Alvin Boyd Kuhn
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…thinking which does not start from and continue in close relation to its foundations in the physical universe must lead to falsity - Alvin Boyd Kuhn
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Overview
Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880–1963) was the protege of the great Gerald Massey. The superlative work of both men is more fully referenced in my book Astro-Theology and Sidereal Mythology. Their overarching interest was exposing before the world the Egyptian elements appearing in Christian scriptures. They explain how and why Christian mythmongers cunningly rescripted the sidereal (astrological) lore of the ancients and how our understanding of the Bible's true meaning demands we possess and utilize the true esoteric keys of decipherment. Kuhn excels at revealing the baneful aspects of orthodox religion, particularly those of Christianity. He emphasizes the anti-natural doctrines which denigrate and demonize animals, the material creation, human sexuality and physical body. He analyzes the kind of consciousness which accepts doctrines which instigate hard dualism. This is the case with Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Gnosticism. According to Kuhn, these ascetic cults generate a practique of self-mortification that finally poisons consciousness. He illustrates the differences between ascetic paths and those which honor the body, earth and universe. Among these paths are the many Hermetic, Tantric and Pre-Vedic traditions, the tenets of which are either largely unknown or grossly disfigured today. Kuhn's work is essential in this regard, as it delineates the principles and outlooks of Hermeticism and high Mysticism. He also clearly explains the teachings, in this regard, of western giants such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, Georg Hegel, and so on, and particularly favors the approach of Sri Aurobindo, the Indian mystic who labored throughout his life to expose the falsity of eastern techniques of asceticism and self-mortification. Among Kuhn's many works, I recommend the following:
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Primitive man was not a hundredth part so likely to be the victim of hallucination or diseased subjectivity as the modem - Albret Churchward
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Nature & the Egyptians
Ages before Christianity took over and ruinously travestied the secret traditions of a primeval revelation by outrageous literalization of pictured truth, nature herself had staged so impelling a drama of the Easter resurrection that nothing within the pale of human genius can do more than faintly copy its impressiveness. We owe the knowledge of it to the sapient Egyptians, who manifested almost a sixth psychic sense in discerning in the characteristic traits of animals many striking analogies with abstract verities. Death of Pan The Christian murder of Great Pan cut the currents of a lively and sustaining sympathy between man and nature, so that from that day there set in over the Western world an obtuseness and insensibility toward the natural world, which, ever hardening over the centuries, has led to a ruthless wantonness in the human attitude toward the soil and its vegetation, with widespread devastation of its bounties and its beauties. As between a civilization deeply softened by a profound reverence for the assumed presence of deity in the earth, and one dulled to any such sensitivity, one must give the rating to the pagan over the Christian. Hatred of Nature Religion, obsessed with the idea of the supremacy and hegemony of the spirit, lost sight of this balancing qualification to the science of self-knowledge and attempted to find the more stable realities in disdain of and detachment from the outer realm, to a large extent carrying the straining effort out into an ideal vacuum and warping devotional life into eccentricities and abnormalities. The central drive of Hindu thought affected to disdain earth altogether, seeking release from mundane duress in the heavens of contentless and unconditioned being….There is happily increasing evidence, however, that the greatest of modern Hindu thinkers, notably Sri Aurobindo and Radhakrishnan, have sought to amend this bent of India’s philosophy and restore its pristine connection with nature. Much futile effort, especially in the domain of religion, has been put forth over the centuries to discover the nature of man entirely apart from his relation to the objective world that extended outside his interior world of consciousness. In fact this move was motivated by the supposition that his true nature could best be introspected when he detached his consciousness and interests as far as possible from the concrete world and concentrated intently upon the world within. The modern world is not at all cognizant of the splendid achievement of the ancient civilizations of two lands at least, namely Egypt and Greece, in so relating their minds to the order of nature that their life in general flowered out in a state of health and wholesomeness that has hardly been matched in the history of the world since. History discloses that the daily life of the Egyptian citizen was one lived in close and intimate relation with the life of nature. No one can study the life of the Greek people of two to three millennia ago without recognizing the tremendous part that what they called physis, or nature, played in their modus of living both at the physical and the intellectual level. Their philosophy, which is still regarded as the heyday of the human achievement in that field, was solidly based on the foundations of all conceptuality found in the order of the natural world. Man and the meaning of his life were not envisaged as detached from the material world, but as of kindred nature with it and in its higher ranges an efflorescence from it. On Nature’s Intelligence Truth is being sought in the too rarefied atmosphere of pure logic and the thinnest abstrusities of thought. The effort at this level severs thought from life and reality. However god-like the faculty of reason, its operation is rendered futile and treacherous if it be detached too completely from the basic grounds of reality where alone its initial premises can be established with certitude. It will lose its way in the criss-cross of twists and turns in a pathless woods of abstractions if it does not hold itself in firm anchorage to the realities of the universal order. Furthermore the mystics base the claim for the superiority of this alleged "higher" faculty of intuition on a distinction between two phases of the activity of mind which in truth are not to be thus set apart. They arbitrarily take one mode of the mind’s activity, which is its normal activity when functioning at its highest and best, extrude it outside the province of mind itself, classify it as a separate and distinct faculty and locate it "above" mind, when it is in reality the most perfect functioning of the mind itself. Aurobindo has been at pains to correct and rebuke this unwarranted and false differentiation between mind and its own supreme form of brilliant operation. The intuition so lauded and exalted "above" the intellect is only that intellect itself sharpened and developed to almost magical competence by long and exacting training in logical processes. Insights and determinations that in the initial stages of mental development were reached only by the slow steps of discursive reasoning, at a later stage of proficiency are caught in lightning flashes of vision and understanding, darting so rapidly into the field of cognition as to seem like the operation of a higher faculty. It is comparable to the brilliant and spontaneous execution of a Beethoven or a Paderewski at the piano, in contrast to the slow, tedious and laborious efforts of their first childhood practices. This thing called intuition is simply mind functioning like the geni that it is, at the incredible height of its magical power. Intuition may be said to be the attic of the house of mind, but it is still beneath the roof, not above it. It is the marvelous flower of the mind. It is still "intellectual." A vast confusion could be avoided and a great simplification of the principles of epistemology achieved if this false distinction was obliterated. Sri Aurobindo He sends out epochal appeal for Hindu thought to forsake its insistent bent on straining to attain the assumed ecstasies of unconditioned being in nirvanic entrancement above the range of human sentience and to turn back to earth and strive for wisdom and enlightenment from the very ground of earth and nature. Aurobindo declares in the most positive terms that the higher divinity latent in us can never realize its potential until it makes a complete union with the actualities of earthly sensual experience, and not in remote areas of the void "above" all existential consciousness in utter abstraction and entrancement, but right here in the world of sense and objectivity. |
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All of yogic techniques invite to one and the same gesture, to do exactly the opposite of what human nature forces one to do – Carl Jung
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Beware the cult of mortification and plague of asceticism
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Theism
In briefest form of definition, theism affirms that God created the universe over patterns of his cosmic thought and supervises its operation from his point of transcendence somewhere at the summit of creation. Mental and Emotional Enslavement Nothing short of such a hypnotism by pious credulity as has been exhibited in Christendom from the third century to the present could ever account for the slavish mental acceptance by the sheepish millions of Western Christians of the unconscionable idea that one man's physical death could exert the tiniest iota of influence to change any individual's karmic relation to his cosmic problem of sin and salvation. For if it could be that the suffering of one could in the least measure later the status of all other men's moral relation to the law of life, the moral equilibrium of the universe would be disrupted. Not only can the action of another than himself not relieve any man of the full onus of his moral accountability, but there would immediately be chaos in the spiritual sphere if it were possible. The two ineffaceable and unalterable realities of the world were, to the great philosopher, Immanuel Kant, "the starry heavens above and the moral law within." The Christian dogma of the vicarious atonement, a digest as it were of the alleged basic fact of the conquest of death (in its physical sense, be it remembered) by the (physical) resurrection of Jesus long ago, would--Kant must have seen--shatter the inviolability and integrity of his supreme moral law into bits. As the Christian theologians have again and again heralded it, the one unshakeable foundation of the faith is the (always physical) resurrection of Jesus. What, then, do we have to contemplate? Not only the repudiation of the veridical historicity of the bodily resurrection of the man of Nazareth, but the irrefragable. Dark Ages It needs no dissertation to elaborate and certify what the record of history reveals as to this portent obsession of the dour religious consciousness over the centuries. It has left its lamentable record in the tale of corruption, banality, superstition, bigotry and general moral and mental blight that overspread the area of Christian Europe over the middle period which has come to be known as the Dark Ages. Gerald Massey One must read Massey’s colossal elucidations to catch the full cogency of this apprehension. Alleging that "metaphysical explanations" have misconceived and distorted the true sense of mythology, he says that "all interpretation is finally futile that is not founded on the primary physical phenomena." He remarks that it is fortunate that we still have left the aboriginal symbols, and we can abstract from them some measure of their semantic message and purport, as best we may. He thinks that early civilization lived through a stage in which it dwelt in closer contact with nature and had developed a deeper sense of nature’s "meaning," and that later tendency weakened this rapport, so that we still cling to the symbol only blindly and uncomprehendingly. Massey’s view that mankind passed through an early stage in which nature symbolism was a universal idiom in religious literature is well buttressed by all the intimations and root motivations underlying that prodigious creation of the early genius of mankind whose efforts produced the literary wonder of mythology. It is doubtful if modernity has yet grasped the import of ancient mythology as a whole, much less interpreted truly and lucidly the individual myths. The word "myth" itself still carries to our minds the suggestion of primitive ignorance and childish belief. We are not quite sure to what extent the ancients did really "believe" their myths. We are somewhat still in doubt as to whether they deliberately created the myths as obvious fiction, or thought they described realities. We would be sharply surprised if told that these constructions were the consciously designed productions of the most astute and subtle dramatic genius perhaps ever to have gleamed from the human mind and with the keenest philosophical acumen employed to pictorialize the deepest truths. It may well be that we, who in self-conscious pride of modern intelligence superciliously speak in patronizing fashion of the primitive child-mindedness that created the myths as products of puerile fancy, are ourselves still lacking in the perspicacity requisite to comprehend the recondite interior purport of these idyllic fabrications of ancient semantic sapiency. Egyptian, Greek, even Hebrew biblical mythology is still largely a sealed tome. We yet await the coming of the sage who will luminously interpret the myths of old time, those creations of the human mind when it was still alive to the intuitive impression of truth caught by the common consciousness in its reflection from living nature. As Wordsworth has so lyrically revealed to us, the consciousness of childhood absorbs the impress and the spirit of nature with a vividness that is lost in maturity. "Heaven lies about us in our infancy," and the human mind in the freshness of its first impressionism was alight with the roseate coloring of the skies of the morning of human mentality. When we recover the mystical sensibility requisite to read the myths aright, there will dawn a new era of enlightenment, a new opening of the eyes of the mind. All mythology stands in close kinship with nature. Mind and nature worked harmoniously together to produce those fictions that most wondrously speak truth’s clearest language. Massey speaks of ancient wisdom literature as expressing a universal mythos. Another writer, Jeremiah Curtin, in his work, Myths and Folklore of Ireland, correlates with mythos another term of kindred significance--logos. Logos and mythos--the two Greek terms jointly connote the mental constitution of the universe, as this is to be conceived by man. The logos is indeed the mind power that created the universe, as even the creeds of Christianity expressly affirm; the mythos is the product of mind power in man that discerns the pattern created in the cosmos by the logos and endeavors to interpret it at the level of his own intelligence. The mythos is the intellectual effort of man the microcosm to discern and interpret to his consciousness the logos of the macrocosm. The logos is God’s thought as embodied in his creation; the mythos is man’s thought awakened in response to the impact of the creation upon his mind, man’s effort to read God’s thought after him from observation of the patterns stamped upon the concrete manifestation. Gerald Massey did reveal, a secret which could jolt and jar Christianity into a recognition of its true origins in this majestic ancient wisdom of Egypt: the irrefutable etymological fact that the name Lazarus in John’s Gospel is but a Judeo-Latinized expansion of the original Egyptian name of Osiris, which was Asar. As the Egyptians generally referred to him as Lord Osiris, the Hebrews prefixed their short El form of "God," making it El-Asar, and the Romans completed the transformation by suffixing the "us" termination mundane ideality and bliss. He expands this idea to say that a symbol, and in a larger scope, a myth, is a hierophany, the imaged appearance of a reality of divine mind. The myth is a more elaborately designed image of a transcendental verity, what modern, especially Jungian, psychology, describes as an archetype in the universal of most Roman masculine names, making it El-asar-us. The initial "E" "wore off," as the scholars say, the "s" shifted to its brother "z," and we have Lazarus. Horus, the Son of God, raised his "dead" father at a town called Annu (Anu). Jesus, the Son of God, raised Lazarus from the "dead" at Bethany. This Anu likewise suffered a sea-change at Hebrew hands, as they prefixed to it their word for "house," which is beth, making it Beth-Anu. As the "u" of ancient Greek words transforms into "y" in English, the outcome in Hebrew hands was "Bethany!" So the miracle of Jesus raising Lazarus is definitely the rescript of Horus’ raising Osiris. And this presumably removes the incident from the domain of history over into that of spiritual allegory. Birthday of Jesus In the case of a festival of such importance and prominence as Christmas, it is a thing of no light insignificance that the Christian Church keeps from its people the simple and singular fact that the early Christians celebrated the birth of their Savior for over the first three and a half centuries on March 25. This, the esoteric understanding of the Easter significance, was in the early days so clear and evident that, be it known as historically a fact, the primitive Christians, for the first three and one-half centuries, celebrated the birth of the Savior on--March 25! This custom was changed by encyclical of Pope Julian II, who in the year 345 A.D. ordained the shift of December 25. Dismemberment & Fourteen Days The Sun-gods in ancient systems were represented as being dismembered, or cut to pieces, when they came to incarnation. Osiris's body was fabled to have been cut by Sut, the devil of darkness, into fourteen pieces, which were scattered and buried over the land of Egypt, to be reassembled later by Isis or Horus, aided by the god Taht, and the body restored whole in its resurrection. Here is indisputable proof that the religious myths were based on astronomical symbolism, for the fourteen pieces can have no other basis than the fact that the power of darkness cuts off fourteen slices of light from the body of the full moon, or cuts the full-orbed light of the sun on the moon, the god in matter, into fourteen pieces. These are reassembled or reconstituted in the next birth of the crescent; and once more the heavenly symbolism of the gradual spiritualization of the lower man takes form in the growing light. So that we can understand the hidden ecstasy of the god Horus, when at the completion of the process and the divinization of his whole nature, he cries, triumphantly, "I am the god entire." The Cross (Plato) Plato describes this as the divine unity bifurcating in space, and it gives the first idea of the cross. The establishment of the polarity pits the two forces at right angles to each other, giving the four-armed cross. God then squares the circle and life rests on its four sided base. But the trinity of spirit-matter-child operates in each of the four levels of consciousness, so that the ideal structure of human life is wondrously symbolized by four triangles, giving basic value and significance to the two most prominent numerical symbols in all the sacred Scriptures of the world: seven as four plus three, and twelve, as four times three. Here we have the basis of two such amazing symbolic structures as the great pyramid of Gizeh, with its four-sided base and its four triangular faces, and the zodiac, with its four elements of earth, water, air and fire in three active phases. The BA-Self (& the Bee) Again the bee and the ba stand in a striking similitude in that both perform the function of the priest as marriage officient. As the bee, by introducing the fertilizing pollen of the male organs of the flower into the female organs and thus marries the two for the birth of seed, so the ba, by his intermediary offices in the psychic economy of human life, marries the two forces of the polarity, soul and body. Real Meaning of Noah Who was "Noah"? It is evident that though Hebrew in origin, at least found in a Hebrew document of antiquity, the name "Noah" is built on the stem of the word which in Greek stood for the rock principle of the universe, Mind, the mental principle in mankind. Anaxagoras' theory that the world is the production of a cosmic Mind, or of Nous, is relevant to this determination. The root of the word is that basic Greek stem, No, and the Greeks called the intellectual principle in man Noé @horizontal line over e. It is important to notice that this is feminine in form and grammatical gender. This is so because, although mind and spirit are commonly typed under masculine symbolism, yet when the spirit descended into matter and became the soul of a living organism, it was regarded as feminized through its coming under the power of matter and body, which are symbolically feminine always. The feminine ending was placed upon it to indicate that it was mind involved in and energizing matter. The ancients always affirmed that the soul entered its "feminine phase" when it incarnated. The Greek feminine ending is the long é, eta. When the Hebrews used the word they substituted on the No stem their own feminine singular ending, which is -ah. This gives No-ah, the principle of mind in body. The Greek word arché means beginning, primal state, aboriginal condition of being. It is seen in our words archaic, archangel, archetypal. End of the Age …It is the dissolution of the worlds and universes at the end of the age (Greek: teleuten aion, so tragically mistranslated "end of the world" in the Christian texts of the Bible). Book of the Dead The next step was taken when in reading Lewis Spence’s Myths and Legends of Egypt, the Egyptian form of the title of the so-called Book of the Dead was for the first time encountered. It was given as Peri-em-heru, and was translated as meaning "The Day of Manifestation," or, "The Coming Forth by Day," or "Into the Daylight." It presumably was in reference to the end of a long period of life in darkness. This translation at once provoked the reflection that there was a mysterious incongruity between the Egyptian title and the English one (given to it by the German scholar Lepsius.) How could a book whose title read The Coming Forth By Day be fitly named the Book of the Dead? Something was amiss here. Some one had blundered. Yet the book dealt mainly with the great trial of the soul of the deceased in the Hall of Judgment, the Hall of Osiris; and Osiris was the Lord of Amenta, the realm of the dead, the dark underworld. He was the king of "those in their graves". It was apparently the book of the typical Christian judgment, enacted in the world of souls following the demise of the body. Yet its original title was The Day of Manifestation. Here was mystification and a thrilling enigma. One knew that the Greeks had derived most of their profoundest conceptions from the Egyptians. Was their figurative use of the word "death" based on some hidden meaning in the Book of the Dead? Could it be possible, one conjectured, that all mediaeval and modern scholarship had missed fundamental meaning by failure to catch some legerdemain of ancient symbolism? Could it be that some mighty truth lurked undiscovered under the metaphor? The mind caught the flash of a possibility; it seemed too arrant a supposition for serious acceptance. We had caught the truth by the tail, but the mind was not yet able to hold it fast. It struggled loose. |
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