The title of this post was a question put to Eckhart Tolle some years ago. His reply:
“Suffering is necessary until we discover that it is not.”
As suffering seems to be a subject that is coming into the news daily, it may be a good idea to find out what Eckhart means by his reply. Suffering also seems to be the major reason why so many people stopped believing in God after the Second World War, because they could not find answers to the questions and statement: ‘Why does God allow this to happen? Why does God not do anything to stop this? Surely this must mean that there is no God.’
As I wrote in my previous article What if the purpose of Creation is the Evolution of God? this is not my question but I do want to try and give an answer to it.
I believe that the reason for asking this question is that in the current world view, in the western world at least, the world of matter is the real world. The world we can perceive with our senses is the only world that exists. We are our bodies and consciousness, whatever that may be, is a function of the brain and it ceases to function when we die. Heaven is an idea and even many Christians do not believe in it anymore or admit that they are not sure that a life after death does exist. And then the question: ‘If God has created this world and rules over it, why then does He not do anything to prevent all these disasters from happening?’ is a logical question.
I believe however that the answer to this question is found in a very different world view. Not the world of space, time and matter, but the world of consciousness and spirit is the real world. Consciousness, God, is (the origin of) All that Is. And we are not our bodies, which only live once. We are eternal as we are spirit, who, as a part or spark of God, temporarily put on a body suit, a coat of flesh—which is the literal translation of the Gothic word lic hamo, which became lichaam, the Dutch word for body—when we want to spend some time in the world of matter. When we die there, it simply means that we take off this body suit again and return to and are reabsorbed in the world we came from.
That world is a world of High Consciousness but, to begin with, with little or no Awareness of it as it was a world of oneness, of sameness, of unity, without anything in it to become aware of.
That is why the world of matter, a world of dense energy, what we might nowadays call a virtual world, was created in order to give us, as sparks/emissaries of God, the opportunity to gain awareness of everything by being exposed to its opposite as well. For how can we for instance know what light is if we have never experienced darkness? We cannot. By having all sorts of experiences, ranging from good to bad, and by learning from the consequences of our choices and our deeds we would slowly gain conscious awareness. The concept of such a world has long since been known. Buddhists call it ‘maya’, illusion, and Hindu’s ‘leela’, a game. In the Bible, in Genesis, this world is called tardema, a dream, a deep sleep. Man enters this dream world when God puts the androgynous Adam to sleep in order to separate the male and female sides in order to enable them to function independently and to have interaction. Nowhere does it say that after this act of separation they woke up again. They did not and we are still mostly asleep.
When Adam and Eve enter this world of matter, they receive a physical body, a body of so-called matter, which in the Bible is called an animal skin. The Hebrew term for this body is ‘or’, in numbers (Hebrew characters are numbers as well) 70-6-200. As written Hebrew knows no vowels, this word can also be read as ‘iver’, which means blind. This means that mankind now blindly enters into this virtual world and has no longer any knowledge of the world of unity and high consciousness that they just left. Their eyes however are opened for the possibilities of a world of duality, where everyone can create his or her own world by the choices they make and the way they react to the consequences of these choices. The possibilities range from miraculous beauty and love to utter despair and hatred. Nothing in this world has an inherent meaning in itself but everything depends on the perspective with which we decide to look at whatever we create and the way we act in response to it. In other articles on this blog I have written about this whole process in more detail.
But, to return to the subject of this article, one of the things we will eventually be confronted with in this world is suffering, our own as well as that of others. It is the most difficult of our experiences and belongs to the challenges we have to face in this world. As none of these experiences are real in themselves however—they are only part of the game to help us gain conscious awareness—God will not interfere.
So, to return to the original question, what is then the meaning of Eckhart Tolle’s statement: ‘Suffering is necessary until we discover it is not’?
I believe that this means that the experience we call suffering is a necessary part of our journey through this virtual world but only until we discover how to meet this challenge in the right way. If we decide to accept this experience, in whatever form, with love and without resistance or expectation, and take a positive perspective on it, we will not suffer any longer. I have seen this many times by now, often in people in the last stages of a lethal illness. Or when dealing with the loss of a loved one in a way that benefits others.
All of this of course is not easy, and we have to take the decision to face whatever we have to face from a positive perspective every day anew but if we do that, then we may be confronted with terrible loss, or with serious illness, but we will still remain positive and be thankful for all the good things we receive every day. If we choose to be victims however, then we will suffer and keep on suffering until we decide to change our perspective. And when the cause of our suffering concerns others as well and we blame them for whatever happened, then we will only create more suffering until we decide to forgive them, and ourselves if need be, and free ourselves from this burden of bearing a grudge.
So suffering in itself is of no use at all but the experience of suffering can be changed into something positive by a conscious decision to look at whatever it is from a different, always loving, perspective and to see the possibility of growth in it. Whenever there are other people involved and there is a question of blame, then forgiveness is the only option to free ourselves from this suffering. Even when excruciating physical pain is the cause of our suffering, it is possible to overcome this, though I must admit that I do not have any personal experience with that yet. But I have seen examples of it, so it is possible. If I remember correctly Eckhart Tolle called this something like ‘offering your suffering to God and a fast way to enlightenment’.
My conclusion is that the decision to overcome suffering may be the beginning of the path to awakening and of course suffering itself will stimulate us to go this way, if only we are willing to listen.
Now the question might be asked: ‘Why should a difficult subject like this be put before us in the days during which we prepare for the joyful feast of the birth of Christ? The answer is that the way we deal with suffering has everything to do with the birth of the Christ in us. Preparing for this birth is all about our willingness to accept the suffering that comes our way and the way we deal with it.
Two years ago, also just before Christmas, I wrote an article touching on this subject and it may be good to reread some relevant parts of it because they show and explain the hidden meanings of certain biblical symbols concerning the importance of how we deal with our suffering, and indeed show that all this is meant to promote our spiritual growth. Many new readers may not have read this article and others probably forgot much of its contents. Therefore I add the relevant parts of it underneath.
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Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Bethlehem is Beth lechem, the House of Bread. Bread is made from wheat or rye etc. and making bread involves a whole process. And is one of the symbols for our process of raising our conscious awareness. There actually is a whole system of those symbols all through the Bible.
Wheat is the first fruit of the Kabbalistic system of seven fruits, which all in their own way stand for the above process, which has several phases. First of all the wheat is grinded, a painful process. Then yeast is added (the whole process of the ego and the emotions that has to be played out), and after that, the purification of the fire during the baking of the bread. The whole process is difficult and painful at times, but when we finally eat the finished product, the bread, then the Christ can be born in us.
Eating is achal in Hebrew, 1-kol, which means reconnecting kol, everything, with the oneness of the beginning. It means absorbing and digesting everything, and after that enjoying the nutrients that came out of all this. It means letting go of all bitterness, and acknowledging that all is Good without an opposite evil, because of all the positive things that may have come out of this experience, for ourselves and for others, because of the growth of our conscious awareness.
I do not know all the fruits of this Kabbalistic system, but I am pretty sure grapes belong to it too. They are crushed and fermented, among other things, in order to become wine. Wine is an essential element in the Bible stories, meaning the wine of the spirit as opposed to the water of ego and emotions. There, of course, the meaning can be found of the story in which Jesus turns water into wine during a wedding.
The fourth fruit is the fig, and that is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, also called ets-2 (tree of duality) or etsev, which means pain. We know how much pain and suffering the eating of that fruit has cost us, but in the end the eating and digesting of all the fruits of that tree prove to lead to the gaining of the higher awareness of the 50 through the word itsavon, ets-2 + 50, which also means pain, sorrow. Fifty however is a symbol of higher awareness, and it provides the sought-after Knowledge, Da’at, which is shown in the picture of the Tree of Life in my article Hidden Symbols and Patterns Inside the Bible: Part 2 in which the tree of the knowledge and the tree of life prove to be one tree with two faces.
The sixth fruit is the olive, the fruit of the sixth day. The process of the olive proves to be Gethsemane, gat shemen, the oil press. Shemen, oil, is related to the number eight, shmona. This process involves again crushing and pressing, this time of the olives, in order to prepare the shemen, the oil, which is necessary for the anointment of the Messiah who will lead us into the eighth day, during which we will start to ascend out of this material world of the seventh day again (the Messiah being a force inside ourselves in this context). And by going from the descending sixth day to the ascending eighth day through this process of crushing and pressing the olives in order to prepare the oil, it becomes clear that Gethsemane itself stands for this material world of the seventh day, and that all the pain and suffering we encounter in this world through that process are only meant to help us grow in conscious awareness and love.
This is confirmed again by the seventh fruit, the fruit of the seventh day itself, which is called tamar, 400-mar, or the bitterness of the 400. Four hundred is a symbol of slavery and addiction (the 400 years in Egypt) and the cross (the number 400 used to be written as a cross on its side in ancient days). This tamar that symbolizes the bitterest period of this seventh day proves to be a date that is sweet and nutritious. But again, we will only discover that when we eat it. When we absorb it and digest and process it.
Even the Hebrew word for cross itself shows it. It is tselav, or tsel-2, shadow of duality. It symbolizes our life in this world of duality, and by calling it a “cross,” it indicates that this life is not always easy, to say the least. Again it indicates suffering, but suffering with a purpose. After all is said and done, the word tselav also can be read as 90-lev, or the birth – after this whole process – of the heart, and of the Christ in us, that is, if we go through this process that is being symbolized by so many different symbols, and that brings us such a growth of conscious awareness, which I believe is the purpose of our descent into this world to begin with.
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With this summary I wanted to concentrate on what the purpose and meaning of this birth actually is, and what leads to it. I also hope that it can be somewhat of a comfort for people who are going through a lot of suffering right now, to know that they are not alone in this, and that there is a purpose to all of it.
In the end, I want to return to the period we are living in right now, the darkest time of the year, just before the turning point, after which the days will slowly lengthen again. Also the seasons teach us the same lesson. And it is not just chance that we celebrate the birth of Christ right now. From the above we can learn that indeed the Christ is born in the darkest of circumstances, and that after that the light will grow stronger again. But we should also learn from this that after this tentative beginning, spring will not be upon us immediately. After this birth we will not be a totally changed being at once. First winter will be there, during which things may seem to get even worse. However, under the ground and inside the trees all sorts of growth is taking place, unbeknownst to us, and then suddenly, maybe when we least expect it, spring will be there in a riot of colors.
That is also what is happening right now – in ourselves when we are attending to this process – and in the world. It may seem that everyone is afraid and desperate and there does not seem to be hope of any change, but underneath it all a lot of change is underway, and many, many people are already involved in creating a more loving world. Let us all join them by striving to live a life of unconditional love as much as we possibly can.
I wish you all Happy Holidays with all your loved ones.
Hi Anny. Thanks for this contribution to the blog. I really enjoyed the read. You made some great scriptural points to back this up.
First of all I loved how you made the point to compare the Eastern concepts of “leela” and “maya” (game and illusion) to the Biblical term “tardema,” meaning asleep. What haven’t more Christians made this connection in academia? It is undeniable, just as is Karma and “a man reaps what he sows.”
In the Genesis narrative you pointed out how Adam and Eve are the separated consciousness of God, male and female, polar opposites. Without such a fragmentation the individual “I” that we experience could not exist. And I believe you are dead on when saying that the Genesis narrative hints at the fact that consciousness, even though it is the ONE before descent into matter, has little to no self-awareness as there is no duality to provide relationship.
For me, the question of suffering is simply part of the natural state of experience. Pain and pleasure are a part of physical experience and must be as the tide must ebb and flow. Some suffer more in this life some less. But who can really know if the myriad of lives lived before, and what suffering an individual had to go through to have this life as they have it now. Suffering can also be seen as a highly subjective experience, since some are set back by it, and others thrive after it. As you say, the choice is up to us in how we decide to handle it during and afterwards.
Your questions are important ones as well. And shouldn’t they help us to reevaluate our idea of God? Some sternly believe God is always intervening, while others believe he steps back and takes a lesser role. But maybe both concepts of God are totally wrong. There is no he / she God, and the intervention comes from within ourselves. The Bible states that as a man thinketh in his heart so is he. Hmm. I would say that all is left up to us. Isn’t God written to have repented for many things he thought and did, and ready to change his mind at the questioning of Abraham and Moses. What does this say about God?
Looking at the deeper interpretations of the Bible, I believe, helps us to realize that God is within, an integral aspect of who we are. Humans and God are woven in the same tapestry, and God can be felt and seen from the outside in, and from the inside out. The concept of God may seem foreign within a physical experience, but is still there in ways it is hard for our limited perspective to comprehend.
Eckart Tolle’s life story is interesting. His book, the Power of Now gets to the core issues of what this physical experience means, and I highly recommend anyone read it who hasn’t. Suffering is indeed a doorway to truth, when our awareness expands into it and can see the cause and effect from within the egoic mind. We cause much of our own suffering from living in the past or future, as the mind runs rampant with evaluating many things so negatively.
Great article Anny!
Is Suffering Really Necessary?
This post should actually bring our thoughts to the three most important questions in life’s journey: who am I?, where am I?, and where am I going? Man having no clues to this question has brought about purposeless suffering on the face of the earth. The answers to this relates to the creation of man in Genesis 3, where the creator forbids man from eating of the fruit of good and evil and eventually cursed man into enormous suffering.
3 “But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. 4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: 5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil…………………………………………………………
22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” the creator god himself confirmed that they did not die but rather, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil” / the True Good God and the false evil god. So now we can see clearly from the beginning that this creator god was a lie, selfish, jealous, greed, murderer who will never answer the prayers of man and wants to be worshiped and adored whilst enjoying and drinking human’s blood and energy when man is suffering under the spell of bondage. Metaphorically, Jesus confirmed by questioning the Pharisees in John 8 44 “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it”. As if it wasn’t enough, he goes on in Isaiah 44:6 “besides me there is no God” threatening man not to evolve in consciousness to know the Supreme God/The Unknowable God. Now curiosity has it that if there is no other God, why will the creator god proclaiming to himself as the only god and that there is no other God above him.
So you can see clearly that the Jehovah/Yahweh god of the Old Testament does not want man to know his origin or his great destiny. He forbids all contact with the higher world. He wants man to be a reflection of him, the creator, and not a reflection of the Supreme God/The Unknowable God and so “Suffering is necessary until we discover that it is not” as Eckhart Tolle will put it.
Almost all the religious myths relate that man “was created by God from dust of the ground”. The bible clearly says: “And the Lord God formed man of dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul”. It is saying here that god created the body and the soul of man. A physical material part, the body of dust, and an animic part, the breath of the creator, which we call soul. Now then, if man were only a body and a soul he would be like any other animal. Slightly more intelligent than the others maybe, but inside he would be more or less the same as an animal. Later we will see that after his so-called “fall”, man such as we know him today is more than a body and a soul. Although god created the body and the soul there is something else. There is an uncreated Spirit, not created by god, which has been imprisoned, enclosed, in the soul of man. The bible doesn’t say so because the bible speaks of that created by god, and god created the body and soul. But wisdom maintain that man has a body, a soul and a Spirit. Where did this Spirit, not created by the creator god, come from?
Why is It there? This is one of the issues we must be looking into. The man in Eden, this “paradise” in which god placed him, didn’t know who he was, he was only carrying out orders. He was naming the animals for example, being a sort of administrator, or representative of the creator god. There, in this “paradise” which god had prepared for him, it was like he was asleep, he did not know who he was or where he had come from. Man became aware of who he was, found himself, only after what was called “the sin”, the Disobedience, when he ate the forbidden fruit and was thrown out of paradise. We will also be looking at this later on. We have said that god created the body and the soul. For Gnostics, all creation is satanic, evil and originates from a satan creator, a satanic god. So not only the body but also the soul of man is something evil and satanic that would have to go through suffering, suffering and suffering until the Spirit of man unions with the etheric Spirit of the Supreme God.
There exists another God higher than the one who created the world and man. The creator god is not the only god. There is above him another God, infinitely superior and perfect. This God, unknowable to man, is outside of this hellish and impure creation. It is impossible for man to find this God via his body and soul, imperfect and created as they are. Only the man who has completely freed himself from this can have the slightest idea or inkling of intuition of what this God, who is outside this finite and limited universe, is about. The ancient Greeks called him Agnostos Theos, the Unknown God. This God is not only unknown but rather impossible to know, unknowable, at the very least with our ordinary form of being in this world. With a body and soul we cannot have the slightest idea of what this God, who is outside all this whole system and infinitely superior to the creator god, is. A God impossible to recognize with this body and soul, from this universe created from matter and time. This God does not belong to a material plane but to an antimatter one. He is an antimatter God, who abhors the hell of the created matter, who with our current state of being we are not able to recognize, nor even imagine. He is a mystery to us. This Unknowable God is like an inconceivable and indescribable fire. He is the True God which when merged with by escaping from the prison in which he finds himself, man can relinquish suffering as Eckhart Tolle puts it. “Suffering is necessary until we discover that it is not” But this True God, normally out of our reach, cannot manifest himself or act in this impure and imperfect universe, in these hellish dimensions of created matter and time. Only in exceptional cases can the Unknowable God penetrate these dimensions, through one of his Messengers – Lucifer, in order to make a generally small change, and with great sacrifice. This only happens on very rare occasions, given the conditions here, in this material hell. Until man escapes the bondage of this creator god, he will continue to experience incarnations of suffering.
Bernhardt;
Great. Fire, and bombastic, that is; your comments are. So revealing!
What you have stated, all can be summed up as, myths.
Each and everyone of us speaks in myths and in so doing; we “myth” the point!
Really like your comments and can feel where you are coming from. Glad you brought it here.
Though what you say about the Higher God; I find “that God” you speak of, is spoken of here in this forum in every article posted by the authors on the site.
For your Higher God to exist, so must the lower god. So must the spirit be lowered into soul and soul lowered into matter or as is said, Man. You also liken Man to animal in nature. Very observant.
Nature; are the conditions that are present. Buddha teaches conditioned genesis, the nature present in the conditions.
Can it be said, animals suffer. Can plants suffer. Can the Earth suffer.
Eckhart Tolle’s quote is so often misunderstood, as simple as it is.
Consider the Buddha’s teachings, so simple though so misunderstood even by those taught by the Buddha who went on to become teachers, teaching a deviation of the truth.
The same can be said, and was said by Jesus on several occasions about the apostles to the apostles. They misunderstood the teachings.
Suffering is the burden carried by that which came from willing-ness. Willing is synonymous with desire.
Suffering is that burden that is spirit, that is soul and is Man that arises from desire.
Suffering is born from desire. That which desires to be something embeds itself into form.
The High God is without form though allows and gives form. Therefore the High God is without suffering.
When Buddhists speak of the Four Noble Truths; there is suffering, there is a path to suffering, there is no suffering, and there is a path to the cessation of suffering; meaning to suffer no more, it is beyond the word or label of suffering. These noble truths pertain to form and it’s impermanence.
That which is impermanent, loses it’s form it identifies with eventually and therefore to hold onto that identity, to invest oneself into the knowledge of who or what they think they are by out-right conviction is suffering by the arisng actions that bring each of us to the self-identity.
Tolle saw this as each of us may.
Is there some agreement here amongst us; for Man to stop suffering, to suffer no more, the human must agree to surrender form.
This is where Faith is born and releases us. It is the great Liberator.
Faith is without knowledge or myth. It is plain and simple. It is without form.
When we live by and in faith we suffer-no-more.
Tolle’s quote of suffering’s necessity and the release of suffering; is releasing the need for, the will from, and desire to be.
This quote was one of many spoken by Tolle which were part of the whole teaching of being mindful, silent, being aware of this state.
Entering the silence, to listen and find obedience.
Jesus, made Man, exemplified this by asking “Father why have you forsaken me?” As Spirit departed the form, the man’s suffering ceased. Jesus also exemplified the path as the way.
We can not escape non-consciousness just as we can not escape consciousness. The Now is all and is in all.
As God is all and in all God.
I can imagine Jesus on the cross. I see Jesus’s body limp hanging from the vertical and horizontal timbers.
The beams, one horizontal representing time. The vertical beam representing space.
The three, time/space/matter entwined. Jesus’ head at the point of where all three intersect. His mid-forehead at level where all three intersect at that plane. The mid-forehead being the seat of the 3rd eye or pineal gland.
Most us have the same image of Jesus on the cross. We have been taught the cross is our salvation. That Jesus died on the cross for our sins, it was through Jesus that we may live. So we are urged to come to the cross.
What we are mything, is we are focused on what is in front of us, the image of Man suffering on the cross, one Man without sin. We are so focused on this man we fail to notice the greater image.
The teaching culminated; God’s culminating purpose.
Could it be, that where the vertical and horizontal timbers intersect, is the NOW. Presence in space, presence in time and Jesus is the matter in those conditions.
When we live as Jesus; as Man, and heed the teaching in it’s true-ness. Without word, without thought and being silent; see from this place, the place the NOW, we enter into samadhi.
We see that Jesus’s teaching and the Buddha’s were truth, their paths similar; they both entered a deep silence in prayer that culminated in them surrendering form.
Enduring suffering that is, seeing it’s arising, releasing suffering to no suffering and seeing it’s arising.
Suffering is the false-identity of Spirit in form. As long as spirit is in form it “will” suffer.
So is suffering necessary, I guess so. Is suffering un-necessary, I guess so. It must be with each of us.
Here we are!!
Bernhardt…
Great to see a comment from you again here on the blog. Hope you have been well.
Good discussions you brought to the table, but I would like to address one point as food for further thought. The Gnostic idea of the demiurge has been misunderstood for centuries for the same reason the Bible has. Scholars have injected a literal interpretation to some of their writings, where they are clearly metaphorical. Origen stated that Christ was also the demiurge. The demiurge is a type of the unconscious man (world soul) who gradually grows and expands into self-realization of his nature. Good and evil, in modern language, could better be explained as opposites on the totem pole of experience, as a push to know more.
Is the demiurge truly evil? To say that he was evil would be to attribute a personality to a being powerful enough to independently create the material universe through willful action, and yet be ignorant. This would imply ordered intelligence, who was at the same time supposed to be completely ignorant. Think of the demiurge as a progression of the development of the soul, which serves as a shell for spirit to experience itself through. As Christ, it learns obedience through suffering.
Anny Vos said:
“Wheat is the first fruit of the Kabbalistic system of seven fruits, which all in their own way stand for the above process, which has several phases. First of all the wheat is grinded, a painful process. Then yeast is added (the whole process of the ego and the emotions that has to be played out), and after that, the purification of the fire during the baking of the bread. The whole process is difficult and painful at times, but when we finally eat the finished product, the bread, then the Christ can be born in us.
Eating is achal in Hebrew, 1-kol, which means reconnecting kol, everything, with the oneness of the beginning. It means absorbing and digesting everything, and after that enjoying the nutrients that came out of all this. It means letting go of all bitterness, and acknowledging that all is Good without an opposite evil, because of all the positive things that may have come out of this experience, for ourselves and for others, because of the growth of our conscious awareness.
I do not know all the fruits of this Kabbalistic system, but I am pretty sure grapes belong to it too. They are crushed and fermented, among other things, in order to become wine. Wine is an essential element in the Bible stories, meaning the wine of the spirit as opposed to the water of ego and emotions. There, of course, the meaning can be found of the story in which Jesus turns water into wine during a wedding.”
I thought I would add to your post that in ancient Egyptian religion wheat and the process of making bread were associated with the suffering, death, and resurrection of Osiris. The followers of Osiris would receive “divine” bread from Osiris in the afterlife.
From http://www.historyplace.com/specials/slideshows/mummies/mummies12.htm:
“Osiris, supreme god of resurrection, was closely associated with the life-giving forces of nature, particularly the Nile and vegetation. Above all, he was connected with germinating grain. The emergence of a living, growing, plant from the apparently dormant seed hidden within the earth was regarded by the Egyptians as a metaphor for the rebirth of a human being from the lifeless husk of the corpse. The concept was translated into physical form by the fashioning of images of Osiris out of earth and grain. These “corn-mummies” were composed of sand or mud, mixed with grains of barley.”
“Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt” by Geraldine Pinch:
“The scything down of the grain and it’s trampling and winnowing were equated with the murder and dismemberment of the “good god”. The sprouting of the seed that began the next agricultural cycle was celebrated as a resurrection for Osiris…”
“Osiris: Death and Afterlife of a God” By Bojana Mojsov:
“All justified souls were admitted to the community of gods and spirits, modeled after the pattern of earthly society. The giving of the bread and beer that issue from Osiris was not unlike the Christian bread and wine offered at the mass of the Eucharist. Osiris, the Good Being, gave sustenance to the righteous and pointed the way to immortality with the shepherd’s crook.”
“Following Osiris: Perspectives on the Osirian Afterlife from Four Millennia” By Mark Smith:
“The title of this spell is ‘Entering in front and going out behind in the midst of those who eat the bread of Osiris’…that of Spell 228 states that when someone who knows the spell proceeds to the god’s domain he will eat bread at the side of Osiris, while that of spell 339 promises that knowing the utterance means eating bread in the house of Osiris.”
Wine was associated with the dying and resurrecting savior god Dionysus.
“Dionysos” By Richard Seaford:
“The restoration of Dionysos to life was (like the return of Kore from Hades at Eleusis) presumably connected with the immortality obtained by the initiates…Not inconsistent with this is the possibility that the dismemberment myth was related to the drinking of wine that we have seen to be common in the mystic ritual…wine is earlier identified with Dionysos himself (e.g. Bacchae 284), more specifically with his blood (Timotheos fragment 780).”
“Dining with John” by Esther Kobel:
“By consuming the animal’s raw flesh along with wine, both of which represent the deity, followers shared in the vital forces of their god. They substantially ingested the god…Reading John 6:56-58, which contains strikingly peculiar and graphic vocabulary, in light of these traditions proves to be allusive of these motifs. Whoever chews Jesus’s flesh and drinks his blood and therein demonstrates belief in Jesus, is said to attain eternal life…The allusions of theophagy as known from Dionysian tradition may well function as a means of reasserting to believers that Jesus is present among them, even within them, and provides life for them even after his own death.”
“Reading Dionysus: Euripides’ Bacchae and the Cultural Contestations of Greeks, Jews, Romans, and Christians” by Courtney Friesen:
“Not only does Paul employ language that reflects mystery cults in several places, his Christian community resembles them in various ways.They met in secret or exclusive groups, employed esoteric symbols, and practiced initiations, which involved identification with the god’s suffering and rebirth. Particularly Dionysiac is the ritualized consumption of wine in private gatherings (1 Cor 11:17-34).”
So the dying and resurrecting savior gives life through his death and suffering. By partaking in a ritual which involves identifying the god with bread or wine his followers become one with their god. The god(spirit) divides himself in order to give life and divinity to his followers. Spirit divides itself in order to give life to all that exists. Both Dionysus and Osiris were torn into pieces when they were murdered and Jesus breaks apart the bread which he refers to as his body. These are allegories for divinity splitting itself in order to “create” all that exists. Both Dionysus and Osiris are put back together and resurrected. This is an allegory for divinity and all who partake of divinity returning back to itself and becoming “one” again. Before rebirth or resurrection, there’s suffering and death.
“Tracing Orpheus: Studies of Orphic Fragments” edited by Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui:
“One of the common threads between Orphism and Pre-Socratic philosophers, whose relation has been long studied and substantiated by many scholars, is the tendency to explain multiplicity from unity…The tendency to syncretize divinities is one of the basic original components of Orphic theogonies that can be found in the texts: what other versions of Greek religion present as separate gods is transformed into different aspects of a single deity. However, the most important feature of these Orphic myths is the
anthropogony/theogony couple. Since human souls undergo purification cycles which start with the anthropogony/theogony seperation from divinity and finish with the restoration of this primal unity, the fate of men is linked to cosmic cycles…This only existing god, who is alone at the beginning of the generation of Cosmos, coincides in many aspects with the Brahmanic Prajapati.”
“Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt” by Geraldine Pinch:
“The creator was sometimes referred to as “the One Who Made Himself into Millions” or “He Who Made Himself into Millions of Gods.” Creation could be seen as a process of differentiation, in which one original force was gradually divided (without necessarily diminishing itself) into the diverse elements that made up the universe…In many Egyptian sources the creation of life involves three elements: the creation of a body, the transfer to that body of some part of the divine essence of the creator, and the animation of the body by the breath of life…The second element, the transfer of the divine essence, eventually led to the concept that all deities,or even all living beings, were not just made by a transcendent creator but were in some sense forms of the creator.”
“Porphyry’s Against the Christians: The Literary Remains” By R. Joseph Hoffmann:
“…Paul’s use of body imagery in his first letter to the Corinthians and the theme of spiritual communion through the incorporation into “the body of Christ”(1 Cor. 12.27f.) is familiar from the language of the Dionysiac mysteries:”Blessed is he who hallows his life in the worship of God, he whom the spirit of God possesseth, who is one with those who belong to the holy body of God”(Euripides, Bacchae 73-75). Pagan critics of the early movement pointed to the fact that Christians addressed Jesus in terms equivalent to those used by the bacchantes(Dionysus’ worshipers). Jesus was kyrios(lord) and lysios, redeemer. In the Dionysiac cult, the god redeemed adherents from a world of darkness and death by revealing himself in ecstatic visions and providing glimpses of a world-to-come.”
Thank you for all the additional information for SOS readers to consider, Nightshade…
Just wanted to let everyone know as per Anny’s request…
She is dealing with some personal and family issues at the moment, and may not be able to respond to any comments until these are resolved. Thanks for your understanding and patience, SOS readers.
Josh, it is the opinion of my inner consciousness at it’s latest stage of evolution, that suffering is only allowed for the soul….our desires and emotions, to be seen as what they truly are……..the soul, Eve’s desires have a tendency not to line up with the will of the father…the universal consciousness or the all. Adam, spirit mind, spirit image in us is our true image, not the flesh you souls tendencies. Being spirit led, or Christ led…meaning god consciousness, is our true nature. Now the soul must humble herself to the authority of the male, spirit, Adam, and be one again. When Eve was in Adam there was no death, pain and suffering. Only when Eve was separated from Adam…or the dual mind that needs the flesh body or animal skins, did death, suffering, become a reality. Adam, spirit had to follow Eve because he loved her, his soul, and could not sit back in the spiritual real and see her wander aimlessly in the realm of matter or the physical realm, leaving her with no chance for redemption, salvation, or at-one-ment. They would have forever been separated. What a wonderful love story this truly is. When sram fell into the physical he became the Christ, the word made flesh. The god consciousness/realization/awakening, now, must occur in the flesh. In a gnostiic gospels, the Christ or the god consciousness in the flesh of the master said this:if you do not experience the resurrection while still alive in the physical body, it will profit you nothing when you die! Isn’t that beautiful?
The flesh, suffering, death are all illusions, false imsges of the soul in it’s fallen state, carnal state.
When Adam fell into the physical body he became the Christ, although he must be awakened by the soul, Eve.