Thanks for your comment, always appreciated!
The childhood you've talked about is an experience we share, like probably so many others. I was rather indifferent as a child to my mother's requests that I pray regularly, of course I didn't and so I lied to her so as not to incur her displeasure or a sermon. My first attempts to manipulate her. LOL
Today I know that it was more a clumsy act to pass on what she knew to me, to do the right thing. The teachings themselves, no matter what culture they come from, can be a source of energy and in principle I have no problem with the "you shall" if it stays with the "you" and is not extended to the "you all shall". In worst case, I would mistake myself as a missionary to address the "all".
I think that ritual prayer is something for the group, it unfolds its power when it is performed communally and the sequence and rhythm enable a physical-spiritual experience. I see silent prayer more as contemplative and introspective, questioning, without performing recitations that can take on something mechanical when done alone. As a child, in church, I experienced the repetitive chants as hypnotic, it felt good to hear and join in several times in a row "Christ, thou Lamb of God" in that particular chant. I always found it a pity that this kind of singing took place too little and the pastor's sermon seemed rather like something out of place and I never paid attention to his words.
Any singing in a group can be perceived as spiritual, I relate to it beautifully.
I wouldn't mind if those who experience Sauron as less Sauron-like because they get close to him see him for what he is: just a person who, because other people either flatter him to benefit from his power or fear him, don't see him any more than he sees them. A fearful person depends on fearless people around him. So as long as there is no one who is fearless, the accusation remains unjustified in its absoluteness that one is being subjugated by a single entity.
A dictator is also only naked under his clothes and goes towards death just like everyone else, right?
HaHa! The blasphemy of "I am God, we are God", it can perhaps be understood in terms of fearing for the individual one is trying to keep from rising up as an oppressor or, in the opposite case, from being denounced as crazy or locked out of the community. For Christians this is probably hard to bear, since they locate God outside themselves, for - is it the Hindus? - this realisation is, as far as I know, not presumptuous.
Would you agree if I said that the obsession with power of some is supported by the same obsession with power of the many? And not, as I so often hear, by a submission to power? So I drew the comparison and used Integumentum as a concealing blanket of one's blind spot which, when exposed, reveals a paradox: one's desire for control and power, if not calmly recognised as true, is immediately suppressed, thereby wanting to gain even more power. More of the same emerges. In my view, this can be broken by consciously imposing "more of the same" on oneself, thereby humorously exposing the ridiculousness of the request. As in the example of the couple at the end.
Greetings!
The idea that we are "god" is actually not far-fetched and does not require religion to understand, but requires "spiritual practice" to experience. You don't have to be religious to realize that if every animate and inanimate thing around you is part of a vast living nervous system that spans billions of light years across spacetime, then you yourself are part of this vast intelligence. No different than a single neuron being part of a vast neural network we call the brain and its emergent property of consciousness.
I think that evolution occurs in stages. Every stage requires a certain kind of power to sustain and develop the launch pads for the next stages. Problems arise when people from one stage (say an industrial society or megalomaniac dictator) use the power of advanced stages to control and subjugate other societies (and individuals) at less advanced stages. For example, European societies were about to enter the industrial economic stage when they made contact with societies in the new world that were not as developed, some who were still living in the stone age. Then all sorts of "sinful" mayhem ensued. Thankfully, the European systems of governance had excellent self-corrective feedback loops that, with time, allowed for a more humanist approach to governance. Plus, those of us of born in the New World tend to have a feisty streak. :)
Just imagine, that this would not have happened. Where ever people traveled, they found more of the same. No differences in development, no otherness in terms of technological and otherwise existing cultures. If modern people think they cannot learn anything for their own sake/development and understanding of the world from this otherness, they are prone to ignorance and self overestimation. The otherness in itself is in my view one stone of wisdom, through the perceived differences in development and habit, the technological oriented mind can see where he lacks something and the mind, bound to tribe and locality, can enter for his part an unknown sphere. For that, the approach has to be slow, not fast, is what I think. In both realms you depend on relaxed empathic minds, would you agree?
I once heard somewhere that pushing a so-called paradigm shift can only be done in a violent way, that destruction is part of the cosmic plan to enable creation. Unlucky will be the one who does not see it this way, when his own physical-spiritual existence breaks under this power.
Personally, I do not attach too much importance to either destruction or creation through such a change, i.e. I do not want to identify with either of them.
Tension and conflict can be a powerful creative force, up to a certain point, beyond which the losses become greater than the gains. Methinks...
Isn't it? Yes, like you, I see great potential in conflict. Where conflict as such is ignored, one can expect losses.