Theos-Talk Archives (May 2008 Message tt00098)

Why not?
Are you saying that people aught not to be made aware of the activities of the Catholic Church?

Almost the only thing I hear coming from you is a complaint about what I am doing.
Is there a special reason for you to keep bashing my emails without explaining why you do it?


Let me at least try to explain to you just a very small part about the reason why I wrote these words in my previous email on Anathema and Excommunication.

Try to read the following article taken down from the hand of Doris Lessing - who recently got the Nobel Prize in literature.
Doris Lessing learned from the Sufi named Idries Shah.
- - - - - - -

There has always been travellers to the mystic East. 

'Tell me, Master, what is the Secret?' 'Oh you want a Secret, dear child, is that it? Well, stand on your head for a week, and chant this mantra...' 

But those of us who tries to approach Sufism through what is offered to us in the West seem nearly always to have gone through something like that, and had to outgrow it: it ishow we have been conditioned to think. What we find in the East isnot glamorous and the mystic, but an approach to humanity, both as individuals and as an organic unity, that goes far beyond our own sciences, in conception and achievement - in sophistication.

How has this come about?

For one thing, perhaps the culture we inhabit is not the advanced, open-minded culture we believe it is. Outsiders, who have always been valuable in providing insights into sciences, although they are always resisted at first, judge us differently.


We are judged as being fettered, and in many ways. We easily talk now of Western arrogance; we begin to know we are insular. But it is a slow business, for we have to contend, in the case of the Middle East and Central Asia, with the implanted results of hundreds of years of suspicion of the dreaded Saracen. This has had, still has, stultifying effects on our culture, from ignorance and bigotry about Islam, to something like this: that the symbols for the planets in astrology - Mars, Venus, Mercury and the rest - are no more than Arabic letters, easily recognisable as such to those who know Arabic. Yet we ascribe to them amazing origins. A tiny example, even an absurd one, of an enormous unmapped area. But why is it not being researched?


We may go on murmuring about Western complacency, but it is another thing actually to face it. Idries Shah instances our belief that we in the West pioneered certain psychological ideas. But the 'discoveries' of Freud and Jung are to be found in Al Ghazzali and Ibn El Arabi, who died in the twelfth century, and in other great thinkers of the time. (Jung acknowledged his debt to the East. Is it not remarkable that his disciples are not curious about what else there might be?) Al Ghazzali wrote extensively about conditioning: then, as now, Sufi teachers were concerned about freeing people from social and religious indoctrinations.

What happened to all that expertise? It was used. It became the property of doctors of the mind, of the soul, of the body; it has been built on, developed...But we, in the West, have been cut off from it - are still cut off from it, and will be until we are prepared to think hard about our own mental sets.

Another instance: we tell ourselves about our inifinitely various and
rich language. But the fact is that English is impoverished; it lacks
words and concepts we need. Any writer who has tried to describe
certain processes and experiences has come up against it: the absence of words. There are ways around it - analogy is one - but the problem
remains. A handful of pitful and worn terms - unconscious, soul,
spirit, collective unconscious, super-mind, ego, super-ego, id, paranormal,
ESP, super-nature - and suddenly, very soon, you've run into the sand.
You cannot use these words for fresh experiences, new ideas,
because each is loaded with unwanted associations. But other
languages are not so barren; their words are not so overloaded. No,
this is not an essay in disparaement of English, or in admiration of
other tongues, for the sake of it, but a plea for recognition: if there is
a desperate and urgent need for something, that need may be met. I hope so.  Meanwhile, it is hard going. I am not a linguist, to put it mildly, but my tiniest aquaintance with Persian, for example, shows
our own dreadful deprivation. But that is the language of a culture
where certain kinds of spirituality were in active operation for
hundreds of years....
... Friends who study 'primitive' cultures and know the language of 
American Indians, or certain African societies,
say that these, too, are well supplied with concepts that we lack (in the english language). Our english language is problably the best
of tools for technical processes, as long as technical processes are
still conceived of as being restricted to the mechanical, but when they 
impinge on the frontiers of the mind...

And there is another, Himalayan block, which we scarely consider.
It is that for 2.000 years the West has been under a most terrible
tyranny, the Christian religion. (I am aware that at this point, readers 
are sighing, thinking vaguely, 'How very nineteenth century.') But it
was, historically speaking, an extremely short time ago. I have met 
people who came into conflict with the churches, when all they wanted
was to opt out of certainties and dogma into agnosticism. Wives and
husbands left them, they lost jobs, were socially ostracised, were cast
off from families - and went to the colonies. There I met them as a 
child. Now the churches has a benevolent, harmless aspect, half
social agency, half genial bully; they cajole people into thinking that
they really have to be born again, or BELONG to something or other. But
for 2.000 years we were kept in a mental straitjacket, and even the
most limited rebellion was horribly punished. Luther's was limited.

He said, I insist on the right to talk with God directly, without the
mediation of the church. He did not say, For many thousands of years there have been people in this world who have had techniques, the
information, to enable those with sufficient preparation to make use of
these tools, to acheive states of mind, or of spirit, that the churches
know nothing about. (But at this point I have to make clear that
Sufism respects all religions, saying that the Truth is at the core of 
each. It is the tyrant, benevolent or wicked, who has to be exposed.)
What I would like to know is this: how is it that, understanding that
our culture has had two millennia of certain kind of indoctrination,
we, our scienctist, are not researching the effects on our mental
processes? For these effects are there; once you begin thikning on
these lines, they are very evident."



M. Sufilight


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: kolad beth 
  To: theos-talk@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2008 2:22 PM
  Subject: RE: Theos-World Be aware. - Anathema and Candle-throwers at the Vatican! :-)



  Why is this even a topic in this conversation? this is what I don't understand.
  ________________________________
  > To: theos-talk@yahoogroups.com
  > From: global-theosophy@stofanet.dk
  > Date: Sun, 4 May 2008 10:52:09 +0200
  > Subject: Theos-World Be aware. - Anathema and Candle-throwers at the Vatican! :-)
  > 
  > 
  > To all readers
  > 
  > My views are:
  > 
  > Try the following on Excommunication (also called sorcery) from a wellknown Catholic website...
  > 
  >>>>Anathema <<<
  > 
  > "Anathema remains a major excommunication which is to be promulgated with great solemnity. A formula for this ceremony was drawn up by Pope Zachary (741-52) in the chapter Debent duodecim sacerdotes, Cause xi, quest. iii. The Roman Pontifical reproduces it in the chapter Ordo excommunicandi et absolvendi, distinguishing three sorts of excommunication: minor excommunication, formerly incurred by a person holding communication with anyone under the ban of excommunication; major excommunication, pronounced by the Pope in reading a sentence; and anathema, or the penalty incurred by crimes of the gravest order, and solemnly promulgated by the Pope. In passing this sentence, the pontiff is vested in amice, stole, and a violet cope, wearing his mitre, and assisted by twelve priests clad in their surplices and holding lighted candles.
  > 
  > He takes his seat in front of the altar or in some other suitable place, amid pronounces the formula of anathema which ends with these words: "Wherefore in the name of God the All-powerful, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of the Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the saints, in virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth, we deprive N-- himself and all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord, we separate him from the society of all Christians, we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth, we declare him excommunicated and anathematized and we judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate, so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance and satisfy the Church; we deliver him to Satan to mortify his body, that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment." Whereupon all the assistants respond: "Fiat, fiat, fiat."
  > 
  > The pontiff and the twelve priests then cast to the ground the lighted candles they have been carrying, and notice is sent in writing to the priests and neighbouring bishops of the name of the one who has been excommunicated and the cause of his excommunication, in order that they may have no communication with him. Although he is delivered to Satan and his angels, he can still, and is even bound to repent. The Pontifical gives the form for absolving him and reconciling him with the Church. The promulgation of the anathema with such solemnity is well calculated to strike terror to the criminal and bring him to a state of repentance, especially if the Church adds to it the ceremony of the Maranatha."
  > 
  > "Publication information
  > Written by Joseph N. Gignac. Transcribed by W.S. French, Jr..
  > 
  > The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume I. Published 1907. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Nihil Obstat, March 1, 1907. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York"
  > http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01455e.htm
  > 
  > ROFL = Roll On the Floor Laughing
  > 
  > I wonder if the various Muslim leaders are subject to daily Anathema and Excommunication as an Axis of Evil. The leaders in USA it seems are not under the wrath of the present Pope. Perhaps theosophists are being excommunicated.
  > 
  > - - - - - - - -
  > 
  > ANATHEMA and THE INFALIBILITY of THE POPE
  > 
  > Also here The Vatican Council - 1869-1870
  > "Therefore, faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the Christian faith, to the glory of God our savior, for the exaltation of the Catholic religion and for the salvation of the Christian people, with the approval of the Sacred Council, we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable.
  > 
  > So then, should anyone, which God forbid, have the temerity to reject this definition of ours: let him be anathema.
  > 
  > Given at Rome in public session, solemnly held in the Vatican Basilica in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and seventy, on the eighteenth day of July, in the twenty-fifth year of Our Pontificate.
  > 
  > In conformity with the original.
  > 
  > Joseph, Bishop of St. Polten Secretary to the Vatican Council"
  > http://www.vaxxine.com/pjm/vaticanI.htm
  > 
  > M. Sufilight
  > 
  > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
  > 
  > 
  > 
  > Messages in this topic 
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