The Purpose of Life

 Human beings were first created in the image of God. We were the image of God to begin with. It is being deceived into thinking we needed to do something to be "like God" that we harmed ourselves and malfunctioned. The true purpose of our lives thereafter is then not just knowing God, not just having a relationship with Him, but it is nothing short of learning to access and be the image of God once again in spite of this malfunction. It is learning how to once more reflect our Creator in every way as was intended. For Christians, this means learning to imitate Jesus Christ who Himself was and is the genuine image of God the Father, submitting to and cooperating with His Father in everything He said and did. It means bypassing their hereditary neurological malfunction through letting go of their fear, aggression, and bodily craving responses and fully cooperating with the Spirit of Christ with whom we are one so that it is He who acts and speaks through us. As God is love, so it is our purpose to learn to reflect, channel, and be that God who is love for all others around us as His image.

On the Universal Understanding of the Original Human Malfunction

 In reading Epictetus, in reading Buddhist texts, and in reading the New Testament and Paul's letters in particular, the behaviors which human beings struggle with and which trip them up in everything all come back to the same three or four responses one way or the other. In nearly every case, and every system of thought, they come back to fear, anger/aggression, the craving for food, and the craving for sex or reproduction (both of which combined can be described singularly as "bodily cravings"). Where these responses present as arguing, depression, panic, murder, theft, greed, adultery, promiscuity, or elsewise it always comes down to these three or four basic human survival responses that we must mitigate and deal with being triggered, flight, fight, feeding, and sex in order to not cause harm to ourselves or others. Even pride is really a survival response rooted in fear, and in some ways can be considered the initial fear based survival response which produced the ego in the first place, and thereafter defends it.
     And all of these are produced, not by the soul or the spirit, but by the physical human brain, specifically these responses are controlled by the hypothalamus, the "gateway" to which is the amygdala. And it is the amygdala which has been demonstrated to "light up" when someone does something inconsistent with what they agree with, such as lying. It has also been demonstrated recently that the human amygdala is configured very differently from our primate genetic cousins, even if, in all other respects, our brains are more or less the same as theirs, proportionately speaking. Yes, our cerebral cortex is a bit larger, but that's about it all things considered.
      Something happened in our "evolutionary history" that caused a radical reconfiguring of the human amygdala from its primate origins. This reconfiguring caused our survival responses to react, not just to physical survival threats like they were supposed to, but also to perceived threats to one's ego, psychological threats, and even mere imagined threats that exist only within one's mind. It caused us to be in survival mode at nearly all times, reacting to everything as though it was a survival threat or survival need, which we would later term "good" (need) or "bad" (threat). Something caused the human amygdala, hypothalamus perhaps, and possibly the rest of our limbic system, to tweak just enough to where it believes it is still doing its original job of protecting us, but is instead malfunctioning and causing harm.
      And nearly every philosophical system in the ancient world recognized this even without understanding the underlying mechanics. Even today, we recognize that fear, anger, and bodily cravings must be kept in check if we are to have healthy, functional lives and societies. Why is this if the source of these responses is itself still healthy and functional, doing what it was designed to do?
      Our primate cousins do not suffer from this malfunction. They live pretty much as they always have, naked and without cognitive dissonance or guilt, reacting to actual threats as threats, and non-threats as non-threats. Were there to be no human beings on the planet, but just our primate cousins, there would be no pollution, no crime, no real wars, and there would be no climate change, no nuclear threat, and so on. There would be no scarcity of resources even. Nearly everyone acknowledges this fact, even if begrudgingly or unconsciously.
      We all know these things to be true from experience on some level, yet no one really wants to put it all together and acknowledge it. Either because it doesn't fit with their view of themselves, their religion, or because it is tied to the concept of "original or inherited sin", a concept which has been bastardized for far too long. We need to be honest with ourselves about this, and be honest that it is our own physical, neurologically based responses which are the problem.

Be Careful!

A dear friend recently posted a meme about how Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven; that is, how it is normal to expect them to fail, be hypocrites, and just be human. The thrust of the meme was that the point of being a Christian is being forgiven, not a change in behavior. As much as I love my dear friend, and I know he posted it with the best of intentions, this sentiment is demonstrative of the pernicious falsehood which permeates modern "Christianity" masquerading as the Gospel. As Paul wrote, "What then? Do we continue to error so that God's charity might overflow? God forbid!"
     Among the ancient Christians, it was understood that if you did not live as Jesus Christ taught, and walked as He walked, you were not considered a Christian and you were expelled from the congregation until you came to your senses. This of course was after being approached and confronted with your error, and that you were in submission to your own malfunctioning flesh rather than the Spirit of Christ. Mistakes are one thing, outright refusal to practice what He taught, or making excuses for not practicing what He taught while calling yourself a disciple was worse than non-belief. As Paul described such a person, "Their god is their belly, their glory is their shame, who set their minds on earthly things."
      All throughout the Scriptures, forgiveness by God is given freely upon a person's coming to their senses, returning home, and doing what is right. Believing Jesus Christ and following Him, living as He taught by submitting to the Spirit of Christ so that it is He who acts and speaks through you, clearly falls under this and forgiveness is given freely. But claiming His forgiveness while continuing to operate from your own malfunctioning responses of fear, aggression, and bodily cravings is not "changing your mind." It is not coming to your senses. It is making a mockery of Jesus Christ and giving cause to others to speak evil of Him, His Gospel, and God the Father Himself. Will God be pleased with the person who does this? Who, as the the Scripture describes, treats the blood of Jesus Christ as worthless and tramples it underfoot?
     To make one's home in Jesus Christ, to remain in Him, is like a wild branch being grafted into a domesticated plant, as Paul wrote, drawing its life and abilities from the trunk of the plant. But as he also wrote, if God pruned off other branches that weren't producing fruit in order that you might be grafted in, be careful. Pay attention. Because if you don't produce the fruit He's looking for, or worse, if you produce bad or toxic fruit, He may not spare you either.
     Modern Christianity needs to stop camping on His forgiving freely, using it as an excuse for all manner of erroneous behavior, and start camping on what the Path of Jesus Christ was about to begin with, submitting to and cooperating with the Spirit of Christ so that it is He who acts and speaks through you, and through Him, God the Father Himself. When this happens, then we will begin to see the Christianity which was described in the book of Acts and the Epistles in this day and age. When the sap from the trunk of the plant is finally allowed to start flowing through the branches to produce the fruit which God wants.

Thoughts on Epictetus and God's Outreach to the World

 As I'm finishing the first book of Epictetus' discourses, what strikes me the most is how much he and Jesus agree on the practice of discipleship. Epictetus was a Greek pagan, born in 50 CE almost twenty years after Jesus' death and resurrection, who worshiped Zeus. He would call what he taught being a philosopher, but though they say things differently, much of the substance of what Epictetus taught is complementary to what Jesus Himself said, and in no way truly disagrees. 

     Epictetus, like the Buddha, complements what Jesus taught regarding the disciple needing to let go of their attachments. It's clear that he lived and taught decades after Jesus ascended and the original disciples spread His Gospel and teachings, though it isn't clear that he's even aware of this. I tend to see this as another example of the same Author, the same Voice, speaking to and within different cultures and worldviews to get His message across. Why do I say this? Because Jesus Christ said the same things, maybe in different ways with different words, but He, being God made flesh, said the same things thus establishing that inasmuch as these men also said what He said, they were speaking the word of God as well. While He was fully manifest in and as Jesus Christ speaking to and within the Hellenistic Judean culture and worldview, that doesn't mean He was silent to everyone else, or didn't inspire anyone else to teach what He believed most important for them to know. 

     There is a reason why letting go of attachments, "treat others as you want to be treated," and a special focus on compassion, kindness, and love are so universal among nearly all of the ancient philosophies and great religious figures; because it was all coming from the same Source as He spoke into the different cultural contexts and worldviews. While God had a unique relationship to Israel, to say that He only spoke to Israel or responded to Israel while leaving everyone else to rot is to severely limit and misunderstand where the Bible says, "Because God so loved 'the world'..." If God loved the entire world, would He have really been silent to the entire world for most of their existence?

      I can't help but notice how familiar this sounds when compared with Paul's writings:

"That's the show a young graduate of the school should put on. Leave everything else to others. Don't ever let anyone hear you talk about these matters, and don't ever let anyone think that you have these abilities, but present yourself as an ignorant nobody. Make it clear by your actions alone that you know how to avoid encountering what you don't want to encounter. Leave the study of law court arguments, hypothetical problems, and syllogisms to others, while you focus on how to face death, imprisonment, torture, and exile. Approach all these things with confidence, trusting in the one who has called you to experience them and has judged you worthy of this post--an assignation that will enable you to show what a rational command center is capable of when it confronts forces that aren't subject to will." - Epictetus, Discourses, Book 2, 1:36-39, Robin Waterfield, trans.

     Consider also the Biblical passages next to a quote from Epictetus:

 "Don't you know that to whom you offer yourselves slaves for obedience, you are slaves to whom you obey, either of error resulting in death or obedience resulting in a right state of being?" Romans 6:16

"And who is your owner? Anyone who controls anything that you're interested in having or avoiding." Epictetus, Discourses, Book 2, 2:16, R.W., trans. with minor alteration

"No one is capable of being enslaved to two owners; because he will either hate the one and love the other, or he will cling to one and be minded against the other. You cannot be enslaved to both God and wealth." Matthew 6:24a

In reading Epictetus, I can't help but hear the echoes of both Jesus and Paul in his words (there are echoes of the Buddha here as well). The foundation of what he teaches is to let go of everything which is not up to you, and the only things which are up to you are your own will, choices, and judgments. How you respond to everything is up to you. Otherwise, what other people do, the relationships you have, the external wealth you possess, even your own body or possessions, none of these things are actually up to you. As such, you make yourself their slave, and the slave of anyone who controls what you might crave or be averse to, when you cling to them or are averse to them. You subject yourself to misery, pain, and suffering when you reverse the importance of what is up to you and the external things which are not up to you.
What is also interesting is that, like Socrates, Epictetus also teaches all of this, and does all of this, in the service of the God (which to him, being a pagan Greek, was Zeus but for our purposes here that is irrelevant). He says:

"If you're ever in the presence of a powerful man, remember that someone else is looking down from on high at what's going on, that it's him you have to please rather than that man." Then speaking of that someone else questioning him, "'Now tell me what things you took to be good.' 'Right exercise of will and right use of impressions.' 'And what is the goal?' 'To follow you.'" (Discourses, Book 1, 30:1, 4, R.W., trans.)

Like Jesus, Epictetus too understood that you cannot be a slave of two owners. You can either be enslaved to God, or you can be enslaved to those things which are not up to you.

The Origin of the Ego/Mind/Identity as The Brain's Original Trauma Induced Fragmentation

     Some time ago, a friend recommended a book to me, Healing The Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, (Fisher, Janina. New York: Routledge, 2017), which talks about the neurobiological basis of compartmentalization of the mind. The fascinating premise of Dr. Fisher is that rather than just a response to extreme trauma in childhood such as produces Dissociative Identity Disorder, the brain actually uses either total or partial fragmentation, or "self-alienation," in order to cope with trauma as a rule. While DID is the most extreme version of this, and the easiest to see as the "personalities" are distinctly compartmentalized and separate from one another, partial compartmentalization can be seen in people who might otherwise appear on the surface to have a fully integrated personality. In the book, which is incredibly well documented, she describes people who are able to put on a separate "self" in order to function with relative normalcy in work, school, and social situations, but internally remain broken and traumatized from past wounds often succumbing to self-destructive behavior and addiction in order to quiet that still hurting "self." In other words, this person, even though a single identity, can operate as two separate personalities because the brain compartmentalized the core personality to protect itself while creating another to take the trauma in a similar, though milder way to DID.

     I wrote before in previous posts that, "the EMI [the 'ego/mind/identity; what we would call the "self"] itself is an artificial construct, the physical brain's attempt to jury rig an OS if you will because of the interruption of its connection to that original Consciousness due to the overactive survival responses and the underlying panic mode in which it finds itself." And also, "In this way, one's ego, Old Man, or EMI is intrinsically tied to the hamartia malfunction, and is a by-product of it just as much as our sense of "right and wrong" or "good and bad" is a product of that malfunction. Furthermore, our assignation of "good" or "bad" to those things which please or displease, what the brain's fight/flight/feeding/sex response system mistakenly registers as survival necessities or survival threats, further reinforces those things as a part of our personal identity with which the ego uses to define itself, being a product of that malfunctioning fear survival response. Why does it do this? Because our survival response system is always in overdrive, it reacts with fear to nearly everything. And when we are panicked and afraid, we blind ourselves to our Source, the God in whose image we ourselves are made and carry, and are cut off in this way from the Spirit of Christ as Fear and Love cannot coexist together in the same place. One is blinded to God when he or she submits to their fear responses, and as human beings, we are subconsciously ruled by fear because of our malfunctioning survival responses. Being blind to the genuine source of identity, the brain panics and devises its own in order for it to continue to function." Thich Nhat Hanh writes in The Art of Living (New York: HarperCollins: 2017), "In Buddhist Psychology, the part of our consciousness that has a tendency to create a sense of self is known in Sanskrit as manas. ... Manas manifests from deep in our consciousness. It is our survival instinct, and it always urges us to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Manas keeps saying, 'This is me; this is my body; this is mine,' because manas is unable to perceive reality clearly. Manas tries to protect and defend what it mistakenly thinks is a self." (p. 31) 

      Based on these two ideas, the thought occurred to me this morning that the original development of the human EMI, the "self," is actually the human brain reacting to the trauma of fear induced separation from that Source of consciousness. That is, the person we originally identify with, our core personality, is itself the brain's first and original compartmentalization in response to the trauma of being "blinded" from the Source of consciousness due to the malfunctioning and overactive survival response. The "self" we identify as is itself a fiction created by the brain in order to continue functioning in its perpetual, emergency panic state.

     The ego/mind/identity, the fictional "self" created by the malfunctioning survival response, must be dealt with before one might truly experience unity with the Spirit of Christ. That we are all one with Jesus Christ is an accomplished fact, but we do not all experience it, and not at all times, because of this physiologically produced mind or personality which is founded or based on the malfunctioning brain's fears and cravings. This must be rendered inert or disengaged from before one might experience functioning from the Spirit of Christ. There are several means of accomplishing a disengagement from it, even for just a short time, but they all require discipline and practice to maintain. They all involve continuous conscious effort.

Orthodoxy vs. Orthopraxy

I am finding that the older I get, the less I am worried about orthodoxy and the more I am concerned with orthopraxy. When I was younger, the major things I was taught to fight for involved the mechanics of Jesus being both God and human, maintaining the vague lines of the Holy Trinity, and other similar things which, quite frankly, no human being can actually discern with any accuracy. But the older I get, the more I see that all of this is really just distraction. Jesus might have alluded to some of these things, assumed some of these things, but it's not what He harped on or taught most of the time, and according to Him, orthodoxy isn't even how we are judged. 

     No, the major things which He harped on were loving one another, literally the last command to His disciples before the cross, treating others as we want to be treated, mercy, compassion, forgiveness is a big one, and just being kind to one another. Jesus cared so much less about what anyone thought about His nature and so much more about whether or not they loved and forgave their enemies. 

     What difference does it really make if you are Trinitarian, Unitarian, or Monist if you're not being kind to one another? Forgiving one another, and loving one another as He loved us? What difference does it make if you're orthodox or Nestorian if you don't live as He taught? Can you really call yourself a Christian, can you really call yourself a disciple if you strictly adhere to the Nicene Creed and yet ignore or contradict Jesus' very teachings? Is it really necessary to tithe down to the penny, and yet ignore the most important things of the Gospel like mercy, love, compassion, forgiveness, and non-judgment? 

     God's not going to give you a theology test in the afterlife, but He is going to replay your life from everyone else's point of view, and it will hit hard when you experience how you treated others from their viewpoint. "As much as you have done these things to the least of these my brothers, you have done it also to Me." Simply being kind to one another, even something as simple as giving a cup of cold water to a child, is so much more profoundly important than what you believe about God's existence and relationship to His creation that Jesus was explicit about it.

      "What did Jesus teach?" is the first question which should be on a Christian's lips, not "What do I think Jesus is?"