Both are outer expressions of something perhaps ineffable. Eden was about how a couple ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil but not of Life. Babel was about how a civilization built a tower and were struck mutually unintelligible. More religions and sects arise daily, not to mention new ideologies, subcultures, hobbies, family divisions, professions, genres, jargons, (life)styles, parties, and a million other ways in which man, the perpetual tailor, seems to stitch together new caps and robes as a pretext for carving out some obscure corner of truth in defiance of oneness, apparently preferring ego’s delusions which to the thinker are immediately revealed as petty and doomed, yet also for the untrained mind, very effective distractions. Some would say the shallow “I” is the wellspring of sorcery and all the world’s horrors, that peace’s ground zero is personal transparency. Does our experience not indeed testify that the more we quiet ourselves the more meaningfully we seem drawn together? But on the other hand is there something in us that craves division, or some mightier power that doesn’t want us banding together (as Genesis often suggests)? How then can we read history without blinders such that we can assertively set about activating our ideals and stop killing one another? Linguists posit a single source “Indo-European” root-language. What if there was likewise a Eurasian root-religion? I remember in Phenomenology (?) class we did some lingustics work centering around the apparently very old term “SAC,” from where we get the English “sacred,” “sacrament,” “sacrosanct,” and possibly also “sanctity.” Freemasons sort of take an élitist train of thought (or at any rate rhetoric) on this and would like us to assume that it was Israel’s King Solomon’s temple knights, of which they are allegedly direct heirs, who guarded the magical essence of which today’s conventions are sort of inbred offspring, sort of the way planets are the bastard children of stars (and, in the lore of Gnostics [a term that adjoins “Freemasons” and “Hindus”], Yahweh [blasphemy alert] is the bastard child of Sophia [i.e. Wisdom. Even those who are aware of Satanism seldom understand that misotheism {or hatred of God} also abides within a range of strands including Gnosticism {which itself modernly abides within so-called Thelema}]). But methinks Freemasons have gone a long way in rewriting history to fit their flaming mythology. (#Christopher Columbus exposed.) Moreover, and more to the point, they do not make room for love and common sense (much less do they give them first prize), presuming themselves to be enlightened (or in Latin “illuminati”). They elevate all materialistic theories as gospel (such as Marxism [Communism], Randism [Selfishism], Darwinism [Gradual Macroevolutionism and Brutalism] and Hoylism [BigBangism]) because of course they worship Satan and/or Planet Earth. I do not go quietly into that night; I do not join this race-to-the-bottom. (Even Christians who overemphasize the Incarnation to the detriment of the Resurrection are ceding to this terrapetal death-force. I believe (Orthodox) Christianity offers something more whole, saving and good. I don’t say that it is, much less am I, the last word on the true meaning or practice of the Platonic Transcendentals of Truth, Beauty, Goodness or Oneness. I don’t say that it perfectly glorifies the Biblical Yahweh, i.e. Being. I do think it worth anyone seriously interested in the higher things looking into. We may always have mystery, let us hold fast to Light.

I saw this clever-sounding saying on Facebook that

Philosophy is about questions we may never answer
whereas theology is about answers we may never question.

And in the modern Western world (which happens to not be the whole world, nor even the whole story on Christianity) this can almost seem to be the case. But (and the tenor of the Gospels’ message bears this out) Christianity only grew long arms when it was politically sanctioned, and sociologically its priesthood filled in for Paganism’s magi. It was with Constantine that you began to see a gulf yawn between religion and spirituality or free thought. And the truest example is this: that was when, armed with Plotinus, the Emperor’s men started to really cast aspersions on the “Gnostics” (another group about whose nature the modern West is astonishingly naïve.) And before the Age of Christendom there was most certainly a Pagandom*. What an individual considers oppressive on the one hand or “zen” on the other seems to have more to do with their ethnicity than their ideals. (Many Zionists don’t seem to see any problem with socialism, just with living under Europe’s and Arabia’s “Goyem.”) What we term “philosophy” came about as a higher/finer development of what we now term “Paganism” (pagan literally meaning villager, rustic; civilian, non-combatant) to the point of being not polytheistic, as we easily conceptualize Pagan mythology and cult, but strongly monotheistic, and it seems largely in the sense we modernly would term “deistic” or “unitarian.” Moreover, it might surprise some to learn that neither Paganism nor Christianity exist apart from magic. In fact no human (or divine?) pursuit of note seems to exist apart from the inspiration of magic, that is, of

• unseen connections in the world (such as what science is now calling wormholes),
• telekinesis (such as what science is now calling the observer effect) and
• uncanny sympathies between like forms (in pop culture, the law of attraction).

But Christian religion as it was initially preached is far more liberating than I think most of my fellow modern Western folks can really imagine. But we would have to have some regard for historical context to begin to understand. We have unlearned a lot of the lessons our ancient forebearers sought to stop relearning the hard way. Parents hope their children will not have to make the same mistakes they did, but they do. Seeing how bloated and slow we U.S. Americans are, it appears we have done a perhaps unprecedented amount of deevolving from our society’s authorship (1776 et al.). We generally lack in intellect and character, hence the number and kinds of rules we regard as oppressive as opposed to savvy. It is said that To fully understand Plato one would have to be wiser than Plato. To the fool everything sounds banal, but perhaps especially behavioral normatives. There is no society without rules, but there will always be some segment thereof who wants to have their cake and eat it too, to harvest that golden goose, because in their world dishonesty has little to no sting to it. In gangland, religion is presumed to be restrictive and superstitious and nothing else. In reality, those who have grappled with history have a tougher time of writing religion off quite so freely. But what our society has lost is lineage, and that is probably as good a stab as any at the question, Why are we becoming slaves? It is our idea of what freedom is that is distancing us more and more irreparably from any and all freedom. Our definition of freedom by now would be better termed entitlement and even parasitism. By the same token, we will not be able to hear the foregoing statement before the eleventh hour, if ever. A spirit has entered the United States of America and the modern West, and its name is Carelessness**. After so many generations of industrial fragmentation, we find we are more at home with things primal, primitive and primary, leaving all sophistication to the élite so they can have their way with us their willing underlings. So long as we don’t have to practice moderation much less continence. We subconsciously realize we are lab rats, but what we lack is the fortitude to decline the coercive invitation to be cogs in a machine, rats in a lab, organs kept alive in a jar. This version of freedom, even supposing it were free, is supremely unsustainable. In our lunge toward newness, we have actually returned to something quite primitive, and we are beings in whom is not “the strength of the hills”***. We show no signs of evolving, unless evolution now must necessarily mean merging with (and presumably being phased out by) our own machinery. Unlike the world Elohim (i.e. Their Majesties) created in Genesis, the world we are creating with our industry is not designed for us to inhabit it, much less subdue it, but as long as we fight for our right to party, well, hakuna matata.

Article: “Judaism’s Sexual Revolution”

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* By the advent of Christendom, Paganism had also largely drifted from Pagan ideals, probably making the excuse that they were outdated and changing conditions, blah, blah, blah, remind you of anybody?
** “Carelessness” as in the Bohemian Grove rituals wherein Club members (many of our top leaders) venerate the Canaanite owl-shaped death deity “Moloch” and cremate the human body called “Dull Care.”
*** C.S. Lewis, author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, wrote, “[J. R. R.] Tolkien once remarked to me that the feeling about home must have been quite different in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps this was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the woods – they were not mistaken for there was in a sense a real (not metaphorical) connection between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air and later corn, and later still bread, really was in them.
“We of course who live on a standardised international diet (you may have had Canadian flour, English meat, Scotch oatmeal, African oranges, & Australian wine to day) are really artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours.”
(The strength of the hills refers to a strategic advantage, referring to ancient war tactics [?], and is apparently a reference to Psalm 95:4 [very common in Orthodox prayer]: “In his hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the hills is his also.”)

Radicals without power are called “dangerous fanatics”;
radicals with power are called “visionary leaders,”

or as Mignon McLaughlin put it,
“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers,”

or as Jesus put it, “They [the sanctimonious fakers] have their reward.”

ON AUTHORITY, COMMUNITY AND THEIR REFERENCE TO THE INDIVIDUAL
A good deal of authority seems to derive not from some idea that the élite are specially in touch with the Almighty, but actually from the illusion that they are tuned in enough with common sense* to tap its genius. This common sense, which indeed can be identified with the sixth sense, the organ for which may well be the mind’s third eye (or pineal gland), also includes tradition because it entails venerating and indeed communing with teachers and other saints** who have passed to the other side. All magi, magisters and magisteria (plural of magisterium) are able to operate because they make constant (albeit veiled) reference to this phenomenon (i.e. to common sense). Indeed it is upon magi that we build words like magic, image, imagination and magistrate (http://www.scrabblefinder.com/contains/mag/). Historically the mage (sometimes magus) is a teacher, since our approach to all science (knowledge) and technology (and every last undertaking) was (is?) magic-based.*** A teaching office or faculty without the acquiescence, the consent and even the cooperation of the human imagining (read magical) faculty is, so far as I have seen, impracticable. There can be no discernible teaching class without the commoner’s active participation. The priesthood, however much they may dislike the fact, are anchored to the jargon of common sense, it is a sine qua non for their caste. The religious élite’s existence is best understood, not as a political fact, but as a reflection or a projection (in some cases a dim one) of an ideal that is also part of common sense, namely of what is (for good, ill or needless mental busywork) sometimes subcategorized as the deposit of faith. They represent the incarnation or crystallization of an archetype that somehow keeps society afloat, but let’s not confuse the issue by making the clergy itself out to be culture’s backbone.
Secondly the common, the community, also cannot exist without the individual, nor the individual without the community. Communism and individualism are both untenable; they are each the reason the other exists. Well, the real reason the warring ideologies exist is the same reason all bellicose and otherwise belligerent exchanges take place: the human ego spiked with an élite divide-and-conquer scheme. We could say that the community represents Being, where the individual represents Meaning. The community is the womb, the matrix, the body; the individual is the soul. Community must have individual, and vice versa. The common man and the thinker need each other as body needs soul, as wife needs husband.
My life’s experience indicates that from the communist or socialist collectivist camp United States Americans’ ears have been filled with such concepts as “a productive member of society” (to replace “a God-fearing citizen”) and, in the case of a convict, “repaying one’s debt to society,” intimating a very modernistic thought pattern that society is an organism and the individual is a mere organ. Yet history shows that those who have contributed the most truth, beauty, goodness (i.e. genuine godliness) and oneness (i.e. organic unity) to society have not always been the most productive or even socially conscious, certainly not the most exploitative or tyrannical. They have rather been the recluse who have managed, at times heroically, to mind their own bloody business, that have most edified the whole of society. (Perhaps this is the reason person and ego remain social conventions, albeit uneasy ones.) Many of the most memorable have been marginally autistic (which comes from the Greek autos or self). Yet even this fact and all relevant societal truths are being frantically buried by the would-be socializers as “social studies” replaces “history” and “civics” replaces “law.” Unless humanity is on the cusp of some unforeseen change in this particular area (namely in how the individual and the collective relate), I propose that our headlong plunge into collectivism is ill-advised, founded on a fanatical deviation from sound anthropology/sociology. It rather seems to stem from a branch of Illuminism that has convinced itself that an Atlantean utopia is immanent and that they are anointed to be its head honchos. Communists (such as Marxists and Alinskyites like Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the President of the United States of America Barack Hussein Obama) do not even see their project as a deviation but rather a fulfillment of democracy and the U.S. American experiment. They believe their will represents the collective will, that those who do not fall in line are simply out of touch with their own will, they are (in Scientological terms) “repressed persons” and should be killed out of compassion. Communism in theory is materialistic (cf. Satanism), leaps to earth-bound conclusions about man; communism in practice has killed vastly more people than any other system, including Nazism. If granted power, they have vowed to do the same in the United States of America. That is why they are to be trusted no further than Muslims.

“He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole”
(Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisitd).

ON EGO, PERSON, (PLACE, THING) AND IDEA
Getting even more word-persnickety here. Are “ego” (“I” or “self”) and “person” the same? Both (“ego” modernly and “person” initially) can mean “mask” and seem to have shallow, vainglorious connotations. Older wisdom and cultures seem to personify ideas (as well as places and things to be sure–even activities!) and idealize persons. Is that how we have in times past immersed mind in heart? Sort of a popular henosis (or simply integration, cf. theosis)? But in that case it seems that “person” need not be so superficial a term as it started off as. At any rate, spirit seems to abhor vanity, and it is always marginally suspicious even of individuality. But of course common sense would look askance at individuality; they’re sort of dueling facets of human life.
But then what of pride? Much of religionism (as Churchianity) seems to consider “pride” to be the deadliest of spiritual sins (or ailments). Usually they have the fall of Satan (or Lucifer if you prefer) in mind, coupled with sayings like “Pride cometh before a fall,” “How the mighty have fallen” etc. But it is a term that fairly demands redefining before it can be so harshly condemned. After all, pride in its folksy sense seems to connote quality of production. An artisan who takes pride in their work or a parent who is proud of their child has given of themselves, sacrificed themselves, denied themselves, assumed a burden and loved. To the saying, “How the mighty have fallen,” one wants to beg the question, What about the Almighty? For even Elohim**** (the name translated in Genesis as God [or in Arabic Allah]) saw that all He made of our world was at least “good” if not “very good.”
So is it only “spiritual pride” that is aberrant to the point of being “deadly”? or taking pride generally in oneself rather than in one’s creations? Yet really you never see spiritual self-love condemned by the teachings in the Hebrew of Christian Scriptures. In fact it is precisely our spirit, so it seems, that we ought to be caring for. Self-love is a ruler for gauging how to love one’s neighbor appropriately. However (as with “idea” and “person,” as with the mind and the heart) we are invited to consider a paradox: if you love your life, you will lose it; but if you hate your life, you have a chance in Christ to find it. “Baptism” means “immersion”; it definitely constitutes a death and rebirthing (or birthing from above, or simply “from the top”). Still, the cathartic or cleansing kind of death we are enjoined to seek is to our earthly lives, to our fleshly egos, precisely with the goal that the spirit take center stage. It can take the form martyrdom, which is the Greek for witness and culminates in theosis, which is the Greek for divinization (or sanctification, or the via unitiva). This only makes sense since “God is spirit,” and faith in a healthy physiology always seeks mysticism. If “humility is truth” as prominent Roman Catholic Bible scholar Desiderus Erasmus once said, I’ll take that humility. If “God is love” as the Apostle Paul said, I’ll take that God. Love wants to radiate from within. If the God of Scripture is to be the standard, then we cannot abuse our higher selves: what we want is to sacrifice our baser members in hot pursuit of higher gifts (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:31 ff.), to sacrifice our fleshly selves for our spiritual selves. That is how we actually worship God in our own members and demonstrate that we are disposed to abide by the Great Commandment. And that, I must say, is the Apostle Paul’s loftiest legacy. And because we do well always to want “higher gifts,” I do not buy the unscriptural dichotomy between loving them in and of themselves and wanting them for ourselves. Supreme blessedness (as heaven) is not a mere speculative or contemplative “beatific vision” we behold but a transformation, a “theosis” we become. If God is personal as well as unchanging (paradox, see also Three in One), then He must be experienced cordially (in the heart) as well as cerebrally (in the brain). In short, mystically (in the spirit). The Father-God Jesus describes is eminently resourceful and will give based on our petitionary tenacity. Self-denial is for the lower members, the carnal self; where the higher realms are concerned we are ordered to “store up…treasures in heaven.” So ambition, greed and exhibitionism–when these be of a celestial order–are consistently encouraged, praised and rewarded in the Gospel. Love is to be universal; active self-abasement is to be prudentially selective. That is the point I think worth making because modern churchgoers seem not to have ears to hear it, and as a result we’re selling ourselves dismally short.

An introduction to Holy Orthodoxy by the blogger.

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* Common sense is also termed sensus ecclesiae, the collective unconscious, or in the words of Vincent of Lérins, “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus” (“that which everywhere, that which always, that which by all [is believed]”), what is catholic, i.e. all-embracing, universal, integral and complete.
** Saints means holy ones, deified ones, those who have attained theosis, since God [and god] also comes from good in the sense of holy, such that god and saint each mean holy one.
*** Even materialism, which denies the supernatural, is a religion of earth-worship; modernism [i.e. immanentism] venerates the present; empiricism and positivism superstitiously exalt the senses; rationalism and intellectualism idolize the mental faculties.
**** It should go without saying that we are to seek above all else union with God, which is theosis, divinization, sanctification, or the via unitiva. Theosis is not hubris, any more than mysticism is divisiveness. Conflating the two stems from some truly preposterous late-medieval Occidental-imperialist sentiments visibly stemming from an uncatholic polarity or polemicism on East-West controversies; it is these sentiments that are destroying monasticism which is a huge component of true Christendom’s foundation. Again, theosis is not hubris, mysticism is not divisiveness, self-love is not other-hatred and pacifism is not sloth.

There is an Internet conspiracy theory floating around that Comet ISON is traveling with 7 companions as it travels through the Solar System. This is an inaccurate assumption.

This conspiracy theory began when a simple gif animation of Comet ISON was posted on SpaceWeather.com on January 16, 2013 and on Twitter on January 17, 2013 at 4:15 a.m. by the BBC’s The Sky at Night host (presenter) Pete Lawrence. The only intention of the gif animation was to show Comet ISON’s status in the sky at that time as viewed from Selsey, West Sussex, UK.

The gif animation featured imagery that was captured on January 15, 2013 at 23:01 UT through January 16, 2013 at 00:59 UT. The gif animation of ISON was compiled from photos taken through a Vixen 4-inch refractor telescope.

After the gif animation was posted unto Twitter, someone noticed what appeared to be unusual activity within the animation. A video was then created by a different person and uploaded unto YouTube on January 18, 2013 with the title of “Comet ISON Not Traveling Alone.” The video was later removed.

On January 19, 2013, Lawrence commented on Twitter that the objects on the gif animation were nothing more than “hot pixels which got through despite the frames being dark-calibrated.” The hot pixels seen in the imagery were basically nothing more than “individual pixels that look much brighter than they should.”

Other videos were subsequently uploaded to YouTube after January 18, 2013 with the inaccurate assumption that objects were following behind or with ISON.

These are samples of some of the inaccurate and sensationalized videos:

“BREAKING NEWS COMET C/2012 S1 ISON FOLLOWED BY ONE OR TWO UNKNOWN OBJECTS”

“COMET ISON IS BEING TAILED BY TWO UNKNOWN OBJECTS.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Each YouTube video uploader commented in the title line on what appeared to be one or two unusual objects in the animation. Each video also shows inverted imagery towards the end of the video of the original gif animation.

On January 22, 2013, this observation evolved into some seeing up to 7 different objects within the animation.

This would result in more YouTube videos being posted with the original gif animation with reinterpreted information.

Here is another sample of an inaccurate and sensationalized video:

“COMET ISON 2012 MAY HAVE 7 COMPANIONS 1st VIDEO”

The website text quoted in the above video is from here and here:

January 20, 2013 posting … !!!!!!! … THIS JUST IN … IT IS TOO EARLY TO CONFIRM BUT SOME INITIAL DATA SUGGESTS THAT COMET C/2012/S1 HAS AT LEAST ONE COMPANION AND POSSIBLY UP TO SEVEN … WHEN SOMETHING LIKE THIS HAPPENS ONE HAS TO BE VERY CAUTIOUS BUT AFTER EXAMINING THE DATA THAT I HAVE SEEN I WOULD SAY THAT IT APPEARS TO BE REAL …

And the uploader continues quoting the website:

FURTHERMORE ONE OF THE POSSIBLE COMPANIONS APPEARS TO BE AT ABOUT TWO LUNAR DISTANCES (HALF A MILLION MILES) AND HAS NOT FORMED A COMA FOR SOME ODD REASON … IF THE OBJECT IS ORBITING THE NUCLEUS OF THE COMET AT THAT DISTANCE IT IMPLIES THAT THE NUCLEUS OF THIS COMET IS POSSIBLY AS BIG OR BIGGER THAN EARTH … ALSO WITH COMPANIONS WE WILL BE ABLE TO DIRECTLY CALCULATE THE MASS AND THEREFORE THE SIZE OF THE COMET NUCLEUS … USING STANDARD ASTRONOMICAL METHODS … NASA TIER II SCIENTISTS HAVE ALREADY PUT THEIR FOOT IN THEIR MOUTHS WITH AN ESTIMATE BASED ON SOME GEEEE WHIZ BAD SCIENCE … AS I HAVE SAID BEFORE ONE OF THE BIGGEST OPEN LIES AT NASA IS CONCERNING THE SIZE OF COMET NUCLEI ALWAYS MINIMIZING THEM TO ALMOST NOTHING AND TRYING TO PROMOTE THEIR INCORRECT DIRTY SNOWBALL COMET MODEL … WE KNOW THEY CAN DIRECTLY MEASURE COMET NUCLEI WITH RADIO TELESCOPES SO WHY ALL THE BAD SCIENCE AND OPINIONED ESTIMATES ??? NORMALLY NO ONE WOULD BE ABLE TO CONTRADICT THEM…

And the uploader continues quoting:

NASA HAS BEEN EXTREMELY ACTIVE IN DAMAGE CONTROL ON THIS COMET AND JUST TODAY ISSUED A VIDEO CLEARLY DOING DAMAGE CONTROL … WHY ALL THE ANNOUNCEMENTS WHEN THE COMET (ACCORDING TO NASA) WILL NOT EVEN BE VISIBLE UNTIL NEXT NOVEMBER ?!?!?! STAY TUNED FOLKS THIS IS GETTING REEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL INTERESTING … jim mccanney