The Taos
Discussion
Sunday, August 28, 2005
A discussion about the Prosperity Gospel
Tony
called us again to talk about Kelly’s book, “For the Love of San Lucia”. Tony wanted to know if the book was fiction
or non-fiction, due to some questions regarding historical events. The answer is, of course, that there is some
literary license made by Kelly in order to make the story revolve around a set
of themes and characters –an illustration of life experiences of a young man
before WWII.
The
books are stories made up to convey a deeper set of primitive truths. The stories are written to entertain and
bring a sense of wholesomeness to the reader.
Tony
rightly pointed out that if someone gains knowledge of natural power in a
perfect way, the person generally does not retain the ability to speak about it
to others. There is a tradition of
“total humility”. If one knows, one
does not speak, and if one speaks one does not know. “Total humility” is a way of dealing with personal knowledge. The discipline of “total humility” makes
some teaching “complex”, where most things are both true and false, or the
perceived truth-ness is not relevant really.
Tony
and I talked about Don Trent Jacobs {+}
Others
were mentioned but we do not give their names here because of the feeling that
many have about disclosing concepts that can easily be mis-interpreted. Often, these mis-interpretations are used to
create polemics that damage the group that was the Native American
traditionalist. Those who use polemics
in this way quickly employ a specific set of techniques – including
demonization of the other. This
behavior is hard to deal with and has often destroyed our ability to gather
thoughts (yes thoughts) and align them with feeling and motion.
We
talked again about the behaviors of those who are involved in prosperity gospel or the many closely
related religious disorders.
My
own sense is that there maybe a type of new science in which it is most
appropriate to speak, even if one knows?
Perhaps a ceremony is needed to sort this out and come to some common
understanding that can be the basis for virtual community.
Again,
I mention the digital Glass Bead Game technology as an enabling technology if
there is a distributed/virtual community is to take form.
The
current situation with the war profiteering that I have personally witnessed
and reported to the GAO may produced this type of moment, but I am not
sure. How do I make decisions that lead
to a remediation of profiteering in the name of tings like the many forms of prosperity gospel? Advertising and the behavior of the venture
capitalist are all deeply influenced by the language of the prosperity
gospel.
One
has to recall, or be aware of, the nature of individual decisions. Decisions to do things are part of a
formative process that once laid down has ripples – like the ripples in a pond
once a pebble has been released from the hand and makes its way toward the
surface of the pond. A great deal occurs
when one is awareness of how these ripples begin, with a decision, and how they
stay around sometimes for years or decades.
The books tell stories
with this awareness in mind. The books
explore the consequences of this awareness.
The
relationship between the prosperity gospel
and the practice of being aware of consequences of decisions, or that decisions
have consequences, is fully complex. By
complex we mean that there are many perceptions about a phenomenon with the
property that the perception can rightly be said to be correct or true, and at
the same time the perception can rightly be said to be false or
misleading. The complexity can be
compared with the simplicity of the prosperity gospel itself.
But
even here one cannot bring judgment to bear, since the awareness of reality
will produce coherent cognitive/emotional experiences that are satisfying and
have a simple focus. This awareness of
reality can be very valuable and can lead to real improvements in one’s life
and well-being. An awareness of reality
can be questioned and made transparent.
The
principles expressed in the Total Information Awareness, with Informational Transparancy
in Secure Channels that the BCNGroup Governing Committee recommended to Tom L
Bush, individual with responsibility for a 4.2 failure in IT modernization
working for US Customs. This
recommendation precedes and followed my taking a leave of absence from the IBM/Lockheed
Martin contracted project that has spent this 4.2 Billion and has yet to deploy
a single operational information system.
The problem is in fact one more aspect of the entrenchment of the prosperity gospel in funding and economic
decisions supported by federal law.
This
is this situation that I am trying to remedy.
One could take the position that people who follow a prosperity gospel do not harm to
others. But the situation is so far out
of control that the harm has been amplified in many ways. Of little true consequence to the issue of
dysfunction of government services, and the capture of the governance of almost
every aspect of our society by a religious disorder, is the possibility that
the prosperity gospel
is a prostitution that hides a truly remarkable spiritual/physical reality.
The
spiritual confusion, many of us experience, arises from the power and
domination of this prostitution. Setting
arise this confusion with informational transparency is opposed by the
practices and ignorance of prosperity gospel.
Much
of what is incorrect about our current educational, political, economic system is
that consequences of decisions made can be ignored. For example, the decision to not allow someone to join the faculty
at NMHU, and address the profound failure in the freshman
mathematics and computer science classes there and at other universities. The decision cannot in any way be seen to
serve any interest of the university, like the taking of an opiate by an
individual addicted to this drug. But
the university system, departments of mathematics, will make this incorrect
decision every time. Why? The answer lies in the support that
reinforced ignorance of the elements of basic arithmetic supplies to the
proponents of things related to the prosperity gospel. The departments of mathematics has a history
going back to the late 1940s where male dominated academic field committed institutionally
supported fraud by training “math teachers” who did not have any real
experience with the nature of mathematics, or the history of mathematics. They, these teachers, were deeply effected
with what we call “Acquired Learning Disability” specific to mathematics
(arithmetic) and science. This ALD
supports the entrenchment of the prosperity gospel.
A
type of chaos allows each of us to be confused about why and how events occur
to us and around us. We are
systematically supporting the prosperity gospel, while ignoring the
underlying spiritual reality that is hidden by this prostitution.
The
thought is expressed, by Tony, that all traditionalists have passed away, and
that only Rick Romancito (a white man) is known to have some knowledge of what
the traditionalist knew. Our sense is
that the new science helps understand a profound lose.
In
most cases, the individual Native American’s sense of the spiritual truth cannot
be reconciled with cultural history and personal experience. There is no coherence with anything other
than something that is to be hidden from the White Man. In this act of making hidden, the spiritual
truth is lost even to the Native American.
They are not alone in creating the mechanism that loses that which is
most valuable to them. They lose their spiritual
direction in a different way that the mainstream American culture has. They do not understand why anyone would listen
to the religious prostitutes who populate the television channels.
The
Native American culture hides what it no longer knows about, if ever there was
a true knowledge. Was the experience of
a spiritual reality common to some Native American cultures before the White
Man so destroyed their ability to maintain their culture? Who can tell, and why is it relevant? Something is hidden even from those who have
hidden it. And, to increase the
complexity; the fact that what is hidden is no longer know by anyone is a fact
hidden and obscured by the White Man’s ridicules belief in the prostitution
that is the phenomenon of prosperity gospel.
The
teachings, whatever “they” are, are not taught except in special
circumstances. But the knowledge of appropriate
circumstances has now become the only knowledge that is present.
According
to traditions, an apprentice must take the time to understand how to not
re-interpret what is said. The teacher
must not teach what the apprentice has not been prepared for. There are many reasons for this tradition,
some quite naturally related to keeping the teaching pure and safe from the
polemics like the prosperity gospel
of the White Man and the cultural harm experiences by the Native American
culture.
The
nature of the phenomenon of “polemics” is being understood by certain academic
disciplines, mainly evolutionary psychology and ecological physics. Perhaps this will help the community
form? We will see if this line of
academic work will ever by allowed by prosperity gospel to have status.
The
intellectual equipment needed to set aside the polemics are behind gates that
are guarded by polemics. So there is no
way out, except through something like the notions developed around simultaneous
policy
“Memetics”
as written about by Blackmore and Dawkins (“The Selfish Gene”) is itself a polemic
disallowing one from getting at a truth that is nearby, but hidden by a kind of
intellectual silliness and an absence of transparency.
These
academic disciplines are close to re-discovering primitive truths about the
natures of this physical world and the natures of our spiritual realities. Part of the BCNGroup’s call for a national project to establish
a K-12 curriculum in the knowledge sciences is to allow some
mechanism to reassert common sense and primitive truth.
There
is no religious argument here, and no point to define.