From: "anartax...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com>
I wonder what companies pander to religious relics, for example could there
be the Coprolites of God Mint, which makes gold-plated casts of the turds of
saints? This psychology is certainly not confined to religious nuts. People buy
relics left over from a motion picture production. I wonder who has the Maltese
Falcon statue from that early 40s flick with Bogart.
Excellent point. "Relics" are what we make them. See below.
I am not entirely immune to this effect. I was at the Morgan Library in New
York City, and there under glass was the original manuscript of a Mozart
symphony I am fond of, something Mozart touched and wrote upon two and a
quarter centuries ago. I would have loved to leaf through the pages.
On the wall over my bed hangs a Tibetan high lama's robe, from the 17th-18th
century. I bought it from a Tibetan who had managed to escape with it to a
Tibetan sanctuary in the U.S. I bought it from him for a song ($500), not only
because he agreed to share half the money with the Tibetan sangha-in-exile that
had referred me to him, but because he told me a cool story about the robe.
It's style -- Tibetan, after the style of Chinese robes at the time -- defines
it in terms of time. It's really a high lama's robe from a certain identifiable
period of time in Tibetan history (1690-1705); I had that verified by other
experts. The person who sold it to me said that his family said it came from a
certain monastery, where it was worn by the high lama during certain ceremonial
occasions. He would wear it while dancing for them. The dance was a form of
transmission meditation -- it was considered to be of huge karmic value to be
present during one of these dances.
OK, he had me at "a high lama used to wear this robe while dancing for his
disciples to get them high." I bought the robe on the spot. But when I got
home I remembered my Tibetan history and looked up the monastery in question
and discovered the actual *name* of someone who could have occasionally been
the visiting high lama of this particular monastery. None other than my
favorite character in human history, the Sixth Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso,
the Turquoise Bee.
It is actually possible that the Tibetan ceremonial robe I discovered and have
hanging on my wall was actually worn by my favorite character in history as he
performed a dance of transmission meditation to get his disciples high. It's
also possible that there may be something to all this "relic" stuff and that
something of the "vibe" of a person's bones or the clothes they wore is
captured in and emanated by the articles themselves.
That would certainly account for what it feels like to put on this particular
robe and wear it.
Let alone dance in it.
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There seems to be something in my psychology that 'likes' those kinds of
connexions. Is this a general human thing to want to link together aspects of
our lives? You seem to have similar kinds of connexions in your life, e.g.,
Robert Crumb being a neighbour. Something in our societal brain that maybe has
to do with linking to something larger and beyond ourselves maybe? The alpha
dog syndrome?
The effect can get out of hand, particularly with religion, when you start to
attribute magical powers to historical artefacts or replicas or outright fakes.
It seems within reason to have nice feelings about things that link together
those experiences in life that make us wonder, if it does not get out of hand.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote :
Although I have never read anything about this practice, I can imagine where it
came from -- self-created "holy relics." Religious nuts in Asia were as crazy
about relics as their Western counterparts. Think back to the booming business
in "pieces of the true cross" and "the bones of Jesus." I personally have seen
the supposed skull of Mary Magdalene in a reliquary in a cathedral in the south
of France. ( Trust me, she's looked better. :-)
Well, Eastern churches a few centuries back were no different than they are
today -- they were looking for things to get newbies in the doors so they'd 1)
become believers themselves and 2) leave the contents of their wallets there
when they left. What better relic than the nearly-perfectly-preserved body of a
monk seated in meditation, that they could show off to newbies to convince them
their practices were so hot that this guy just went into samadhi one day and
never got up.
And the thing is, you're dealing with religious fanatics, so there would be no
need to *force* the monks into starving themselves to death -- they'd do it
willingly just to "spread the faith."
This is all just a guess on my part, but if anyone feels motivated to do any
research on it, I'd be willing to bet you'll find similar speculations on the
part of scholars.
In other words, s3raphita, I don't think it's a Buddhist thang at all. It's a
"preserve the illusion that our teaching is cooler than it really is" thang.
Religious fanatics do this kind of shit all the time. Just think about how many
years Tony Nader pretended to be the ultimate purusha celibate because
Maharishi wanted him to pretend to be. To do this, he had to lie to almost
literally *everyone in his life*, including his best friends and co-Rajas.
People will do *anything* in the name of their beliefs if those beliefs have
been implanted in them deeply enough. #yiv4941178579 #yiv4941178579 --
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