Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
1. The reason for the expulsion from the garden. (Metaphor)
2. Now here we have to understand just what that means.
You are aware that God can bring evil upon us right? I mean He does state that in the old Testament.
Ref: Jos 23:15 Therefore it shall come to pass, that as all good things are come upon you, which the LORD your God promised you; so shall the LORD bring upon you all evil things, until he have destroyed you from off this good land which the LORD your God hath given you.
So, the onus is ours not to invite such evil by our very deeds.
3. We are already dead!(Lost) What we need is like the prodigal son, redemption from God the Father, the giver of life from the dead.
4. Discernment is given is given upon surrender of the will establishing the enabler in us as God.
(5) We can not get passed anything without first surrendering the will.
That is the whole point!
Blessings, AJ
The 'son/Son' a metaphor for 'relative consciousness', and 'Father', a metaphor for Cosmic or Absolute Consciousness; So the Lord shall bring upon you all evil things is the conditioned, enculturated consciousness of the ego when in charge of our lives, and Father Absolute Consciousness, rushes out to greet both the Ego and the Conscience in Psyche, for he forsakes none of His own children, is the giver of life and death. As ego (flesh) we are doomed to die (cast out of heaven and barred from entering, but as spirit, man of flesh in consciousness and actions has arisen above his base nature instict and conditioning/enculturation (also a spirit, if so it might be said but of a lesser nature), Spirit having arisen/Tranformation not unlike Gideon, Moses, Paul, etc., gets a reprieve granted by Absolute Cosmic Consciousness aka God. 1st Corinthians 15:35-58
'Consciousness' is all there is. Google 'Consciousness', the word made flesh.
The overall message of all the major religions is one of non-duality (not two) seperation, duality, is good and evil. The immaterial is good and the material is evil.
If reality is only what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch...Reality is nothing more than electrical signals interpreted by a brain and 'we', I, you, me, we, they, them, are nothing more than three pounds of maleable flesh, little more than fish, with bio-functions, swimming in an ocean, or a wave in that Ocean.
Last edited by Ocean Drifter; 02-15-2010 at 06:46 AM..
You don’t know that you’re already living Buddhas in all that you do. You think that you attain enlightenment and become a Buddha by piling up merit through religious practice. But since that’s totally wrong, you go along pathetically, leaving one darkness only to enter an other. As for me, I don’t preach about the Buddhist teaching. I only point out the false notions you bring with you.
The Unborn The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei
When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then the one who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.
[SIZE=3]"Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings,
vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle,
unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat.
Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear nor tongue utter it;
only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure and silent, merge with formless truth.
He who finds it is free; he has found himself;
he has solved the great riddle; his heart is forever at peace.
Whole, he enters the Whole.
Perceiving the truth, he becomes the truth;
he passes beyond all suffering, beyond death;
all the knots of his heart are loosed."
~ A verse from the Mundaka Upanishads written 2,500 years ago.[/SIZE]
The self is the ear of the ear, the eye of the eye. It is the mind of the mind, the speech of the speech, and the life of the life. Not clinging to any of the senses, not attached to any thought in the mind, the wise become one with the deathless self.
Eye cannot see It, tongue cannot utter It, mind cannot grasp It.
There is no way to learn or to teach It. It is different from the known, beyond the unknown (So how do we know this last ?? a conundrum) It is experiential. When the student/fruit, is ripe/ready, the Teacher/Paraclete will appear. God is the Tendor/Harvester, The Sower and the Reaper
In all this the ancient masters agree. God plays hide-and-seek with Himself.
A real physical external battle fought between good and evil on Pandora as a metaphor for A real virtual internal mental battle between good (higher) and evil (lower) which is of Nature(essence), and is fought within (each and every one of us)
When ego is Master, It is Hell, When ego is Servant, it is Heaven. [M/D relationship] Shakti
Once upon a time, two demons were terrorizing heaven. Even the greatest of the devas were powerless against them. In panic, the gods fled, taking refuge at the feet of Lord Vishnu. They appealed to Vishnu for relief and shelter.
[SIZE=3]Vishnu appraised the situation and, through his power of yoga, saw that the demons had been granted a boon by Lord Shiva whereby they could only be slain by each other. Since they were brothers and fond of each other, this was unlikely. So Vishnu transformed himself into a beautiful and ravishing woman named Mohini. This alluring creature then appeared before the two devils and batted her eyes.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]The first demon said, “Marry me!”[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]The second said, “No, Marry me.”[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]Mohini looked at the two loathsome creatures, whose mouths were smeared and caked with blood, and said, “Hey, what kind of girl do you think I am? I can’t marry both of you. I’ll marry the one who’s strongest and most powerful.”[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]Instantly the two demons set upon each other to see who would win Mohini’s hand. The reverberations of their contest shook the universe: the sea sloshed from its bed, the sun fled to the netherworld, and the moon, which had always been romantically pale, turned a shade paler. For days the battle raged. The devils clawed each other’s faces and gouged each other’s eyes. They ripped each other’s throats; they bit each other’s necks. Whenever one of them began to tire, Mohini would simply wink at him, and the battle would resume. At last both devils exhausted themselves and collapsed at her feet.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]Mohini, having accomplished her task, now made a fatal mistake. She looked at herself in a pool of water and thought, “My, what a beautiful woman I am. No wonder those monsters wanted my hand.” And intoxicated with her own beauty, she sauntered off, regarding her reflection in every stream and pool. In fact, she soon forgot she had ever been Vishnu. She believed she was Mohini and she felt that such a beautiful woman was deserving of a husband. And so she approached the great Lord Shiva and offered to be his wife. Shiva agreed to marry her, proposing they have Brahma, the Creator, wed them. But when they approached Brahma to perform the ceremony, the hoary deity looked aghast. He said to Mohini, “You can’t marry Shiva!” And why not?” Mohini asked. (and here, anticipating the punch line of a story told a thousand times, one begins to laugh so hard, tears would stream from ones eyes)[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]“Because---you’re Vishnu!”[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]Mohini’s forgetfulness and predicament are our own. Like Mohini, we are God, but we believe we are not. Like Vishnu, we are the Self, the Lord of the universe, yet because of our mistaken identification with our body and mind, we think we are a beautiful woman---a writer, a subway conductor, or a mother of three.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]How did this backward transformation come about? How does God forget who he is and become a human being? A yogic text explains: “Chitti, or universal Consciousness, descending from the Absolute, contracts to become the mind. Because of this contraction, She becomes an ordinary being, subject to limitations.”[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]Or, in simple English, God, by limiting his powers, becomes you and me.[/SIZE]
The understanding of Daisen
"is central [essential] to situated cognition.
Why are we gods? Because we have our own will, "to do" as we please.
Now, if we surrender that will to God, then the doer of good is in us to do.
Of ourselves, there is no power of any good.
To say that God is not the mover and shaker of our deeds, is to say that God is not in us, save we claim it is us and not God.
And that would be exactly what causes the separation in the first place.
Arrogance is the height of a god in its own will.
1Jo 2:16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.
Joh 5:30 I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek notmine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me.
You see, not our will, but the will of Him that inhabits us, is the doer, the enabler.
Blessings, AJ
"It is not my teaching but the teaching of He who sent me."
Aionios does mean eternal when used in that context. This is easily shown if anyone will simply do some HONEST research on it. Universalists rely on the principle that if you repeat a lie often enough, people begin to believe it.
Calling it 'Hell' or Hades doesn't make any difference. By either name that we call it, it is described in Luke 16.
Jesus Christ died for all men. Only those who believe in Him are saved.
Acts 16:31 Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.
John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, That whosoever believes in Him SHOULD NOT PERISH, but have eternal life.
God's will is to save those who believe the Gospel concerning the need to believe in Jesus Christ for salvation.
You purposely distort the requirement of God's holy nature to separate from Himself those who do not receive His offer of salvation through Christ into a desire on God's part to torment people and then challenge them to find such a verse.
As anyone with sense can see, these universalists all ignore the many scripture passages that tell you that you MUST believe in Christ in order to be saved. They proclaim that they have some great revelation from scriptures that they in fact don't even understand.
People who fall for this Satanic lie of universal salvation will reap what they sow.
Act 16:30 and having brought them forth, said, `Sirs, what must I do--that I may be saved?'
Act 16:31 and they said, `Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved--thou and thy house;'[SIZE=3] [/SIZE]
[SIZE=3][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]Looks pretty convincing to me what one must do to be SAVED...
[/SIZE]
So you don't believe the scriptures I posted?!? "If what you believe is true..." I posted scriptures. I guess you don't believe them. I will be posting more scriptures, hopefully soon.
It is just the way you are interpeting them...They are understood when taken in context with the rest of scripture...
Heb 3:7 Wherefore, (as the Holy Spirit saith, `To-day, if His voice ye may hear--
Heb 3:8 ye may not harden your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of the temptation in the wilderness,
Heb 3:9 in which tempt Me did your fathers, they did prove Me, and saw My works forty years;
Heb 3:10 wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, Always do they go astray in heart, and these have not known My ways;
Heb 3:11 so I sware in My anger, If they shall enter into My rest--!')
Heb 3:12 See, brethren, lest there shall be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in the falling away from the living God,
Heb 3:13 but exhort ye one another every day, while the To-day is called, that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of the sin,
If they did not enter unto God's Rest, then where else could they have gone?...And what is THE SIN that is being spoken of, it is referencing the SIN of those in the Desert 40 years and that was a SIN of unbelief...
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I posted scriptures. I guess you don't believe them. I will be posting more scriptures, hopefully soon.