1-Evolutionary Consciousness with Dr

Evolution in Consciousness

Conversations D r. M i c e a l L e d w i t h

Dr. Miceal Ledwith, L.Ph., L.D., D.D., LL.D (h.c), served as a Catholic priest and as Professor of Theology and College President for over 25 years in Ireland. During the course of his academic and administrative careers he lectured extensively to interested adult groups in many countries and continues to speak at venues all over the world today.

He is a long-time member of Ramtha's School of Ancient Wisdom and has been invited to speak at events held by the school for several years at many venues throughout the world.

He was one of the scholars featured in "What the Bleep Do We Know," and its sequel" Down the Rabbit Hole."

Given his life's experience and long years as a professional theologian Miceal Ledwith believes he is in a unique position to assist people who are also searching for information and answers, and to point the way so that they too can move towards finding the journey of discovery which he is on. To assist in that way is the objective of both the DVD series and his forthcoming major work, "Forbidden Truth." His book "The Orb Project Phenomenon," co-authored with the German physicist Dr. Klaus Heinemann and his DVD “Orbs: Clues to a More Exciting Universe". Part One of his book "Forbidden Truth," which will be titled "Jesus of Nazareth," is forthcoming.

Conversations In January 2013 he will be recording five new DVDʼs to be entitled “Conversations.” They deal with how the brain forms and processes fundamental and crippling beliefs,especially religious beliefs. Why it is so difficult to change them and how.

Dr. Miceal Ledwith Photo by Robert Leon

Evolution in Consciousness

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• Religions, a Sexist Organization?

• Hatred of the Way God Made Us: Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

THE GODS OF MEN,III. • Mary Magdalene Enigma: A Person of Puzzling or Contradictory Character • The Rise and Fall of the Halo • The Wino and The Master • Reversing the Law of Cause and Effect • How Can Little Green Men be Made in the Image of God? • Orbs, is the Vail Lifting?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15396401@N00/11463203

A

t a public lecture many years ago a

speaker surprised me by saying the some of the most sexist organizations on this planet have been the world's great religions.

Indeed many of them, he went on to say, claim to base such

prejudiced attitudes on the inspired written word of God. It occurred to me then

Knowing how far apart the belief and practice of any organization can sometimes drift I wondered if this prejudice was a matter of fundamental doctrine for the great religions, or was it just how things happened to develop in practice for any number of the many reasons imaginable. So I began to look afresh at the principal writings that the great religions hold sacred, to see how they estimated women, such as the Old and New Testaments, the Talmud, the Koran, and the sacred scriptures of the Buddhists and Hindus.

It was a discouraging investigation.

I

f we start with the most ancient the Hindu laws of Manu state: In childhood a female remains subject to her father. In youth a female is subject to her husband. When her lord is dead she shall be subject to her sons. 'A woman must never be independent.' Indeed the sacred texts of the Hindus state that it is the highest duty of a wife to burn herself after her husband has died. Some central streams of Buddhism believe that to be born a woman is due to bad karma. A woman ought to pray to be re-born as a man in a future existence. The Koran regards a woman as 'half a man.' Forgetfulness overcomes a woman. They are 'inherently weaker in rational judgment.' Even the great western thinker Plato quotes Socrates approvingly: Do you know anything at all practiced by mankind in which the male is not far better than the female. It's hardly surprising that Plato's pupil Aristotle, the tutor of Alexander the Great, didn't even accept that women were legitimate human beings: they were & failed men due to some mishap in the womb during the conception process.

There is no doubt that the influence of the Church has profoundly shaped our culture in the West, and that has brought many good things for which we should be profoundly grateful.

But it does not take much research into either the sacred texts of the great religions or the history of their practice down the centuries to see that they have played a central role in fostering the disenfranchisement of women. That did not stay within the Church's sphere, for its religious influence has come to be expressed in most bodies of fundamental secular legislation and practice around the world, not just in the West.

But I came to see eventually that the facts of the matter were much more complicated even than this.

This was not an influence that found an unwelcome reception in those over

whom it was exercised. It seemed to me unmistakable that a pro-male and anti-female bias was buried deep within the human male psyche, independent of and long prior to anything we would today regard as a religious influence. If this is the case then it should come as less of a surprise to find so much overt sexism in fundamental religious texts, given the traditions out of which those religions have themselves grown.

A language's slang vocabulary can reveal a great deal of what prejudices lie deep at the heart of any culture, and Bishop Shelby Spong was one of the first to point out how so many popular words for sexual intercourse display enormous male hostility and contempt for the female.

One of the greatest libraries that ever existed was established at Nineveh, beside Mosul in modern Iraq, by the last of the Assyrian kings, Assurbanipal (died about 627 BC). He was known as Asenappar in the Hebrew Bible and as Sardanapalus to the Romans. He was one of the few kings in antiquity who could read and write, and was the only literate monarch in fifteen centuries of Assyrian Kings. History regards him as forming the first deliberately collected library.

Bishop Shelby Spong

Its significance for us here is that we can assume all ancient written works and records in cuneiform literature that existed in Mesopotamia, that most ancient cradle of civilization, were collected at Nineveh using all the resources of the mighty Assyrian Empire to do so. It is an incomparable record of the earliest recorded stages of human history and our best source to discover where the anti-female bias in our history truly began. The remains of this library were unearthed in the latter part of the 19 century and comprised more than one thousand documents now in the care of the Iraqi Department of Antiquities and the British Assurbanipal

Museum.

Most reputable scholars today will admit that several of those documents are the precursors of seminal documents that later went to form the foundations of the JudeoChristian tradition, in particular the Book of Genesis which is central to understanding the estimate of the female in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Genesis is an immensely profound work despite having been turned on its head all too often by well meaning preachers.

These worthy gentlemen have apparently convinced themselves that it is no more difficult to read and understand a three thousand year old text from a culture as remote from ours as is possible to imagine, than it is to read the morning newspaper.

Genesis wrestles with an age-old issue that must at some stage come to perplex every living person. If we persist in thinking of God and God's relation to the world, in the homely ways to which we have so long grown accustomed, then we are left with an insoluble problem, which is what the opening chapters of Genesis wrestles with.

The world as we know it is replete with more than its fair share of suffering, disease, old age, infirmity, natural disasters, frailty, disappointment, betrayal and ultimately death.

That kind of world cannot have come from the hand of a good God, so either God did not create the world or something went wrong. Those indeed are the only two options we have in the mindset I have labeled the Hamburger Universe.

What is a Hamburger Universe? http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ZPohpsN9n-o&feature=related

Photo by Robert Leon

That God did a good job originally but something went wrong was the explanation the authors of

what is really notable is that the blame for what went wrong was laid fairly and squarely at the feet of Eve, Genesis went for, but

the mother of the human race. So now from some of the earliest sources in the human record we have the female blamed for everything that's wrong with the world, (even though it should be noted that in the Nineveh documents a minor god is blamed as well). I had often noted in my biblical studies years ago that whenever something went really wrong some woman was usually blamed.

But we have to ask if those ancient texts are the root of the anti-female bias in the male psyche, or did those texts themselves grow out of an already existing bias? If it's the former then a major element in rectifying the situation would be to ask the religions to clean up their act as far as the female is concerned. If it's the latter then we have a far deeper problem that originates way beyond the realms of rational thought and discourse, rooted in the shady realms of the unconscious, the subliminal and taboo. It probably also is connected to those aspects of the female that are related to the mysterious, their closeness to the facts of birth and the renewal of life, the unavoidable attraction they hold for men which undermines males perceived power, and those aspects of the female that provoked cries of ritual uncleanness in every culture of which we have knowledge. Once we understand all of that we will have gained a major insight into the operation of religion and its rationale for the subjugation of women over the past four thousand years. Indeed some of the worst atrocities for which religions were responsible have come when the seal of divine approval is used to justify our wars, fears, hatreds and phobias and the oppression of the female must surely rank as one of the most outstanding examples of this.

This prejudice against women as the cause of all our woes has descended as an integral part of most of our cultures and history, and its hardly surprising that eventually the distrust and avoidance of women became a central religious duty and indeed the very badge of holiness in the West.

So even if the religions have historically been some of the most sexist organizations on earth it seems they were more the agencies who exacerbated what was already there than that they were the origins of it. In turn that would mean that addressing the anti-female bias would have to be the first priority for any body of teaching that purported to be in the vanguard of spiritual evolution. It would also have to be the touchstone of its validity.

This raises some serious issues. Less than two decades after the Passion of Jesus, and some two decades before the appearance of the first Gospel of the New Testament, St. Paul started to put pen to paper. Over the next fifteen years more than half of the New Testament as we know it came from his hand, and those writings preceded all the Gospels.

Paul never mentions the quintessential Christian female, Mary the Mother of Jesus, in his extensive writings. He states women will be saved only through motherhood (1 Tim. 2: 15); and that they ought to be subject to men. There is little doubt among scholars of the New Testament that Paul saw in the growing emancipation of women in the Roman world, a major strand in the breakdown of orderly society, and he believed that Christians should adhere to the traditional strict lines of family life. Peter says that women should be cherished because they are weaker, and the context implies he is not just thinking of physical weakness (1 Peter). Things hardly improved when St. Jerome came on the scene and justified marriage only because it could produce more virgins. The highest praise Augustine could manage for women was to regard them as a malum necessarium,; 'a necessary evil.'

Saint Paul Writing His Epistles

If we look back twenty or thirty years earlier than St. Paul's writings we can see the cultural and religious background from which Jesus emerged. He had, of course, made enormous waves among the religious traditions of his day. It was time when at every religious service the men prayed; ;Blessed are you O Lord who has not made me a woman, or worse, Blessed be God who has not created me a heathen, a slave or a woman. It was a time when the women had to sit in separate sections, and when they were not counted in the votes. It was unusual for them to be taught the Torah. Indeed the writers of the Talmud added that it would be better to burn the words of Torah than entrust them to a woman.

This very unpromising context is the background from which Jesus emerged, and seems to be the general background which Paul and Peter wished to perpetuate.

If, as noted earlier, the emancipation of women has to be the touchstone for the validity of any leading edge spiritual movement for human liberation, then this raises disturbing questions because of these elements in the witness of Paul and Peter. But before we ask those questions, we have to inquire if this version

of things was in fact true to what Jesus taught and did, or not, or whether the structure erected on the foundation he had established had drifted from his message?

But looking back over those previous 20 or 30 years we see a very different attitude in the teaching and practice of Jesus. The New Testament clearly acknowledges that w o m e n w e re a m o n g h i s earliest followers. Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Susanna accompanied Jesus during his ministry and supported him financially.

According to one account an unnamed Gentile women stated to Jesus that the Ministry of God is not confined to particular groups or persons, but belongs to all who have faith. (Mk.7: 24-30; Mt. 15: 21-28)

Illustration by Paolo Veronese of Jesus healing the woman with a flow of blood.

Raising of Lazarus John Bridges Christ healing the mother of Simon Peter

Jesus ate with women as well as men, which would not have been customary, and spoke to them both in public and private. In the very early years of the church this trend continued and some of the earliest gathering places were in the houses of such women. Churches often grew up on those sites later, and have preserved their names in those locations even

Whatever may be said of the teaching of Jesus about women in the New Testament his conduct and practice would certainly have been branded as revolutionary. into our own times.

Hemis gompa in Ladakh

However, the most poignant of all the teachings of Jesus on the dignity and nobility of women came to light just over one hundred years ago, and from another non-canonical source, the famous scrolls discovered by Nicholas Notovitch at the monastery of Hemis, near the city of Leh in Nepal. It was said that similar scrolls were to be found in many other monasteries scattered throughout India and Tibet, not just at Hemis. The scrolls shed light on what Jesus was doing in those eighteen years of his life that are missing from the New Testament directly after his appearance in the Temple at the age of 12, presumably for his /www.flickr.com/photos/75823101@N00/1364617997/ Hemis Gompa, India 2006 Bar-Mitzvah. Are we told nothing of those missing years by the New Testament because nothing of any account was happening, or was something so significant happening that all mention of it had to be omitted since it did not accord with the politically correct version of him which it had now been decided to preach?

The Notovitch scrolls fill in what was happening in those missing years. According to the Scrolls Jesus arrived in India at age 14 and studied in the sacred cities for six years, after which he went into the high places and studied there for another six years. He returned home to Israel about the age of thirty having survived several attempts on his life because of what he taught.

Because of the tumult which his teachings provoked in Israel he was constantly under scrutiny by the religious and secular authorities, and the spies of Pontius Pilate were constantly monitoring him.

One day an old woman who was listening to his teaching was roughly pushed aside by one of those spies. He was rebuked by Jesus, and what followed must be one of the most inspirational pronouncements on the dignity and nobility of woman that has ever been produced. It merits quotation in full.

It is not good for a son to push away his mother, that he may occupy the place which belongs to her. Whoever does not respect his mother, the most sacred being after his God - is unworthy of the name of son.

Listen to what I say to you. Respect woman, for in her we see the mother of the universe, and all the truth of divine creation is to come through her. She is the fount of everything good and beautiful, as she is also the germ of life and death. Upon her man depends in all his existence, for she is his moral and natural support in his labors.

In pain and suffering she brings you forth, in the sweat of her brow she watches over your growth, and until her death you cause her the greatest anxieties. Bless her and adore her, for she is your only friend and support on earth.

Respect her, defend her. In doing so you will gain for yourself her love, you will find favor before God and for her sake many sins will be remitted to you.

Love your wives and respect them for they will be mothers tomorrow, and later the grandmothers of a whole nation.

Be submissive to the wife; her love ennobles man, softens his hardened heart, tames the wild beast in him and changes it to a lamb.

Wives and mothers are the priceless treasures which God has given to you. They are the most beautiful ornaments of the universe, and from them will be born all who will inhabit the earth.

Even as the Lord of Hosts separated the light from the darkness and the dry land from the waters, so does woman possess the divine gift of calling forth out of man's evil nature, all the good that is in him.

Therefore I say unto you, after God, to woman must belong your best thoughts, for she is the divine temple where you will most easily obtain perfect happiness.

Draw from this temple your moral force. There you will forget your sorrows and your failures, and recover the love necessary to aid your fellow men.

Suffer her not to be humiliated, for by humiliating her you humiliate yourselves and lose the sentiment of love, without which nothing can exist here on earth.

Protect your wife, that she may protect you-you and your household. All that you do for your mothers, your wives, for a widow or for any woman in distress, you will do for your God.

Gustav Klimt

But we do not have to go as far as ancient Nepal to gain a different view. A treasure trove of early Christian documents discovered in Egypt in the 19th and 20th centuries give us some amazingly fresh insights into Jesus's relation to women during his ministry. Several of these

Pistis Sophia, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, the Dialogue of the Savior, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary, focus on one woman in particular whom we already knew from the documents such as the

New Testament as a prominent prophetic leader and visionary in at least one section of the early Christian movement, Mary Magdalene. In the Sophia of Jesus Christ; five women and twelve men are gathered to hear the Savior. Mary is entrusted with the most elevated teachings of Jesus and has a prominent role in handing on his message. In the Pistis Sophia; she is also prominent among the disciples and asks more questions than all of the rest put together. Her high spiritual status is affirmed and she intercedes with the Savior as some of the disciples are despairing. In the Gospel of Mary the Magdalene is portrayed without doubt as a woman leader among the disciples. She alone of all the disciples is not frightened and afraid. She is pre-eminently the one whom Jesus most esteems. The Gospel of Philip focuses on the special relationship between Jesus and her.

In the Dialogue of the Savior Mary is named along with Jude Thomas and Matthew as partaking in a prolonged dialogue with Jesus, and she questions Jesus on several matters as the representative of the group. All of this evidence should settle the debate we often hear about whether she was an apostle or not. The real question now is not whether she was one of the Apostles of Jesus but whether she was in fact, in the title often ascribed to her of late, the Apostle of the Apostles.

Some churches still prohibit women from the ministry and the reason adduced normally is that the pattern of an all-male priesthood laid down by Jesus is not something that the Churches are at liberty to alter.

Even when some churches admit female ministers, to then admit them as bishops is seen as a further major barrier. But what if the pattern of the priesthood established by Jesus was entirely different, and not just that but that the chief among the first such group was female? Certainly if the primary duty of any true religion has to be to set about rectifying the inbuilt anti-female bias in the male psyche, no other initiative could ever hope to be as appropriate and successful as that.

Nuestra SeĂąora de los Dolores. Capilla del Sagrario de la Iglesia Parroquial de Santa MarĂ­a del Alcor. El Viso del Alcor (Sevilla).

And what of the personal side of things?

A succession of works such as

Holy Blood, Holy Grail, 'Bloodline of the Holy Grail,' ;Rex Deus andThe Da Vinci Code, have raised afresh the question of what kind of personal relationship there was between Magdelene and Jesus. That inevitably leads to the further question of whether there exists any such thing as a Messianic Bloodline, and if there is, what does it entail? Is it simply a matter of historical physical descent from this preeminent pair, or would such descendants carry something in their physical or mental make up that sets them apart?

More than 150 years ago Ludwig Feuerbach remarked that rather than God having created us in his own image, it is we who have created God in our image. So in all the religions what we are dealing with in the first place is human-style images of the creator rather than with the real thing.

As far as repression of the female goes those images have to be recognized in the truest sense as nothing more than the Gods of Men. Copyright, Miceal Ledwith.

http://www.hamburgeruniverse.com/

The conclusions put forward about Jesus in this DVD will come as a surprise to both the religious right and the religious left, because these precise conclusions have never before been drawn in the long debate about him. The early Christian Church spent several centuries of tortured controversy trying to explain how God could have become man in Jesus the Christ. The Church would have been far more faithful to the original message and intent of Jesus if it had focused instead on how the divine element in every man and woman could be effectively drawn forth. According to the teachings of Ramtha, and upheld by a thorough investigation of all the historical sources, that is precisely what Jesus came to exemplify and facilitate for everyone. Running time of the DVD 3 hours 40 minutes.

Order Here

The insights of leading-edge science indicate a very different understanding of God and our place and purpose in creation than the ways of thought with which we were traditionally familiar. In the main this is because in the theologies of the religions cosmological views about the nature of reality have never been distinguished p ro p e r l y f ro m t h e re l i g i o u s b e l i e f s themselves. A good example is how the belief that the earth is at the center of the universe still tends to hang on in the form that the human race is in some way at the center of existence in the universe and at the very heart of God’s design and purpose.

In this DVD Miceal Ledwith uses a humorous image which he called “The Hamburger Universe” to describe a mindset of which we may be almost totally unaware, but which nevertheless will keep up firmly blocked from any significant spiritually unless we address that mindset.

The separation of time conditioned modes of thought and views about the nature of reality, as well as how we understand God and human destiny, is a painful but very rewarding process for any person seriously interested in finding the answer to life’s great questions. Running time of the DVD: 57 minutes.

If the New Testament appears to be silent about the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene perhaps it is because it was formulated in the period after the Bar K o c h b a r r e b e l l i o n a n d t h e fi n a l destruction at Jerusalem and Masada. It was a period when it became imperative to placate the Romans and accuse the Jews of being the cause of the hostility which the message of Jesus aroused. In the later era when the Gospels were formed incidents and their significance in the life of Jesus would come to be missed. But they would have been clear as crystal when the early Christian movement was still predominantly a Jewish or eastern Semitic thing. If the New Testament as we have it wished to be silent on the relationship between Jesus and Mary it did not realize the significance which the Eastern mind would read into several incidents which are recounted in the New Testament. If their implications had been realized they would have been removed.

Married?

The original meaning of "Apostle was "apostellein," 'to bear witness.'

If Magdalene was not alone just a witness, but the very first witness who saw him at that time, does it not justify her having the title not simply of "Apostle" but also that very ancient appellation often attributed to her, "Apostle of the Apostles?"

In John 2: 20, 28 and 29 the incident is told of Jesus returning from his travels to the house at Bethany which belonged to Martha, Mary and Lazarus who had just died. Martha goes out to meet him, but not Mary. Is it because a wife in mourning cannot go out to meet her husband returning from a journey until she is sent for? That was the Jewish custom then, and Mary did go out to meet him when she was sent for.

In Matthew 26 and Mark 14 we are told of the woman who anointed the feet of Jesus with oil. John Christopher Thomas in his perceptive work "Foot-washing in John 13" points out that it was only a wife who would be permitted to engage in such an intimate act with a man, and indeed that in that culture it often was a prelude to sexual intercourse between husband and wife. In the Diatessaron, which dates from about 150-160 AD, we are told that the foot-washer was the woman known as Mary of Bethany or Mary Magdalene.

it would have been considered scandalous for any woman other than a wife to do this.

In the same category is the incident told in Luke 10:39: the woman Mary who sat at the feet of Jesus. In first century Judaism

Excerpts from article by Dr. Miceal Ledwith Hatred of the Way God Made Us: Jesus and Mary Magdalene. THE GODS OF MEN,III.

In the New Testament's seven lists of women associated with the ministry of Jesus Mary Magdalene is named first in six of them, even ahead of the mother of Jesus.

In the narratives of the appearances of Jesus in the garden after his passion Magdalene was the first to meet him and it was within the context of an exchange of intimacies.

By Dr. Miceal Ledwith

For full article click here

Mary Magdalene is traditionally depicted with a vessel of ointment, in reference to the Anointing of Jesus.

By Dr. Miceal Ledwith

Enigma: "a person of puzzling or contradictory character:" Of all the characters of ancient history that have captured our imaginations powerfully in recent years, Mary Magdalene must surely rank as the most enigmatic. Her name has been linked to a vast range of issues that peak our curiosity ranging from the conspiracy theory/secret society gloss to the sultry insinuations of being the intimate companion of the Savior.

There is little doubt than those who would find the idea of Jesus being linked in a personal relationship to as woman as inappropriate or even blasphemous, would do well first of all to examine why they consider hatred of the way God made us to be a primary religious duty.

Mary Magdalene

But perhaps what is even more important is to realize that those concerns that preoccupy us so much today may not have concerned the contemporaries of Jesus and Mary nearly as much. Perhaps the contemplation of such a close relationship between these two persons is such an issue for us today that it actually serves only to obscure the real importance of the message of both those figures. All the while we merrily go about working out what really are after all only our own mental prejudices and gymnastics, but at their expense.

Several acclaimed authors have quoted the famous text from the second century Gnostic Gospel of Philip: "Jesus loved her (Mary Magdalene) more than the other disciples and used to kiss her often on the lips" (Philip 63, 64). What they blithely ignore is the actions of many mischievous termites down the centuries which have left holes in that ancient manuscript precisely where those loaded words figure in the Coptic text.

There is no word for "kiss" and there is no word for "lips" in the text as we have it. What those words may have been is anybody's educated guess, but it is certainly not legitimate research to quote the text as if no gaps existed, for we will fill the gaps with terms that suit our own interest. Several respected authors have stated that the Gnostic documents from Nag Hammadi describe Mary Magdalene as the lover of Jesus. There are no such Gnostic texts.

If you are looking for evidence of a special relationship between Jesus and Mary there is no need to look to the early 1940's Gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi. You should look to the New Testament itself.

By a fortuitous accident of history the original Western

redactors of the new Testament text did not appear to fully realize the import certain narratives would carry for the eastern mind, which is the mind in which the very early oral and written traditions about Jesus were formed.

In an earlier article in this series

(The Gods of Men, III, Bleeping Herald, July 2008) I have analyzed the several references within the New Testament canon which demonstrate beyond doubt that there was a very special relationship indeed between Jesus and Mary, so there is no need to look for dusty documents to prove it in texts found a generation ago in an ancient burial ground of the sixth dynasty Pharaohs.

But one of the issues that concerns me most in the discussion of the Magdalene today is the fascination with the secret knowledge or teachings which Jesus is alleged to have given her as "apostle of the apostles."

One of the greatest delusions that has dogged humanity's path on its quest for evolution is the conviction that there exists a secret knowledge, which if only one could find it, would open up the doors to all we have ever desired. True spiritual evolution certainly requires true knowledge about how things are before we can make any progress, and we have certainly been fed with far more than enough defective knowledge about these matters from those who have decided to their own satisfaction that they are in charge of our immortal destiny. But knowledge on its own can never do it. There is no secret knowledge to be given to anyone by anybody which will automatically lay the miracles of the universe at our feet.

The second century Gnostics were preoccupied with secret knowledge, so it's no surprise to find their texts have the form they do. If one believes the moon is made of green cheese, or that the sun revolves around the earth, these are harmless enough beliefs in terms of everyday living - unless you are instructing astronauts. If you believe we were sent here by God to work out our destiny by obeying a set of rules, and that Jesus came here to suffer and die because of our sins, those are relatively harmless beliefs too, unless you happen to be advising people on how to work out their eternal destiny in this world.

But that being said, there is no secret knowledge that can deliver this to you ready made; there is only knowledge that will help you to engage that knowledge into experience and that is where the work of salvation comes in.

Salvation, or working out your destiny, or evolving

spiritually, or whatever term you choose to describe it, does not come from knowledge, but from what you accomplish using informed knowledge.

This is why it was always called The

Great WORK. Any secret knowledge that was supposed to have existed in certain exalted circles in the past, was only secret because of a prudence that the great masters used to prevent the information about how things worked from getting into the hands of those who would misuse it for their own selfish gratification, usually in the manipulation of others. This was the sense in which Jesus spoke of "not casting your pearls before swine." In the case of the Magdalene whatever so called "secret" knowledge was given her by Jesus, was given only to facilitate and guide her own personal work in the voyage of self-discovery along which mastery lies. And it would not have been given to her in the context of any personal favor or relationship, but in terms of what she had already earned in terms of personal effort and discovery of the path along which evolution occurs. Basically, that consists in confronting and dealing with our own personal issues that have kept us blocked life after life. It is not about finding any magical secret knowledge which will deal with it for us.

Secrets

So if Jesus revealed certain secrets to Mary Magdalene, as he is recorded also as having done to his twin

brother Thomas, it was not done

because of any privileged personal intimate relationship or connection, but because of the seriousness they had demonstrated in accomplishing the degree of spiritual evolution they had already made. That now made this knowledge meaningful for them in terms of personal spiritual growth.

Mary was a very common Jewish name in the times of the New Testament. There are 16 women whose names we know from the New Testament Gospels who were associated with the ministry of Jesus and six of those were called Mary. So when the name "Mary" is mentioned in the New Testament you usually have another qualification tagged on to identify more clearly who the person being spoken of really is; for example "Mary of Clophas,"" Mary of Magdalene, " etc..

In fact the Mary Magdalene of the Gospels as we have come to know her from the Christian tradition is something of a conglomerate figure ranging over the full scale from the reformed demoniac to the repentant prostitute who anointed Jesus before his passion.

Of the six Marys in the Gospels all recognize Mary who was the mother of Jesus. Then there is the Mary whom Luke calls "the sinful woman," the reformed prostitute, or the one from whom several devils were ejected, according to Mark; the one who anointed Jesus prior to his passion, according to John, and therein the one who first saw him in the garden after his passion, thus meriting the title "Apostle of the Apostles."

Passion

We have Mary of Bethany, who is the sister of Lazarus. In John's Gospel it is Mary who is preeminent, but in Luke it is Peter. But then Luke was Peter's secretary, and there was no love lost between them. It was not until the year 591 AD, in his famous Thirty Third Homily, that all of these female figures were combined into one by Pope Gregory the Great.

So who really was Mary of Magdalene, if she is not a five-part composite of history?

At Magdala, a town near top of the Lake of Galilee, the cult of Ishtar or Astarte, mother goddess and Queen of Heaven, was common. The cult of Ishtar had a seven-fold initiation in which the sacrifice of doves was held to be important. The dove in fact was the symbol of the goddess. There is independent evidence that sacrificial doves were raised in village of Magdala.

So coming from Magdala it is extremely likely that Mary might have been associated with that cult, and the statement in the Gospel of St. Luke that she was a woman out of whom seven devils were cast might mean something quite different if interpreted correctly in a wider context.

It might not refer to an exorcism at all, but to some progress along a path of initiation wherein each of the seven levels of initiation might be symbolically expressed as the casting out of a devil from us -

demons"

"facing your

as we would express it today.

The

New Testament saw that as a terrible thing. It might in fact turn out to be something quite wonderful if seen in terms of a progress of initiation in the school of the female goddess at Magdala.

We would do well to remember that in the esoteric tradition the principal teacher of Jesus during his time in the Himalayas, between the ages of 20 and 26 years, told him that when the time of his passion was imminent he would send him a jar of precious ointment as a sign to warn him to be ready, and to assure him that he was not going to be alone and abandoned during the time of his initiation.

Mary was the one who performed the anointing.

Did this indicate that she had some

connection with that same brotherhood and sisterhood, and did this have anything to do with the Mother Goddess Cult of Magdala?

This is not something I casually suggest. In my DVD " How Jesus Became a Christ" I said that to my mind the greatest proof that Jesus was in India and Tibet was not just the scrolls that so emphatically say he was there, the most famous of which were the ones discovered and published by Nicholas Notovitch in 1893. The real indication, even if such scrolls had never been discovered, is the well over one hundred major parallels I have pointed out between the message of the Buddha and that of Jesus, even though the Buddha was five hundred years earlier. Does that mean Jesus was a plagiarist or the Buddha his inspiration? By no

What it indicates is that both were conduits of a much older wisdom that predated each, a wisdom old as the foundations of the world. means.

We would do well to remember that in the esoteric tradition the principal teacher of Jesus during his time in the Himalayas, between the ages of 20 and 26 years, told him that when the time of his passion was imminent he would send him a jar of precious ointment as a sign to warn him to be ready, and to assure him that he was not going to be alone and abandoned during the time of his initiation.

Mary was the one who performed the anointing.

Did this indicate that she had some

connection with that same brotherhood and sisterhood, and did this have anything to do with the Mother Goddess Cult of Magdala?

This is not something I casually suggest. In my DVD " How Jesus Became a Christ" I said that to my mind the greatest proof that Jesus was in India and Tibet was not just the scrolls that so emphatically say he was there, the most famous of which were the ones discovered and published by Nicholas Notovitch in 1893. The real indication, even if such scrolls had never been discovered, is the well over one hundred major parallels I have pointed out between the message of the Buddha and that of Jesus, even though the Buddha was five hundred years earlier.

Does that mean Jesus was a plagiarist or the Buddha his inspiration? By no means. What it indicates is that both were conduits of a much older wisdom that pre-dated each, a wisdom old as the foundations of the world.

But I said earlier that Mary Magdalene was an enigma. In the celebrated Gospel of Mary, discovered by Dr. Carl Reinhardt in Cairo in 1896, (another copy was part of the Nag Hammadi find in 1946) but not published until 1955, it is also not hard to detect very obvious Buddhist and Taoist ideas, and given that this Gospel had strong associations with Mary's tradition, it raises very interesting questions about Mary and her associations in the Orient which no one hitherto has expressed.

In the Gospel of Mary Jesus is quoted as saying

" All

natures, all formed things, all creatures, exist with and in one another, and will again be resolved with their own roots, because the nature of matter is dissolved into the roots of its nature alone."

This closely resembles the Taoist idea of the

one-ness and the return, which you find in the Tao Te Ching:

"All things derive their life from Tao; all things return to it and it contains them."

Another striking parallel in the Gospel of Mary is the description of the soul's journey after death and the trials it has to overcome, and how critical it is to prepare for this. The Egyptian Pharaohs were preoccupied with this from the first moment of their reigns. This is uncannily reminiscent of passages in the Tibetan Book of the Dead which describes the encounter with the loving and the angry God which the soul has to encounter after its departure from the physical body.

"When the soul had overcome the third power, it went upwards and saw the fourth power which took seven forms.

The first form is darkness, the second desire, the third ignorance, the fourth the excitement of death, the fifth the kingdom of the flesh, and the sixth the foolish wisdom of the flesh, while the seventh is the wrathful wisdom. These are the seven powers of wrath."

So I think in some odd ways we would have to agree with Peter and Andrew that Mary was indeed a "woman peddling strange and alien ideas" in a very powerful way, more powerful obviously than they were able to accept.

But did she also, like Jesus, get those ideas in the

Orient? That is the background against which I would like to present the enigma of Mary Magdalene

if we are trying to understand her significance for today;

not just reflecting the preoccupations of the present, which can only try to assess her significance largely in the sultry terms of whether she was the companion of Jesus or not. That aspect will undoubtedly help to correct many of the disabilities under which women have had to labor over the past two thousand years.

But there is much more to the enigma of Mary than what figures in the four Gospels of the New Testament, or what is traditionally associated with her sojourn in Rennes-le-Chateau, or as is narrated in The Golden Legend. That aspect is far greater than any of the others; that is where the real enigma of Mary lies, and it is one which today's authors have still to notice.

Dr. Miceal Ledwith Photo by Robert Leon

The Rise and Fall of the Halo MĂ­ceĂĄl Ledwith Stories of the renowned saints and mystics always fascinate; the vortex of many colors that surrounded Joseph of Cupertino before he performed his outstanding feats of levitation and teleportation; or the adventures of that paradox of mysteries, Teresa of Avila. She was profoundly mystical, yet an immensely practical reformer of enormous energy, a bastion of orthodoxy, while at the same time under suspicion by the Inquisition who believed her paranormal feats were diabolical in origin. When she came from prayer her fellow workers were frequently dazzled by the blaze of light surrounding her head.

Anyone who ever pokes through the dusty files of history will certainly agree that "things are seldom what they seem," including Teresa of Avila's halo. Many of the most sacred religious practices and symbols often have quite a different origin and explanation than is commonly assumed. While this is certainly true of the halo's history, what is even more interesting is what this phenomenon might now herald for a new stage of awareness in humanity's evolution. I

was intrigued to discover well over one hundred parallels between the teachings of the Buddha and the teachings of Jesus five hundred years later, just as I was to discover that the seven sacraments of the Christian Church were all initiation ceremonies of the ancient Egyptian Mystery Schools. What did that tell us: was Jesus or the Buddha a plagiarist? On the contrary, they were both channels of a much more ancient wisdom.

If this is the case with such central matters as the teachings of Jesus or the sacraments of the Church, then what do the levitations of Joseph and the blazing countenance of Teresa tell us?

That they were specially favored by God, who was thereby putting his stamp of divine approval on them? Or rather are they not far more likely to be telling us something of

ultimate concern about the real nature of God and the true make up of the human being and of this universe in which we float?

The halo has been understood as an artistic device only, and by the nineteenth century it had definitely gone out of fashion with artists who were too embarrassed to portray it any more. But we're still accustomed to think of it as a religious trademark, and in the West, of course, to consider it the very badge of medieval Christian art.

But in its origins the halo

is neither western, Christian, nor even religious, and most interestingly of all, is probably not an artistic device either.

Haloes began to appear in art long before any religion with which it has been associated had ever assumed recognizable form. At the end of the Greek Dark Ages, twenty nine hundred years ago, Homer's Iliad describes a preternatural light shining around the heads of Greek heroes engaged in murderous combat at the height of pitched battle. But long before Homer, "sun discs" or rays of light appear around the heads of Ra and Hathor in Egyptian art.

The Kushan Emperors of northwestern India seem to have been the first to depict themselves with haloes on their coins in the second and third centuries before Christ. And by doing that I think they intended to say far more than that God was on their side.

Later the depiction of haloes becomes quite common in both Japanese and Chinese Buddhist art and eventually appeared frequently in a great variety of Hindu religious literature.

Even when the halo began to be understood in the West as some form of divine radiance that conveyed closeness to divinity, it was probably an import from the Persian Empire and made its way to Rome with the spread of the Mithraic religion. The images of the Roman Emperors, like Alexander before them, began to feature aspects redolent of divinity, including the halo. Initially this was the practice only after they had died and were now judged to have been deified, but it soon came to be used also in the depictions of living Emperors.

It was only long after all of this long history, in the fourth century after Christ, that the halo began to be used by the organization that now claims the image as its own: the Christian Church. It belonged to the

movement that more and more accommodated Jesus and Christianity to the traditions, practices and symbols of the mystery religions.

It is hardly surprising that within Christianity a hierarchy of haloes soon began to form. In the beginning only Christ was depicted with a halo and it was meant to represent his divine nature. In the early Christian centuries a considerable body of Christians believed that Christ was born in a state similar to every other human being and that he only acquired the state of being divine as his journey progressed. The Church, in confronting this view in what it called the Nestorian Heresy, defined as an article of its faith that Christ Jesus came into this world with a fully formed divine nature as well as a human nature. Some artistic depictions of Jesus before the Church made this pronouncement did not show him with a halo until after the time of his baptism by John, which was regarded as the most likely stage at which he assumed a divine nature. Those artworks would of course be regarded as seriously heretical by the orthodox believers.

Surface is composed of triangles.- Plato In medieval art it became customary to represent Persons of the Holy Trinity with a halo within which the figure of a cross was inscribed but God the Father was sometimes depicted with a triangular halo. Lesser mortals had to be satisfied with plain round or spherical haloes. This became the practice in the Middle Ages and later it became usual to depict only the circumference of the halo as a circular line.

For individuals who were revered for their sanctity but who had not yet been formally declared saints, it was usual to depict rays of light emanating from their heads, but no actual halo was added until canonization had taken place.

Sometimes in the early medieval period living people of renown were depicted with square haloes to indicate that, however illustrious they were, they were still alive.

Notorious villains of this world or of the world to come, such as Judas or Satan, were depicted with black solid haloes.

And finally even back in the secular days when haloes began, sometimes the entire body of the person was encased in a halo radiating beyond the physical body.

Examples are found where Jesus is depicted with such a full-body halo and also a halo around his head. Where both intersected a vesica piscis was formed which had its own special significance.

By the High Renaissance period most of the major Italian painters had stopped depicting haloes altogether. Part of the reaction against the Protestant Reformation mandated that they be used in Catholic Christian art, but usually the painters tried to comply with this by placing a natural light source behind the subjects head to give the effect of a halo. By the nineteenth century haloes were definitely gone, unless one were striving to give a medieval 'flavor' to a scene. They are now found only in images of popular piety with those bleeding Jesus figures of the Mel Gibson genre.

However, haloes in their origin are neither western, Christian, or even religious, and most interestingly of all, are probably not artistic devices either.

What then does the luminescence around people like Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Cupertino really tell us? It wasn't imagined; those images were included by artists because that is what was actually seen around certain individuals.

But, even if it has ceased to be fashionable in mainline art, how is the luminescence of the halo to be explained and what has it to tell us? In both my book and DVD on the orb phenomenon, I point out that doing nothing but wondering

in

amazement at the variety of orbs pictures that can appear to us would be as if those physicians who first saw chromosomes in the blood after the invention of the microscope simply continued to look, without taking the knowledge they gained from looking to fight disease and promote health. If my contention is correct that orbs are seen by fluorescence, not by reflected light, is it possible that the different colors of fluoresced light that comes from the orbs really reveal dimensions above this physical one to which the orbs belong?

About Orbs Science to Sage Sept issue About Orbs and Vortexes December Issue

If so, then as individuals would we also exist right now in those same six planes of the electromagnetic spectrum above us which every high school text book of physics shows, since it is impossible for a lower frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum to exist without a higher one to hold it in place, right back to the source . If all those fabled and

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/TimothyRias

legendary beings of folklore and religious traditions really do exist, they would also presumably exist on one of those six planes above the physical that make up the whole gamut of the creation, but that would not make them superior to us, quite the contrary.

So for example, if an Archangel is a being who lives on the fifth dimension or plane of reality, we would need to realize that so too do we exist there on that same dimension in another aspect of our makeup which plays its indispensable part in holding this physical aspect of us in being.

D-Kuru/Wikemedia Commons

Dispersive Prism Illustration by Spigget

Hebrews 2:7, quoting Psalm 8, says that God made us "a little less than the angels" but if my hypothesis is true would we not actually be more? Perhaps the effulgence, caused by the reaching of altered states in remarkable individuals of the past, and which was made visible and immortalized in the halo, is the talisman and pledge that we do

not live in the kind of universe we thought, but in one that is frequencybased, and, even more important, one that is intensely responsive to thought?

Is it possible that the interaction of mind Light dispersion conceptual waves by Kieff

with a frequencybased universe is what opens up access to the other dimensions that make us what we are, and that make up the universe as well?

And is the mechanism that produces this what causes the halo?

Lookang/CC 3.0

If so this would be the path along which our emergence into true power and ability within ourselves lies. So if originally the halo was neither western, Christian, or even religious, and was probably not an artistic device either, who would have thought that now understood in a profoundly different way, it might be the herald for us of an enormous and longforgotten human potential, not too long after we became embarrassed to depict it any more?

Copyright Š Míceål F. Ledwith All rights reserved.

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The Law of Cause and Effect, which we accept so uncritically that it has become part and parcel of the very way we think, can be one of the greatest barriers we meet on the road to manifesting our desires. - Miceal Ledwith

LAW

miceal ledwith

REVERSING THE LAW OF CAUSE AND EFFECT

Whenever we discovered something fundamental about the nature of reality it seems we couldn't resist calling it a "law."

So in all the

disciplines from physics, to philosophy, to theology, psychology or chemistry, we have a range of such "laws"; the law of Gravity, the Laws of Thermodynamics, the Natural Law, the Law of Conservation of Energy, the Laws of Motion, and most recently in the buzz phrase, "The Law of Attraction."

In the normal sense of the word a "law" is passed by some authoritative body such as Congress or a Parliament, comes into effect on a due day, and presumably can be altered or abrogated subsequently.

The "laws" of nature have nothing at all in common with such usage.

Presumably gravity, for instance, worked fine long before anyone decided to stick a label on it. And even the most diehard proponents of the view of God as some sort of human being enlarged; have never suggested that it would be possible for God at some point to abrogate the Law of Gravity or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. All down the centuries the natural law traditions have viewed the "laws" of nature not as regulations promulgated by God acting as some form of cosmic legislator, but as reflections of something in the divine nature itself, and therefore unchangeable as long as God remains God.

All of that of course might not matter very much were it not for the fact that in following out the course of spiritual evolution, to which so many in the world are wakening up right now, the ways in which we think of such "laws" can radically alter our ability to manifest what we desire.

That is equally true whether we are aiming at fabulous

wealth, glowing health and long life without disease, or a lasting personal happiness.

Isaac Newton eloquently expressed something fundamental about the nature of reality in what we know as the "Third Law of Motion:" or more popularly "The Law of Cause and Effect." To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is absolutely true of everything we experience, whether it's hitting a golf ball or launching a probe to Mars.

Unfortunately applying this way of thinking to our spiritual evolution is going to land us in a heap of trouble and disappointment, because all of those supreme and unchangeable laws do not apply at all in the realm of manifestation. We are dealing now with a realm whose laws are entirely different from what has become familiar, and we have never been told that, or if we have been told, we have not come to realize the implications.

The Law of Cause and Effect, which we accept so uncritically that it has become part and parcel of the very way we think, can be one of the greatest barriers we meet on the road to manifesting our desires.

There has never been time when human beings didn't desire to have something that was attractive to them, whether that be was a good home, a new job or a satisfying personal relationship. As a race we have gone through various stages in how we enlist powerful forces seen as outside ourselves, to help us attain those desires.

The earliest form of this was to envisage God sitting up there, seen in some way as an enlarged human being, who has the ability to grant our requests. Even today most people's form of prayer is based on this form of assumption. However this flies in the face of another fundamental "law" which was expressed by Jesus in the form in which it is most familiar to us today:"When you pray for something, believe it is already yours, and it shall be so." (Mark 11:24). Instead of obeying this "law" we instead beg, implore, desire, hope, beseech, request and pray that God will grant our request. What this means is that we have stated that the desired thing is not ours, and given what Jesus taught, we have in effect now issued a law that it can never be ours as long as we persist in that attitude of supplication or lack. We have to

first become it in order for us to have it. Most assuredly this is one of the hardest lessons for us to learn on a path of spiritual growth.

"When you pray for something, believe it is a l r e a d y y o u r s,

Prayers

and it shall be so." - Jesus

will find dozens of titles assuring us that we create our own reality and that all we need to do is hold our focus on whatever it is we want and it will be ours. This also is a very over-simplistic version of this truth, but it is certainly a major advance over viewing God's main role as some cosmic form of wish fulfiller.

But even in this shift we still tend to become bedeviled by the "Law of Cause and Effect." We try to figure out what the appropriate "input" might be for this "Law of Attraction" to take effect and create the output we desire.

Unfortunately the law of cause and effect does not operate in the quantum field, or to put it more accurately it operates in reverse.

In

manifestation from the quantum field, the effect has in a real sense to come before the cause.

That's also the reverse of everything we have been used to experiencing, and it is the reverse of what has been the received wisdom about the nature of reality and about God and prayer for millennia. This is the

main reason why there is so much disappointment in religion centering on apparently unanswered prayer, and why

the art

of prayer is so little understood and so poorly practiced.

Dr. Miceal Ledwith. http://www.hamburgeruniverse.com/

Be Cause

Nowadays when you go into any reasonably good bookstore today you

BY DR. MICEAL LEDWITH The Wino and The Master

S

ometimes when I speak to groups about matters related to quantum physics I pose the question “Who do you think has the greater ability to manifest reality: an unfortunate homeless person living in abject poverty under a bridge, or an ascended Master such as we read about in those fabled accounts from long ago?�

For months, the media has been filled with accounts of one series of economic disasters after another all across the First World.

It’s very rare that such a vast swath of humanity has been so united in focus on the same thing. Everyone across all of North and South America , Europe and the East seem to be concerned with the same realities, and with a fierce intensity; will my investments be safe; will my savings, if I have any, remain secure, how will I pay the mortgage or meet my children’s school fees this year? Will I have a job in six months time? How can I afford to heat the house this winter? As a 19th century writer put it: “It’s a prospect Both the to dizzy and appall.”

in recent years have actually done a great disservice to the majority of people who espoused them. The impression was given that it was all very easy, even automatic to master these techniques. That suited the instant gratification society’s expectations but it just didn’t work and the result was disillusionment. There is no doubt that what we have deeply and profoundly accepted will manifest into our lives. Unfortunately, all

too often, what we have deeply and profoundly accepted in this way is lack, ill health, misfortune and what we are pleased to call bad luck.

Sometimes when I speak to groups about matters related to quantum physics I pose the question “Who do you think has the greater ability to m a n i f e s t re a l i t y : a n unfortunate homeless person living in abject poverty under a bridge, or an ascended Master such as we read about in those fabled accounts from long ago?”

Wino and the Master have exactly the same ability to manifest.

There are aspects to this present situation in the world at large which give great concern to anyone who has realized even the most basic facts about what quantum physics has to tell us about how reality functions. For almost a century now the quantum physicists have been telling us that reality obligingly takes on the shape corresponding to the way in which we observe it. Needless to say this insight has been popularized in countless versions which usually neglect to mention the awkward fact that while the realities we experience every day are determined by the way in which we observe them, it is no small task to acquire the skill to manifest what it is we would like to see popping up in our lives as opposed to what normally does.

In that sense, I believe that many of the wildly popular self-improvement programs that have attracted such enormous attention

The answer invariably is “The Master” - who has everything his or her heart can desire.

But that is not so. Both the Wino and the Master have exactly the same ability to manifest. There is obviously an enormous difference between the circumstances of the two, but the difference does not hinge on their ability to manifest because they both have that ability in equal measure, and so has everyone else who ever walked this earth.

Everyone is born with the innate ability to manifest any reality out of the quantum field that corresponds to their deeply accepted beliefs and feelings. This is as much a part of us as our unique DNA, our digestive system or the circulation of our blood. You cannot exist without the ability to manifest out of the quantum field. It is not something you have to learn.

The problem lies in the fact that what the vast majority of people take for granted and deeply accept is usually the reality of lack; the conviction that things are scarce; that if I do not get my share before someone else gets it I am in danger of being left short; that life is unfair and unless I am on guard and alert I will end up being pushed around to my detriment by organizations and people who are more powerful than I am. Is it any wonder then that such negative realities figure so often in many people’s life experiences?

So in pondering the case of the Wino and the Master, the Wino stands as an archetype of someone who is convinced that the world is harsh, hostile, discriminatory and unfair.

As this is what is deeply accepted it is inevitable that more of the same will manifest in such a person’s life. The Master on the other hand started out by realizing one of the most basic realities about human life: the kind of life I have been experiencing mirrors the way I have been thinking. In “What the Bleep” I said Positive Thinking was fallacious, because usually all it meant was that I had managed to put a thin smear of positive thinking over a vast boiling cauldron of negative thinking underneath, which is obviously what is going to manifest, because I is what I have deeply accepted.

We all come into this world endowed with a certain type of character, intellectual ability, and physical attributes, but I know that through the course of my life I can alter what I have been endowed with, for better or for worse.

The person who grows to be a Master realizes this even though he or she may have suffered hardships, disappointment, discrimination or betrayal. That individual came to realize that it could all be turned around if only they could learn to control their thoughts at the deepest level.

That is a very different exercise indeed from suppression. We are masters at fooling ourselves into thinking that we have accomplished real change in our lives when all we have done is suppressed the tendencies, thoughts or beliefs which we want to be freed from and are thus no longer welcome in our lives. But these suppressed realities hide like a festering sore until the day when they erupt to the surface again in a much more virulent form than they ever had before the attempt to squash them into submission.

Any form of enemy we perceive without is visible to us only because it mirrors what is already within ourselves, but which may be so deeply buried that we are not aware of it until it is mirrored back to us by some person or thing that is external to us.

It should alert us to the fact that normally the varieties of ways in which people focus on things that matter to them cancel each other out for the large part. But now the focus of most people on the earth is much more unified than that, and it is concentrated by the apprehension of doom and gloom. When there is such a rare common focus, when it is negative, and when it is feared, then we can rest assured that a self-fulfilling prophecy is about to manifest and what was bad in itself can very easily become much worse simply because most of the world’s population has

much more of the Wino in them than the Master.

Many will say “We can change this� and that is true, but while bailouts may solve the external economic crisis, the only way to avert the power of such a widespread negative focus on disaster as we are experiencing now is to accomplish a profound revolution in our habitual ways of thinking. That is a much more difficult and long drawn out process, but it is the only way to eventually bring our habits of self -destruction to an end.

Vatican Observatory Telescope in Castel Gandolfo/CC 3.0

From South America, to the Vimanas of India, to the spaceship of a Christian drawing - Bible to the Vedas.

How Can Little Green Men be Made in the Image of God? The new Director of the Vatican Observatory announced fairly recently that it was all right to believe in extra-terrestrials, and that such a belief did not conflict with belief in God. I wasn't sure what to make of the statement since I couldn't figure out any way in which belief in aliens could ever be construed as counting against belief in God - quite the contrary. And while an interview with the Vatican Astronomer is a far cry indeed from an official Church statement, it was given some weight by the fact that it appeared in the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

But a few days later the British Ministry of Defense announced a four-year program to release previously classified documents about UFOs into the National Archives. I wondered if it was just co-incidence.

There is a time bomb ticking at the heart of all the main western religions and it has to do with the troubled subject of aliens. The vastness of even the visible universe can be realized by anybody nowadays by viewing the extraordinary images from the Hubble Telescope. And when you see that, it's very easy to realize the depth of arrogance needed to believe that the human race on this earth is the only intelligent form life in the entire universe, or that all life would have to occur in our form of it. To make matters worse we don't seem to be even living in prime real estate: we are situated in the very boondocks of what is itself a comparatively rural galaxy. Oh for the happy times of Galileo and Giordano Bruno, when the only issue that troubled the Church was whether the sun revolved around the earth or vice versa.

Come to My Mansion...

It is said there are many mansions and scientist believe there are many galaxies, then consider, that when we look into the night sky and see billions of stars, that it would only be common sense to assume that we do not exist alone.

Even on earth there are so many creatures that look entirely alien. StarWars a n d S t a r Tre k d e p i c t e d t h i s i d e a wonderfully with their cast of characters.

It's a public secret that reported sightings of UFOs and the dramatic quality of them has escalated over the past few years.

From time to time rumors circulate that authoritative statements on the subject from major world governments is anticipated, not all of those rumors coming from conspiracy theorists. If this should ever happen it would pose enormous difficulties for all the main tenets of almost every major Christian belief system.

Most of the Christian churches and denominations have managed to turn their basic message into a proclamation that Lord knows there are plenty of characters the creation as a whole is in a fallen state. From this condition it in our own lives. can be rescued only by God sending his only Son to suffer and Science states that opposing forces are die for our sins so as to appease God's anger against us. If the what keeps us in motion. Perhaps this existence of aliens were ever to be undeniably proven the rule still applies to visitors, some possess mind can only boggle at the extent of the enormous doctrinal the dark force and others the light. This updating the Churches would be faced with to accommodate is the epic story of the our planet. Then that fact within their belief system's view of reality. Belief in why not the universe? - Karen Elkins aliens may not threaten belief in God, but it would certainly pose enormous difficulties for almost every other major belief held by the western religions. The matter of course would be made immeasurably more difficult for them since the main religions maintain their central doctrinal beliefs are perennially true and irreformable, and so cannot be updated.

However, let's take look at some of the main alterations that would have to be made to accommodate that fact that aliens exist and where they fit into the scheme of things, particularly into God's plan; what beliefs might have to be jettisoned or adapted, what new ones adopted?

If God is supposed to have "made man in his own image" then in whose image would the proverbial little green men from outer space be made? And what if we were to discover that our definition of life was hopelessly narrow and left no room for life forms so different from ours that they didn't need oxygen, hydrogen, or even a carbon base? And what if the claims of some scientists made earlier this month came true that within a decade, on the basis of some current research discoveries, they anticipate being able to artificially generate life, which would have no connection with any life form known on this earth? Maybe at that stage we would have to realize that the way we have couched the relationship of God to the origin of life is hopelessly dated and outmoded.

The western religions believe that life began as the result of a specific and personal divine intervention.

Some minor groups even go so far as to maintain that this all happened during a particularly busy week for God about 6,000 years ago.

The Christian religions of the west believe that the fallen state of the race began on the fatal day a talking serpent cajoled that famous ribwoman into eating fruit from a magic tree.

It is equally believed that the only hope for the human race now is a rescue by Jesus, God's only Son incarnate.

Jesus is seen as a savior, not just a savior but a universal savior, so that all access to God by rational and intelligent forms of life, and access to their destiny, is possible only through him, and through his agents here on earth whom he has sub-delegated.

Tenochtitlan, Entrance of Hernan Cortes. Cortez and La Malinche meet Moctezuma II. , November 8, 1519

But suppose for purposes of argument that one day aliens were proven beyond doubt to exist. Where would this scheme of things leave them? Or more to the point, where would it leave Jesus, or rather the Churches version of Jesus?

All of this imaginar y scenario reminds of a situation five hundred years ago when a series of frenzied debates took place at the renowned University of Salamanca in Spain. The debates were provoked by the Conquistadores discovery of the many races of "Indians" in the New World of the Americas north and south. If every human being is supposed to have descended from our first parents, Adam and Eve, how did these people get there, since up to now at least Adam and Eve and their descendants had no means of crossing the great oceans? If they didn't descend from Adam and Eve how could they be human? And of course if they weren't human it was perfectly all right to plunder them of their vast treasures of gold and silver to swell the coffers of Europe. Fortunately the majority of the expert Spanish theologians eventually accepted that they were human. They left the historical problems of Adam's and Eve's transportation system to be solved by someone else at later date.

So how would extraterrestrials relate to the progenitors of the human race? If Adam and Eve had no boats capable of crossing the Atlantic most assuredly they had no interplanetary craft. Or how would they relate to Jesus, whom the entire Christian system wants us to accept came as a savior to rescue the human race from the worst effects of their ancestors' blunder?

In recent times many thinkers who contemplate qualities such as emotion, intelligence and memory in what we are pleased to term the sub-human forms of life on this earth, such as cats, dogs, horses, dolphins, whales, or birds, are willing to attribute to them something of spirit. It's often phrased: "They have a soul, but it's a lesser grade then the human soul." So, to use this terminology, if aliens did not descend from Adam and Eve, do they still have a soul, and is it a lesser, greater or equal grade of soul to that possessed by humans?

When the American "Indians" eventually became accepted as human, even though no one ever managed to explain how they had descended from Adam and Eve, it was in large part because Christian thinkers began to realize that the circumstances surrounding the origins of life and the origins of the race were far more complex than just what God supposedly did during that particularly busy week six thousand year s ago surrounding the origins of life and the origins of the race were far more complex than just what God supposedly did during that particularly busy week six thousand years ago.

Copyright Š 2005 David Monniaux/CC 3.0

Creator in Old Testament

Sophisticated literature that claims to have an alien origin is abundant these days. As in all other areas of life the fake is liable to outnumber the genuine

But one thing is notable above all else in some of that literature, the high quality of its spirituality. The same of course is true in relation to much of by a hundred to one.

the spiritual literature that forms the body of this earth's religious traditions.

While in general subscribing to these exalted concepts what's remarkable about us is the degree to which we ignore them in practice. Indeed some of this allegedly alien literature assesses the human race as far more barbaric and less evolved than the aliens are. We have grown so unthinkingly accustomed to measuring everything from a human-centered standpoint that the bitterest pill of all would be having to accept that at least some extraterrestrials might turn out to be superior to us.

Creator Myth of Mayan

That superiority to us of course should come as no surprise if they had a technology capable of taking them to this earth. At that point we should start to fervently hope that their spiritual development had kept pace with or surpassed their technological progress.

Where would all of this leave Jesus or indeed God, as they are envisaged in the Christian systems? Is Jesus now to be demoted from being the Universal Savior? Or did God separately also send him to those alien races in some appropriate local form, just as he came among us a human?

Maybe in pondering what would be the implications for our beliefs, if alien beings exist, we can manage to prune, refine and make those central everyday beliefs of ours more consonant with the facts. Maybe for far too long we have held them unquestioned within a system of knowledge about reality which was seriously deficient?

Maybe the truth is that Jesus did not come here to suffer and die for our sins to appease God's vengeance against us? Such an interpretation in any case doesn't do much for either Jesus or God. Indeed one might ask have we ever pondered the hugely negative impact such a picture has for how we imagine God to be, or Jesus to be? What kind of father would demand the suffering and death of his only son who was completely innocent? What kind of son would willingly comply with that sentence and at the same time never cease to speak of the profundity of God's love for us all, which is totally belied by that very picture?

The Greek tradition in Catholic theology has always maintained from the most ancient times that the work of Jesus had nothing to do with appeasement of God's anger and everything to do with the making divine of the human being. It's an insight of which most western theologians down the centuries have either been ignorant or have chosen to ignore.

What atrocities and suffering would have been avoided over the last thousand years if such a different view of Jesus and salvation had held more general sway?

Or perhaps the aliens' ancestors were more fortunate than ours and never had to ward off the unwelcome attentions of whatever their equivalent of that talking serpent would be. If that were so then they wouldn't need to be saved or redeemed.

If they did not need this, then by our theological standards they would have to be immortal or at least extremely long lived, since both the Old and the New Testaments regard death as the result of "the Fall," and not part of the original scheme of things at all.

The pictures of God and human destiny in western Christianity were eventually to become exclusively shaped within the context of sin and redemption, and now Christianity can no longer think outside that box it seems. As a result nowadays it seems almost impossible to think of Jesus, or indeed of Christianity itself, except in terms of the suffering and bloodied savior who struggled up the hill of Calvary to die for our sins. Consequently trying to envisage a race that would neither have "fallen" or be in need of redemption, actually smacks of the impious to us. Maybe part of the reason might be that we are beginning to suspect our own race might be in a similar position, and because we sense the catastrophic implications that would have for our major belief systems.

So if our picture of God and human destiny was totally shaped by the consciousness of sin and redemption how differently would an alien race, which had not "fallen," picture God? And would they worship such a God, or is worship just one other downside that comes from the context of our unfortunate history?

If God could and did create other worlds and beings to inhabit them, did he then also create another heaven for them, or do we have to share with them what we always thought was exclusively ours? Do they need their own Devil to test them, and do they have a private Purgatory, Limbo and Hell? And if they do not, why not?

But of course in this imaginative scenario which I put out here for the sake of pondering the ways in which some very deep matters have been formulated historically by the religions, the biggest question of all would have to be not whether there are other heavens, hells or saviors, or the lack of them, but why there is no mention at all, or even a hint, of any of this stuff in the Scriptures or in the doctrinal traditions?

If aliens exist that is quite a problem.

Posing imaginative scenarios like this can often help us to prune and refine our beliefs and tell us where we have drifted off the mark in the ways in which we have responded to God knows what historical circumstances down through history. In many ways it's reminiscent of the bizarre and complicated system of cycles and epicycles which the Ptolemaic astronomers over time had to introduce into their theories to reconcile their belief in an earth-centered solar system with the actual rotation of the planets. When the Copernican theories came to be known, the entire paradigm changed and the complexity of the Ptolemaic system was seen to be useless and redundant. When too many qualifications, complications and mental gymnastics have to be introduced into any system its time to recognize that the real problem may well be that the original insights got the matter wrong. If that is the case no amount of subsequent modification of the original insights will ever rectify the matter.

It's only four hundred years since Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for suggesting that God might have created other worlds on which intelligent beings would relate to God in their own way. If the reality of extraterrestrial life ever becomes impossible to deny then the Church will come to mourn bitterly the loss of that four hundred year head start which Bruno's invitation offered to it.

With all due respect to the new Vatican Astronomer the fact that belief in aliens doesn't threaten belief in God should be the least of his worries. Almost every other religious doctrine would be challenged to the very core by that fact. Furthermore, by interpreting the whole reality of God and Jesus so exclusively in terms of sin and redemption, the religions have maneuvered themselves into such a corner that effectively dealing with such a major doctrinal crisis would be almost impossible without jettisoning the majority of its system of beliefs. Maybe this semi-official interview in L'Osservatore, as well as the similar statements over several years past by the Vatican's official Exorcist, Monsignor Corrado Balducci, might well be the humble beginnings of an effort to avoid being too blindsided if the worst ever came to the worst.

Dr. Ledwith puts words on the problems most thinking people have found with the traditional proposals about God, religion, and human destiny.

A scholarly perspective 2012 Phenomenon Much Much ofof the the material material circulating circulating isis either either disdisinformation informationororhighly highlyinaccurate inaccurateand andexaggerated. exaggerated.

Dr. Miceal Ledwith In this DVD Miceal Ledwith makes a dispassionate analysis of this mountain of material, ranging from 13 prophecies frequently cited to bolster up a world catastrophe in 2012, to a candid assessment of the real challenges we face and the Order Here or at Banyen Books opportunities they present.

Only the FACTS ...

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They are circular shaped visual phenomenon showing up in hundreds of thousands of photos in a myriad of different settings, under all kinds of conditions. These mystifying “orbs� have attracted attention in both the scientific and spiritual communities all over the world.

ORBS IS THE VAIL LIFTING? Some orb enthusiasts theorize that these spherical lights have been with us for centuries, possibly the source of our belief in angels, fairies, or other paranormal intelligence. They could be the inspiration for the halos shown around the heads of spiritual teachers in classic paintings.

With the introduction of digital photography, these bright balls of energy are no longer confined to religious art and sacred mythology.

Although orbs have previously appeared up in photos taken with traditional film cameras, it has only been since point and shoot digital cameras moved into the mainstream that photographers have been able to consistently record them.

Many believe that, since digital cameras are more sensitive to the infrared section of the electromagnetic spectrum, they are able to “see” slightly beyond what is visible to the naked eye.

However, even with the aid of our new cameras, it appears that it may take something of a leap of faith to make contact.

Photographing orbs may require a shift from an “I’ll believe it when I see it” attitude towards the unknown, to an “I’ll see it when I believe” it perspective. That, along with a good camera and a working flash is all that’s necessary to become an orb photographer, says Miceal Ledwith, co-author with Klaus Heinemann, of The Orb Project. With over 300,000 orb photos in his collection, Ledwith speaks from experience.

The other 90 percent is rejected by the brain which focuses only on stuff we want to help us with everyday living such as food, bringing the children to school, paying the mortgage, etc. Orbs obviously don’t fit into that category so we don’t see them. The difference between looking at something and seeing it involves an act of consciousness by the brain. You can convey to your brain that you are interested in seeing orbs.”

“You don’t need to be a guru, a mystic, an avatar, or specially favored by God to see an orb,” he says. “All you need is a cheap digital camera and an open mind.”

It may also help to have a basic understanding of how we process what we see.

Ledwith explains that “the brain comes into play in human seeing and we don’t see all that’s out there. We only take in 10 percent of the information coming in through the lens of the eye.

DR. MICEAL LEDWITH

B o t h m e n a re e x p e ri e n c e d re s e a rc h e rs w i t h e x t e n s i ve backgrounds in both science and spirituality.

Heinemann is a physicist and former NASA researcher.

Ledwith, a theologian and former president of Maynooth College in Ireland, served on the International Theological Commission at the Vatican for 17 years. Neither Heinemann nor Ledwith accepted what they were seeing in their photos without considerable skepticism, and both took painstaking efforts to validate their results.

Although many critics have dismissed orbs as dust particles, water droplets, or even tiny insects that have wandered into the camera’s field, the evidence indicates otherwise.

“I devoted a lot of time and research to make sure I was on solid ground and I wasn’t dealing with easily explainable phenomena,” says Heinemann. However, that doesn’t mean “fake” orb photos don’t exist. Although he concedes that it certainly is possible for natural phenomenon to produce occasional orb-like effects, he is quick to point out that the overwhelming number of orb photos that now exist make this explanation highly implausible.

For the skeptics, Heinemann offers a series of indicators that can authenticate orb photos. For example, he says, if a photograph shows an orb that is positioned behind another object, it essentially rules out the possibility of water or dust on the lens of the camera. He also classifies as authentic photographs that show orbs that change size and move from one location to another in successive shots. Equally hard to dismiss are photos of extremely bright orbs that are easily visible without digital enhancement, or orb photos taken in the same location at the same time by different cameras. The multitudes of photos that depict orbs in strategic locations such as at the elbow of a healer or the mouth also defy “logical” explanation.

Some skeptics also suggest that orb photos are the result of image manipulation. However, Ledwith explains, because the camera’s EXIF (exchangeable image file format) log tracks all changes made to the original picture, it is extremely difficult to successfully fake an orb photo.

These strategies apparently work. Both Ledwith and Heinemann have captured thousands of orbs of every size and color in their massive array of photos. However, these researchers are not shooting orb photos for the sole purpose of adding more and more spectacular images to their impressive collections. They believe the orbs are much more than a curiosity; that they have both a meaning and a purpose.

Inspired by their orb experiences which, between the two of them, comprise over 12 years of concentrated study, Ledwith and Heinemann have come to their own separate conclusions about the true nature of the orbs they photograph.

Heinemann believes the orbs are the perfect bridge between the scientific and the spiritual, allowing us to see that we are “just a part in a huge continuum of consciousness and conscious beings.” He says the orbs are Spirit beings, or more correctly, Spirit emanations. “They are emanations from a Spirit being,” he explains, rather than the entirety of that being. “I liken it,” he says, “to a person using a flashlight. Standing in the dark, you as the observer only see the flashlight — you don’t see the person. That person could be moving that flashlight

You could say that person is directing the flashlight and it is emanating from that person, but there is so much more to them than just what you see.” around and even shining it in your camera.

Spirit Emanations Are digital cameras the vehicles for providing us with at least the initial answers to these intriguing questions?

It all remains to be seen, of course – both literally and figuratively.

Ledwith Concludes ...that, “Orbs are, basically, at least in the first form in which we become aware of them, what you and I would be without the physical body.”

He further suggests that, “we are living in a frequency-based universe” That means, he says, that “these are beings just outside of our present dimension of frequency.

They belong to a realm where you and I have been many times before we come back into a physical incarnation.”

Ledwith explains the implications of his conclusion through comparing human beings to icebergs — 1/8 of which are above the surface while the rest is hidden below. “The part of us which is beneath the surface exits in all of the various dimensions.”

Does this mean that orb encounters are paving the way to a greater understanding of the nature of the universe?

Dr. Ledwith’s personal collection of orbs is well over 100,000 images.He is the co-author of “The Orb Project”. His DVD “Orbs: Clues to a More Exciting Universes” draws some thought provoking conclusions about the nature of the universe and our place in it. Dr. Miceal Ledwith uncommon blend of wisdom be it from the conventional religion text to ancient wisdom traditions. He is featured in the movie “What the Bleep Do we Know?” and “Down the Rabbit Hole”. http://hamburgeruniverse.com/ Article courtesy of BellaSpark Magazine and interviewer Linda M Potter

Orbs: Clues to a More Exciting Universe

Trailer ORBS - “Clues to a More Exciting Universe� http://hamburgeruniverse.com/ trailers.html

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Dr. Miceal Ledwith

Conversations Coming January 2013

In January 2013 he will be recording live new DVDʼs to be entitled “Conversations.” They deal with how the brain forms and processes fundamental and crippling beliefs,especially religious beliefs. Why it is so difficult to change them and how.

Join the Conversation in the Hamburger Universe with....

Dr. Miceal Ledwith

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