Technicians of the Sacred, Third Edition by Jerome Rothenberg

Recommended by Eric Sinclair

for - BEing journey - meditate on two polar images - apply nondual love - can you recognize the sacred? - the shared being of both? - Rupert Spira

BEing journey - meditate on two polar images - apply nondual love - can you recognize the sacred? - the shared being of both? - Rupert Spira

adjacency - between - Rupert Spira's exercise to identify the Common Human Denominator (CHD) of the sacred in both - abused-abuser relationship - adjacency relationship - Rupert's exercise can lead to compassion if we study the abused-abuser relationship deeply and bring it to bear - The coexistence of - the feeling of anger arising from the suffering the abuser causes - the feeling of sadness arising from the suffering the abuser has suffered earlier in life - creates a mixture of feelings in the same person - Also can help to think of the mechanism by which the abused-abuser cycle continually becomes reconstructed and perpetuated in the world

reference - untreated childhood abuse of children - they can grow up to become dictators - such as Putin, Trump and Kim Jong Un - https://hyp.is/LOhh4mqvEe-mU3_0EcDYiQ/acestoohigh.com/2022/03/02/how-vladimir-putins-childhood-is-affecting-us-all/

for - democracy of the sacred - illusion of Maya - poverty mentality

democracy of - the sacred - illusion of Maya - Theoretically, we should all be able to awaken to the sacred, because THAT is what we all are! - And yet, most of us are so deluded that we cannot access that experience - Maya's illusion of separation is so strong - Poverty mentality is so strong

for - more meaningful lives from connecting to the greater whole of the human species - n other words - experience the sacred

• for: treating each other as sacred, recognizing the sacred, quote - not recognizing the sacred

quote: not recognizing the sacred - we've become sadder and meaner because we don't treat each other with the consideration that we deserve

• for: epoche - application - harmonizing radical alterity of the sacred.

• comment

  • this would be an invaluable tool for Deep Humanity analysis

Massebah for pagan worship: - Exodus 23:24 (https://hypothes.is/a/r3m5QmyDEe6SC8eLYcJE1Q) - Hosea 10:1 (https://hypothes.is/a/4PK2GGyDEe6wZg_r2YpVCA ) - 2 Kings 18:4 - 2 Kings 23:14

Massebah for worship of Yahweh: - Genesis 28:18 Jacob's pillow (https://hypothes.is/a/NF5p8Gx6Ee65Rg_J4tfaMQ)<br /> - Genesis 31:44-45 Jacob and Laban's covenant - Exodus 24:4 - Joshua 24:25-27

In neighboring cultures in which both have oral practices relating to massebah, one is not just destroying "sacred stones" to stamp out their religion, but it's also destroying their culture and cultural memory as well as likely their laws and other valuable memories for the function of their society.

View this in light also of the people of Israel keeping their own sacred stones (Hosea 10:1) as well as the destruction of pillars dedicated to Baal in 2 Kings 18:4 and 2 Kings 23:14.

(Link and) Compare this to the British fencing off the land in Australia and thereby destroying Songlines and access to them and the impact this had on Indigenous Australians.

It's also somewhat similar to the colonialization activity of stamping out of Indigenous Americans and First Nations' language in North America, though the decimation of their language wasn't viewed in as reciprocal way as it might be viewed now. (Did colonizers of the time know about the tremendous damage of language destruction, or was it just a power over function?)

• Comment
  • the power of the mind can indeed be extended,
  • but without the simultaneous extension of the power of the heart,
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Jan%2Bsmuts
  • We will only create destructive technologies with ever greater efficiency
  • that is is why the next major evolutionary transition
  • must involve compassion and the rediscovery of the sacred
  • which this journey of life has blinded us to
  • The next great evolutionary shift must be conscious cultural evolution
    • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Jan%2Bsmuts
  • that is the direction civilization must collectively move
  • if civilization itself is to have a chance of surviving
  • emotional intelligence needs to balance intellectual intelligence

Each human being is born sacred. We each enter the world without pre-conceptions, filters or biases. We certainly do not enter the world with hatred or animosity. As scientist Gerald Edelman once said, we come into an undivided world. There is no division, there is only an experience of nature experiencing herself through a human body, a human form.

This initial embodiment of the sacred is transformed by culture's and introduced by culture's leading agent, our mother. She first introduces us to language and enculturates us into the world of other humans like us. And along the road of life, the diverse environments individual human beings find themselves (ourselves) in can cause us to stray from embodying the sacred as a living principle to the same degree as that first moment of birth.

In this moment of our collective human history, when the project of civilization building reveals a fundamental flaw and we are tasked to undo our impact on the natural world as exponentially quickly as we have damaged it, rekindling awe may be our final saving grace. For we need something extraordinary to turn things around at this point, and that extraordinary is something that has always been inside of each of us.

In the human-created world which now fills us with anguish, reminding each of us that we are sacred, returning to our primordial roots as being incarnations of nature herself, can accelerate system change in the nonlinear way now required.

As neuroscietist Beau Lotto points out, the Anthropocene is creating greater and greater uncertainty and unpredictability, but the one human trait evolution has created to help us deal with this is the sense of awe. See my annotation on Beau Lotto's beautiful TED Talk: How we experience awe and why it matters https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F17D5SrgBE6g%2F&group=world

In short, the sacred is the antidote to the increase in uncertainty and unpredictability as we enter into the space of the Anthropocene. Awe can be the leverage point to the ultimate leverage point for system change that Donella Meadows pointed out many years ago- it can lead to rapid shift in paradigms, worldviews and value systems needed to shift the system.

So very true. Monsters are made, not born. Everyone is born into the sacred, but then life can transform the sACred into the sCAred. Pathological fear can motivate a host of pathological responses such as selfishness, alienation, greed, anger, control, abuse, othering,dehumanization, etc.

A great quote and framing from Abigail Echo-Hawk.

This reliance on going to community elders (primarily because they have more knowledge and wisdom) is similar to designing for the commons and working backward. Elders in many indigenous cultures represent the the commons.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't continue to innovate and explore the evolutionary space for better answers, but going slow and fixing things is far more likely to be helpful than moving fast and breaking things as has been the mode for the last fifteen years. Who's watching the long horizon in these scenarios?

This quote and set up deserves some additional thought into the ideas and power structures described by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture