Are There Multiple Paths To God?

I took the path less travelled.....Robert Frost....

 

On a frosty-flaked morning , I came upon a spoon in the road . And then another .
Ah well , I know of the spoonless who are expecting me .

 

Thank you for providing the definition of the word "path."

 

By definition a path doesn't have to be repeatedly traversed. A hurricane has a path, for instance.

 

I've ever had just one dream featuring Jesus . There was a path in it , and I didn't take it . It
was a busload of church people who did , driving up the mountain road to where he stood .
Anyway , I just started walking up a creek bed .

 

I see-----you meant the Modern Age. Yes----I certainly would agree with that.

Because of the persecution, repression, exploitation, and outright prejudice against natives and their traditional beliefs, there is a lot of negative feelings among natives to have their beliefs associated with anything non-native. Sometimes it is not warranted, but most of the time it is.

Conjuring would be a bad choice of words with any native that walks the Red Road on many levels. The first is that there beliefs are treated as silly superstitions and savage ways. Lakota cosmology, for example, is actually very sophisticated, and understands a world that is not that far off from what Quantum Physics and the Theory of Relativity explain. I think that this is partly why Albert Einstein called the Medicine Man, Wallace Black Elk, the only real teacher he ever knew. Conjuring does suggest charlatanism, and Indians have long been accused of that (The real reason behind the Wounded Knee Massacre, is that the US government was afraid of the Ghost Dance-----that's why those Indians were out there---off the reservation. The guns they had were merely for hunting. They were there for ceremony.) And then they are exploited by Charlatans, and plastic shamans who take their ceremonies and make money off them, and whatever harm that does, the Indians get blamed for too.

This is why the Dine' (Navajo) and other Southwestern tribes are so protective of their traditions from outsiders. I generally don't share with Dine' that I attend sweat lodges and so forth. Some are actually angry (behind my back) that I attend Native Ceremonies, others will politely try to nudge me to find a place in my own traditions. I don't blame them one bit.

The Lakota on the other hand are happy to have outsiders participate. They say that their traditions are for everyone----just be respectful, and don't change them or try to make them your own. If you want to run a sweat lodge, for example, they only want you to go through the training and sacrifices that any other Indian would do in order to pour at a sweat lodge. On the other hand if you ask a Lakota a question about, spirit animals, for example----something that could be misinterpreted or that they think you wouldn't understand as they do----then you are likely to get an answer that downplays it, or is misleading.

The label of conjuring also goes against their teachings. A medicine man would take offense that he conjures, because he is humble and, as he says, a common man. He is just there to do ceremony---it is the Great Spirit that does everything. When I took a white friend to a sweat lodge he embarrassed me by asking my friend, the medicine man that runs the lodge, "Are you a Medicine Man?" He answered back, "No, I'm just an everyday ordinary man. Only Tunkashila (Grandfather Spirit) knows what I am, and I don't ask him." I too, when I pray with the pipe, I do nothing but sit and pray. It is up to spirit to answer it, and what that answer will be. To conjure assumes that one has an ability to do such things, which the Natives deny.

Even a yuwipi man insists that he has no power to do the yuwipi. Which might seem hard to understand when you see all that he has to do and how some yuwipis are more powerful than others. But if you suggest that he is conjuring he will be offended and state that he has no powers and is only a common man. What he does have though is many years of sacrifice and so forth. I am not envious of any medicine man----they live a tough life, all of it for other people.

The prejudice and so forth is even found among their own people. The church holds a lot of power on the reservations, and it has aggressively spoken out against traditional spirituality. Reservations are broken into two factions---the traditionalists and the progressives. The progressives, of course, have all the money, and power, and try to follow the white ways. Even on the rez, if you have an Indian name, you are looked down upon by all those who have white names. The sad thing is that the church and the progressives have had very little to no success in stopping the epidemics of alcoholism and suicide on the rez.

I've already explained the problems with the New Age Movement. And, if you use the term New Age to me, I will understand it as referring to the New Age Movement. I think it is a transitional stage for modern man, and I think that people can and do connect to spirit through the New Age, but it is rife with exploitation and so forth. I could write New Age books and get followers and do all kinds of exploitive things, and I am sure I could become very wealthy from that. But I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did.

 

So it is not a dead horse yet? We can still beat it enthusiastically?

In that case I will respond to your post------but it will have to wait till I can get the time---probably a day or two.

But I would like to say that I do like your point about the table-----I have been working on a phenomenalist philosophy----and so I very much agree-------the table as we know it is our own perception of the phenomena of the table. Our experience of the table, and the concept of its existence or non-existence is a mental representation of the table.

 

https://youtu.be/mlCjy52h0hc?t=4m40s

Just watch that for 2 minutes ant let it sink in. 4:40 to 6:40

 

"Conjuring would be a bad choice of words with any native that walks the Red Road on many levels. The first is that there beliefs are treated as silly superstitions and savage ways."

Actually conjuring is an accurate word, the calling upon of spirits through ritual, no matter that you find some common associations with it distasteful. Another word we could use is necromancy.

I think the belief that a choice of a word is bad because it seems unflattering and the belief that modern practices lack essential vitality is vain and superstitious.

So I said the question earlier is what does the path you have chosen do for you. In this instance the effect of the chosen path is to be convinced it is superior and to take offense at any other suggestion and keep a running account of perceived historical injustice.

If a man could experience bad blood over the use of the word conjuring then the way he describes his path is not universally reputable.

 

A table is not a path , but it could be absolute firewood . From existence to ash is a path .
Non-existence does not relate . Why ever mention it ? The fire you would make of it gives
no comfort -

 

Seems like the table is an idea or arrangement we have made of matter. You can burn a table made of wood for example. To create is the function of the naturally abstract mind.

 

You could burn some wood and hear the priest scream Table! Table! Oh ,no! You
could toss a cell-phone in the camp fire and be killed for it .

 

Oh, please watch the whole thing. It's one of the best discussions of the theodicy issue i've seen. I think the rabbis had the better of the argument, but Hitchens and Harris were in top form.

 

Alright, I watched those two minutes. So, what am I supposed to have gotten from it? That children die?

 

Harris’s point concerning how God didn’t answer the prayers of the parents of the nine million kids who die each year could be said to be shortsighted. For instance, let’s say that little, five year old Jimmy falls prey to some terrible disease and bites the proverbial dust. And now you want to know why God didn’t answer his parents’ prayers for his recovery. Well, little did you know that Jimmy was going to grow up and have a nice little place in the country where he would have had some geese. Then one Sunday, one of his geese--the really mean one--gets loose. And as it so happens, a Sunday School bus carrying thirty-four children is passing by Jimmy’s farm. The bus’s air conditioner isn’t working, and, being an especially hot day, the driver has her side-window open. When the bus stops at an intersection in front of Jimmy’s place, the goose sees the bus as some kind of a threat. As the bus is gaining speed after leaving the intersection, the goose flies into the open window and goes at the driver. She inadvertently hits the gas pedal, and before you can say WTF--or more appropriately in this case, OMG--the bus smashes into a bridge abutment, bursts into flames, and kills twenty-seven of the children and terribly disfigures the rest of them.

Jimmy hears the crash and runs to the scene. Having been thrown through the windshield, the goose and driver are lying in the ditch, dead. Jimmy recognizes his goose, and, smelling a lawsuit, or worse, grabs the goose and runs farther down the road and throws it into the water-filled ditch. He finds a rock and places it on the dead goose’s body. Suddenly the movie “Deliverance” pops into his head, and he quickly finds another, way bigger rock and puts it on the dead goose under the water. Then he runs back to . . .

Anyway, just because you can’t see the bigger picture doesn’t mean God can’t. The life of Jimmy versus the lives of thirty-four Christians. And Jimmy wasn’t even a Christian! For God, it was a no-brainer; Jimmy had to go. As an aside, just after the bus tragedy that
would have been, one of Jimmy’s other geese would have gotten loose and flogged an innocent kitten to death. And that kitten would have grown up to kill the rat that carried the disease that devastated the whole community . . . including children!! But God, being all-knowing, prevented the geese and so prevented the bus incident, and the cat lived to kill the rat. So . . .

 

Yes, god cares, that's why he gives us painful, slow deaths by cancer. Because he's god, and because he cares.

 

My post was in fun, and does not reflect my beliefs; not even a little.

As far as children dying, what difference does age make. No matter who dies, there are mourners. If you believe that death is the end of consciousness, then what is the big bad thing about anyone dying? If you believe that death is not the end of consciousness, then what is the big bad thing about anyone dying?

 

One's idea of what underlies reality is an ever evolving matter. The biblical idea of "how things are" is a base construct. In time, it doesn't serve, and you move on. Or, in an expression of resentment, you attack this base construct of the past by offering up disease, war, etc. as evidence of its falseness, and then attack the experiences of others who have moved beyond resentment.