Then you say none of these equal the Monad. How would we determine the truth or falsity of that assertion together?
Perhaps it's not necessary for us to determine anything together. I say to you this has already been determined 2,000 years ago. And here is why, I'll give you a few reasons of why I believe this is so.
For 2,000 years, we have been told that God is love, that he is the father of light. Yet open the OT and you meet a different entity entirely, Yahweh. The one you believe to be the supreme god, the god of the jews, the god of the Old Testament. Use critical thinking, what was the one thing that got Jesus killed? it was not because he was talking about love, forgiveness, caring or compassion. One day in Galilee Jesus said something that would eventually get him killed, he was talking about God. The true God that is. The one that is pure love, now open the OT and you meet a different entity entirely. You meet Yahweh who commands the slaughter of entire cities. A being who demands the blood of infants. A being who drowns the world in a fit of rage and requires the smell of burning flesh to be appeased. Does that sound like the infinite source of creation to you? Or does it sound like a monster? IMO, Jesus didn't come to serve the OT God Yahweh, but to expose him instead.
The true god I was referring to, the Monad or the Pleroma, is pure infinite consciousness. The Monad has no needs. It has no gender. It has no jealousy. It does not judge because nothing exists outside of it. It simply emanates light and love like the sun shines without condition. And this is the key. Now, read the OT with this key, you will be surprised. The erratic, violent, jealous behavior of Yahweh suddenly makes perfect sense. He isn't a mysterious God whose ways are higher than ours. He is a jealous, insecure jailer protecting his farm. And the evidence is written in his own words. And this is Reason #1, his name is jealous. Read carefully Exodus 34:14. It does not say he feels jealous. It says his name is jealous. It is his core identity. Now use critical thinking. Why would the infinite creator of the universe be jealous? Jealousy is a secondary emotion. It is biological. It stems from fear. It stems from insecurity. It stems from scarcity. You only get jealous when you are afraid someone else is going to take what is yours. You get jealous when you feel threatened by a competitor. If you are the supreme god, the only god, who are you jealous of? The Monad knows no jealousy because nothing is separate from it. It is the all. Jesus never described the Father as jealous. He described him as a force that makes his son rise on the evil and on the good. Unconditional, universal.
You mentioned "God[Yahweh] is not the author of evil, but you could say he's the Author of authors of evil.". Any modern Christian pastor would say the same thing, evil comes from Satan or from man's free will. They will tell you God is all good. But Yahweh begs to differ. He confirms evil comes from him. Look at Isaiah 45:7
"I form light and create darkness, I make goodness and create disaster. I am the LORD, who does all these things.". Yahweh makes peace and creates evil. The Hebrew word used here [baw]raw which means adversity, calamity, disaster, evil. He does not say he allows evil. He says he creates it. He authors it. And this is reason #2. Why? Because Yahweh (the creator/the Demiurge) creates through duality. He cannot create the unity of the Pleroma. He can only build a world based on friction, positive and negative, light and dark, predator and prey, good and evil. Black & White the checkered floor or mosaic pavement is one of the most recognizable symbols of Freemasonry. It represents the ground floor of King Solomon’s Temple. The floors of Masonic lodges are paved in a black and white checkered pattern to symbolize this foundational temple floor. Duality. Yahweh hardens Pharaoh's heart so he can punish Pharaoh. He sends lying spirits to deceive kings. He orders a census and then kills 70,000 people because the census was taken. He creates the problem so he can sell you the solution. Just like the recent pandemic the whole world had to go through. A virus was created in the lab, so Bill Gates and co. can provide the solution (vaccine). Just as Judaism & Christianity create the problem of sin, and offer the solution of atonement or salvation. Yahweh creates the fear so he can sell you the protection. The Monad creates only by emanation like a flower releasing fragrance. It cannot create evil because it has no concept of separation.
This brings me to reason #3. The most disturbing aspect of the OT, the blood sacrifice. If you read the book of Leviticus, it reads like a manual for a slaughter house. It is endless. Kill the bull, kill the goat, kill the lamb, slice the throat, sprinkle the blood on the altar, burn the fat. And it is a sweet savour unto the Lord. Or "an aroma that will be pleasing to the LORD." - Lev 1:13, ISV I'm asking you again to use critical thinking, why would God enjoy the smell of burning flesh? Does a spirit need meat? No. But a parasite does. Gnostics talk about Loosh - emotional energy, life force. When a living being dies in a state of fear, pain, and trauma, it releases a massive amount of psychic energy (which comes for the source, Pleroma). Energy that is harvested by other beings feeding off it. a constant supply of death energy to keep the loosh flowing. Yahweh demands the firstborn. He demands war. He demands genocide. Read the story of Jericho or the Amalekites. Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass, 1Samuel 15:3 Why kill the animals, too? Why leave nothing breathing? Because it's a harvest. Jesus tried to stop this. He disrupted the temple sacrifice. He quoted the prophet Hosea, I desire mercy and not sacrifice. "For it is love that I seek, and not sacrifice; knowledge of God more than burnt offerings." - Hos 6:6 He was trying to cut off their food supply. The moment Jesus threatened the food supply of the archons, his death was guaranteed.
I'll end with this, the Monad is silent. The Monad has no ego. The Monad does not need your validation to exist. The Demiurge on the other hand only exists because we validate him. Without our belief, without our fear, he starves.
I say to you this has already been determined 2,000 years ago.
Maybe, but each individual determines it afresh for himself. You seem fine with another's determination previously made and uncertain about my determination previously made.
open the OT and you meet a different entity entirely
That is not self-evident.
Does that sound like
Frankly, it sounds like the result of a paradigm shift culminating in the 4th century about the testaments compounded by another paradigm shift in the 19th century in which self-declared experts made up their own interpretations without respect to original culture. I'm surprised you buy these recent German arguments instead of going to the source about what people actually thought when Jesus walked the earth. If any gnostic aspects predate that, they were dead for a millennium before these Germans revived them.
The true god I was referring to, the Monad or the Pleroma, is pure infinite consciousness. The Monad has no needs. It has no gender. It has no jealousy. It does not judge because nothing exists outside of it. It simply emanates light and love like the sun shines without condition.
Those attributes are not self-evident. That's why I asked exactly how we come to agreement on attributing things to entities. We could both talk into the air but that wouldn't be likely to bring agreement. It seems to me agreement is brought by agreeing to pursue truth wherever it leads and then working together from that common understanding to align our own paradigms. We could line up all the reasons the Monad is or isn't something and then infer the best explanation.
If you begin by proposing we don't need to agree and then continue with your belief system and a couple reasons as if they stand without needing questioning or in fact validation (as if it's important that people agree with you), that's kind of two different approaches.
Your stated reasons are (1) Yahweh's name is "Jealous", (2) Yahweh creates by separation (duality), (3) Yahweh seeks blood sacrifice; implied conclusion, Yahweh is not the Monad. You also give many supportive recent tropes about why one should conclude this. I asked how you'd like to resolve this, but you demurred to that question. If, for instance, the answer were "critical thinking" then we might both propose structures that appear to be critical thinking, but we'd still need to agree on basic rules of facts and logic so that we can determine which is better. We could both propound many arguments, I am known for going very long, but it wouldn't help if we weren't seeking some core agreement and were only trying to validate our own already-determined positions. Your propositions are not disabusing me of my errors because I've mostly seen them before and feel very comfortable with how I handle them in my own mind; plus they go in so many directions that it's hard to be selective. So let me go very basic.
(1) We agree that the Monad and an adversary exist (you also use "satan" so I trust I can substitute that too).
(2) When you say that adversary "exists because we validate him", I presume you mean he is benefited from our validation and deficited from our invalidation (not that he could cease to exist, or maybe you think he could), which I agree with.
(3) When you argue against belief or fear, I presume you mean not to put any trust or reverence in that adversary, which I agree with.
Why then should we give that adversary any undeserved credit by giving him titles or attributes beyond what is straitly revealed about him? Maybe Yahweh is some third entity that is neither Monad nor adversary, and this adversary is stealing all of Yahweh's thunder like he steals Zeus's thunder. It's not self-evident to me that all your assertions about an adversary have either historical or revelatory backup, they are just inferences that (to me) contribute toward glorifying that adversary. I hope you don't mind my speaking frankly about that because it seems to me central to the rest of the argument.
Sorry! I meant, your presentation involves a number of appeals to logic that were mostly first espoused in Germany in the 19th century, and I led with that thought in answer to your question of what it "sounds like" to me. My larger point is that we don't determine it by what it sounds like, and thus having an agreement on a way to resolve differing sounds seems to me more essential than you suggested.
I don't want to sound standoffish or anything; you've taken it on yourself to seek to give me a clearer view of things than the one I profess, and I'm interested in whether I'm wrong or not. If you wish to teach me what satan is and I don't find it convincing, my general question was how we could resolve such an impasse. For instance, we could appeal to common external revelation, or to a common external Spirit speaking to us both, or to common objective logic, definitions, historical facts, etc. You appeal to "critical thinking" but I've used that and gotten different conclusions, so it seems we need to be clearer on how we use critical thinking (or anything else) to arrive at the same answer. In math everyone gets the same answer with the same start, and it'd be nice for the same to happen in informal logic.
(1) Yahweh's name is "Jealous", (2) Yahweh creates by separation (duality), (3) Yahweh seeks blood sacrifice; implied conclusion, Yahweh is not the Monad
I had a chance to read your entire message. Your first part of the message didn't make any sense to me and I already told you so. However, this is correct. Except the conclusion, I'm not trying to convince you "Yahweh is not the Monad". I'm not trying to convince you of anything. Why are you making this statement? I already told you this was established 2,000 years ago. We don't need to talk about this any longer, but we could even thou it doesn't make any difference. If you or I are not right, we'll have another chance, and another, until infinity. Eventually we'll get it right.
the answer were "critical thinking" then we might both propose structures that appear to be critical thinking,
Sure, again you're right here. But, what difference does it make if we still need to agree on basic rules of facts and logic? again I'm not trying to prove anything and once again I say, it has been already been proven (2,000 years ago). It doesn't matter if we "determine which is better", it makes no difference. But, we could still argue about, and that could be fun, but that's it.
So let me go very basic. (1) We agree that the Monad and an adversary exist
No, we don't agree on this. What I said all along there is a spiritual realm, known as Pleroma and physical realm created by the Demiurge (Yahweh). Yahweh is not opposed to the Monad or Pleroma. He just doesn't know what's above him. All he knows, or feels, or senses the Pleroma, the true light above him. He knows there are other forces greater than him. And he is terrified. Terrified that his creation, the humans who carry the divine spark will discover the true Father and stop worshiping him. So what does he do? He acts like a narcissistic abusive partner. Look at me. Worship only me. If you look at another god, I will kill you. He commands exclusive devotion not because he deserves it but because he needs it to maintain the illusion. We live in Yahweh's simulation, or as Hindus say we are living in Vishnu's dream, which is nothing but an illusion.
(2) When you say that adversary "exists because we validate him", I presume you mean he is benefited from our validation and deficited from our invalidation
No, we don't agree on this. What I'm saying there is no adversary. There is only a physical world that was created on the principle of duality, wright or wrong, good or evil. I will give a lot of credit to Yahweh for creating everything, it's an amazing job he has done. But, it has to work on this principal of separation, duality, there is no other way. Because Yahweh is unaware of Pleroma, although he sense it. When you go to vote you really have two choices Democrat or Republican. Many say your vote matters, IMO, your vote does not make any difference. It's just an illusion, again created for you to feel good about it. In reality your vote doesn't influence the outcome, TPTB always select and control both sides. Just like the physical world we live in (as above so below). I don't care what you call this principle, good & evil, black & white, the Chinese call this Yin & Yang the absolute foundational principles of the physical universe.
(3) When you argue against belief or fear, I presume you mean not to put any trust or reverence in that adversary, which I agree with
No, we don't fully agree on this. IMO, Yahweh only creates the fear so he can sell us the protection. Whatever that may be, religion, empire, institutions. It's important that we live in a world of fear, suffering and pain. Like I said when a living being dies in a state of fear, pain, and trauma, it releases a massive amount of psychic energy. The demiurge and his archons are cut off from the eternal source of energy, the Pleroma. This is their food. They feed on low vibrational energy, fear, guilt, anger, and death. The entire sacrificial system of the OT was not a system of forgiveness. It was a harvesting system. It was a buffet.
Perhaps it's not necessary for us to determine anything together. I say to you this has already been determined 2,000 years ago. And here is why, I'll give you a few reasons of why I believe this is so.
For 2,000 years, we have been told that God is love, that he is the father of light. Yet open the OT and you meet a different entity entirely, Yahweh. The one you believe to be the supreme god, the god of the jews, the god of the Old Testament. Use critical thinking, what was the one thing that got Jesus killed? it was not because he was talking about love, forgiveness, caring or compassion. One day in Galilee Jesus said something that would eventually get him killed, he was talking about God. The true God that is. The one that is pure love, now open the OT and you meet a different entity entirely. You meet Yahweh who commands the slaughter of entire cities. A being who demands the blood of infants. A being who drowns the world in a fit of rage and requires the smell of burning flesh to be appeased. Does that sound like the infinite source of creation to you? Or does it sound like a monster? IMO, Jesus didn't come to serve the OT God Yahweh, but to expose him instead.
The true god I was referring to, the Monad or the Pleroma, is pure infinite consciousness. The Monad has no needs. It has no gender. It has no jealousy. It does not judge because nothing exists outside of it. It simply emanates light and love like the sun shines without condition. And this is the key. Now, read the OT with this key, you will be surprised. The erratic, violent, jealous behavior of Yahweh suddenly makes perfect sense. He isn't a mysterious God whose ways are higher than ours. He is a jealous, insecure jailer protecting his farm. And the evidence is written in his own words. And this is Reason #1, his name is jealous. Read carefully Exodus 34:14. It does not say he feels jealous. It says his name is jealous. It is his core identity. Now use critical thinking. Why would the infinite creator of the universe be jealous? Jealousy is a secondary emotion. It is biological. It stems from fear. It stems from insecurity. It stems from scarcity. You only get jealous when you are afraid someone else is going to take what is yours. You get jealous when you feel threatened by a competitor. If you are the supreme god, the only god, who are you jealous of? The Monad knows no jealousy because nothing is separate from it. It is the all. Jesus never described the Father as jealous. He described him as a force that makes his son rise on the evil and on the good. Unconditional, universal.
You mentioned "God[Yahweh] is not the author of evil, but you could say he's the Author of authors of evil.". Any modern Christian pastor would say the same thing, evil comes from Satan or from man's free will. They will tell you God is all good. But Yahweh begs to differ. He confirms evil comes from him. Look at Isaiah 45:7 "I form light and create darkness, I make goodness and create disaster. I am the LORD, who does all these things.". Yahweh makes peace and creates evil. The Hebrew word used here [baw]raw which means adversity, calamity, disaster, evil. He does not say he allows evil. He says he creates it. He authors it. And this is reason #2. Why? Because Yahweh (the creator/the Demiurge) creates through duality. He cannot create the unity of the Pleroma. He can only build a world based on friction, positive and negative, light and dark, predator and prey, good and evil. Black & White the checkered floor or mosaic pavement is one of the most recognizable symbols of Freemasonry. It represents the ground floor of King Solomon’s Temple. The floors of Masonic lodges are paved in a black and white checkered pattern to symbolize this foundational temple floor. Duality. Yahweh hardens Pharaoh's heart so he can punish Pharaoh. He sends lying spirits to deceive kings. He orders a census and then kills 70,000 people because the census was taken. He creates the problem so he can sell you the solution. Just like the recent pandemic the whole world had to go through. A virus was created in the lab, so Bill Gates and co. can provide the solution (vaccine). Just as Judaism & Christianity create the problem of sin, and offer the solution of atonement or salvation. Yahweh creates the fear so he can sell you the protection. The Monad creates only by emanation like a flower releasing fragrance. It cannot create evil because it has no concept of separation.
This brings me to reason #3. The most disturbing aspect of the OT, the blood sacrifice. If you read the book of Leviticus, it reads like a manual for a slaughter house. It is endless. Kill the bull, kill the goat, kill the lamb, slice the throat, sprinkle the blood on the altar, burn the fat. And it is a sweet savour unto the Lord. Or "an aroma that will be pleasing to the LORD." - Lev 1:13, ISV I'm asking you again to use critical thinking, why would God enjoy the smell of burning flesh? Does a spirit need meat? No. But a parasite does. Gnostics talk about Loosh - emotional energy, life force. When a living being dies in a state of fear, pain, and trauma, it releases a massive amount of psychic energy (which comes for the source, Pleroma). Energy that is harvested by other beings feeding off it. a constant supply of death energy to keep the loosh flowing. Yahweh demands the firstborn. He demands war. He demands genocide. Read the story of Jericho or the Amalekites. Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass, 1Samuel 15:3 Why kill the animals, too? Why leave nothing breathing? Because it's a harvest. Jesus tried to stop this. He disrupted the temple sacrifice. He quoted the prophet Hosea, I desire mercy and not sacrifice. "For it is love that I seek, and not sacrifice; knowledge of God more than burnt offerings." - Hos 6:6 He was trying to cut off their food supply. The moment Jesus threatened the food supply of the archons, his death was guaranteed.
I'll end with this, the Monad is silent. The Monad has no ego. The Monad does not need your validation to exist. The Demiurge on the other hand only exists because we validate him. Without our belief, without our fear, he starves.
Maybe, but each individual determines it afresh for himself. You seem fine with another's determination previously made and uncertain about my determination previously made.
That is not self-evident.
Frankly, it sounds like the result of a paradigm shift culminating in the 4th century about the testaments compounded by another paradigm shift in the 19th century in which self-declared experts made up their own interpretations without respect to original culture. I'm surprised you buy these recent German arguments instead of going to the source about what people actually thought when Jesus walked the earth. If any gnostic aspects predate that, they were dead for a millennium before these Germans revived them.
Those attributes are not self-evident. That's why I asked exactly how we come to agreement on attributing things to entities. We could both talk into the air but that wouldn't be likely to bring agreement. It seems to me agreement is brought by agreeing to pursue truth wherever it leads and then working together from that common understanding to align our own paradigms. We could line up all the reasons the Monad is or isn't something and then infer the best explanation.
If you begin by proposing we don't need to agree and then continue with your belief system and a couple reasons as if they stand without needing questioning or in fact validation (as if it's important that people agree with you), that's kind of two different approaches.
Your stated reasons are (1) Yahweh's name is "Jealous", (2) Yahweh creates by separation (duality), (3) Yahweh seeks blood sacrifice; implied conclusion, Yahweh is not the Monad. You also give many supportive recent tropes about why one should conclude this. I asked how you'd like to resolve this, but you demurred to that question. If, for instance, the answer were "critical thinking" then we might both propose structures that appear to be critical thinking, but we'd still need to agree on basic rules of facts and logic so that we can determine which is better. We could both propound many arguments, I am known for going very long, but it wouldn't help if we weren't seeking some core agreement and were only trying to validate our own already-determined positions. Your propositions are not disabusing me of my errors because I've mostly seen them before and feel very comfortable with how I handle them in my own mind; plus they go in so many directions that it's hard to be selective. So let me go very basic.
(1) We agree that the Monad and an adversary exist (you also use "satan" so I trust I can substitute that too).
(2) When you say that adversary "exists because we validate him", I presume you mean he is benefited from our validation and deficited from our invalidation (not that he could cease to exist, or maybe you think he could), which I agree with.
(3) When you argue against belief or fear, I presume you mean not to put any trust or reverence in that adversary, which I agree with.
Why then should we give that adversary any undeserved credit by giving him titles or attributes beyond what is straitly revealed about him? Maybe Yahweh is some third entity that is neither Monad nor adversary, and this adversary is stealing all of Yahweh's thunder like he steals Zeus's thunder. It's not self-evident to me that all your assertions about an adversary have either historical or revelatory backup, they are just inferences that (to me) contribute toward glorifying that adversary. I hope you don't mind my speaking frankly about that because it seems to me central to the rest of the argument.
Now, I totally lost you. I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not buying anything????
I haven't read you full message I stopped at this, because it doesn't make any sense to me.
Sorry! I meant, your presentation involves a number of appeals to logic that were mostly first espoused in Germany in the 19th century, and I led with that thought in answer to your question of what it "sounds like" to me. My larger point is that we don't determine it by what it sounds like, and thus having an agreement on a way to resolve differing sounds seems to me more essential than you suggested.
I don't want to sound standoffish or anything; you've taken it on yourself to seek to give me a clearer view of things than the one I profess, and I'm interested in whether I'm wrong or not. If you wish to teach me what satan is and I don't find it convincing, my general question was how we could resolve such an impasse. For instance, we could appeal to common external revelation, or to a common external Spirit speaking to us both, or to common objective logic, definitions, historical facts, etc. You appeal to "critical thinking" but I've used that and gotten different conclusions, so it seems we need to be clearer on how we use critical thinking (or anything else) to arrive at the same answer. In math everyone gets the same answer with the same start, and it'd be nice for the same to happen in informal logic.
I had a chance to read your entire message. Your first part of the message didn't make any sense to me and I already told you so. However, this is correct. Except the conclusion, I'm not trying to convince you "Yahweh is not the Monad". I'm not trying to convince you of anything. Why are you making this statement? I already told you this was established 2,000 years ago. We don't need to talk about this any longer, but we could even thou it doesn't make any difference. If you or I are not right, we'll have another chance, and another, until infinity. Eventually we'll get it right.
Sure, again you're right here. But, what difference does it make if we still need to agree on basic rules of facts and logic? again I'm not trying to prove anything and once again I say, it has been already been proven (2,000 years ago). It doesn't matter if we "determine which is better", it makes no difference. But, we could still argue about, and that could be fun, but that's it.
No, we don't agree on this. What I said all along there is a spiritual realm, known as Pleroma and physical realm created by the Demiurge (Yahweh). Yahweh is not opposed to the Monad or Pleroma. He just doesn't know what's above him. All he knows, or feels, or senses the Pleroma, the true light above him. He knows there are other forces greater than him. And he is terrified. Terrified that his creation, the humans who carry the divine spark will discover the true Father and stop worshiping him. So what does he do? He acts like a narcissistic abusive partner. Look at me. Worship only me. If you look at another god, I will kill you. He commands exclusive devotion not because he deserves it but because he needs it to maintain the illusion. We live in Yahweh's simulation, or as Hindus say we are living in Vishnu's dream, which is nothing but an illusion.
No, we don't agree on this. What I'm saying there is no adversary. There is only a physical world that was created on the principle of duality, wright or wrong, good or evil. I will give a lot of credit to Yahweh for creating everything, it's an amazing job he has done. But, it has to work on this principal of separation, duality, there is no other way. Because Yahweh is unaware of Pleroma, although he sense it. When you go to vote you really have two choices Democrat or Republican. Many say your vote matters, IMO, your vote does not make any difference. It's just an illusion, again created for you to feel good about it. In reality your vote doesn't influence the outcome, TPTB always select and control both sides. Just like the physical world we live in (as above so below). I don't care what you call this principle, good & evil, black & white, the Chinese call this Yin & Yang the absolute foundational principles of the physical universe.
No, we don't fully agree on this. IMO, Yahweh only creates the fear so he can sell us the protection. Whatever that may be, religion, empire, institutions. It's important that we live in a world of fear, suffering and pain. Like I said when a living being dies in a state of fear, pain, and trauma, it releases a massive amount of psychic energy. The demiurge and his archons are cut off from the eternal source of energy, the Pleroma. This is their food. They feed on low vibrational energy, fear, guilt, anger, and death. The entire sacrificial system of the OT was not a system of forgiveness. It was a harvesting system. It was a buffet.