EternalCowabunga said:

Jesus was not just a moral or enlightened man... the way I see it he was the embodiment of Compassion itself. So if you became the archetype of Compassion you could call yourself Christ and you would have quite a lot of responsibility because your heart would plead with you to heal the wounded... and there are a lot of wounded on Earth.

To worship Christ is to embody the archetype of Compassion.

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Be careful what you say. You could go to hell and have to deal with Icelander. And I have bad gas.

Icelander said:

God is worshipped by being in Christ.

Right, so you can choose to believe what ever helps you to "be in" the fullness of your being. My only real problem with the common Christian is their belief that theirs is the only path to salvation or whatever. That is just arrogant non-sense and fear based delusion. I was severely abused with this ugliness as a child so now I like to hunt these people down and shoot holes in there non-sense when ever possible. I would prefer that others not endure this crap because no one stood up to their, IMO, self-defeating LIES.

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Whereas I agree with you here, I do not agree with the way you're allowing your own pain to poison your response to ZShroom. Regardless of which tradition embodies 'The Way,' whether Christian, Taoist, Buddhist or whatever,  compassion, agape (dispassionate love), or altruism characterizes 'The Way.' Your anger is a dark cloud and lightning bolt in the cloudless sky of our Ground of Being. Hurling thunder bolts belongs to demigods like Thor , but not the Ground from which they too are formed. In other words, it too belongs to the egoistic mind in a negative way.

That a Fundamentalist Christian holds the superstitious idea that the compassion of a Taoist or a Buddhist or a Jew cannot be identical to the compassion of a Christian only attests to the incontestable ignorance that underlies the nature of religious intolerance and bigotry. It further illustrates that the mentality of the Fundamentalist cannot understand the subtlety of language in conveying sublime truth.

Fundamentalist mentality is, in a very real way, retarded. It has remained at a developmental level that cannot process metaphor and symbol which point to a dimension of consciousness that cannot be grasped by thought. It cannot perform a "phenomenological reduction" and perceive invariant or universal features in a variety of differing forms. Not only that, when I have affirmed that the uniqueness of Iesus is based on a mythological overlay rather than an actual ontological status, I am often accused of denying the 'Deity of Christ.' In reality, I am affirming the Deity of all human beings as our essential nature, including Iesus of course. Iesus is the archetype, the paradigm for every human who has ever lived. What applied to Him, applies to us. This is what the Truth about Iesus is, as Grace Slick once sang: "...any man's story..." Iesus on a pedestal is worse than useless, it separates and prevents the union which unites humans under compassion. The divinity of Christ Iesus lies in His humanity, in His Compassion.

Peace.

EternalCowabunga said:

Jesus was not just a moral or enlightened man... the way I see it he was the embodiment of Compassion itself. So if you became the archetype of Compassion you could call yourself Christ and you would have quite a lot of responsibility because your heart would plead with you to heal the wounded... and there are a lot of wounded on Earth.

To worship Christ is to embody the archetype of Compassion.

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palmersc said:

The communication that takes place between a true believer and God is entirely spiritual. The love and communion that takes place is what I yearn for more than anything else. It is a love which has no bounds.

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Icelander said:

My only real problem with the common Christian is their belief that theirs is the only path to salvation or whatever. That is just arrogant non-sense and fear based delusion. I was severely abused with this ugliness as a child so...

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Awesome posts, js and Rahz.  Reading those was a very cool way to start my day.

Rahz said:

I've never understood the draw of zen. It's nice, but I want some action. Nothingness just doesn't seem that exciting, and I know there is something more to experience. Adyashanti practiced zen for 15 years before realizing he was trying to hard to find something through nothing.

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In my very limited understanding it's more about no concepts than no-thing.  Adding no concepts to what is, one sees whether there is nothing or something (and whether there is one seeing).  Paradox.

bug said:

Awesome posts, js and Rahz.  Reading those was a very cool way to start my day.

Rahz said:

I've never understood the draw of zen. It's nice, but I want some action. Nothingness just doesn't seem that exciting, and I know there is something more to experience. Adyashanti practiced zen for 15 years before realizing he was trying to hard to find something through nothing.

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In my very limited understanding it's more about no concepts than no-thing.  Adding no concepts to what is, one sees whether there is nothing or something (and whether there is one seeing).  Paradox.

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That's a good way to put it. Perhaps as time goes by it is something I will do, and is not so much a "thing" I try to do.