Make Sense of Christmas, Using Your Senses

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Three Magi mosaic - Sant'Apollinare Nuovo - Ravenna 2016
Sant’Apollinare Nuovo – Ravenna, Italy – The Three Wise (Way) Men Photo © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / , via Wikimedia Commons

We can make sense of Christmas with our senses. Sound surprising? Sense-ability has nothing to do with belief or disbelief. It’s an aspect of Sacred Stories that most of us ignore entirely because our own Ancestral Stories, and their Keepers, were destroyed. Most of us descend from Peoples upon whom Sacred Stories entirely alien to our Ancestries and our Homelands were forced upon us. Instead of lamenting this, or ignoring this, if we trace our steps, not only as individuals, but as Carriers of the Consequences of our Ancestral Lineages, we can Find our Way again. Instead of simply “believing” or “disbelieving” in the Story of the Christ, we can begin to make sense of it, with our senses.

You can watch Christ be Born WITH YOUR EYES, every winter – in the Northern Hemisphere – at the solstice.  I’ll show you how. The Story of Christ’s birth is SACRED, which is to say, it is for making sense of a Whole Reality. If we believe, or disbelieve it, however, it’s sense-making Gift is entirely lost to us. It is to be SEEN. 

Now that’s a hugely loaded statement if we have lost our sense of the Sacred, as connected to our SENSES, and merely resort to “believing” or “disbelieving.” Let’s take this slowly. Sacred means “that which is not to be taken apart, severed.” Few “believers” or “unbelievers” in dissociative imperial culture imagine that the Sacred is entirely available to our senses. So if you ask me, “Was Christ born of a Virgin?” I’d have to tell you, “OF COURSE! But only if you make sense of the statement, in heaven!”

Sternenhimmelhal
Here you are looking at the Orion Constellation. After you watch the video you will know where the Three Wise Men are.
If you ask me if I believe in heaven, I’d have to tell you, “NO! I SEE heaven, as you can, right from where I’m standing.  To SEE is fundamentally distinct from believing or disbelieving.  It is a relationship to reality, not just some idea in my head.”

To see Christ’s appearance we have to do exactly what the three magi did and follow the Star to the Manger where the Virgin delivered the Son of “the Luminous One.” We can STILL do just that! The other term for the magi are “the three wise men.”

Wise comes from the Proto-Germanic wijs which literally means “ways.” So “wise men” are “way men.” In desert cultures being able to orient by stars is essential to being a “way person” in those places and to make our way on Earth “as it is in heaven.”

One of my favorite contemporary writers is Nassim Nicholas Taleb who comes from the Greek Orthodox Christian community of Lebanon, which is to say, from one of the original churches (ekklesia in Greek, “community, assembly”). He is an indigenous Christian from a People who were Christian long before the “Jesus” most conquered descendants of the tribes of Europe either “believe” in, or “disbelieve” in sense-less-ly. There is a tremendous amount of wisdom to be learned from Taleb. Here I’d like to point something out that I have heard and read from Taleb in several places:

Virgo & Corvus
Here is the Constellation Virgo, or the Virgin, holding her child with outstretched arm. You will see this same Virgin image, in the same posture, portrayed around the world, including in representations of “the Virgin Mary and child.” In this view of the sky, she appears to be laying down with her head to the right, as you will see in the video.
Being from the indigenous Christian community in the Middle East, Taleb mentions that if someone came to his community and asked the People there “if they believe in Jesus Christ” they would have no idea what such a person is talking about.  They never lost their faith. They are not Christians “because they believe.” They are Christians because they belong to a Community, with Continuity, in Place and are faith-full (literally “trust-worthy“)  to the Continuity of their Community in that Place. An essential part of the social technology that allows any Community to proceed in Continuity is to encode wisdom in multi-dimensional, fractal Way-Finding Stories that reveal layer upon layer of far more Way-Finding Wisdom than one could real-ize in one single lifetime, but that a whole Community of individuals will care for, together. 

To be faithful is to be oriented and thus worthy of trust. That actually takes far more than just one single individual. It takes a Community of People who learn and encode their Wisdom together.

Conquered peoples, whether believer or disbeliever, are forced into a politico-religious state of sense-less-ness and a total disruption of their capacity to guarantee Continuity for their Community, from generation to generation.

In a very real sense, the de-indigenized “belief” in a story foreign to our ancestry, and which we were forced to adopt, without the key to its sense-making, is quite akin to “having a map of Paris” and “believing” in its “Truth and Infallability” without having any intention of actually going to Paris, or even really knowing that the map uses symbols to indicate landmarks, streets, access to the subway, etc.  Instead we “worship” a piece of paper with lines and drawings on it.  We “believe” that it is “true” without any ability to actually true our Journey in Paris with it. Such a person may believe that Paris is actually in some “alternate” dimension and there’s really no point in going to Paris because their map “is” the key to Paris, without any need to actually make sense of the map. There would be something rather grotesquely childish about this relationship to a map. 

Equally childish would be “disbelieving in the map.” Yet this is the condition not only of most “believers” today, but of most “unbelievers,” as well. One says “I believe that these wonderful lines and drawings are the key to Paris.” The other says, “Ah… bullshit… those are just a bunch of lines and drawings on a piece of paper. I don’t believe that! There’s nothing magical to that!” Both miss the pointing, which is simultaneously far more wonderful than any “magical lines and drawings,” while also far more mundane.  There is a very real adventure to be had, right here, on Earth, and it doesn’t require “finding some extra-dimensional Paris and worshipping the magical lines and squiggles.”  We can grab the map, get ourselves to the reality of Paris and have a real experience in reality.

Sacred Stories are for literally getting Oriented sense-ably.  Oriented to what? To finding one’s way in heaven, of course, which is to say “in the bigger contexts and dimensions that our short individual lives unfold in, in reality.” It’s to become a conscious part of that Greater Unfolding, and to get oriented in its SENSE-ABLE reality

Ravenna - Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, l'adorazione dei Magi
Once you are done reading this article and watching the accompanying video you will actually be able to SEE Christmas and SEE what the Builders of the Churches of Europe hid in plain sight of a believing, and disbelieving, public who can “enter the church building” yet still remain “shut out of the Temple.” To enter the Temple you have to SEE the Temple and you have been LOOKING AT IT your whole LIFE without SEEING it! Photo By Emanuele Schembri (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons
People who have undergone a multi-millenial process of institutionalized trauma, with the resultant dissociation and sense-less-ness that results from trauma, are convinced that “heaven” is some great cosmic “elsewhere” that one has to “believe” in, without any sense-able capacity to orient in reality, except by way of second-hand descriptions given to us by politico-religious psychopaths with an agenda of debasing and exploiting us.

The purpose of Sacred Stories, in the lives of free people is precisely the contrary purpose of such stories in the lives of slaves: they teach free people how to orient.  Slaves, on the other hand, “believe” them or “disbelieve” them, sense-less-ly.

If this all sounds kind of nuts to you, hang in there. Those of you who have been reading my articles for awhile know that I have no mystical mumbo-jumbo to sell you.  I’m interested in way-finding. This is precisely what the three magi  who found their Way to the Manger where the Virgin brought Her Child into the world were into, right?

If I believe that, or disbelieve that, I am equally lost, which is to say, I cannot find my Way in Heaven, in Patterns that unfold in scales of Time and Relatedness far vaster than my “impressions” about “a story.” In that condition, whether I “believe” in Jesus, or am an atheist who disbelieves in Jesus, I still have not put away childish things.  My Life is in a state of sin, which is an archery term and signifies “missing the mark.” How can I make the mark if I don’t even know what I’m aiming for, or with?  In brief, my childish “Jesus” is on the same order as Santa  Claus, the tooth fairy, or the Easter Bunny – to which my relationship is also just as sense-less and dissociated.

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” 1 Corinthians 13:11

Isis con Horus (26675222002)
Isis nursing Horus, also born of a Virgin, Egypt. Photo by By Ángel M. Felicísimo from Mérida, España (Isis con Horus) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
When we put away “childish things” then we can take up “heavenly things.” To a people abused by religion and imperial psychopathic anti-culture, we have lost all sense of what’s literally “heavenly.” It’s right above our heads and surrounds us.  To “take up heavenly things” is a way of “getting a bigger context.”  We begin to not only SEE that we are part of something VAST, we develop real skills to orient in that vastness.

For those of us who come from Peoples whose Ancestral Wisdom was waylaid, and who lost our Way, part of Re-Membering ourselves in that Vastness includes discovering how we lost our Way. Few of us do that.  Instead we want to go “shopping” in some “other tradition.” But to discover that we are truly lost, and how we got lost, is the way to finding our Way again.  It’s precisely what most de-indigenized, conquered people do not want to do.

Some people who have asked me to teach them about Sacred Mountains are shocked when one of the first things I tell them to do is to grab a Bible, grab a Strong’s Concordance and read every verse and story with the word “rock” in it.  The Bible is 100% traditional indigenous Sacred Mountains Story Stone Wisdom – and people are totally blind to it because they “believe” or “disbelieve” what is right under their nose.  So there! I just handed you a key to True, Sacred indigenous Wisdom.

But very few people will actually DO it because their minds are festering with a confusion of beliefs, disbeliefs, childhood traumas, and ancestral traumas rooted in what they “believe” the Bible is “about,” without ever truly having read it.

In the indigenous Christian tradition, Christ-mass is on the solstice for one very simple reason: that is when it actually is, every year.  If you have clear skies you can watch the whole Christmas Story play out in the Heavens. Christ is “the anointed Son of Adonai, the Luminous One.” Cool. Where and what is “the luminous One”?  Use your senses!  Christmas is on the solstice because that’s when it actually OCCURS, IN HEAVEN.  It is when “the Son of the Luminous One” is “born.” What is that Son?

Change the date however, and then the story becomes literally sense-less. Those who “believe,” or “disbelieve” remain equally as sense-less. Being sense-less, they lose all capacity to make things “on Earth as they are in Heaven.”  They are literally cast out, which is to say, incapable of coherence between their individual, social, and national lives, and the patterns of a Greater Unfolding.

Hopefully, if you have been reading many of my articles to-date, you have got this far without drawing any conclusions for one very simple reason: you still have not made sense, with your senses, of what words can only point to.

As the Takelma People say

“For those who SEE, their EYES speak.

For those who DON’T see, OTHER MOUTHS are talking.”

I’ll show you how to make sense of what I’m saying, but you will have to do it four days sooner than the date used by the slavish believers and unbelievers of Rome; on the Winter Solstice. I hope that this little Christmas message allows you to make sense out of the religious nonsense that takes a Sacred Story for Orienting Oneself in Heaven and profanes it. This takes a Story of liberation and morphs it into one of enslavement into dissociative, sanctified genuflecting to mystified, non-sense.

The word profane is used precisely and its sense is simply stunning. Pro comes from the Latin “before,” and that can be in time and/or in space.  Fanum is Latin for “temple.” That which is profane is “before the temple.” In other words, it is right in front of the temple but incapable of entering it.  It is “shut out” of the temple.

Which temple? The temple of Heaven, of course, within which all of reality is unfolding; the temple of self-led, self-orienting FREE People.  Heaven, of course, is the Sky and the Stars, which is what all of us are traveling in, right now, along with the entirety of Earth and other Heavenly Bodies.  One enters the Temple, of course, to find our Heavenly Bodies.

David Triptych of Jean Des Trompes rear
Triptych of Jean des Trompes, by Gerard David (circa 1450/1460–1523) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Oil on wood, 127,9 x 96,6 cm Groeninge Museum, Bruges, Belgium
The Slaves, however, are profane.  Their “heaven” is sense-less. 

They “believe” in it without any sense-able relationship to reality.   Their “believing” actually disorients them, to reality. So does the disbelief of the unbelieving!  HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Their heaven is precisely what reality is not, and in the pursuit of this kind of “heaven-that-is-not” reality gets transformed into a living hell. This “deep feeling of disorientation and dissociation” in a “sense-less heaven” is precisely the spirituality of slaves and a hallmark of trauma which engenders further trauma.  Most people today are walking around in a “world” of  deeply programmed imagination, but they “have not put away childish things,” nor will they due to arrested development.  This is part and parcel of the acculturation into imperial anti-culture.

When they tire of the sense-less-ness of non-sense-ical “Christianity,” or “Judaism,” or “democracy,” or whatever mystified non-sense has been forced on them, they then go shopping for something else which they generally adopt with the same kind of sense-LESS-ness, including the grotesque bastardization of what we call “science,” today, also mainly adopted by way of a narrative and with little use of our senses.  

Our so-called “science” is just as profane as our so-called “religion.” Few of us have any deep sense that the Sacred Stories were illustrations of the Sacred Science for those who were raised in coherence with Wholeness, and then grew into response-abilities for that Wholeness.

One who cannot orient in reality or associate with reality has no means for true self-mastery. How are we going to lead ourselves in reality if we cannot orient ourselves in reality? Such people are in need of someone to do for them what they cannot or will not do for themselves. Such people need someone else to be their master, their “savior,” one who tells them how things are, and what they are, and what to do. There are countless peddlers of religious, political, financial, and endless non-SENSE who are as eagerly on the prowl for slaves as the slave is in search for a “master.”

When we actually catch what these words can only point to, and how this plays out in our lives, at multiple levels, we begin to develop our ability to orient on Earth as it is in Heaven.  Other ways of saying this is “we become coherent,” “we enlarge the dimensions of our Life Journey,”  “we clue in to bigger dimensions and guideposts to reality,” “we become capable caretakers for Greater Dimensions, Permutations, and Relationships in the Greater Aliveness.”

Crippling our ability for self-led self-orientation is precisely what empire does.

“The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.” Philip K. Dick, Valis, p. 235, citing entry 41 from “The Exegesis.”

Derangement  comes from the French dés: “to do the opposite of” + ranger: “to order, to align” + the Latin mente: “mind.” Derangement is “a mind that is in opposition to alignment.” Alignment with what?  With living, relate-able reality!

On the other hand, one who merely believes or disbelieves sense-less-ly, signals to any of those who have kept their faith, i.e. their Way-Finding Capacity and thus, trustworthiness, that they are a slave and fundamentally faith-less. That is a developmental condition.

A Free People are self-led. That requires real abilities to orient in reality. To “believe” or “disbelieve” are not that. Consider that. You’ll see that there are a number of “reasons for the season,” just like the “Christmas season” itself has been altered to make it on Earth as it is not  in Heaven.

To free ourselves requires orienting ourselves, in reality. If we prefer disorientation, alienation, and mystification, however, we shall be enslaved. This has a long history among the descendants of the tribes of Europe who got captured into the Roman Empire which, in turn, got hijacked by a sect of literalist Jewish Pharisees. The psychopathic Roman emperor Caligula tried to force the Jews of Roman-occupied Palestine to engage in emperor worship in their temples. Many Jewish communities rebelled. The Pharisees ended up betraying the uprising and joining forces with Rome. They then hijacked a corrupt Roman empire from within with some mind-blowing Jew-jitsu that is a fascinating study, in its own right.

They are presently hijacking and enslaving the members of the modern iteration of imperial Rome masquerading as “the Western world.” What we think of as “Christianity” in the West, or “Judaism” were both hijacked by Pharisee literalists with political aims.  The “apostle” Paul, who never met Jesus and was a Jewish-Roman centurion was also a Pharisee.  So was Flavius Josephus who had led a Jewish uprising in Palestine and then defected to the Romans and was adopted into the Flavian family of Vespasian and Titus who put down the Jewish uprising and eventually each became emperor of Rome. Flavius Josephus is one of the primary sources for the history of that era.  But the discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls in the 1950’s suddenly gave the world access to writings from a Jewish community that were not Pharisees nor lovers of Rome.  Both the Catholic and Protestant clerics who led the decipherment of the scrolls delayed their release to the public as long as they could.

Some people want to blame the Jews.  They fail to appreciate that Jews are not only at the head of the psychopathic crap coming out of Hollywood, modern media, pornography, slave trading, international politics, and the slavery of modern banking, they are also at the head of many of the most humanizing efforts, such as the work of Drs. Gabor Maté & Allan N. Schore highlighted on this website.  The question is not simply one of what “the Jews are doing.” The question is what are WE doing with the incredible opportunities we have today?

For anyone interested in delving further into the human tapestry of what was happening in Palestine in the first century, under Roman occupation, Robert Eisenman’s James, brother of Jesus is a fascinating exploration into the very rich and varied tapestry of sects, ideas, and ideas of that era, the most important and common of which are almost entirely absent from our notions of “Christianity, Judaism, or Islam” today.

You may think that this is “just ancient history.” No it is not! We are still stuck both in Rome and the Pharisee Jew-jitsu, and the fine arts of perfecting total enslavement that is ongoing. Instead of merely being depressed or shocked, we can acknowledge this wonderful challenge to wake UP or be destroyed, AND WAKE UP by starting to Re-Member ourselves in the Greater Unfoldings and Dimensions of Consequences at play in our lives today.

The Pharisees hijacked “Judaism” by taking it literally. They also bastardized an oral tradition by writing it down.  Few of us have any deep experience of oral traditions. The hallmark of Sacred Stories that are kept orally is that they do not change!

Since they are always told in a COMMUNITY of People, ALL adults know the entire Story by heart, from start to finish, and will correct any omissions or distortions in the telling.

It seems the Pharisees had a heavy hand in creating the weird Judeo-Roman amalgamation of “Savior worship” that became the literalist, slave-making version of “Christianity” that Rome, and the romanized, then spread by force.  The ceremonial name for the Roman emperors, by the way, is “savior,” or soter, in Latin.

But even to speak of “Christianity, Judaism, and Islam” is a projection of modern reality onto the past. In Greek, the word for “church” is ekklesia, which is a community.  In the first centuries, there was no such thing as a “religion” or a “church,” as we think of them today.  There were communities which are very much like extended family and tribal groups.  Each community had its “Way,” much as my Lakota friends today belong to tiyospayes, which are extended family groups led by a wichasha wakan or “Person of the Wholeness,” which we tend to call a “Holy Man” without really appreciating what that is, because we see things from belief, and disbelief, rather than from WHOLENESS.

My intention here is to open another window into how to SEE Sacred Stories. Sacred Stories are Whole Stories about the Whole of Reality, not mystified, dissociative non-sense.  If you truly catch what I am pointing to here, you’ll see what a crafty little trap imperial culture is.  In either believing or disbelieving, it never occurs to us that there’s an entirely different’, sense-making  approach to reality that Sacred Stories invite us to, very much like solving a puzzle.  THAT is a Christmas gift worth giving and receiving.  It’s precisely the opposite of “salvation,” which is a creed of slaves, always waiting for some “great someone else” to come save our asses.  HAHAHAHAHA!

“It is a shame to be enslaved by the idea of salvation when our minds are self-liberating.”

Second Treatise of the Great Seth – This is part of the Nag Hammadi Codices which were hidden in caves in the first century by one of these ancient communities of the Middle East. It gives a vision of Christianity, Judaism and Gnosticism that is vastly distinct from that promoted by the literalist bastardizations of those profound Wisdom traditions. Of course, the Gnostics – who were the primary kind of early Christians – got exterminated by Rome because People who realize that “our minds are self-liberating” make real lousy suck-ups to imperial, psychopathic non-sense, as will YOU, when and if you discover that YOUR mind is self-liberating, too!

Merry Christmas!  David Mathisen is doing some beautiful work showing how these stories orient us in heaven.  Please note that Sacred Stories are not only astrotheological. They are also maps for terrestrial reality, as well, as are ALL initiatic stories. But if we believe in them, or disbelieve in them, we remain as lost as the average “Christian” or “atheist” walking under a starlit night. Faith is trust.  To be “faithful” is synonymous with being “trust-worthy. Trust requires orientation, in REALITY, in its TOTALITY, not just spouting off a bunch of sanctimonious mumbo-jumbo, or merely denying sanctimonious mumbo-jumbo. It takes making sense. The more sense we make, the more skillfully we orient to reality.

Few of us imagine that the same stories that Free People use to orient themselves can be misused to disorient, dissociate and further mystify slaves, and that slaves will often do this to themselves, insistently and quite sanctimoniously.  Here the Invitation is to Orientation.

Those who keep the Sacred Mountain Story Stones show us how to lead ourselves on our Journey into Wholeness with that Wholeness. We learn to Read Reality, in its Living Totality,in the Language that Life speaks in the entirety of BEING, that is to say: in that which EXISTS.

As We Learn to Orient and Find Your Way in a Greater Unfolding, We Gather Seeds – of Wisdom – which is Way-Finding. We learn to Find Our Way for the sake of a Continuity for the Community of the Greater Aliveness. With care-FULL-ness and Response-abilities we enter the Temple of the Greater Aliveness. Instead of remaining shut out and stumbling around in who we merely “think” we are and where we merely “think,” we are, dissociatively, i.e. “missing the mark,” we rediscover our reality at the Heart of a Greater Reality and, in so doing, rediscover the deep sense and sense-ability at the Heart of our capacity to BE Human.

 

 

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