The Motherhood story -- a neopagan / western unorthodox witnessing thread

Great Debates
1

In the beginning of all events…

That Which Is said “I am that which is”. And was all, and saw all, and had always been and always was, and was one.

And yet, being one, determined to be more. And yet, being all, how to be more?

“I shall play”, said That Which Is, "and become other, many others, each in turn and all at the same time, and I shall have companionship, and I shall be a companion, and in playing I shall be each of these other things which are not the same as each other.

“I shall be many, and varied. I shall play and in play I shall sever, split apart from myself, and then come together. I shall divide and separate, and then mix and intersperse, and I shall be many and I shall be all, and I shall see different and from apart and I shall see all, and all shall play together.”

And That Which Is did thus conceive of other, and did prepare to split; And for this we say of That Which Is that She who is That Which Is set forth to be the Mother of all.

And She did conceive of other, saying, “She shall be of me, and a part of me, yet apart from me. I shall be hers, and she, mine, and we shall play together. I want her to climb and run and taste and shout and hear and touch and see. And I shall be there for her, and care for her, and she shall know that she is loved and is worthy of love, and is part of all, and as is her birthright she shall know herself to be all that is and that has been, one, That Which Is; and we shall be together”

And in this, for the first and last and only time, That Which Is, who was all and saw all and had always been and always was, in determining to be more, came to learn of limitation, and knew pain, and frustration, and failure, and the awful hurt of sacrifice, for She, to be Mother of all, was unable to do all as she wished and instead had to pay a horrible cost.

And in this, also, came the sense of Adversary, the voice of adversity, and this adversary was Circumstance, that and nothing else. And the experience of this voice was met with anger and pain.

For it is one thing to say, as She had said, “I shall divide and split apart”, and yet not so easily accomplished when one is all, and all one. As That Which Is made Her preparations to take leave of herself, she gently detached and let go and prepared to give birth to That Which She Was Not, and the Adversary, the voice of Circumstance, said to Her, “Then she is dead, and not in being, for there is no That Which Is Not That Which Is”.

And in anger and frustration, She wailed, and drew back to herself the other that she conceived of, and said “She is not dead and is still of me and part of me, and I of her, and we are one yet not the same”. And the Adversary spoke to her again and said, “Then she is not split, and not in being, for you have drawn her back into yourself and you are one and the same and no other”.

And in love and fury, She screamed, and cried and lifted again apart from herself the other that she conceived of, and, while holding her apart thus, poured herself, her all, into the other, and felt the pain of draining as she bled out from herself, and said, “Then, behold, let it be known that this is what a Mother will do, if she must, I will die that she might live, and in that moment, in that act, she will know she was loved even if I may never know her; and in so knowing she will know what it means to be one and other”. And still the Adversary said, “No, for still she is not split, nor you from her, for you have only shifted That Which Is, and you are still one, and all, and there is once again no other”.

And so in bitter sorrow She lifted yet again apart from herself the other that she conceived of, and, weeping, let go, and was apart. And She said to the other, who could not listen, “Go, then…you will not know where you came from, or how you came to be. In order that you might be, I cannot hold you. You may never know yourself to be loved. That you may live you you must start off alone, not knowing who you are. You, who are so precious to me that I would give my all for you, must begin in separation, not knowing of me. And what you know most and first shall be what it means to be apart. I had to choose between not having you or not being there with you, and only if you should come looking for me without knowing who I am, or even that I am, will you find me to look upon my face”.

And so it was begun.

2

Is there a point to this? Other than people can make up religions?

3

We already know people can make up religions.

The question of whether any of them get here by some other route or process is a bit more up in the air, I suppose.

Parabolic stories are told in order to convey understandings of things, much as art and music is created. I already warned you in the subject line that this was a witnessing thread.

4

I, too, am a bit confused as to what the proper response to this would be.

I guess a suitable GD answer would be: From where do you draw this particular worldview? What makes you think it has any more validity than the other 40 million other permutations of the divine we have to contend with?

Does your religion/philosophy actually advance any human understanding? By that, I mean does it answer any questions that actually impact one’s day to day life?

5

Is there perhaps another translation? Something akin to that new easy to understand bible that explained things in plain English. Maybe I’m just a little slow but all that flowery text just doesn’t make much sense to me.

Marc

6

Drawn from my own experiences. Which, depending on your take on things, either includes experiences of the spiritual or delusions of the schizophrenic. Or, I suppose, some combo of the two.

It advances my own human understanding which has an impact on my day to day life, yes. Not in the sense of telling me what sox to put on, but making sense of the “life and how to live it and who I am” questions, yeah, definitely.

7

AH3, you know I share your religious beliefs, bro. I like seeing you witnessing for this. I’m sorry but I have to agree with Marc that the dense literary style got in the way of my appreciating it. I still support you for saying it because it needs to be said.

It reminded me of the creation myth that Starhawk wrote in Chapter 2 of The Spiral Dance. Starhawk’s myth was more readable. Would there be any copyright issues if I quoted it here? It’s only a few short paragraphs.

AH3, I will defend the validity of your own personal experience of the Goddess and your expression of it. If you say it advances your human understanding and helps your day to day life, I believe you, bro. You are one of the topmost intelligent, compassionate, and articulate Dopers we’ve ever been blessed with here. I consider you in the same league as tomndebb, Diogenes, Polycarp, and Eve, to name a few of my favorites, and that’s saying a lot. Your posts have greatly helped my understanding of the issues that matter to me the most. Please don’t take it amiss if I say your myth would be improved by rewriting. I just wish I could write posts half as good as yours consistently are. May I suggest you lose the imitation Biblical style? Even the Bible translations these days don’t write like that any more. I want to see you succeed in getting your valuable spiritual message across.

8

And how do you know all this? Through revelation or the suggestion of others?
And how is it that some of us don’t need this to live full lives and treat others with respect?

9

(Excerpt from the game script of The Legend of Mana, copyright Squeenix.)

(Now, I don’t agree with the actual philosophy put forth in the plot itself, but that’s one of the most powerful text crawls I’ve read in a while, video game or not.)

10

Johanna:

It certainly is! (Wow…excuse me, preen break…).

OK, I’ll work up more of an “everyday colloquial English” version.

& thanks :slight_smile:

11

Revelation.

I know some people who find it profoundly moving to go far far away from the light-pollution of the citified areas, out into the electricity-free wilderness, just for the opportunity to stare for hours at the night sky full of stars.

I know others who manage to do just fine without that experience.
I am not so self-important that I think that my particular understandings, even my personal spiritual take on how to apprehend some complicated concepts about what it means to be, are vital for anyone to have a life of happiness and fulfillment.

In fact, I take it for granted that anything I perceive that is worth putting into words has been perceived and intuited before.

It can be divine and sacred nevertheless.

12

That would include me.

13

Then why witness?

Also, is your present path that in which you were raised? Since you answered another poster that you had a ‘revelation,’ I assume not. However, what was your previous creed, and how opposed are you to that now?

In my experience, paganism is often a backlash toward more conventional (or conservative) philosophies. Quite a few people divorced from Christianity go through this phase before settling into a ‘who cares? none of it changes my basic behavior’ mode of thought.

Just my thoughts on it, as a former Catholic, dabbler in several other creeds, and who has now settled into a very comfortable sort of atheism.

14

People like to share things that affected them profoundly. Certainly at least in part that includes the desire/expectation that it’s going to elicit a similar reaction from those they share with. It’s human nature :slight_smile:

I was raised Christian/Protestant/Methodist, in congregations (and family) where the “supernatural” parts of religion were sort of de-emphasized and charitable/social works brought to the foreground, along with homilies and discussions about ethics in everyday life. Certainly I was exposed to the idea of God, and of Jesus as the divine Son of God; lots of warm fuzzy Christmassy stuff about the virgin birth and three wise men and etc but not without overtones of “we don’t take this stuff too literally”, and only seasonal attention to the Easter resurrection.

Of three congregations, two were more interested in impressive choral productions of good Easter music than the theological-spiritual “risen Christ” stuff; at the third, our high school youth group put on a pageant in which a couple fishermen grouse “What the %#$@ are we gonna do with all these rotten stinking fish?” (they’re at Sea of Galilee immediately post-loaves-&-fishes miracle), make nudge-wink references to “that unbelievable fatherhood story”, and turn a vacant-eyed true-believing camp follower around to quit chasing miracles and instead simply “live! live, knowing the promise has been kept”.

I think I was in Junior High before I first encountered the “To be saved you must accept the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal Savior” / “The whole purpose of Jesus was to come down and get hisself killt, God needed a sheep to sacrifice before original sin could be forgiven” stuff, and it wasn’t from any church I attended.

Certainly I think being exposed to the raw idea of religion, as well as individual bits and pieces of existing religious thought, had a large effect on me and how I thought about things; but I don’t think I’m the typical “reactionist” neopagan who has swapped out a fundamentalist and/or orthodoctrinaire mainstream religion for an alternative substitute. I’m more at home in a Unitarian-Universalist intellectual discussion group (or the SDMB) than either a rigorously earnest Wiccan coven (“no, we shouldn’t use a pine wand, it must be willow or ash, and we should protest the cardboard witches at Sears as offensive, and are you coming to the Samhain midnight enchantment?”) or an occultophile “building a mystery” convention (“pyramid power, horoscopes, crystals, copper bracelets, homeopathy, regression to previous incarnations, om, auras, charms, amulets…”), if you know what I mean.

15

I did this one more like telling the story to a young child. Which, I suppose, is appropriate, since any attempt to put these things into words is always going to be a ‘babytalk’ oversimplification chock-full of metaphors and symbolic visualizations and so on. Not to mention the overtones per the subject matter :slight_smile:

I don’t like it as well but it may be more accessible. Or it may make it more obvious that I’m a bit of a nut with a head full of strange notions. Here goes…

Once upon a time, God was alone in the world. God was “That Which Is”, because there was nothing else. There wasn’t even a separate “world” for God to be in. Just God. So God was everything.
But God wanted to be more than everything. Which is not a simple task, if you see what I mean, even if you happen to be God.

God said, “I want to play. I think I’ll become lots of different things and people and animals and stars and fishes and, well, just all sort of stuff, and that way I’ll have playmates and companions. I’ll be all of that at the same time. I’ll divide myself up, and the parts will be different, even though each of them will still be me, really. And because they are me, really, they will each be “That Which Is”, the whole works, way down deep. It will be fun to have, or be, all those interesting different things and creatures!”
So when God said this, God conceived of “other”. Before this, since God was everything, there had never been anything or anyone you could call “other”, so the idea had never been thought before. The whole idea of “other” was new.

Now, as you may know, conceive has two meanings. We say that you conceive of something when you first have a picture in your mind of it, when you first think of it. But we also say conceive when a woman becomes pregnant and is going to give birth to a child. Now, one thing about being God is that there isn’t the same kind of gap between thinking of something, where you have a picture in your mind of that thing, and actually making that thing. That’s just kind of part of being God, that when you conceive of something you’ve actually made it happen.

Except this time, when things got a little complicated for God!

Now, I just said that this new idea that God conceived of was the idea of splitting into parts so that there would be “other”, as well as companionship and the fun of being all these different things and creatures and all that. So under what circumstances does a person split apart and become more than just themselves? That’s right, when a woman becomes pregnant and gives birth to a child! So when God conceived of the notion of doing this, it was also like God conceived in the other sense and became pregnant with the idea of splitting and becoming lots of different things.

Because of the way that fits together so nicely, we often like to say that God, who is That Which Is, is a She, the Mother of us all.

So I want to tell you about how that happened. As I said, it got complicated for God. Another part of what it means to be God is that you don’t tend to run up against limitations. And so you would not know anything about frustration and anger and pain and not being able to always have your own way. But in this one thing, God actually experienced those kinds of things because God was only able to do this thing, this splitting, after trying several different ways that didn’t work, and the way that finally did work meant making a huge and painful sacrifice. So here’s how it happened.

How do you divide and split apart when who you are is, by definition, everything that is?

God tried it the first time, trying to split up in such a way that there would be a new part that was not God but something else. But that didn’t work — the situation itself kind of spoke back to her and reminded her that since God is That Which Is, there’s no such thing as That Which Is Not That Which Is! So God could not split into parts where one part was still God and one part wasn’t.

That sounded like the threat of a stillbirth, as if God in making that first attempt were going to give birth to a baby that was not alive, and of course that made God very sad and angry, so instead of letting the attempted split continue, she pulled that part back to herself and said that the other part was not going to be something that wasn’t God after all. “She is still part of me”. This time the situation itself objected, “But in that case she isn’t really split from you, there’s just you, That Which Is, and there is no other”

So God became angry, and also miserably sad because she wanted to do this and it wasn’t happening! And she said she would sacrifice her own life, die in order that the split-off child she was trying to create would live while still being a part of That Which Is, without just still only being her. God figured that she would empty herself out until she became nothingness and died, and that while this was happening the split-off other would have that experience, the experience of being plural, so at least otherness would come into the world finally, even if God had to die for it to happen. And for the third time the situation itself said that it wouldn’t work, because it would be like God just moved from one place to another. When it was over there would still just be one, that one would still be That Which Is, and would still be everything, and would still be God, and there would still not be any other.

So, you see, even when God tried to do this through making what you could call the supreme sacrifice, it would not go through!

So God had to make an even sadder, even worse sacrifice. She began to split, and the other part was not something that was not God, but in order to make the split an actual split so that it wouldn’t again be true that they were still really one and the same, she let go and separated completely from the other part. It was as if, in order to be able to give birth, she had to give up her newborn child and never hold it, never take care of it, and instead just push it out alone into the world to fend for itself. It meant the newborn child might never know that she loved it, and also would not grow up knowing that who it was, its true identity way down deep, was That Which Is, the entirety of everything, God. And it meant the newborn child’s first experience would be the experience of being alone and apart.

God had to hope that the child will look so deeply within herself that she will be led to come looking for God without even knowing she exists.
That’s us, of course, and everyone and everything else, all the many different creatures and things in the universe, parts of God that were split off like children given up for blind adoption because that’s the only way it was possible to both be God and to have other and difference and variety in the world.

16

And see the point of my question re revelation or suggestion of others is this.
That above account of the beginning of everything is quite detailed so by revelation you mean that “that which is” told you?

17

Yes.*

Not verbatim, mind you…e.g.,

ding! Oh AHunter3…
huh? what wazzat?
ding! I am That Which Is.
…right!
ding! I want you to take a letter!
C’mon, who is this really!?

:wink:

But yeah. Circa 1991 or 1992. Like having a brainstorm for the plot of a movie, complete with condensed snippets & notions of conversations, vivid emotional content, etc.

  • As with all such claims: I might be wrong. Anyone can claim revelation and state a divine source for it. Any of us who do so might, for any given one such occurrence, have been visited by pharmaceutical interactions, stimulations to the overactive imagination, or, as Dickens might say, a conflict with the evening’s gravy. One should always be somewhat skeptical about such things. I try to remain at least marginally skeptical myself.
18

Most parts of this are very similar to my own faith. It may indeed be the case that we are two kindred spirits who merely speak different languages. May our God bestow upon you all Her blessings.

19

A few questions:

Did God do this because she was bored? (Wanted to play.)

Is the universe now composed of that which is God, and that which is not God?

Is the world better off with “other and difference and variety” than it was before?

20

Yes

No, it remains true that nothing exists which is not God. The creation of other was accomplished without violating that rule.

There was no “world” before, only God. Yes, better this way.