Let me give you some context: Both Matthew and Luke drew on a source we call Q, whose sayings filled up much of the space of their gospels, second only in importance and space to the material they copied directly from Mark. This Q material included what went into the Sermon on the Mount--but the sayings from the Mount are scattered throughout Luke. Now, why would Luke disassemble the Sermon? That would be the worst possible blasphemy, and anyway wouldn't make sense from the perspective of a writer trying to get across a message, since the Sermon is such a strong scene. Luke would never take apart the Sermon. So what happened? Instead, Matthew sewed together the various sayings into the Sermon. Why? Matthew's whole angle was that Jesus was the new Moses coming to reform the corrupt Jewish leaders and turn Jews into even better Jews. The Sermon on the Mount was created specifically to mirror Moses coming down the mountain with the Commandments. That's why the Mount. Too, Moses gave the Commandments to the Jews so they could live in the Holy Land; Jesus gives the laws to his listeners to they could enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
John is the least dependable of the Gospels, being written about 30 years (to the best of our knowledge) after Matthew and Luke, and the furthest away in terms of its content. It is the only Gospel that says Jesus was there at the beginning of the universe, and that he is his father. Here Jesus, portrayed in the earlier gospels as an apocalyptic Jew preaching about the coming end of the world, says that the kingdom of heaven is inside yourself--when really in Mark he's talking about the Kingdom of Heaven as an actual kingdom that's going to appear on the planet. Later on, as he speaks to Nicodemus, the passage relies on a pun in Greek which doesn't work in Aramaic--meaning that it was all too obviously inserted by its writer, like most of the material. By the time we get to John, we've reached the stage where the gospel is nothing more than a piece of fiction dreamed up by someone who never even met anyone who met Jesus. Moreover, the anonymous writer didn't even have enough skill to make the characters speak differently (not that Luke fared much better, there).
It's another conversation altogether whether we should take Jesus/Buddha as presented as serious objects of contemplation--i.e. as reified objects whose conveyed lessons are more important than who actually conveyed them--but to take the holy books as reliable is to misstep seriously, against all the best scholarship, into dangerously wishful thinking.
By the way, it's more than possible to lose your mind gently and still keep your job. I know someone personally who did it, who only sank into full-blown psychosis over years. She thought she was enlightened too. I don't know you and don't want to judge. I'd suggest only that you might muster dozens of pages of arguments for your sanity and still turn them against them one day. Words, words, words...
Nov 16, 2023·edited Nov 16, 2023Liked by Carlos Ramírez
Thanks for your solid description of your spiritual awakening. After all sorts religions have been mythologizing the stuff for thousands of years, it's quite refreshing nowadays to hear plain accounts of how awakening - of various kinds and depths - just happens to people. One of my favorite such accounts is Pathways Through Space by Franklin Merrell-Wolff - if you haven't heard of him you might be interested. The book is probably out of print but the pdf is easy to find on the internet. He tells an intense personal story throughout, quite honest and without too much baggage.
On the topic of Shaman Kings, you write:
> a big tournament every 600 years to decide who is going to be the Shaman King, the spiritual leader, of all mankind. 600 years is pretty close to the spacing between Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad...
I get that such speculations of a cosmic cycle of teachers within the history of humanity are the kind of thing René Guénon loved to indulge in. But there's another, perhaps more radical view I've heard and read before: that ultimate world-class sages are not actually rare, maybe up to dozens or hundreds per generation, shining just as bright as any Jesus or Buddha, each in their specific ways. But whether anyone picks up on them, or whether their transmission continues in the form of a new religion, or of a renovated branch of an existing one, or not at all, is not up to them, or up to some hallucinated divine plan. It's just an incidental, circumstantial question of what kind of people happen to hear the message and find themselves impressed, and in what kind of surrounding culture and historical moment, and what kind of powers of communication they happen to have access to. Most cultural moments are just not open to a radical opening, so the breakthrough mostly never happens.
But Jesus didn't make up the Sermon on the Mount.
Matthew did.
Let me give you some context: Both Matthew and Luke drew on a source we call Q, whose sayings filled up much of the space of their gospels, second only in importance and space to the material they copied directly from Mark. This Q material included what went into the Sermon on the Mount--but the sayings from the Mount are scattered throughout Luke. Now, why would Luke disassemble the Sermon? That would be the worst possible blasphemy, and anyway wouldn't make sense from the perspective of a writer trying to get across a message, since the Sermon is such a strong scene. Luke would never take apart the Sermon. So what happened? Instead, Matthew sewed together the various sayings into the Sermon. Why? Matthew's whole angle was that Jesus was the new Moses coming to reform the corrupt Jewish leaders and turn Jews into even better Jews. The Sermon on the Mount was created specifically to mirror Moses coming down the mountain with the Commandments. That's why the Mount. Too, Moses gave the Commandments to the Jews so they could live in the Holy Land; Jesus gives the laws to his listeners to they could enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
John is the least dependable of the Gospels, being written about 30 years (to the best of our knowledge) after Matthew and Luke, and the furthest away in terms of its content. It is the only Gospel that says Jesus was there at the beginning of the universe, and that he is his father. Here Jesus, portrayed in the earlier gospels as an apocalyptic Jew preaching about the coming end of the world, says that the kingdom of heaven is inside yourself--when really in Mark he's talking about the Kingdom of Heaven as an actual kingdom that's going to appear on the planet. Later on, as he speaks to Nicodemus, the passage relies on a pun in Greek which doesn't work in Aramaic--meaning that it was all too obviously inserted by its writer, like most of the material. By the time we get to John, we've reached the stage where the gospel is nothing more than a piece of fiction dreamed up by someone who never even met anyone who met Jesus. Moreover, the anonymous writer didn't even have enough skill to make the characters speak differently (not that Luke fared much better, there).
It's another conversation altogether whether we should take Jesus/Buddha as presented as serious objects of contemplation--i.e. as reified objects whose conveyed lessons are more important than who actually conveyed them--but to take the holy books as reliable is to misstep seriously, against all the best scholarship, into dangerously wishful thinking.
By the way, it's more than possible to lose your mind gently and still keep your job. I know someone personally who did it, who only sank into full-blown psychosis over years. She thought she was enlightened too. I don't know you and don't want to judge. I'd suggest only that you might muster dozens of pages of arguments for your sanity and still turn them against them one day. Words, words, words...
Thanks for your solid description of your spiritual awakening. After all sorts religions have been mythologizing the stuff for thousands of years, it's quite refreshing nowadays to hear plain accounts of how awakening - of various kinds and depths - just happens to people. One of my favorite such accounts is Pathways Through Space by Franklin Merrell-Wolff - if you haven't heard of him you might be interested. The book is probably out of print but the pdf is easy to find on the internet. He tells an intense personal story throughout, quite honest and without too much baggage.
On the topic of Shaman Kings, you write:
> a big tournament every 600 years to decide who is going to be the Shaman King, the spiritual leader, of all mankind. 600 years is pretty close to the spacing between Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad...
I get that such speculations of a cosmic cycle of teachers within the history of humanity are the kind of thing René Guénon loved to indulge in. But there's another, perhaps more radical view I've heard and read before: that ultimate world-class sages are not actually rare, maybe up to dozens or hundreds per generation, shining just as bright as any Jesus or Buddha, each in their specific ways. But whether anyone picks up on them, or whether their transmission continues in the form of a new religion, or of a renovated branch of an existing one, or not at all, is not up to them, or up to some hallucinated divine plan. It's just an incidental, circumstantial question of what kind of people happen to hear the message and find themselves impressed, and in what kind of surrounding culture and historical moment, and what kind of powers of communication they happen to have access to. Most cultural moments are just not open to a radical opening, so the breakthrough mostly never happens.
try reading the bhagvad gita , its pretty solid