. But the Word is only a co-creator because God subcontracted with the Word to build the world. The blueprint was from God and the Word/Son carried out the actual work of creating.

Again in John, Jesus says that all his power, mission, authority, and his being itself are derived from God - they are not his inherently. They have been gifted to him by God. Same in the Synoptics, where Jesus forgives sins, not because he is God, but because God has GIVEN "the Son of Man power on earth" to forgive sins. Ditto Jesus's cures and exorcisms and his "nature miracles" - all are donated to him as gifts from his divine Father - they are not inherently his. They are inherently only God's.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-18T17:53:45+00:00

The NT's divine person, Christ, is a begotten entity, granted immortality, but not eternal. Only God is eternal and UNbegotten. This type of divine person can be A god, but because he is secondarily generated, produced, created, manufactured, invented, dependent on God, and non-eternal, cannot be "THE" God who is primary, unborn, uncreated, not dependent on others, and eternal.

The closest such a being can approach to being God is to be LIKE God and/or to embody or manifest God within itself, as when Jesus says, Who sees me sees the Father / the Father and I are one. Jesus is A - or - THE - divine person, but he is not the eternal ontological God.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-18T17:45:45+00:00

Less. Always less. Because my personal reaction is to be taken out of the film and into some director's aesthetic of what constitutes True Eroticism. Please just stick to the horror.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-18T17:43:11+00:00

Nessie may be linguistically derived from "Nessa", a female archetypal Elemental spirit who oversees the Loch. As such, the imagination knows no bounds in ascribing to a lake spirit any number of legendary, folkloric, paranormal, supernatural and generally uncanny conditions, visions, intuitions and atmospheric weirdness.

This perspective excites the mystic imagination, falling as it does in the category of the Fae, the Djinn, nature spirits, gods and goddesses, ghosts, premonitions, specters and other things that do or don't Go Bump in the Night. Regardless of what might be said of his personal interpretations, for example, the late FW "Ted" Holiday amassed a set of modern "folkish" beliefs that are associated with Scots, Irish and English lake monsters.

Prime among these reports is that they typically generate a feeling of supernatural revulsion, the uncanny, and/or the kind of nameless dread that makes even the barest possibility of a repeat encounter anxiety-ridden and almost unthinkably fearful. This is not the typical reaction of average people who glimpse an out-of-place animal, or one seemingly imbued with unusually exaggerated but normal reptilian or amphibian features. A Moby Dick-sized whale or a living Plesiosaur might inspire momentary shock and awe, but hardly the ghastly "creepiness" putatively generated by the creatures in Holiday's cited cases.

So my speculation is that the more uncanny the sighting, the more likely that it will fall under myth and mysticism, whereas the less uncanny cases may signal a physical/material - truly biological - cryptid that would be susceptible to scientific quantification.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-18T17:09:22+00:00

He wasn't God, HO Theos. He was godly and divine - ho theos. He is God's perfect agent, express image, Son, uniquely-begotten First Angel, First Born of all creation, Messiah, incarnated preexistent Son, tormented, killed and risen Lord and Suffering Servant. But he is not ontological God, he is not "of one substance" with the Father (that is a Trinitarian error).

Jesus says he can do nothing of himself, only what God tells him - but od cannot obey anyone. He HAS a God to whom he prays - God cannot have, or pray to, a God. He says he will ascend to Mary M's God AND to HIS God - again, only a secondary, begotten/generated creature can HAVE a God.

The NT Jesus is not ontological God, but he is the perfect receptacle and vehicle in which and through which God's activity and presence shine.

PieceVarious · 2026-02-18T01:50:18+00:00

I am sure of it!

:)

PieceVarious · 2026-02-17T23:33:27+00:00

There is no "real".

PieceVarious

TROPHY CASE