>>Thanks for bringing to my attention the idea of a burial site in regard to graven images. Now I can't get the notion out of my mind that Commandment meant that one shouldn't worship dead images. Is there such a simple idea behind "worship". What's the real thinking behind the saying, "Thou shalt not worship graven images."? Is the writer suggesting "worship" in the same way as meditation. In meditation, the whole process appears to be about not allowing past thoughts to influence the present.<<
Writing the above paragraph to Isabella on the Thomas list made me wonder the original purpose of The Ten Commandments. After all, the story of Moses ascending the mountain to receive them was just another account of a "peak experience". Did he go up into the mountain to meditate? Lots of people claim to have peak experiences during their practice of meditation. Are the Ten Commandments instructions for living a life of no blame in order to enhance one's meditation practice or to "worship" some graven image?
Which begs the question: Is the term "worship" intended to be used in the same vein as the Oriental religions use the term "meditate"? I don't see how anybody who establishes a long-running practice of meditating could possibly worship anybody's version of a historical persona as their "lord and savior". Only Christianity considers the spirit of God born of woman.
"The persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is." ~ Carl Jung
Thinking or ideating oneself to be a persona exists as the prime example of the species-wide flaw Sartre writes about in his masterwork, Being And Nothingness. It's impossible to literally perceive the persona as not "being" oneself, because nothingness gets in the way. I recommend reading Sartre if you wanna understand that. Good luck with that. It took me months and months. Just getting through that 800 page tome was accomplishment enough for me.
I burned a pile of brush located on my lawn in order to see the pond just down the hill from my house a couple of day's ago. I intended to move it out into the edge of the woods to burn to keep from burning a spot in the centipede grass. I got all scratched up pile the underbrush on my lawn, and my body is hurting from the arthritis, so after a couple of months of it laying there with the lawn getting greener by the day, I decided to burn it where it lay.
After I burned the pile, and it burnt hot because it had completely dried out during the interim of when I cut it and then lit it up, there was a charred spot right in the center of a 10 foot (9.144 M) circle, but around the edges it only charred the grass and it was left standing at the height it grew up under the pile.
I had mowed around the brush pile previous to burning it, so I had a sort of bull's eye spot of maybe three concentric circles in my lawn. There is taller around the outside where the heat only killed the spring growth, then an inner circle where the grass had burned down to the ground but there are hardly any ashes, and then the center of the pile where there are ashes.
I figured to use my brother's riding lawn mower to make it at least smooth across the area of the lawn where I had burned. I expect the outside part where only the exposed grass got burned back to grow back during the summer, but the center part was probably killed down to the root, and it will have to fill in from the outside. It doesn't matter. I live a long way off the paved road. Nobody knows.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
