Have you ever considered that The Wizard of Oz is an excellent example of the Hero's Journey, of the monomyth, of the mystical experience of our journey back Home?
Tag: death
In Mysticism, what is Submission or Surrender?
It is something that is present in nearly every religion, and particularly in their mystical traditions. So what is it? What are we surrendering?
Die Before You Die: A Mystical Approach to Depression and Suicidal Thoughts
Eckhart Tolle says that if we feel like dying, we might allow our self to die, by surrendering that "ego" of our mind to reality as it is. Such surrender is found in all the world's religions and mystical traditions, including Christianity.
Is Physical Death the Death of our Individual Personhood?
When the finite body dies, is that the end of our person, or do we continue on? Yes and no.
A Bodily Resurrection of Jesus? or of Christ? A Mystical View
Did Jesus come back from the dead, or should we look deeper for the truth of resurrection?
The Two Deaths in Mystical Christianity
I think that Christianity may have conflated Jesus's mystical experience of an ego death, perhaps at the time of his baptism when the "heavens opened," in which his individual psychological self "died" and he was was "reborn" of Spirit, or "raised up" (resurrected) to his identity in Christ consciousness (a consciousness of nondual union in God/Reality), with his biological death on the cross. These two deaths seem to have been conflated at some point, resulting in a supernatural conception of the resurrection.
“What is the point of it all?”
This short documentary Being 97 by Andrew Hasse is moving and poignant. The ageing philosopher Herbert Fingarette (1921-2018) contemplates the meaning of life and death after having written several books about it during his academic career. He asks, "what is the point of it all?" He feels he failed at solving it.
1 Corinthians 15 BHT, Paul’s Earliest Witness of the Resurrection into Christ Consciousness, the “Gospel”
An addition to the BHT, containing the earliest account of the post-resurrection appearances of Christ in the New Testament, where Paul describes his witness of the resurrection and what it means to be resurrected into Christ consciousness. This seems to be an excellent summary of the Christian Gospel, or "good news," but it is something which I think we've generally misunderstood in Christianity for centuries. I feel that this is one of the most important translations of the BHT that I have been given the Grace to work out yet—yet not I. I was in tears by the end.
Paul and the Early Jewish Christians’ Mystical Resurrection “in” Christ
I've been reading about the post-resurrection appearances of Christ, and the description of the earliest written records and development of the early Christian resurrection narrative is quite intriguing. It seems to show that there was a significant change of the meaning of resurrection beginning in the very first few decades of Christianity, between the time of Paul and when the gospels were written.
“Canticle of the Sun,” by St. Francis of Assisi, and Joseph Smith’s “Olive Leaf”
One of the last things we did at the seminar with Bernard McGinn this past weekend was read through and discuss Saint Francis of Assisi's poem and religious song Canticle of the Sun. McGinn considers this to be a very mystical text from Francis, as Francis seems to see God powerfully in and throughout the whole of creation, including in the sun, moon, stars, Earth, etc. McGinn noted that it is a kind of nature mysticism. Francis wrote most of it in the year 1224, and the last few lines in 1226 just before his death.