The Two Kinds of Requests and Their Sources in Prayer or "Manifestation"

 Here is some food for thought. Why would you strive to be a millionaire or billionaire when everything is already yours? Why would you set your sights so low as to strive for a currency which could be worthless tomorrow, or any material object as a personal possession, when you yourself are one with God who owns everything, and from whom everyone merely borrows? Why would you pray for baubles like this, or try to "manifest" such things when they are nothing in comparison with what is already yours through whom you are already a part of? It is quite frankly a kind of insanity.

     What is the source or origin of wanting more money, a better house, more friends, a "better" significant other? What are we operating from? The flesh, which is malfunctioning, or from the Spirit? Certainly the God knows that we need food, shelter, clothing, and so on in order to continue living in this life. Certainly He's aware that this frequently takes money in our society. That is not the issue at hand. But when we want or think we need more than what is given to us by Him, why is that? When we think we need these things to be happy or happier, why is that? What is at work there?

     Most of the time, what is at work is fear of not having enough. Similarly, fear of being consigned to a lower social class than your peers is also at work. Fear of not feeling secure or safe. So what is at work with this kind of prayer or "manifesting" is tied to fear which is the dominant response of the malfunctioning survival response system in the human brain. In other words, desiring or believing that you need more than you have been given is a response born from the flesh, and not the Spirit. There are times and places where such things are appropriate, and where they benefit not just the recipient, but all those around the recipient. And there are some prayers for such things which are appropriate within their own context, and when the request is born from love and not fear, for selfless reasons and not selfish ones.

     There are then these two kinds of requests of the God, ones born of fear and self-service, and ones born of love and service to others. The God's purpose for each of us is to free us from our enslavement to our malfunctioning neurology, to free us from doing the bidding of our overreactive fear, aggression, and bodily craving responses. His purpose is for each of us to cooperate with Him and to operate with our true nature as a member of Him, a fractal, a piece or shred of Himself so that His love flows through each one of us. Which kind of request furthers this purpose?

      Sometimes God answers these flesh born requests just to get someone's attention. It's His way of flashing a sign in front of your face saying, "Hey, I'm right here!" But when He has your attention, He tends to shift away from it and tends to try and get you to make progress towards His goals for you, rather than your own frequently misguided goals for yourself. Those goals of His for you more often than not involve shedding those things you thought you needed, and those things you thought were certain and secure so that you would trust Him instead of things which are by nature impermanent. He wants you to see what you really are to Him, and that is very difficult with distractions.

     Jesus' conditions for receiving what we ask for are these, that we ask with His name, and that we make our home within Him and His words make their home within us. And as John said, how can someone actually be making their home within Him if they do not love?

     Consider the source of your requests to God carefully. Are they from fear, or from love?

When God Lets You Go Hungry

      The question often comes up, “Why didn’t God give me what I asked for?” or “What didn’t God give me what I needed?” Sometimes it’s “Why did God let me or my family go hungry?” I was thinking about this very thing this morning, and I wanted to share the answer with a story about my wife. My wife, Heidi, at this point is in perfect health, and is strong enough to not only manage the farm we live on, but carry more than her weight in caring for the animals. But just five or six years ago that wasn’t the case. In fact, that wasn’t the case for a sizable part of her life.

     When I first met Heidi, we knew she had some kind of seizure disorder, though it wasn’t like any kind of epilepsy most people had heard of. She had a few episodes in college when we first met, but the ones I remember most is when she would lose the use of one of her legs. The doctors in Lewiston where she grew up either couldn’t find anything or wouldn’t find anything, and at least once suggested that it was “all in her head.” Her pregnancies were hard on her body, and by the third one, she was wheelchair bound for most of it.

     Then for a while, she was doing very well, and was working as a special education instructional aid for moderate to severe preschool kids. She did this for two years. And then one morning, right after I had recovered from a serious month long lung infection, she woke up and couldn’t move. She couldn’t get out of bed. She had almost no strength in her limbs. For days, and then weeks, she could only hold herself up for about ten or fifteen minutes, and then she had to be propped up. We took her to a clinic we could somewhat afford, but they had no idea what was happening, and neither did we. She ended having to resign from her job after I had to leave mine because of my lungs. We had to research her symptoms online and came up with Guillan-Barre syndrome, but we had no way to see a doctor. The weeks passed into months, and she barely recovered enough of her strength to walk short distances. 

     We moved out to Tennessee where I became the co-pastor of a parish for a short time. One of the women in the parish had celiac disease and was completely gluten-free. She suggested that Heidi might try it and see if it helps. She did, and she started slowly recovering her strength and function. She still needed the wheelchair on occasion, and as she started cutting out more foods, she started getting better. Not 100%, but better.

     After the 1000 year storm in Tennessee we relocated to live at her grandparents’ old ranch which had been standing empty for a few years by then. At first, I got a job in town and we were doing okay. But we were living in the middle of wheat fields, and especially during harvest time the wheat dust would infiltrate the house and Heidi would lose use of her limbs again. Then I lost my job, and regardless of what we tried, we couldn’t seem to bring in hardly any income. We went on food stamps, but then those were taken away about a year later. We watched as our pantry and refrigerator dwindled to nothing until we only had pinto beans to eat. And we made those pinto beans for the five of us, Heidi, myself, and our children, every meal until they were gone. And then the only thing we had left was a few fifty pound bags of dried peas which we recovered from the fields outside which had been dumped and left. I don’t remember how long we went eating the beans, and then the peas. And you have to understand, it was only peas which we had to soak, cook, and then eat. We all dropped huge amounts of weight as our bodies went into fasting and starvation mode. 

     At this point, we were praying like mad for more food, an income, some kind of provision. We were hungry and getting thinner by the day, and I couldn’t find work or produce anything to feed us. And the biggest question on our minds was “God, why?” Throughout our lives and our marriage, we had sought to follow wherever God had led us, and follow what He wanted, even when we didn’t understand. We thought we were where we were supposed to be, doing what we were supposed to do at that point in time, and we were losing weight because all we had to eat was peas. I think a neighbor might have stopped by and given us a bunch of frozen fish he had caught but couldn’t use as well. You better believe we were thankful for that fish.

     We ate only beans and then peas for maybe a month and a half or so. After that, my mother sent us some money. We didn’t tell her what was going on. We didn’t tell anyone what was going on. But she felt like the Lord had moved her to send something, and we were grateful. Over the next couple of years, we continued to struggle with our finances, and to make a long story short, we moved down to Arizona and ended up in an R.V. which we then, literally on faith alone, took across the country (that is another long story), and eventually ended up on my uncle’s property for a year where, while we never went as long as we did at the ranch, there were times when we continued to have very little to eat.

     But, throughout this time, Heidi started to get stronger again to where, when we eventually returned to California, she was able to regain her full health once more though her diet was incredibly restrictive if she was to avoid the partial seizures she got. And it continued to get more restrictive as time went on. But she returned to her job as a special education aid, and was very physically active.

     Then, in 2019, Heidi went to work one morning, lost the use of her legs, and then collapsed. I would have to drive and get her. This time however, we had medical insurance and were able to take her to the doctor where, after three doctors and two MRIs, she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and Transverse Myelitis as the lesions on her spine and brain became apparent. The doctor, the MS Specialist at UCI Medical Center, would give her ten years, and then after that…

     Heidi wouldn’t accept that. Like the stranded astronaut in “The Martian” she made the determination, “I’m not going to die here.” And held her ground. She knew that the medication for it would likely make her worse because of the fillers, and so she declined to take it, much to the doctor’s chagrin. She also knew that the medication could do just as much damage as the MS itself. Instead, she went online and started researching, and researching for anything or anyone that might give some kind of a lifeline.

     The first thing she really tried was CBD oil upon the suggestion of a friend. And it did help. It got her out of the wheelchair and able to walk on her own for longer distances and time. After this, GABA was added to her routine. We discovered this after I was watching a Great Courses video on the Biological roots of human psychology to brush up on a previous course on Psychobiology I had taken in college. In one of the courses, the professor was discussing how in some people, the brain produces too much of the neurotransmitter glutamate and when it does, it can literally explode dendrites on neurons in the brain causing seizure. 

     Gluten is about 25% glutamine, and glutamine becomes glutamate in the body. This explained why gluten and certain other foods were causing her seizures. But what I remembered from my coursework was that almost every neurotransmitter has an opposing neurotransmitter, so that if one is the accelerator (like glutamate) the other is the brake and the two are meant to balance one another. I couldn’t remember what the balancing neurotransmitter was, and so I contacted a psychologist friend whom I trusted and asked him. It was GABA, and the Amen Clinic where he worked produced a GABA supplement that was more efficient in getting past the blood brain barrier. He used his work discount and picked some up for Heidi in addition to her CBD oil. She was able to leave the wheelchair behind mostly after that.

     Heidi continued to do her online research and found that the MS medication worked by replicating the state the body goes into when fasting. After doing more reading, she felt like she needed to go on a hard 40 day fast which started on a liquid only diet, and only towards the end could she eat more solid food during certain times of the day. She did this twice over the next year, and her strength completely returned. She got to the point that she no longer needed the CBD, and then eventually dropped the GABA as well. The next MRI she got was completely clear as she walked into her appointment with the MS Specialist and told her what she had done. She has not had a flare up since in the last four to five years.

      So what does all of this have to do with how God answers prayers, and when He says “no”? We didn’t know Heidi had MS when we were eating just beans and then peas. We certainly didn’t know that fasting like that, as hard as it was, was the best treatment possible for her. But those periods where we felt like we were literally starving saved her life and hit the reset button on her MS long enough for her to get to where she could get a real diagnosis and learn how to overcome it. God knew what was going on even when we didn’t. He wasn’t ignoring our prayers. He was saving her life and treating her disease the best way possible at the time. If we hadn’t have gone through that, we might have lost Heidi to MS years ago. Instead, she reversed and beat it.

     When we talk about trusting God for our provision, we have to do just that, even when He doesn’t provide in the way we think we need in that moment. We also must trust that He knows what He’s doing, and He knows when we need something we ask for, and when we need that thing to be withheld for whatever reason He sees fit. We need to trust that He really does have our best interests at heart, even when it looks like everything is collapsing around us. You never know when God’s “no” or “not yet” may just be saving your life.

Reflections on Ancient Alien Theory

 I've been somewhat considering or entertaining the notion of the "alien origin" theory. The idea that human beings, in whole or in part, are descended from aliens who came in ancient times. Usually the theory goes that aliens came down and altered human DNA from our original ancestors by inserting some of their own into the mix to create Homo Sapiens.
     Among other problems with this theory, the one that sticks out to me the most is the problem of DNA. When you compare the DNA between human beings and chimpanzees, they are 98-99% identical. But that 1-2%, while variant, is largely a matter of different genetic switches turned on or off. That is, the genes are still present, just dormant. When you then spread out from there, or go deeper, while the deviations increase the further up the evolutionary tree you go, all life on earth is still built on the same building blocks of adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine (ATCG) and still has a double helix. This is true whether it is plant or animal life.
     Were human beings to have been a kind of hybrid life form between alien and native genetic material, we should see something different, something radically different that no other lifeform on Earth shares, in that 1-2% of genetic variance between us and our closest genetic cousins. What are the actual chances, given the probabilities of evolutionary development to begin with, that life would arise on another planet, no matter how close, with the exact same building blocks and double helix structure as on Earth? Perhaps we might eventually find evidence of a bacteria on Mars which could definitively answer that question (not outside the realm of possibility), but at the moment, it seems pretty far fetched to suggest that.
     "Well, what about the theory that Earth was originally seeded with life that didn't originate here, that might explain that." True, it might, but it would totally negate the humans as alien hybrids hypothesis. If that were the case, then that would have happened roughly 2-3 billion years ago. Animal life in particular didn't arise until roughly about 500 million years ago when the oxygen in the atmosphere built up enough to support it. The aliens would have been long, long, long gone by 300,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens first emerged.
      The time frames involved don't line up either with all of the ancient aliens theories such as the Sumerian Anunnaki actually being a race of aliens posing as gods (a la Stargate). The Sumerian civilization collapsed and evolved into the Babylonian roughly around 2000BCE. It really only tracks back to about 4000BCE. Homo Sapiens arose around 300,000BCE. You have to understand the shear scale of the time frames involved. Human civilization from start to now is only maybe 15,000 years old, and no one actually knows much less remembers anything for certain about that beginning period of time. Does anyone really believe that the Sumerians, much less any later society, would remember anything about beings from 300,000 years ago? That strains credulity immensely. The only reason we know anything about Adam and Eve is because of prophetic revelation.

     So then, how does one explain a relatively credible source such as Joseph McMoneagle's remote viewing of Mars 1 millian years ago, and his insistence that we are descendants of survivors of a Martian catastrophe? (For context, he viewed Martians that had already been dead for a long time at 1mya. When he was asked to go back to when they weren't, there's no time reference to when that was he then viewed. It could have been 1.5mya, it could have been 1bya.) Mr. McMoneagle's remote viewing accuracy is well established, and the credibility of his Mars session transcript is only increased when you understand that he had no idea he was remote viewing Mars until after the session was over. This being said, the first rule of remote viewing is not to attempt to interpret what you're viewing. Mr. McMoneagle viewed that Martian survivors journeyed to a place with a lot of active volcanoes and weird plants. No animal life was mentioned. It was a place which is described a lot like primeval Earth roughly about a billion years ago. Again, the time frames and conditions involved must be taken into account. If there had been any attempt at relocation to primeval Earth, it is highly unlikely that those Martian survivors even survived for any length of time after arrival, and if they did, they would have been limited to the technology and resources which they had on hand like any other colonist or "castaway". The ability to travel between planets does not mean the ability to terraform, or any other fantastic science fiction technology.
     So, there are these difficulties with these theories which, in my mind, will prove insurmountable without good evidence otherwise.

A Hypothesis About The Confusion of Languages at Babel As Recorded in Genesis

 I've had a thought that's been brewing about the confusion of the languages at Babel. Most will take this story as a myth or a legend about how the different languages came about. The thing about legends is that every legend has a kernel of truth to it, and I have an idea of what that might be for this one.
     The story of Babel goes like this:

The whole earth was of one language and of one speech. As they traveled east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there. They said one to another, “Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.” Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do. Come, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth. (Genesis 11:1-9, WEB)

     Babel or “Bavel” is the ancient Hebrew name for Babylon. In turn though, Babylon as a culture and a people inherited a great deal from the even more ancient Sumerian people, including religion, territory, and language. What’s interesting about this too is that even as late as 500 BCE they were still using the ancient Sumerian language in their religious liturgical and magical rites. When the Biblical text describes Abraham as having left Ur of the Chaldeans, Chaldeans are another name for the Babylonians even though Ur during the time of Abraham (approximately 2000 BCE give or take 100+years) was the city of a Sumeria in the process of collapse.
       Ancient Sumerian is considered a language isolate, that is, a language with no known siblings or daughter languages and a part of no known language family (though there is strong evidence to indicate that Basque might somehow be a descendant). Unlike Indo-European languages like Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit it is an agglutinative language rather than an inflected language. Unlike Semitic languages, it doesn’t follow the three consonant pattern of verbs and word cognates. All things considered, it should bear as much resemblance to either language family as a tribal language from Papua New Guinea; none at all.
     But what’s really interesting to me about ancient Sumerian, and what throws a bit of a monkey wrench into this are the first person singular and second person singular pronouns. Why? Because they follow both the Indo-European and the Semitic patterns. What’s so significant about this? Because pronouns, because of their very nature, are some of the slowest parts of speech to undergo changes in the natural evolution of language.
     To give an example, look at the word for “I”, the first person singular pronoun. In Indo-European patterns, it always follows a vowel-velar-vowel pattern of some kind. Sometimes the first vowel is omitted, sometimes the latter one is omitted, sometimes, as in modern English, the velar is omitted, but you will never see a vowel-dental-vowel pattern, for example. To illustrate what I mean:

Hittite (1500-2000BCE) – uk     Gothic (4-600CE) – ik     Anglo-Saxon (1000CE) – ic            Latin (500BCE-1000CE+/-) – ego     Greek (500BCE-present day) – ego     
Sanskrit (1500BCE) – aham

In Sumerian, the first person singular pronoun morpheme is “gu”. When you look at a word from the ancient Semitic languages like Hebrew (circa 1000 BCE), you see the elements of this within the pronoun as well, “anokhi”. In Akkadian, a Semitic language contemporary with Abraham’s Sumeria, the word is “anoka.” You see the same agreement with the second person singular pronouns, “you (thou)”, dental-vowel:

Hittite – zik    Gothic – thu    Anglo-Saxon – thu     Latin – tu     Greek – su     Sanskrit – tvam

In Sumerian, the second person singular pronoun morpheme is “zu.” In Hebrew, the second person singular masculine pronoun is “atah.” In Akkadian, it’s “atta.”

      For more examples, the Sumerian word for father is "abba" (Hebrew and Aramaic, ab, abba) or "adda" (Greek familial, atta). The Sumerian word for mother is "ama" (Hebrew, em, Indo-European, mater. meter. etc.). The word for son is "dumu" (Indo-European, sunus, Hebrew, ben). The word for river, watercourse is "hubur" (Greek, hudor "water"). There does appear to be a sound change between "b" and "d" between the Sumerian word and the linguistic descendant depending on the family. One interesting word is "illa" which means "elevation" but is also the Akkadian word for "god," "illah" as well as the Hebrew "eloh". There is also the word for earth, "ki" which is nearly equivalent to Greek "ge". Also "an" meaning sky isn't far removed from Greek "ano," meaning up. Finally, the word "abzu" meaning sea, abyss, isn't far removed from Greek "abusson" meaning virtually the same. There is also an argument to be made for "dumumus" or "dumutur," meaning daughter, being the direct ancester of Indo-European "dughater". Interestingly, the Akkadian for daughter is “ahatu,” which is one dental consonant away from falling into the same Indo-European pattern. There is also the Sumerian word "igi" meaning eye. It is clearly a cognate of the German word "augo" and the Anglo-Saxon "ege" from which our modern word "eye" descends, and suggesting it as a cognate of the Hebrew "'ayin" doesn't seem like much of a stretch either given how it descended in Germanic languages as "eye" and "oye" (Norwegian).
     Now, when you compare the rest of the Sumerian language to any Indo-European or Semitic language, you start running into inconsistencies and differences of vocabulary, but more importantly, you run into major differences in how words and sentences are put together. All ancient Indo-European languages, for example, are inflected in some way using word endings and suffixes to indicate who’s doing the action, when the action’s being done, and what part any given noun plays in a sentence, whether it’s a subject, an object, an indirect object, and so on. So you have a root morpheme like “ama-” in Latin, and then you stick a personal ending on it, “ama+t” to indicate that “he/she/it” is doing the “ama-”. In the Semitic languages, all verbs and nouns are derived from a three consonant root, and the vowels you place in and around those consonants change those consonants into the word you want. So in Hebrew you have “YLD” which can be “YeLeD” meaning “boy” or “YaLDa” meaning “girl” or “YaLaD” meaning “to give birth”. And this is just how the internal logic of these languages go whether it’s Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, or Akkadian.

     Another piece of this puzzle, and something that’s interesting about language is how it’s learned by children. Children are born with the capacity for acquiring and building language, but they are not born with a language pre-programmed. Children will “acquire” a language from what they hear of the sounds which those around them are communicating with. But more accurately, children will “build” their own language based on those sounds and what they assume they mean. Adults will correct their “mistakes” over time so that the language the child builds conforms to the mutually accepted and intelligible version of that particular combination of sounds.
     So, how does this all fit in with the confusion of languages at Babel? There’s one more component to this puzzle, and that’s how and where the brain processes language, and what it can look like when it fails. The brain processes language in the left hemisphere in specific areas called the Broca’s area, the Wernicke’s area, and the angular gyrus. There are however different kinds of neurological disorders which come under the label of “aphasia” which can wreak havoc on a person’s ability to speak and understand language. These disorders come from a degeneration of those areas of the brain which deal with speech. They can range from a loss of words, a confusion of the meanings of words, a loss of grammar, and more. This degeneration can be caused by stroke, brain infection, brain tumors, brain injury, and other things which might affect the brain tissues.
     Hypothetically speaking, where Babel was concerned, let’s assume originally everyone at Babel, maybe around 3-4000BCE, was speaking some ancient form of Sumerian. Then, at one point, something happened where certain large parts of the population were struck with a degeneration of the language centers of the brain. Perhaps it was Divine intervention, perhaps it was something environmental (not exclusive of Divine intervention perhaps). Maybe it only affected the adults, but not the young children. The adults lose their grammar, or perhaps their grammar becomes scrambled. So, for example in Elizabethan English, you might have the question, “Knowest thou me?” With the grammar scrambled it might come out “me estknow thou?” or Hamlet’s famous quote, “To be or not to be” being scrambled into “not be to be to or”. In an agglutinative language, where words can be built of many morphemes or smaller word components which must be in a specific order in order to make sense, this would be catastrophic for communication.
      Where the story of Babel begins to make sense is then when these adults begin to pass on this scrambled grammar and language to their children who were not affected by this language degeneration. (As to why young children wouldn't be affected, it is just a thought, but perhaps the Aphasia only afflicted those on the tower building project, mostly being adults or children capable of working. It would have required potentially thousands of workers, and children old enough to walk and speak were rarely spared from working in ancient times. Something about that project, perhaps something environmental, caused a specific kind of neural degeneration which affected their language centers. As to what the cause might have been, maybe a type of bacteria around the stone being used or something toxic in the stone dust might have caused the neurological deterioration which led to the aphasia.) The children then naturally build their own languages based on the way the adults are speaking, using the same morphemes but in different combinations, and make their own changes of meaning, vocabulary, and grammar as these new languages coalesce. (This is something which has been demonstrated several times by several different groups of children. One that I can think of offhand was in an orphanage or school for the deaf in South America where the children developed their own fully expressive and developed sign language independent of any known version. There are also stories of unethical experiments throughout the centuries of children raised in language isolation from birth developing their own spoken languages unintelligible to anyone but them.) But then one group of these children as they reach adulthood either can’t understand the other, or the other sound like idiots to the one because they “can’t talk right.” And human beings have a long history of looking down on and isolating those and isolating from those who speak differently from them. Eventually these new groups of people move off and away from Sumeria and those people who sound like idiots or barbarians, or they’re forced to by those who still speak “proper” Sumerian. The whole process might take a hundred years or less if a generation is every 20-30 years.

     Another observation when discussing the Babel text in Scripture, is that the four main "cradle" civilizations which would have been impacted were all established at nearly the same time. The Sumerian civilization proper was established from an earlier settlement and culture around 3500 BCE. The Egyptians were established as the Egyptian civilization around 3150 BCE. The Minoans were around 3100 BCE. And the Indus Valley Civilization (also representing the Indo-European language group) was around 3300 BCE. With perhaps the exception of the Indus Valley group, these cradle civilizations more or less represent the "table of nations" found in the Genesis account just after the Babel event. So, if we're looking at some kind of a time frame for the Babel event, I would say that it would fall at the beginning of the fourth century BCE at the latest, and probably hundreds of years earlier than that.
     Not every language can be realistically linked with any part of ancient Sumerian, but I think there’s a good case to be made for the Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic languages originating at least from the morphemes of Sumerian based on the pronominal structures. Languages like Chinese, Japanese, and the many, many minority languages found in Papua New Guinea and among the Native American populations, in my opinion, clearly have an independent origin from Sumerian. But the Genesis account actually only focuses on the origins of the Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic people groups anyway; that is, only those people groups and languages around the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East as far as ancient Persia. It does not concern itself with the other people groups and languages which must have been in existence when it was written. It is therefore not a stretch to suggest that the Babel account may only be referring to the origins of the various languages within this geographical region at the time.
     Is this what happened? I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis that might stand up under a stress test with a few modifications as more data might present itself. I think it does at least present a workable basis for the events of the confusion of languages at Babel as recorded in Genesis. Yes, this is all speculation, but it's possible speculation, which is all I'm suggesting right now is that it was possible, there are mechanisms that would make it possible, and there is linguistic evidence to suggest that morphemes from ancient Sumerian made up the roots of the Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic language families just as the Scriptures suggest.

When Good Spiritual Teachers Go Bad

      It’s a pattern, and it doesn’t seem to matter which religion or spiritual teaching or denomination is involved, where a spiritual teacher, pastor, or priest begins very well intentioned and able to teach effectively, appears to be enlightened and can lead others to their own spiritual awakening, enlightenment, or salvation as it were, and then further on down the road veers off, beginning to see himself or herself as the only one with the answers and discouraging anyone from listening to anyone else, even sometimes taking advantage of their positions of leadership or power and seducing their followers sexually. This happens frequently among New Age teachers, but it also happens more frequently among Christian pastors from all denominations than those denominations will care to legally admit. One can only look to all of the scandals which have popped up over the last thirty years to see this.
     And this begs the question, “Why?” How could someone who started off so well and so well intentioned end up going so far off course, sometimes even leading their followers into debauchery or, God forbid, suicide. Fingers are often pointed at the spiritual beliefs in question, the doctrines taught, and “If they were only following the truth (i.e. the way I believe), then this wouldn’t have happened.” Except this happens across the theological and doctrinal spectrum. There really isn’t a religion or spiritual teaching which isn’t affected by it.
     The path to spiritual growth begins with the disengagement from, as R.J. Spina calls it, the ego/mind/identity. St. Paul calls it the “old man” or literally, the “old human being,” or “old Adam.” In Buddhism, it would begin with the realization of the “self” as an illusion, and thus dissociating from or disengaging from it. No matter which spiritual path is followed, it is absolutely necessary to identify one’s own ego or self-identity and remove it from the driver’s seat. St. Paul talks about being joined to Christ in His death so that we may also be joined to Him with His resurrection, and makes this the foundation of all Christian spiritual practice that the Saint writes about in the New Testament.
     But what St. Paul is also clear about in his writings is that this is an ongoing discipline. One does not disengage from the old man, the self, the ego once and done. There has to be an ongoing disengagement, and an ongoing cooperation and submission to the Spirit of Christ, a constantly maintained connection to the Head of the Body in order to continue to be able to receive signal and ability from that Head.
     The ego/mind/identity is a product of the malfunctioning human survival responses as I have written about before, being formed from what pleases or displeases one after the connection between the brain and the Source is blocked by that constant, overreactive survival response. This deviant or malfunctioning response system has to do with physical changes in the human brain from our more animal-like, “innocent” ancestors, and, from what I’ve been able to track down, has to do with the differences between the human amygdala and hypothalamus and those of our primate cousins. Regardless, it is physical and it is hardwired into our brains, and it is there until the brain dies and decomposes. It is, in some ways, like any other neurological disorder that affects behavior, except that it is located in the deepest and most essential parts of the brain and cannot be corrected surgically. It is something we have to be aware of at all times even if we are not engaged with it but in cooperation with the Spirit, because it can and will exert itself without warning if we allow it to become triggered by engaging with our fear, aggression, feeding, or sexual responses.
     Spiritual teachers and pastors, more than anyone else, have to keep themselves aware of the hardwired nature of this malfunction, of this ego/mind/identity. It’s not something that they can do away with, but only bypass with the Spirit of Christ. It’s when they believe themselves to be fully free of error, of “sin,” of the ego and believe it cannot return because of their spiritual enlightenment or progress that this malfunction generated ego, this “old man” quietly resumes control away from the Source.
     From my observation, the biggest error anyone, especially spiritual teachers, can make is not respecting the existence and perniciousness of the human malfunction. Because it is physical in nature, it will be there attempting to exert control until the body dies. We don't grow past it. It's hardwired, and this fact has to be respected with humility at all times. This is where just about every spiritual teacher trips up believing they no longer have an ego when it is their ego that has slipped back into control unawares.
     St. Paul understood this very, very well. He understood the danger posed by his own flesh, the soft tissues of his own body, his malfunctioning brain and “heart.” He writes about disciplining and “beating” his body like an athlete training for the games, a runner running a race, a boxer in a bout. He understood that the problem was a malfunctioning organ which wouldn’t go away until he died, and so he had to put up with it. He didn’t have to like it, but like a person with a broken arm, he did have to be aware of it and take care of it without using it. There were a few times when he let his ego get away, and he felt like he paid for it dearly every time. It was enough to teach him to be constantly on guard against this adversary which he carried everywhere with him.
      Everyone walking the Path, but spiritual teachers all the more because of their office and position, must be aware they will carry their adversary with them until the day they die. They do not have to engage with it, they do not have to submit to it, but they can never risk fooling themselves into believing it is no longer there or that it can no longer exert control over them.

Prophets Texts Translated from the Septuagint

 Malachi 2:10a
Isn’t there one Father of you all? Didn’t one God create you?

Psalm 39:6-8 LXX (40:6-8, Hebrew)

You didn’t want a sacrifice and offering, but a body You made ready for me; You didn’t demand burnt offerings and those concerning an error. Then I said, look I am here; it is written about me within the chapters of a book, I wished the doing of Your will, and Your Torah in the middle of my heart.

Jeremiah 7:22-23 LXX

Because I didn’t talk to your fathers and I wasn’t commanding them about burnt offerings and sacrifices on the day in which I had led them up from the land of Mizraim. But instead I was commanding them this spoken word, saying “you will listen to My voice, and I will be to you for a God, and you will be to Me for a people, and you will go on all My paths which I would command you, so that it would be good with you.

Isaiah 1:11-17 LXX

“What are the multitude of your sacrifices to Me?” Yahweh says. “I am full of burnt offerings of rams, and I don’t wish for the hard fat of lambs and the blood of bulls and goats, neither if you should come to be seen by Me; because who sought these things out from your hands? You will not deliver these things to tread My court. If you should bring fine wheat flour, incense to no purpose, it is an abomination to Me; I am not supporting your Rosh Khodeshim and your Shabbats and the great day. My Breath of Life hates your fasting and rest from working, and your Rosh Khodeshim and your festival holidays. I’ve come to have enough of you. I will no longer let your mistakes go free. When you reach out your hands I will turn away My eyes from you; and if you should multiply your petition, I will not yield it for you; because your hands are full of blood.
     Wash, become clean, subtract your vices from your breaths of life; stop from your vices, learn to do the beautiful, seek out judgment, rescue the wronged, decide for the orphan, and do the widow right, and come here and we will discuss this.” He says: “And if your errors are like purplish red, I will whiten them like snow, and if they are like pomegranate seeds, I will whiten them like wool, and if you should want and should yield to Me, you will eat the good things of the ground, and if you shouldn’t want neither should yield to Me, a single edged sword will devour you; because the mouth of Yahweh talked these things.”

Epictetus Texts

 1.3:1-6

     If someone should be sympathetic to this doctrine, in relation to his worth that he is able, that we had all principally happened by the God and the God is Father of both human beings and the gods, I suspect that nothing low-born neither humiliating will he take to heart about himself. But if in fact Caesar should adopt you into his family, no one will raise his eyebrow at you; and if you experience that you are a son of the God, will you not be lifted high? But now we don’t do it, but since these two things have been mixed together with our birth, the body in fact common with the animals, and the logos and the means of knowing common with the gods, others in fact turn off at this kinship which is failure and a corpse, but a few at the Divine and happy. Since therefore it is a necessity for every person to assail each thing in this way as he would interpret concerning it, those few in fact, as many as suspect to have come to exist for a realization, and for a reverent awe, and for a secure stability of the usefulness of impressions, they take to heart nothing humiliating neither low-born about themselves, but the many just the opposite. “Because what am I? A miserable manikin?” and “my wretched bit of flesh.” The bit of flesh in fact being wretched, but you also possess something better than the bits of flesh. What then are you dropping that for and have clung to these things?

2.17:22b-25

…and simply want nothing else than what things the God wants. And who will prevent you? Who will force you? Not more than the God. When you should have such a leader as the God and you should wish together with and reach together with such a one, what are you still afraid you might fail for? Charitably give your cravings and your aversion to poverty and wealth; you will fail, you will encounter it. Elsewise to health; you will be unfortunate; to offices, to honors, to home countries, to friends, to children, simply if to any of the things not under the control of your own will. But charitably give them to the God, to the other gods; hand your cravings and aversions over to them, they will pilot you, your cravings and aversions have been marshaled to battle by aid of them; and how are you still unlucky?

2.8:11-14

     Yet you are a being that goes first and leads the way, you are a shred of the God; you have within yourself some part of that One. What then are you ignorant of your kinship for? Why don’t you instinctively know from where you had come? Don’t you want to have remembered, when you eat, what Being you are who is eating, and whom you are feeding? When you should have sexual intercourse, what Being you are who is having sexual intercourse? When with company? When training in exercise? When conversing? Don’t you know that you are feeding Divinity, you are training Divinity in exercise, you are carrying Divinity around with you, wretch, and you are ignorant. Is it your opinion that I’m speaking of something silver or gold external to yourself? You are carrying Him within yourself and staining Him by dirty whims and filthy practices, and you don’t take notice. And when a statue of the God is present you wouldn’t dare to do any of these things you are doing. Yet when this God is present internally and overseeing and overhearing everything do you feel no shame taking these things to heart and doing them, senseless of your own nature and object of Divine wrath?

Didache 1:1-5a, 5:1-2

      There are two ways, one of Life and one of Death, and there is a big difference between the two ways. The Way then in fact of Life is this: first, you will love the God who made you; second the person next to you like yourself; and everything whatever you would want to not happen to you, you also don’t do to someone else. And of these words the teaching is this; speak well of those calling down curses on you and pray on behalf of your enemies, and fast on behalf of those hunting you down, because what kind of charity is it if you love those loving you? Don’t also the people groups do the same thing? But you love those hating you and you will not possess an enemy. Keep away from the physical and bodily cravings. If someone gives you a strike on your right cheek, turn the other to him also, and you will be mature. If someone should press you to serve for one mile, go with him two; if someone should lift your cloak, give your shirt to him too; if someone should get from you what is yours, don’t ask for it; because the Father wants to give to everyone from His own charitable gifts.
     Yet the way of Death is this: first of all it is good for nothingness and full of curses; homicides, adulteries, cravings, whorings, thefts, idolatries, magics, drug use, piracies, false testimonies, hypocrisies, duplicity, treachery, arrogance, harm, self-will, avarice, disgraceful speech, rivalry, audacity, grandeur, false pretensions; hunters of good people, hating reality, loving a lie, not experiencing the compensation of a right state of being, not clinging to the good neither deciding rightly, passing sleepless nights not for the good, but for the good for nothing, from whom courtesy and endurance are a long ways off, loving vain things, hunting down repayment,, not being merciful to the destitute, not working hard for the one being worn out, not experiencing the One having made them, murderers of children, corruptors of the Divine form, turning back the one being in need, wearing themselves out against the one being afflicted, advocates for the wealthy, lawless judges of the working poor, entirely malfunctioning.

Passages from 1 Clement and Barnabas

      Therefore we should leave the empty and purposeless speculations, and we should come upon the famous and revered metric of what was handed down to us, and we should see what is beautiful and what is delightful and what is welcome in front of the One who made us. We should gaze intently at the blood of the Anointed and experience it like it is precious to His Father, because it was poured out because of our deliverance for all the world it brought down the charity of a change of mind. We should pass through into all the generations and should thoroughly learn  that with generation and generation the Master gave a place of a change of mind to those willing to turn around to Him. Noach preached a change of mind and they who obeyed were rescued. Yonah preached catastrophe to the Ninevites, and they who changed their minds about their errors propitiated the God having approached as supplicants and got deliverance, although being strangers to the God.
     The liturgical ministers of the charity of the God through the Holy Pneuma talked about a change of mind, and the Master of all things also Himself talked about a change of mind with a vow; “Because I live, Yahweh says, I don’t wish for the death of the malfunctioning person as I do their change of mind.” Applying also a good means of knowing: “Change your mind, house of Yisra’el, from your lawlessness; I said to the sons of My people: if your errors should be from the ground up to the sky, and if they are redder than a pomegranate seed and darker than goat-hair cloth, and you should turn around to Me from your whole heart and should say: “Father, I will listen to You like a holy people.” And in a different place He says in this way: “Wash and become clean, subtract the good for nothingness from your breaths of life directly in front of My eyes; stop from your good for nothingness, learn to do the beautiful, seek out judgment, rescue the one being wronged, decide for the orphan and set right the widow, and come here and we will dispute this.” He says: “And if your errors are like purplish red, I will whiten them like snow, and if they are like pomegranate seeds, I will whiten them like wool, and if you should want and should listen to Me, you will eat the good things of the ground, and if you shouldn’t want neither should listen to Me, a single edged sword will devour you; because the mouth of Yahweh talked these things.” Wishing then all His dear ones to share in a change of mind, He secured this by His omnipotent will.

 *   *   *

 There are then three doctrines of the Owner. 1) hope of life: the start and end of our realization; and 2) a right state of being: the start and end of judgment; 3) a love from mirth and great joy: a testimony by works of a right state of being. …
     Because it had manifested to us through the prophets that He craves neither sacrificial victims nor whole burnt offerings nor offerings, saying at the time in fact: “What is the multiplication of your sacrifices to Me? Yahweh says. I am full of burnt offerings, and I don’t wish for the hard fat of lambs and blood of bulls and goats, neither should you come to be seen by Me. Because who sought these things out from your hands? Don’t impose to tread on My court. If you should bring the finest wheat flour, it is for nothing. Incense is an abomination to Me. I am not held up by your Rosh Khodeshim and Shabbats.” He shut these things down so that the fresh Torah of our Owner Yeshua the Anointed, being without the yoke of force, should hold the offering not made by human beings. And He says again to them: “I wasn’t commanding your fathers going out from the land of Mizraim to offer to Me burnt offerings and sacrificial victims, was I? But instead I was commanding them this thing: Each one of you don’t bear a bad grudge against the person next to you with his heart, and don’t love a lying oath.” We are then obligated to apprehend with our senses, not being senseless, the means of knowing the goodness of our Father, because He tells to us to seek how we should approach Him, willing us not being led astray similar to those people. He speaks in this way then to us, “A sacrifice to the God is a heart having been shattered, a fragrant odor to Yahweh is a heart imagining the One having molded it.” We are then obligated to be precisely instructed, brothers, about our deliverance, so that the good for nothing one wouldn’t have made a loophole of deception within us to launch us away from our Life as from a sling.

1 Peter 1:3-25, Revised from "The Practice of the Way"

     The God and Father of our Owner Yeshua the Anointed be blessed, who in line with His much mercy rebirthed us into a living hope through the resurrection of Yeshua the Anointed from the dead, into an undecaying inheritance both undefiled and unquenched, having been kept in the heavenly realms for you folks who are guarded with the Divine power through the realization as far as the prepared deliverance to be revealed in the last period of time is concerned. By means of whom you are overjoyed, if at present having been grieved with many kinds of temptations is a little necessary, so that the proof of your realization, more precious than gold which is destroyed yet being proved through fire, might be found for approval and reputation and value with the revelation of Yeshua the Anointed; whom not having seen you love, into whom at present not seeing yet trusting you are overjoyed with unspeakable and glorified joy, being furnished with the goal of the realization, the deliverance of breaths of life.

      About which deliverance the prophets who had prophesied about this charity as far as you’re concerned searched out and scrutinized, scrutinizing as far as what or what kind of period of time the Pneuma of the Anointed within them would clarify the sufferings as far as the Anointed is concerned, being witnessed beforehand and the glories with these. To whom it was revealed that, not for themselves yet for you folks they were serving these things which now were proclaimed to you by means of you having been evangelized with the Holy Pneuma having been sent from the heavenly realm, into which things angels desire to bend over and steal a glance at.

      Therefore, the hips of your faculties of thought having been belted up, being well balanced, hope upon the charity having been brought to you with the revelation of Yeshua the Anointed maturely. Like obedient children not modeling yourselves on the desires of your first ignorance but down the line of the one having summoned you holy you also yourselves become holy with every behavior. Because it is written that “You will be holy, because I am holy.”

      And if you invoke the Father who decides impartially down the line of each thing done, behave with awe during the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from your pointless behavior handed down from your fathers not by decaying things, by silver or gold, but by the costly blood of the Anointed like an unblemished and spotless lamb, with it previously being made known on the one hand before the founding of the universe but having been manifested upon the last of the periods of time because of you folks who trusted through Him into the God who raised Him from the dead and given reputation to Him, so as for your trust and hope to be into the God.

      Having purified your breaths of life by fire with the obedience of the truth as far as unhypocritical brotherly love, love one another from the heart eagerly, having been rebirthed not from a seeding of decay but of undecay through the Logos of the living and abiding God. Because, “every single organic being is like grass and every opinion of it is like the blossom of grass; the grass dried up and the blossom fell off; yet the spoken word of Yahweh makes its home into the eon.”

     And this thing is the spoken word which was was evangelized to you folks.

James 2, Revised from "The Practice of the Way"

     My brothers, don’t hold the faith of our reputed Owner Yeshua the Anointed with partiality¹. Because if a gold fingered man should enter into your synagogue with bright clothing, yet a homeless guy also should enter in filthy clothing, and you should look up the guy wearing the bright clothing and should say, “You sit here the best seat,” and to the homeless guy you should say, “You stand there or sit under my footstool,” didn’t you separate yourselves among yourselves and didn’t you become judges with good for nothing inner dialogues?

      Listen, my dear brothers, didn’t the God select those destitute where the illusion of this world is concerned to be wealthy with the realization and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those loving Him? Yet you devalued the homeless guy. Don’t the wealthy wield power against you and drag you into the courts? Don’t they blaspheme the beautiful name which was invoked upon you? If you would really bring the royal Torah to completion in line with the Scripture, “You will love the person next to you like yourself,” you are doing beautifully; yet if you are being partial to people, you are achieving the malfunction; being brought to light under the Torah as violators. Because any guy who should keep the entire Torah yet should step wrong with one thing, he has become guilty of all of them. Because the One having said, “You will not commit adultery,” also said, “You will not commit homicide;” yet if you don’t commit adultery but you commit homicide, you have become a violator of the Torah. In the same way talk and in the same way act like intending to be judged through the Torah of freedom. Because judgment is merciless to those not having done mercy; mercy exults over judgment.²

      What is good is it, my brothers, if anyone should claim to possess the realization yet shouldn’t possess the deeds? This realization can’t rescue him, can it? If a brother or sister starting off naked and being left behind from their daily food yet someone from you should say to them, “Go in peace, be warm and well fed,” yet you don’t give them the suitable things of the body, what is the benefit? In this way also the realization, if it shouldn’t possess things done because of it, is a lifeless corpse by itself.

      But someone will say, “You possess the realization, and I possess the things I’m doing;” show me your realization apart from these things done, and I will show you the realization from the things I’m doing. You trust that “the God is one,”³ you do beautifully; the demons also trust and shake with terror! Yet do you wish to experience, O empty human being, that the realization separated from the things which are done because of it is useless? Wasn’t Avraham our father made right from the things he did having brought Yitzhak his son up upon the sacrificial altar? Do you see that his realization was working together with what he was doing and the realization was brought to completion with what he did, and the Scripture was filled which says, “Yet Avraham trusted in the God, and it was figured to him for a state of right being” and he was called the Divine friend. Yet in the same way also wasn’t Rahav the whore made right from the things she did having entertained the messengers and having tossed them out by a different path? Because just like the body separate from the pneuma is a corpse, in this way also the realization separate from things done because of it is a corpse.

1Lit. “receiving what someone looks like”

2As Jesus told the F'rishe, quoting Hosea 6:6 in the LXX, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than whole burnt offerings.”

3From the “Sh’ma,” Deuteronomy 6:4.

Philippians 4:1, 4-14, Revised from "The Practice of the Way"

 

As also my dear and longed for brothers, my joy and crown, in this way stand by means of the Owner, dear ones.

      Always be joyful by means of the Owner; again I will say, be joyful. Let your fairness¹ be known to all human beings. The Owner is near. Don’t be anxious about a single thing, but within everything by prayer and by petition with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to the God. And the peace of the God which is beyond every intellect will guard your hearts and thoughts by means of the Anointed Yeshua.

      The remaining thing, brothers, as many things as are true, as many things as are revered, as many things as are right, as many things as are purified, as many things as are cherished, as many things as are well spoken of, if anything is a virtue and if anything is praised, take these things into account; what things you also learned and received and heard and saw with me, practice these things; and the God of this peace will be with you.

      Yet I rejoiced by means of the Owner greatly that already at one point in time your being mindful on my behalf sprouted up again, upon which you were also mindful, yet you had no time. Not that I am speaking in line with a coming up short, because I myself learned to be self-sufficient within what situations I am. I know both what it is to be humble, and I know what it is to overflow; with everything and with all things I had been initiated, both to be well fed and to hunger, both to overflow and to come up short; I am strong for everything with the Anointed empowering me. However, you did well having shared with my trouble.

1In the sense of equitability, tolerance, and not necessarily according to the letter of the law.

Philippians 3:2-21, Revised from "The Practice of the Way"

       Finally, my brothers, be joyful by means of the Owner, I’m not bothered to write the self-same things to you in fact, and for you folks it’s rock-solid.

      Watch out for the dogs, watch out for the bad workers, watch out for the mutilation. Because we who do the priestly service by the Divine Pneuma and speak loudly by means of the Anointed Yeshua, and have not been persuaded by the soft tissues of our bodies are the circumcision, although I myself hold a reason to have been persuaded by my flesh and blood also. If anyone else thinks to have been persuaded by their flesh and blood, I have more reason by a circumcision on the eighth day, from the race of Yisra'el, of the tribe of Benyamin, Hebrew from Hebrews, a F'risha where the Torah is concerned, chasing down the congregation where zeal is concerned, where the right behavior which is by means of the Torah is concerned having become faultless. But what things were a profit for me, I have held these things a loss because of the Anointed. But on the contrary I am also holding everything to be a loss because of the superiority of the experience of the Anointed Yeshua my Owner, because of whom I lost everything, and am holding everything to be trash, so that I would be profited with the Anointed and be found within Him, not having my state of right being which is born from the Torah but the state of right being through the realization of the Anointed, the state of right being born from God upon realization, experiencing Him and the power of His resurrection and communion with His sufferings, being formed together with His death, if somehow I would arrive into the final removal from the dead.

      Not that I’ve already gotten it or already been brought to completion, yet I chase after it if I would also seize it, by which thing also I had been seized by the Anointed Yeshua. Brothers, I don’t yet figure myself to have seized it; yet one thing, forgetting the things behind me on the one hand, yet stretching out to grasp the things in front of me on the other, I am chasing down the goal for the prize of the summons above of the God by means of the Anointed Yeshua. As many then as are brought to completion, we should be mindful of this; and if you are mindful of anything differently, God will also reveal this thing to you; but as far as what distance we’ve already come, for us to march in step with Him.

      Become mimics of me together, brothers, and scope out those operating in this way just like you have us for a type. Because many are operating (whom I was speaking to you about many times, and now speak in tears) who are hostile to the cross of the Anointed, whose goal is destruction, whose god is the belly, and reputation is with their disgrace, who are mindful of the earthly things. Because our citizenship starts off with the heavenly realms, from where also we are eagerly waiting for the rescuer, the Owner Yeshua the Anointed, who will transform the body of our humiliation to be formed together with the body of His glory in line with the energy of Him being able also to subject the everything to Him.

Philippians 2:1-18, Revised from "The Practice of the Way"

 

If you have any motivation with the Anointed, if any encouragement of love, if any communion of the Pneuma, if any deep feelings and compassions, fill my joy so that you would mind the self-same thing, having the self-same love, united in soul, being mindful of the one thing, nothing in line with discord neither in line with a liability to vain imagination but by humility guiding one another [towards the peace]¹ surpassing what comes from yourselves, each person not looking out for their own things but each of you for the things of the others different from yourselves.

Be mindful of this thing within yourselves which also was in the Anointed, Yeshua, who starting off with Divine form, being equal to Divinity, didn’t admire² the spoils of plunder, but emptied Himself taking the form of a slave, having become with the likeness of a human being; and having been found with a figure like a human being He humbled Himself having become obedient up to the point of death, and death of a cross at that. Therefore the God also lifted Him high beyond and charitably gave to Him the name which is over every name, so that with the name of Yeshua every knee of the heavenly realms and of the earthly and of the underworld will bend, and every single tongue will utterly agree that the Owner Yeshua is the Anointed for the purpose of the reputation of the Divine Father.

So as, my dear ones, just like you’ve always obeyed, not as just with my presence but now much more with my being away, achieve your own deliverance with fear and trembling; because the God is the One who acts within you both the willing and the acting on behalf of His good pleasure. Do everything without complaints and overthinking things, so that you would become faultless and unmixed, unblemished Divine children in the middle of a crooked and twisted race, among whom you shine out as heavenly lights in the universe, holding up the Logos of Life, for a reason to brag for me as far as the day of the Anointed, because I didn’t run for an empty reason neither did I wear myself out working for an empty reason. But if also I am poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrifice and liturgy of your realization, I am celebrating and I am celebrating together with you all; and over the self-same thing you both celebrate and celebrate together with me.

1The word for “surpassing” in Greek (sometimes translated as “superior to”) is feminine plural,whereas the word for “one another” is masculine plural. Therefore “surpassing” cannot be referring to “one another.” This suggests a feminine plural word to which “surpassing” is referring is somehow missing from the text. The word “peace” is feminine in Greek, and so, given Paul’s use of “the peace surpassing every intellect” in 4:7, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that a similar phrase was originally meant here.

2I am translating this word as αγαμαι as this is very close in form to the word in current texts, and fits the context of the sentence better.

Philippians 1:6-30, Revised from "The Practice of the Way"

 

       I thank my God upon every single memory of you always in every single petition of mine over all of you, submitting the petition with joy, upon your communion into the Gospel from the first day up to this moment, having been convinced of this same thing, that the One having made the beginning of a good work within you will complete it up til the day of the Anointed Yeshua; just like it is right for me to be minded this way over all of you because of me having you within my heart, being my partners from the charity of you all in both my chains and in the defense and confirmation of the Gospel. Because the God is my witness as I would long for you all with the deepest parts of the Anointed Yeshua. And I am praying this, so that your love would overflow more and more with the knowledge which comes from seeing Him for yourself and with every single sensory perception as far as you proving the things which carry from one to another, so that you would be unmixed and free from having caused harm as far as the day of the Anointed, having been filled with the produce of right behavior which is through Yeshua the Anointed for the Divine reputation and praise.

       And I want you to know, brothers, that the things which are happening to me have more come for the advancement of the Gospel, so as for my chains by means of the Anointed to have become visible among the whole Praetorium and all the rest, and the more of the brothers with the Owner having been convinced by my chains to overwhelmingly dare to speak the message fearlessly.

       Some on the one hand also through envy and discord, yet some on the other hand also preach the Anointed because of good intent; these on the one hand from love, knowing that I am lying outstretched for the defense of the Gospel, but those on the other hand proclaim the Anointed from selfish ambition like a politician drumming up support for themselves, not purely, expecting to rouse up trouble by my chains. Because of what? However, that by every manner, whether by pretext or by truth, the Anointed is proclaimed, and with this I am rejoicing. But I will also rejoice, because I know that this will turn out for me for a rescue through your petition and [the] support of the Pneuma of Yeshua the Anointed in line with my eager expectation and hope that I will be ashamed by nothing but with every openness like always and currently the Anointed would be magnified with my body, whether through life or through death. Because the Anointed is what I’m living and for me to die is profit. Yet if what I’m living is in the soft tissues of the body, this situation is fruit from the work for me, and I don’t make known what I would prefer. Yet I am caught pressed between the two, holding the longing for the unloosing and to be together with the Anointed, better by a lot more; yet the keeping going in the soft tissues of the body is more constraining because of you folks. And being convinced of this I know that I will stay put and stay nearby you all for your progress and joy of the faith, so that your loud talking might overflow with the Anointed Yeshua with me through my arrival again in your direction.

       Just live worthily as a citizen of the Gospel of the Anointed, so that whether having come and seen you or being away I hear what’s happening with you, that you would stand with one Pneuma, with one breath of life contending together by the realization of the Gospel and not being scared by anything at all by those opposed, which is an omen of destruction to them, yet your rescue, and this from the God. Because it was charitably given to you on behalf of the Anointed, not just to put your trust into Him but also to suffer on His behalf, having the same struggle, as much as you saw with me and now hear with me.

Thoughts on the Pneumatikoi (The Spiritual Gifts) and Paranormal or "Psychic" Abilities

 

      I’ve been thinking about what Paul calls alternately the “pneumatikoi” or the “charismata” this morning, frequently translated as “spiritual gifts, and the paranormal abilities of Near Death Experiencers, remote viewers, and the ability which we, and my wife in particular, rely on almost daily now called simply “muscle testing” or “energy testing.” But I want to start with this last thing first. I’ve written about it before, and instead of reinventing the wheel, I’ll just quote myself here noting that the original research and studies done on its efficacy, reliability, and limitations were performed by Dr. David R. Hawkins (deceased) and written about in his books,

The idea behind muscle testing is based on the body having its own energy field, sometimes referred to as "chi" or "qi" which reacts with the energy fields of other things either positively or negatively. In addition, the body's energy field will react to a truth or untruth positively or negatively either being strengthened or literally pulled towards the truth, or being weakened and literally repulsed by the untruth. In this way, it is possible to ask and receive answers to yes or no questions with a high degree of reliability.

There are however some caveats we've learned about this technique, sometimes the hard way, which are well worth reflecting on and pondering. The major caveat to it is that you cannot get a reliable answer to a question where you have an attachment to the answer you get. Your own subconscious will interfere and skew the results to whatever you either think it should be, or whatever you're afraid it might be.

If you are in a state of fear, conscious or unconscious, or aggression your answers become unreliable and the muscle testing will start delivering gibberish responses where "yes" can be "no" and vice versa. In other words, if you are engaged with or in submission to your own malfunctioning survival responses, the muscle testing doesn't work right and itself malfunctions. Any emotional state which is ultimately rooted in fear or aggression such as despair, anger, or pride results in unreliable answers. In order to receive reliable answers, fear has to be let go of and the practitioner has to shift in the direction of courage, reason, joy, compassion, and ultimately love (not of the romantic variety but of the agape variety). The closer one is to agape (and the farther one is from fear), the more accurate and reliable the answers become.

      Initially we were very skeptical about it at first when Heidi began experimenting with it, but then we experimented with electrically conductive and insulating materials to see if they had any effect, and yes, they did. The insulating rubber in particular seemed to block the effect completely. This lent it a good deal of credibility in my mind which would be further reinforced when it accurately predicted what Heidi could and could not eat safely which, if you understand my wife’s past history, a wrong answer could result in a seizure. This was part of the beginning of her road to beating her multiple sclerosis really.

      But the part of this I really want to point out is the requirements of disposition which are laid on an accurate response. In general, negative emotional states such as fear, despair, anger, pride and so on will produce wrong answers, whereas positive states beginning with courage, then joy, peace, all the way to love (and specifically agape) will produce correct and accurate answers. Another guardrail if you will is that one cannot have an attachment to the result, you just have to let it happen without any emotional investment in it or else it will skew the result one way or the other either from fear it’s not what you want or strong desire for a particular result. One might go so far as to infer from this that, simply put, it will not work correctly if you’re operating from your own malfunctioning survival responses of fear, anger, and bodily cravings such as food or sex. Finally, and as a kind of summary of all of this, there must be a certain amount of setting aside of the ego in order to allow things to “flow” properly.

      As I have become familiar with these “rules” of muscle or energy testing over the last few years, I have been struck by how similar the same guidelines appear to be with remote viewing. Remote viewing is the ability to mentally visualize a “target” from great distances and accurately describe the target. At one point, the U.S. Department of Defense had a very successful remote viewing program, of whom former Chief Warrant Officer Joseph McMoneagle was the primary agent. From the memoirs I’ve been reading from both McMoneagle and Luis Elizondo, there has to be a setting aside of the ego, you can’t have a negative or malicious intent towards the target of the remote viewing, and you have to maintain a certain mindset or headspace in order for it to work. From the descriptions in particular which former CWO McMoneagle gives of his experiences, one’s intentions and mindset are also key to the outcomes. The most detailed outcomes for McMoneagle seemed to come when he was focused on locating and rescuing hostages. He himself had no personal stake in the outcome, but he was focused solely, and more importantly selflessly, on the welfare of others.

      I have also written before about the after effects of Near Death Experiences. Because of the length of those blog posts, I would refer the reader to those, “More Thoughts About NDEs, Consciousness, Baptism, and Paul's Writings” and “Baptism, Dying and Rising with Christ, and the Aftereffects of NDEs” here on this blog within the past couple of months. What’s important to note here is that the paranormal abilities which are observed coincide with the reported ego death, increased love and compassion for others, and both the desire and appearance of being more “connected” with the spiritual realm. That is, the NDE appears to induce the conditions within the person which are necessary for both muscle or energy testing and remote viewing to work properly and accurately.

      I have one more example to add. It is my understanding as well, being informed by someone who knows the practice better than I, that the practice of “energy healing” as is seen in some New Age or eastern philosophies or religious systems also maintains the same requirements in order for it to have any effect. Although where “energy healing” is concerned, one must maintain a much greater degree of positive disposition and selfless love in order for it to even begin to work as compared with muscle testing and remote viewing.

      The pneumatikoi, or the “spiritual gifts,” are probably one of the most controversial, misunderstood, and misapplied part of the Christian tradition and experience. In some denominational traditions, their existence is all but denied (and they’re certainly not active today, in their opinion), in others, certain expressions of them are seen as proof of one’s salvation and guarantee of entry into heaven in the afterlife. Most denominations and systems of theology hold a line somewhere in between these two extremes.

      The pneumatikoi, put simply, are supernatural or paranormal abilities which were displayed by all or nearly all of the disciples of Jesus Christ actively and visibly for at least the first two hundred years, though they seemed to become less and less frequent approaching the fourth century. After that, church writings only record them being performed by certain people of what was then and now considered extreme compassion, love, mercy and selflessness. As recorded in the book of Acts and the letters of the New Testament, these abilities included healing, exorcism by single command, the ability to speak a language the person doesn’t actually know or understand a language the person doesn’t know, perform impossible things, raising the dead, foretelling the future, knowing things that one can’t possibly know, and more. It’s clear from the New Testament that they are products of the Pneuma or Spirit and are abilities which are otherwise unnatural to the person displaying them. A person who is otherwise unable to speak publicly or teach others suddenly has the ability to do both effectively, for example.

      According to Paul in his letter to the Galatians, what a person can expect to see or experience from someone operating by means of the Pneuma or “Spirit” is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, trust, courtesy, and self-control,” and there is a great emphasis throughout the New Testament by both Jesus and Paul of dying to oneself or one’s “old human being,” as a part of the requirements for actually being a disciple. I can’t help but see the parallels between these and the guidelines or requirements for effectively and accurately performing the paranormal abilities I have described.

       There appears to be a genuine correlation between the paranormal abilities I’ve described and the pneumatikoi described in the New Testament. Both require a setting aside of one’s ego or the death of one’s ego and a certain selflessness in order to operate effectively if at all. Both require a connection to the immaterial part of the human being, and require that this part be in control at the time without interference from the survival responses of the human brain of fear, anger, feeding, or the sexual drive. Both require a total lack of negative intent, judgment, or attachment to the target or recipient of the ability. It goes without saying that both require a certain trust or realization that the ability exists at all.

      If all of this is true, then there is a great deal of explanatory power in this as to why some Christians appear to be able to display them and some are not, and in particular, who depending on the mindset and disposition of the individual in question. It may also explain why, the further from the first century one gets, the more rare they become among professing Christians as the shift in emphasis from practice to the correctness of one’s theology takes place. It may also explain why some people, professing Christian or not, are able to perform them, but many can only do so sporadically and with a questionable rate of effectiveness and accuracy as they succumb to the ego and negative dispositions or mindsets. If one becomes proud or ego driven because of them, then they lose their connection to what produces them.

Galatians 5:16-26, Revised from "The Practice of the Way"

 

      Yet I say, operate by the Pneuma and you will not bring the desire of the soft tissues of the body¹ to completion at all. Because the soft tissues of the body desire against the Pneuma, and the Pneuma against the soft tissues of the body, because these things lie opposed to one another so that you would do these things you wouldn’t wish.² And if you are guided by the Pneuma, you aren’t subject to the Torah. But the things worked by the soft tissues of the body are visible such as adultery, whoring, dirtiness, violent sensuality, idolatry, drug use, hostilities, discord, jealousy, rages, selfish actions, seditions, factions, envies, homicides, intoxications, hard partyings³, and things similar to these, what I am telling you beforehand just like I told you previously that those performing such things as these will not inherit the Divine Kingdom.

      But the fruit⁴ of the Pneuma is love, joy, peace, having a long temper, kindness, goodness, trust, courtesy, internal control; there isn’t a Torah against such things as these. And these people belonging to the Anointed Yeshua crucified the soft tissues of the body together with its sufferings and its desires. If we are living by the Pneuma, we should also march in step with the Pneuma. We shouldn’t become conceited, provoking one another, having malice because of envying one another.

1Speaking of the malfunctioning neurology: the hypothalamus, amygdala, and limbic system in general which treats everything like a survival issue, physical or psychological, even when it isn’t.

2See Romans 7:18-23

3It can be demonstrated that everything on this list can be seen as being initiated by the survival responses of fear, aggression, feeding, or the sexual drive, all of which are governed by the hypothalamus, and in general are responses that cling to and hoard what is seen by the brain as necessary for survival, and push away and attempt to destroy what is seen by the brain as a threat to survival.

4Note that this word is singular. It is describing a single fruit, not many; that is it is describing the life of Jesus Anointed being expressed through the person and refers back to Jesus’ statements about knowing a tree by it’s fruit.