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What Is Enlightenment?

This Group is for people who wish to engage in meaningful spiritual inquiry about the topic of enlightenment. What is enlightenment? What does it mean to be enlightened, and what comes next? What has your experience been with developing your own awareness, with those who claim to be enlightened, or those that promise enlightenment?

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  Bill : practicioner & free

Newsweek discusses the mayan 2012 thing

Bill said Jun 6, 4:12 PM:

 

Hmmmm, 2012 makes the bigtime…

“That an external force will soon intervene to set things right.”.

The ancient hope of the human - for an external force to releive him of his responsinility and terrible loneliness.

Dang, wouldn't that be sweet? Me, I like the external force as an older wiser faster-than-light civilization from another solar system, but I wouldn't turn down an immaterial and interventionist's god's hand, should one happen to reach out of wherever such things reach.

Oh, that sweet longing for a god that isn't just a voice in the head and a few nouminous coincidences.

Such is life.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/195688

David Freidel is an archeologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He recently agreed to speak at a New Age conference on 2012, he says, mainly because he wanted to deprive Jenkins of the opportunity. “I immediately said yes so I could get to the podium before the charlatans do,” says Freidel. He has studied the Mayan calendar (actually, calendars), and while he agrees that what's called the “long count” calendar does end in 2012, he believes that the Maya—were they still living by their ancient system of dates—would not have seen it as any kind of cataclysm. The year 2012 is nothing more than the resetting of a clock, an odometer reaching zero before it starts again, he says. Freidel accuses Jenkins and other popularizers of inventing a theology to support their view that the world is in decline—and that an external force will soon intervene to set things right.

Pyburn complains that the 2012 phenomenon makes exotics out of the Maya. “When people who have been colonized and oppressed decide they want to use their heritage to promote themselves, that's their choice. When it's being done by wealthy First-World nations, I think that's exploitative and I have a problem with it.” Her Indiana University colleague Quetzil Castañeda makes a similar argument a different way. “The Maya,” he says, is a Western tag for a diverse group of people who lived—and indeed still live—without any unifying language or culture. To speak of any belief as “Mayan” is like saying “all brown people are the same.

  andrew : ~SmAsHInG dUaLiTy~

Re: Newsweek discusses the mayan 2012 thing

andrew said Jun 7, 10:01 PM:

 

fair enough, i've never met any god that was anywhere but in my interior. but the coincidences have become somewhat of a plague in my life although i would never put off to supernaturalism that which could be explained by my  pissing off very powerful people………..

naomi klein says undesirables in 3rd world countries are dumped out of helicopters into the ocean never to be seen again; in canada, different tactics are used……………………

  Bill : practicioner & free

Re: Newsweek discusses the mayan 2012 thing

Bill said Jun 8, 3:19 PM:

 

Yep, if it weren't for all these darn coincidences, all would be so crystal clear, I have been known to say.

When I was younger, I used to talk about the apparent “synchronicity bending” powers of the human mind as one of the great unsolved mysteries and curiousities.

If there is an exterior entity responsible for coincidences, that entity is clearly freaking crazy!



So, to explain coincidences, these days I line up the usual suspects in roughly this order.

- pattern seeking in the mammalian brain
- some latent “synchronicity bending” quality of living organisms or possibly of matter and/or spacetime itself
- some exterior interfering entity

Of course it might be a conspiracy between these three, possibly including other agencies or functions we haven't identified yet.

If I had to bet my life, I'd pick pattern seeking.

  andrew : ~SmAsHInG dUaLiTy~

Re: Newsweek discusses the mayan 2012 thing

andrew said Jun 8, 7:56 PM:

 

i appreciate your not dismissing outright my experiences bill:)

just for fun though let's imagine you and i are having this conversation in 1935 germany…………oh yes, of course, we've transcendent long ago such dismal totalitarian regimes and i'm sure we're both thankful at how far civilization has evolved…………….

it's true though what i am experiencing could simply be a vendetta by my wealthy ex in-laws, they certainly have the means, and they've done nothing over 17 years to make me think they wouldn't play those games….
then again, there is the local eco-politics of b.c. which has been hi-jacked by the neo-con agenda in the last 20 years although i'm sure the cia//csis would never mess with any sovereign citizens right to freedom of conscience and expression…….
but really, who can control the timing of weather and death? 
(the mythology goes that jesus could)
yup, it can get pretty freakin' weird, high strangeness indeed……
i'm not much of a betting kinda guy but my vote would be for the combo:)

  Bill : practicioner & free

Re: Newsweek discusses the mayan 2012 thing

Bill said Jun 9, 5:54 PM:

 

Well guy, there's no way for me to know what you are talking about, or even guess, because you aren't saying much.

Sounds pretty mysterious. And a bit yucky. A bit like a bad scene.


I was more commenting on the influence and effect of coincidence on all of us, and on the 'sense of the holy' which we all can feel, being humans with human brains.

One of my fave coincidence stories I actually take from an Oprah show I watched sometime back in the day.

A woman was telling a story, about her sister's early and tragic death.

She was suffering with grief over the loss, crying, and in deep emotional pain.

The woman looked up, and saw a hawk flying in circles above her. She was suddenly seized with the conviction that the hawk was the spirit of her sister, telling her that life goes on, and that she (her sister) was okay now, and that death was nothing to be feared.

Now, that story struck me as archetypal, a classic example of how what we experience as meaningful coincidences (in this case, looking up, seeing a hawk, and feeling that the hawk was profoundly meaningful, was in fact “sent” by a spirit to send a message) strike we humans as being among the most powerful and important experiences in our lives.

That's what I meant when I said, if it wasn't for coincidences, all would be crystal clear. I know I've experienced many hundreds, thousands, of meaningful coincidences.

Haven't we all?

  andrew : ~SmAsHInG dUaLiTy~

Re: Newsweek discusses the mayan 2012 thing

andrew said Jun 10, 5:36 PM:

 

that's correct bill, some of this is deeply personal and this isn't the place to go into it…………………

but let me assure you that i've long been willing to look at all possibilities and interpretations. does that sound like something a paranoid person would do? were the monks in burma imagining their persecution? are we headed towards a society where you may be the next to be persecuted while others are suffering that fate now? obviously with obama in power the eugenics aspect of national socialism has been abandoned, but to many many people n. america seems to be moving towards the politics of fascism……….i hope this isn't the case; but again, many here feel like it is……………
yes, i rather like jung's take on archetypes and synchronisity, that would definitely be a part of the combo, but there is more to it than that i'm afraid, perhaps even much more……………..

it could be that i'm just experiencing the nightmare version of the celestine prophecy!lol

  andrew : ~SmAsHInG dUaLiTy~

Re: Newsweek discusses the mayan 2012 thing

andrew said Jun 11, 6:00 PM:

 

here is a link showing what i'm talking about…..

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/5496912/EU-security-proposals-are-dangerously-authoritarian.html

now if we look at all the countries that are already totalitarian and add to them the trend of 'free' countries moving in that direction one could easily assume that the voices of freedom and liberty are being slowly silenced on a worldwide scale…………..moreover, it starts to look like control of the entire earths population is the agenda which is why i made the previous comment on eugenics and obama; it's all of us that appear to be the targets. now who would want an earth full of slaves? and who are the slave masters?

at the very best it looks like were heading into a world that is going to look very similar to the movie minority report……………….

pre-cog anyone? or perhaps  pre-crime units based on finding the psychopathic/prone to criminal behavior  gene……………

  Martin Gifford : Grandiose, Unrealistic, Arrogant, and Ejected

Re: Newsweek discusses the mayan 2012 thing

Martin Gifford said Aug 19, 1:15 AM:

 

Andrew,

I would be all for widespread security systems, etc…. except the governments have proven themselves untrustworthy. Generally speaking, politicians are the least trustworthy people around, yet they want us to trust them with these expanding powers!

Bill,

Regarding 2012: I suspect it is a big illusion. But one interesting thing is that on 21 December 2012, the earth passes through the centre-line of the universe or something so there is an astrophysics aspect to it.

If there is some major miraculous transformation, I think it would need greater wisdom than we currently have to ground that transformation. Otherwise it would be like giving a double dose of LSD to granny.