Sunday Stream (53) ~ 1?

[mtmynd]

<center>1?</center>

"When the Many are reduced to One, to what is the One reduced?" Zen koan

One. To win the One once won this One is but one thing... where do I find the All, but within the One.

'One' has many definitions, not just one. As an adjective 'one' is " being a single entity, unit, object, or living being," among other definitions.

As a noun 'one' is " the cardinal number, represented by the symbol 1, designating the first such unit in a series," again, among other definitions.

As a pronoun 'one' is defined as " an indefinitely specified individual."

So many 'ones' that it is difficult to count them all, either as an adjective, a noun or a pronoun... not to include idioms.

Why should it be so variable to get our hands around 'one'? The greatest of 'one' is God or its named equivalent... even 'God' is multiples although we are taught to believe that the One is above all... the creator of both Heaven and Earth.

Is God the ultimate 'one'... the first and final One? Can we even have a 'one' without picking among mulitiples? One is the singular of several... perhaps just a couple... but to have 'one' is a choice between more than one. So why would we refer to (a) God as 'One' if we didn't choose between (a) God and some other God?

That would presuppose that there is always more than one God to begin with... perhaps a Jewish God, a Christian God, a Native American God..? We choose our God(s) in order for that choice of (a) God to be the 'One.'

But if we believe that our God is the only God what does that make of the God(s) others may believe in? God certainly shouldn't be the ultimate in mankind's confusion should it/he/she?

Monotheistic is a faith or belief in 'one' God.. not many Gods. Monotheism states there is but 'One' and no others before 'Him." Odd that presumes this 'One' to be the only but yet in the same breath this 'One' is a male, 'Him." And then we look into the Bible and it states that Adam (the 'one' male) grew lonely and wanted companionship. So "He", the one (male) God gave this 'one' lonely (read 'horny), male a female companion. Now this is a very cool God that would lessen the testosterone level of this Adam fellow! Only another male would appreciate the beauty of that gift.

So monotheism came after beliefs in many Gods became too confusing. Paganism has God(s) in plants and animals, the early Greeks and their mythologies had multiple gods, the Egyptians, Romans, Hindu... so many groups, so many gods. It had to be narrowed down to lessen the confusion... what to call all these 'gods', how to approach them... it was difficult. It was monotheism that settled for 'one' god.

If indeed there are/were all these 'gods' then logically they should all be from some 'one,' somewhere. The concept of monotheism came from logic - all things can be traced back to one choice, one conclusion, the single most important concept - One God above all other gods.. that gave life to All things.

Mind creates 'God.' It is mind's job to find answers and mind had to find the answer to where it (mind) came from. Early man lived in tribal situations where the larger questions were answered for small communities... no questions from those outside the group. With nobody to question the answers of the few within the tribe, those answers sufficed.

As mankind grew and migrated to different parts of the earth, many communities had their own concepts of God(s). Those that settled into the forests where the skies were hidden by the canopy of trees did not see the stars and envision the constellations, whereas those that lived in areas of grasslands and seashores were able to see clearly the night skies. The forest people saw 'god(s)' in the plant and animal kingdoms... and the grassland people saw god(s) in the heavens above. Some seashore people saw god(s) in the water creatures that submerged and were little seen.. what kind of creature to live under the water without breathing air?

As mankind and our technologies and discoveries multiply, our world shrinks in philosophies and religions... there is too much knowledge gained to accept the more primitive belief systems, there is so much learned to think that a 'god' is generic, a male or female. No wonder religions are losing their power over man, despite a resurgence of fundamentalism and evangelicalism - these are the last gasps of those that refuse to shed the old belief systems. Their indoctrinations are so strong and powerful they fear to accept the new vision of a truly 'one' world, 'one' consciousness. That is beyond their own concept of their 'one god'.

Yes, there is no one, no thing, no where but that which resides within us - the multiples. These multiples are not just we humans, but all life - human, animal, plant where we once saw life as did our pagan ancestors, but can no longer believe in as 'gods.' The circle is not two-dimensional but spiral-like continuing ahead, with or without believers in a 'one' of our own thinking mind. That which lies beyond mind is not 'one' but the totality of existence that has no one beginning nor shall have one ending, but is reduced to eternal.


Cecil
3o October 2005

<center>(1) Millipede[camera shy]

</center>

[Arcadia]

thanks for the stream, Cecil!
very beautiful photo.
saludos,

Arcadia

[gypsyjoker]

One thing that beats me is how words can say what can not be spoken. I don't get around much anymore Cecil, in fact I have never been anywhere. Europe is pretty secular I hear but I have not heard that religion is fading away overthere. I don't know why the United States of America is so religious. We are on the verge of becoming a theocracy. Just how stupid is the american public. Christian Zionism is my boogey man. If a kid came to my door with a George W Bush mask it would scare the beegeezus out of me. I spent fourteen days under lock and key with two preachers. Talked a lot about the Bible and the Jews. I don't know why I felt responsible for their faith. I called them on everything that did no jibe with me. Maybe I was wrong and they were right but I was trying not to butt heads with them. They would both go on about the infalibility of "G-d"s words. They had to get an Amen out of me or I was going to have to deal with a lot of soul saving on their part. I finally got through to them about the falibility of man's understanding of the Word. I am happy to say that I was not invited to either one of their churches.

sorry for the ramble
nice stream

Speaking of Adam did you that he was a lutheran? who else could stand next to a naked woman and be tempted by a piece of fruit.

Then of course there was Adam's first wife, the one with a mind of her own.

[judih]

The big thing about Judaism and i think the thing that scared most of the population at that way back time was the taking the idea of gods and taking them from the visible to the abstract.

There was no image (sure Adam was theoretically created in God's image, but that again was a compromise to get a few believers in the audience).

The abstraction was a challenge.

After the original idea was introduced, all kinds of malarkey followed...God said this, God promised that...blah, blah.

People needed to get their hands on something tangible.
The idea that the spirit of the holy, or whatever a person calls it, is one spirit is a huge concept to handle.

Monotheism demands humility and keen awareness - it ain't easy.

Outer trappings were hatched to assist active belief - within a ritual, a person could feel they were actually 'believing' in something.

Simply being aware is way too difficult.

One.

Do i truly understand the nature of One?

It's not found in any bible.

[mtmynd]

Arcadia ... otro vez, gracias, amiga!

Truck - What put you in the situation of spending "fourteen days under lock and key with two preachers" ? That is what I'd like to know!

Judih - "one spirit is a huge concept to handle," may seem the largest of all concepts, but yet it is here.. just outside the mind. Not so large from that perceptive. Is 'now' any larger than 'then' or 'when'..? Our past or future thinking encompasses our own dimensionality of our presence, but yet when we accept the now we accept not only the totality of 'I' (ego) but the fullness of being 'outside' the limits of that ego life that mind is.

[gypsyjoker]

Cecil I deleted to posts here after judih. Going to try and GO with it. You know how sloppy my writing is. I am pretty sure it annoys you sometimes. Quacker for Quacker and stuff like that. This is a very pure stream here. How do I know. I borrow sister judhih's eyes. The nature of one. I see it in the multiplicity of all creation. I let my mind drift over all the people, the roads, the cars the plastic soda bottles, the broken glass, the rotting corpses in the streets of New Orleans, the snow flakes falling on MT Shasta, the stars and planets, the galaxies. When I get to the far edge of everything that intersects with my brain, then I can vaguely imagine the nature of one, just over the edge of my event horizon.

dam dam \
I was going to put this on go
but when you got to GO you just got to Go.

if I don't hear nothing otherwise, going to leave this here.

here is the stuff I deleted
**************************
Quote:
"When the Many are reduced to One, to what is the One reduced?"


One is everything I have ever seen touched, thought tasted heard felt, loved, hated, experienced.

One brings to mind the multiplicity. Truck driver after images of bottle factories thousands of bottles tinkling together on conveyer belts. Plastic bottles, glass bottles, and factory after factory churning out bottles all across the country, thousand of factories. Can factories millions of cans. We got to make things are we not gods. We create and create, cars, bombs, TV sets. All around the world billions of busy hands doing the devil's work. And one? I let my mind drift off in the multiplicity of things and people and stars, and galaxies, on and on until it just fades into the far edge of my consciousness. One is over the edge. Zero is dead center.

talk about mindless. lordy
good night
_________________
People can often feel my power.

Humility is right. I stopped trying to reify G-d. But I still seek.


Quote:
Another invention that revolutionized mathematics was the introduction of the number zero by Muhammad Bin Ahmad in 967 AD. Zero was introduced in the West as late as the beginning of the thirteenth century. Modern society takes the invention of the zero for granted, yet the Zero is a non-trivial concept, that allowed major mathematical breakthroughs.


The nature of one?
It takes one to know one.
The nature of zero is pretty interesting too.
_________________
People can often feel my power.

[mnaz]

Cecil....

I know this isn't the main point or path of your piece here, but I feel like meandering around that "God vs. God" thing.

It was often explained to me (in church) that there really is, and always has been one God.... the Christian God.... an all-powerful entity who (which?) is the same as the God of any other monotheistic faith. The key was to designate the Bible as the one true divinely-inspired Word of God, and to insist that this Word must be "rightly divided" into God's different programs of faith, called "dispensations". This allows Judaism to be explained as a bygone dispensation, before God sent Christ to die as payment for all sin, thereby ushering in the current dispensation, proclaimed and spread by Paul. And Islam is thus dismissed simply because it uses the wrong text.

The concept, or sense of one God isn't necessarily a big problem. Hell, I wish some of the brazen criminals and con-men running this country had some actual "fear of God" in them, as they profess.... might make it tougher to swindle people and bleed them dry. I could never be an atheist, and I could never try to jam God into my finite perception and understanding.... false pride and arrogance either way. No, one God isn't a problem. But the chosen "absolute truth" doctrines built up around God often are. They amount to unnecessary restrictions of consciousness.

And I don't know if the monotheistic religions are on the decline, as you say. I think I heard that both Mormonism and Islam are experiencing significant growth in recent years. Although, technically, the Mormons believe that more than one God exists throughout the universe, and that they themselves can actually become God, if they strictly follow a certain program, which includes "celestial marriage" (originally, polygamy.... not any more in the 'mainstream' church).

Anyway, to me, God informs and energizes all creation, and as Joseph Campbell said, 'eternity is a dimension of the here and now'. I am such a heretic.

And that's my rambling ramble for the day.

Thanks, Cecil

[panta rhei]

That which lies beyond mind is not 'one' but the totality of existence that has no one beginning nor shall have one ending, but is reduced to eternal.

one is not a fragment. it is the all-encompassing nature of the many. it is the epitome of the many just as i am the many and the many is me .
to self-immolate the i at the core of being means to be this this material universe’s infinitude experiencing itself as a sensate and reflective human being.... to be eternity as one.

[mtmynd]

Truck - you bring so much to your replies I find it difficult to respond to any 'one' thing within them... if they do indeed require a response! Having said that, I do enjoy your ramblings and I do get something(s) out of them. Continue on, my good man!!


Thanks, Panta... always enjoy your viewpoint(s). Nothing you have written in this reply I can add to nor subtract from... a good 'one'! To know the flow is to go...

[gypsyjoker]

ten four, panta rhei got it in a nutshell. I could not find the words, just a jumble of images.

Yeah it has been a long trip and it seems like it was only yesterday that I stumbled on litkicks. Where would I be know without your streams. Still stuck in the mud more than I am, spinning my wheels going nowheres fast. Going through the motions, trying to get so someplace but I don't know where.

thanks for the flowers compadre.

[mtmynd]

You're too kind, truck... my Streams just run outta me, even tho I do try to figure out what the next one will be, once I sit down here at the keyboard I just begin with something and let it happen. As I said somewhere recently, sometimes they are floods, sometimes a stream and yet, other times they are but trickles. I am humbled by your comment on the Streams and thank you for interest in them. Glad to be of help in some way!

[gypsyjoker]

a little streaming ramble for ya
thinking about something mousey1 said to me on flames
thinking about ted williams
he never tipped his cap to the applause or to the boos
going to break it off here cause I feel a ramble coming on about Nietzsche and Buddhism

keep on streaming
Alamo Rose tells me I am kind to a fault
you my highway hero
because I know you don't take this stuff to heart
even if Charlie Chan said "Praise in any language is sweet"
I mean words run off our minds like drops of water on a duck's back

[mtmynd]

Truck - "Nietzsche and Buddhism"... Freud and Christianity... Walt Disney and Judaism... Einstein and Mohammedism... Whitman and Satanism... they're all parts of the whole but yet so different. It's those differences that acknowledge the duality of the 'whole ball of wax'... no 'one' better or less than the other as long as we perceive the wholeness of it all.

[gypsyjoker]

ten four

[mtmynd]

mnaz - I don't know if you'll see this as it's been a couple of days since you replied, but in going over your post I must comment -

True, as seen from the 'outside' it appears that both fundamentalism and evangelicalism is on the surge, but I see this as the 'storm before the calm'... i.e., so many people nowadays seem to be searching for answers, any kind of answers, to calm themselves. Witness in our culture (U.S. in particular) the abuse of various drugs that bring a (false) sense of calm... the tranquilizing effects that we all seem to appreciate. I feel this is mainly due to releasing our stress. No doubt that this crazy world of ours brings on stress on many levels. Why are 'we' looking for our peace? How do we regain the sense of innocence that surrounds the peacefullness that we once had?

The evangelicals offer a return to Jesus, the 'Prince of Peace'... and he is offered, not through the old established Christian religions but as a return to the roots type of worship. I feel that within that growing group, that yes, they (the followers) are finding some peace, but as time passses the newness of this religiosity will soon dim... it won't fulfill completely that void that resides within. Where will those folks go..? It has been so ingrained within the followers that Jesus is the answer that to ignore those answers is a swipe to God himself, in their believing. Many will hang on to this thread of belief for it will offer them a hope... but not a realization.

The same with the Fundamentalism of the Mid-East... there are literally millions of practioners that take certain words with their Koran (much like the Christian counter-parts) and hang on to those words to bring them their own sense of peace and righteousness. What we are seeing in the Mid-East, in part, among the youth, is a desperation to find inner peace, to destroy the stress within them, (even as radically as blowing themselves apart). But I see the limitations within that belief system in due time.

Joy, bliss, peace... these states are not enduring. They are limited as a good orgasm - temporary states that need to be experienced over and over again... on their own merit as an individual.

Peace is not a product that we shop for, not even in places of worship, but states of being that can only be had through our own inner searches. Religions may temporarily, and often do, bring out the 'fragrances of peace' through their own flowering, but the roots of the plant are synonymous with that individual inner search in order to sustain that which we need to understand our authenticity.

[enough]