--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Robert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Janet Luise" <janluise@> > wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <no_reply@> wrote: > > > > > Can I ask a question? I don't know you from Adam, > > > but you've been coming across a tad...uh...cultlike > > > about this Tom fellow. And the website you pointed > > > us to has a vibe that's more than a little icky IMO. > > > How much money have you...uh..."contributed" to > > > this Core Spirituality Institute? > > I remember Tom, when I was at MIU in the late '70's, early 80's... > He always seemed to be an honest intense, 'in your face' kind of > guy... > I think sometimes people who have intense personalities or who > exclaim passionate rhetoric, can often be viewed as cultish... > Why people have this reaction, I don't know. > I heard a lady on C-Span this morning, from Kentucky, who was > saying something about Barack Obama scares her, and reminds her > of someone like the cult-leader Jim Jones, who had is followers > commit mass suicide back in some past bad dream... > This is the mentality of some people, which I find strange, to > say the least..
It's a viable concern, one that I mistakenly had myself until Janet's post cleared it up. It seems that what I mistook for "follower enthusiasm" is far simpler -- the enthusiasm of someone for her long-time partner's work. And it's *diligent* work, well-written and well- footnoted. The bibliography is a bit pretentious, but he's probably read all those things. My issue with the book is that I'm just not interested in the subject matter. Jesus leaves me as cold as the fishes he multiplied to feed to the faithful. :-) I just got involved because of a favorite nitpick of mine, the tendency for people to project *onto* ancient religions and belief systems their more modern and completely unrelated beliefs. I've spent so much time wading through that with regard to the Cathars (a group related to the Gnostics in that they both sprang from the same Dualist found- ations) that I'm a tad over-sensitive. Given *my* sensibilities and the things I've studied in my life, it took me a long time to "get" the appeal that Dualism *had* for the ancient mind. Them was tough times, man. The average lifespan was about 40; death and disease and injustice and in- equality were everywhere you looked. The Catholic Church was as corrupt and degraded as a spiritual institution can possibly be. And the Catholic "take" on God was that he was the *architect* of all this evil and injustice and inequality that people saw all around them, but that he was a Good Guy anyway. Buzzzzzz. Just doesn't compute. But the Dualist idea that the world they saw about them *wasn't* created by God but by the Other Guy? That computed. It didn't require the people to believe that the same God that they believed was all-Good could turn around and waste your entire village with the plague. So the Dualist ideas took hold and became, in the south of France and in other areas, more popular than the mainstream Catholic Church's ideas. This was somewhat of a challenge to the Catholic Church, and they reacted predictably and created two Crusades and the Inquisition and eliminated the "unsound ideas" by killing the people who thought them. So it goes. I don't actually *believe* the ideas of the Cathars or the other Dualists I've studied; I find them completely opposed to my own. But I enjoy studying them. At the same time, I try not to impose my ideas onto theirs. They believed different things; they did NOT have any idea of being able to attain a permanent Union with God in this life. Anyone who started talk- ing about Unity experiences would have been driven out of the group instantly. So when I encounter New Agey tracts that portray *proud* dualists as non-dual, it gets my dander up. Gnosis was a temporary insight, one that could not in their view be made permanent as long as the perceiver was "burdened" by a material body. To suggest otherwise about what *we* believe is OK; but to suggest otherwise about what these people believed seems to me to be projecting one's Eastern philosophy onto a Western tradition and trying to make it "fit." Square peg, round hole. As for the website that made Tom's book available, I don't get a good feeling for the organization, but hey!...I took advantage of a website that isn't mine and not all of whose ideas I agree with to make one of my books available for free, too, so who am I to complain? Bottom line for me is that I've got a limited time left on this rock, and hopefully a lot of books to read before I'm outa here. I just can't spend my time reading the ones that don't interest me. And any book whose focus is to suggest that Christ was more than human just isn't going to interest me. That *weakens* his story IMO. The whole "avatar" thang just so completely misses the point in my opinion that I just glance its way and then move on to something that gets the idea that there is nothing *at all* special about the enlightened. They just achieved normality, that's all, while most of us haven't yet.
