Friend wrote: RE: the movie, the BK-related stuff is impressive! Something about Apocalypse having historically been mentioned as "Ram" or "Krishna," Destruction of this world with the Chosen Ones who remain building a New World, I think even the four Horsemen has been connected to 'Baba.' So, for anyone who's heard/read of a lot of Murlis, the trailer totally 'clicks.
Pop culture is built on what is popular and commonly related to. Is it "BK-related stuff” as you say? Or do the BK try to relate to what went before, which others, who’ve ”heard of” those things, might be impressed by when their ”little knowledge” is filled in?
There is a technique used by ”psychics’ called ‘time shifting” where they take ownership of what the client offers and then claim that they saw it first e.g.
"Is there a man with red hair? Something red? Red something, a red car perhaps? ...”
- Well, my boss had a red car
”Yes that’s it, and he carried a brief case... ”
- He used a laptop, not sure about any case.
That's probably it, a laptop. He was a mentor to you.
- Well, no, we didn’t get on.
That’s what you think but he had great hopes for you and watched over your career/
- He fired me.
That was for your own good. He did not want to to, Do you see that now?
- Look, the boss with the red car was someone I only worked with for a short time, I think we both knew it wouldn’t last I think you are reading too much into that.
It was more significant for your life direction than you realise.
- Well, maybe.
It's too easy to create an overlay of undisprovable assertions, e.g. there are those who say God, deities, mythologies are referring to extra terrestrial guardians. That is no less disprovable than saying they were mutants as per the X-Men film. Modern takes on ancient stories. In fact, a friend of mine wrote a novel retelling the Epic of Gilgamesh as exactly that, ETs and mutants, and it is quite easy to suspend disbelief when it's a well-told story.
To say the mythologies, religions and pop culture references suit explanations that each is a ”memorial” of yogis who connected with God (through Brahma) last ”Kalpa” is not disprovable -
except by its own terms in relation to
hard evidence. And there’s much hard evidence that disproves Gyan. So what does that say about the self-proclaimed authority (author) of the Gyan?
Then, if "feelgood” and "doing no harm to anyone" is the proof of value, then the "lotus eaters" who desert their posts are the most enlightened ones, surely? Many BKs are ”lotus eaters”.
No. Of all the examples above - mutants, ETs, cosmic BK yogis through repetitious kalpas, rather than saying one is the reality and the others are the reflections or misinterpretations, it's the fact that there
are common themes, cultural references and permutations to be found that is, IMO, by far the more interesting phenomenon. The flip side of that phenomenon is the way the same thing or event is interpreted differently by different people. Personal subjectivity, cultural subjectivity, the species subjectivity.
You may have heard of a little series of stories called ”Star Wars”? The writer/director George Lucas approached the great scholar Joseph Campbell to work with him and to advise him on his first scripts to bring it more into line with Campbell’s thesis of the "universal myth”. Campbell is an anthropologist and mythologist who is studied by many writers, advertising creatives and screenwriters. He (his work) is one reason these archetypes are even more blatantly prevalent these days, and they are more prevalent because it works, and they are profitable. And religions have built their empires and businesses on this fact that certain archetypes evoke powerful responses.
To put it simply, Campbell says we think ”anthropocentrically” - i.e. we see the universe from a human perspective and just as humans have certain propensities physiologically that makes us human, so too we have inbuilt propensities psychologically - we think in terms of common archetypes and the many manifestations of core archetypes are seen reflected in the cultures and stories of human societies.
So, where Hellenic philosophers and Christian thinkers mention the ”Alpha & Omega” (few terms used in Bkisms are original) and connecting to the source to understand the rest of creation - that is religion or theology.
Campbell’s studies are, on the other hand, one aspect of what I’d call
meta-religion or
meta-psychology.
Which approach liberates people and which approach binds them ? (Pun intended. Check the etymology of "religion” - Latin:
to bind, to tie - and then look at the word ”paradise” - literally para- "beyond”, -dise ”, binds, boundaries, enclosure, ties”) The irony, or cynical cosmic joke here, is that religions ask the devotees to bind themselves to the religion’ss precepts then when they die they will have paradise!
His work was immediately following, informed by and informing of, the evolution of psychology, the new paradigms of Freud and Jung, the latter in particular, and their successors, i.e. our subjective, species-based way of patterning, of making sense of the world and finding meaning, needs to be understood to be able to be utilised appropriately and for the best. Philosophical names for this way of seeing, that may make my point clear, are Epistomology, Phenomenology and Ontology (how do we know what we know? Is reality to be taken as it presents to us as humans and does our language shape our conceptions? What is the nature of ”being”).
In terms of ‘eastern philosophy’ this is all actually closer to what esoteric Buddhism understands, Dzog-Chen in particular, which parallels the new physics (there are no ”things’ only ”events”) rather than Vedanta or Islam (where Lekhraj is 'rooted' - pun intended!).
The BK Gyan and the Marvel X-Men view of the world are as equally valid and as grounded in truth as Norse mythology or Siberian Shamanism.
"Brahma promised the old world would end and Ram Raj would be established".
”Odin vowed to purge the ice giants"
Well, I don’t see any ice giants around