Caustic Ramblings

Some notes from recent thoughts:

Never trust preachers. They have no meaningful wisdom to offer, as their way is preaching feel-good (or fear-bad) tidbits to the unknowing multitude. To be a preacher is to pander to whatever assortment of popular prejudices, biases, bigotries and idioms-of-the-day, underpins the mass consciousness of a particular time and place.

A preacher is either a charlatan or a smooth-talking fool, and sometimes a combination of both. The latter type of preacher may have had a religious experience or sudden epiphany at some point and then feel into the very tempting delusion of over-blowing that experience to be something magnitudes more profound than the experience actually was, if we are even to suggest that an objective standard could be applied to measuring the amplitude of religious experiences. The uninitiated in particular lack the knowledge, discipline and intellectual maturity required to differentiate the numinous wheat from the mere psychic chaff.

Before the 'Piscean Era' set in (that age of runaway salvationist moral panic) and the sort of fervent missionary activity that flows from that religious premise of salvationist ultra-ugency, we could say that the religious mode of the multitude was something far more humble, respectable and reliable than the mass-preaching of abstract ideals and ham-fisted moralisms ostensibly from somewhere up high. In the older ages, the masses weren't commanded what to absolutely believe and feel. Rather, sacredness was readily available to the people through micro-illuminations of even the most mundane aspects of their immediate environment. Persons of even modest means were afforded the opportunity to set up a household altars, or simply go make offerings in the woods, and venerate whatever assortment of deities might be out there listening. Such worship and reverence was entirely on the terms of the practitioner. This was the grand opportunity for people to experience for themselves exactly what sacredness means. When results of their devotions and offerings yielded fruit, something like a brief glimmer 'micro gnosis' might occur. This kind of direct experience is perhaps what drives the most genuine kind of faith.

During the 'Piscean Age' what we could term 'DIY Spirituality' was gradually stripped away from the people. The people were told that their own religious experience no longer matters, and that the only experience that does matter is some extremely limited set of 'revelations' derived from third and forth hand knowledge of someone else's experience that happened in some other (usually quite distant) place from some other time, now fossilized into written text format. The paradigm of Bibliolatry (worship of the written word) began that horrifying process of desacralizing the world and paving the way to the ubiquitous atheism and materialism that runs rampant today in every place resembling a 'developed' country. When all that is sacred and magical is stripped way (psychologically-speaking) from the surrounding world, all that is left is a pile of dead letters and the sort of drab, austere, and somber religiosity that accompanies the vulgar endeavor known as book-worship.

So does any of this invalidate salvation as a concept? I would say, certainly not. But salvation must be re-framed and put back in its proper context. So yes, there does come a time for the human soul to graduate beyond material incarnation and thus ascend to a higher mode of being. But we could say, there's only really a very small number of humans incarnated on this planet at any given time who are karmically ready for to achieve the escape velocity needed to leave this place for good. In other words, most people are not ready, and many are just getting started, as far as the process of trying out an assortment of mundane human life experiences is concerned. Why bother them with abstract notions of needing to be "saved" right here and right now? And saved by whom? How can the immature human soul even know what salvation means in any higher sense? And anyway wouldn't a higher realm be a totally alien or unintelligible experience to a human ego-mind who hasn't yet even dipped their feet in purer waters?

By this, we can surmise that the preacher selling salvation at their roadside stall hasn't a clue what they are ranting and raving about to any passerbys curious enough to stop and listen for a moment or two. The preacher has probably read about "being saved" in a book somewhere and they haven't yet cultivated their own gnosis to sufficiently understand the higher concept (Hint: Gnosis doesn't come about from reading books). In other words, we have the blind leading the blind. The preacher by definition is either uninitiated, or they once tasted the first stage of initiation and turned their back on the genuine path and instead opted for the wayward path of cultivating fame, prestige, and popularity in the eyes of the profane. Both the uninitiated and traitors to initiation are those who throw pearls before swine for a quick buck (and we know how the rest of that verse pans out).

As the energies of Pisces recede back into the oblivion from whence it emerged, the hammed up sense of urgency to escape earthly incarnation will certainly settle down and go back to 'normal' levels. Religious and spiritual experience will once again become decentralized and pluralistic, and the moralizing browbeaters and ecstatic fanatics will pack up and go home and take up some more humble occupation; one that better fits the karmic character of such a person. Priests will once again be honest-to-gods masters of ceremony rather than people seen as infallible moral authorities. And the Sages will once again teach the sacred science (and real salvation) to those who are ready, willing, and able.

I've been getting a lot into Indian Astrology as of late. The Indian system (sometimes referred to at this misnomer, "Vedic Astrology"...if we want to be pedantic) is supremely different than the Astrology most people here in the West think of when they hear that word. The Western system most of us have heard of (unless you've been living under a rock) uses the Tropical Zodiac, which is fixed to the seasons of the Northern Hemisphere; the first sign "Aries" begins at the Spring Equinox, which is the exact start of the new solar year. Not so in the Indian system, whereby the zodiac calendar directly follows the constellations at they appear in the sky as the stellar positioning shifts throughout the year as the Earth orbits the Sun. This is known as the sidereal zodiac. People use to the Western system might be a bit disoriented at first as they will probably find their sidereal sun sign to be one position off from what they're used to it being on the Tropical. And of course, Indian astrology goes magnitudes beyond a simple sun sign and the sort of dumb magazine-style horoscopes that get attached to that.

Anyway, I'm discovering some rather riveting (and sad) insights about myself as I work with my Indian birth chart. Of course the person delving into this system must believe in a spiritual realm and higher power of sorts and at least be open to the concept of reincarnation and karma. Otherwise, it's just going to be even more gobblygook than what you might get with Western astrology.