[MD] The Wise and the Foolish

[John Carl]

The following is a parable of DQ and SQ.  It also has somewhat to do
with the difference between messiahs and degenerates.  I will expound
upon it, after I tell it.

>From Wiki KJ Bible, Matt. 25

1Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins, which
took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.
2 And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.

3 They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them:

4 But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.

5 While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.

6 And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh;
go ye out to meet him.

7 Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps.

8 And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our
lamps are gone out.

9 But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough for
us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for
yourselves.

10 And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that were
ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.

11 Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open to us.

12 But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not.
--------

Here is an interesting dichotomy - the lamp, and the oil.  Without the
lamp (SQ) there would be nothing to hold the oil (DQ). So the lamp is
absolutely necessary.  With  no structure or encapsulation you would
be  trying to hold  oil in your cupped hands.  Sure, you could do it,
but it'd take constant attention and would involve endless focus.
I'm afraid this is what Zen advocates, in a sense.  The mindfulness is
possible, sure, but what a lot of effort!

I prefer a more practical approach.

It is  expedient to use a vessel.  A vessel contains and holds and
makes manipulation feasible.
For all intellectual evolution, the vessel is words - the codified,
the defined, the explicated.
Those are as necessary for ideas as life itself. is necessary so these
are the  SQ, then, Language and culture --  The past and all that has
been done before us, that brings us to this moment in time.


But here's the interesting thing about this particular parable.  In
this parable, The past isn't venerated.  It's an unsual parable, for a
religion because mostly all religion is conservative in nature - the
veneration of the past is absolute.  But in this parable, the SQ, the
past, the word,  is derogated.

For those who don't understand what I'm saying, the bible uses
allegories from the past, to make points in the present.  Christ was
called "son of David" and it was David who said "thy Word is a lamp
unto my feet".  And Christ was talking to the most rule-bound people
in the ancient world.  In fact, their "rule-boundedness" could be said
to be fundamental to modernity... but nvm all that...

Everybody has the doctrine, but not everybody has the spirit.

 - sure, you've got to have the doctrine, but that alone is not
enough.  It's not enough to have memorized the Koran, or the Bible, or
the MoQ.  It's not enough to have the absolute, intelligent mastery of
all the right "codes".  Sure, its necessary.  You won't get there
without some kind of launching platform.  But the launching platform,
isn't enough.  Sooner or later bucko, you gotta light that candle-fuze
and go where it takes you.  It's the nature of the dichotomy between
DQ and SQ.

Here in a written world, we focus on SQ because that's the structure
of our discourse.  But ...

The point of the past, should not be the past.   The point of SQ,
should not be SQ.  Other points to other, or the whole value of Value
is lost.

This was what Christ was pointing to with his parables, and the fact
that the whole world has lost sight of that truth, is a sad thing
indeed.  Fundamentalism!  What a joke.  What a travesty.

The fact that some on this list,  insist upon a narrow orthodoxy, is
even more sad.  More consciously chosen, therefore more karmically
binding.

Sad indeed.

Obligatory Wilshire Quotes:


" James's The Varieties of Religious Experience was based on hundreds
of actual accounts gathered by E. D. Starbuck. But James's book is
best construed as a set of free variations on religious experiences,
with the end of discovering the invariable residuum in all, or nearly
all, of them. In a remarkable passage that fleshes out Peirce,
parallels indigenous insight, leads into later American thinkers, and
anticipates key elements in Whitehead, Jaspers, Heidegger, and
Merleau-Ponty, James writes, 'Religion, whatever it is, is a man's
total reaction upon life, so why not say that any total reaction upon
life is a religion? Total reactions are different from casual
reactions, and total attitudes are different from usual or
professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the
foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the
whole residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien,
terrible or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree every one
possesses. This sense of the world's presence, appealing as it does to
our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or
careless, devout or blasphemous...'

In the very last paragraph of his book, Wilshire talks about visits
from the ghost of his daughter, lost at 23 in a car crash...

"Perhaps the embarrassment of appearing to believe in ghosts comes
back to inhibit us. Do we really believe in ectoplasmic emanations and
concretions in space and time, in ghosts that flit from place to place
and time to time!? No, that's precisely what we needn't and shouldn't
believe, I think!

For we are trying to imagine a level of reality that is not
spatiotemporal at all-as that is typically conceived-but is just
suddenly with us. It is practically impossible to imagine this, so
profoundly conditioned are we by the quotidian spatiotemporal world in
which we either adjust or die. Beyond all this, the truly ultimate
question,

Why is there any universe-or universes-at all? Nobody who thinks
claims to know, not even Stephen Hawking. Are we connected even now to
a Source that we cannot begin to imagine, so beyond our conceptions of
space and time and localities is it?

Isn't this what the world's religions have tried-however fumblingly,
variously, bludgeoningly-to introduce us to, so that we will not be
torn to pieces or numbed into oblivion by the everyday world-so
closely and relentlessly pressing around us? To which we must respond
or we die? It is easy to say that Bekah is dead and gone. She is
dead-God knows that's true-but I don't exactly know what "gone" means.
Something remains to teach me endurance, at least so far, and maybe
someday delight in just being. And surely, if love means finding one's
rhythm in another-as someone has said-then I love her, and keep on
loving her, more than anything I can imagine."

amen