Keith Cleversley and His Pea Brain

Yes, that’s me in the photo, feverishly paddling my chicken arms as I try to catch the wave looming directly behind me.  I’ve been enamored with the romantic vision of a subculture that’s so passionate and often obsessive about their chosen pastime for many years, but finally getting my skinny frame on a surfboard made the world around me make sense in a way it never has before.  At least not quite in this way.

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Was Jesus married?

Highly doubtful.

Did the Jesus of the Bible revolutionize the role of women?

Without question.

The question to me isn’t whether or not Jesus was married, it’s why the Church has completely manufactured a completely different reality in relation to the practically blasphemous teachings that can be found in the Bible in relation to women.  If I were a woman, I feel like I’d be angry enough to confront anyone with an ear in the Church, especially those who still believe that women are second-class citizens in the eyes of the God of the Bible.  In fact, feeding the fire of the debate in relation to whether or not Jesus had a wife only takes the attention away from the truth about how Jesus truly seems to have revolutionized the role of women in both society and the Church. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bottom Line

The Catholic Church has done its best to eradicate any connection to its own mysticism-based roots for reasons still not entirely agreed-upon.  Unfortunately for Catholic Church, evidence in direct contradiction to the repressive dogma they’ve peddled for centuries is mounting, and radical re-visitations of existing and sometimes exalted works are coming to light.  For me, one of the most personally compelling examples is The Great Canterbury Psalter (also called the Anglo-Catalan Psalter), which is a beacon for the Catholic Church. Read the rest of this entry »

“What is now needed is not yet more data (though more data are always welcomed), but rather a radical re-thinking of what we already know.  That is not to say that each and every question can now be answered; we do not have to explain everything in order to explain something.” – David Lewis-Williams, “The Mind of the Cave”

Travel with me to a Paleolithic cave such as Chauvet, Altamira, or a rock shelter in Round Valley, California.  Then, imagine you’re an ancient shaman on a vision quest in an altered state of consciousness.  You’re in winding passages that trail off into the darkness, some too small to explore, you find precipices that seem to reach deep into another world, and as the trance state starts to take a firmer hold, rock walls become animated as visions of animal and geometric forms project themselves onto solid, impassable rock, and shadows dance from flickering firelight.

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Introduction

Sophisticated transformational art suddenly and inexplicably appeared in caves of south-west Europe and Southern Africa somewhere between 50,000 – 25,000 years ago, marking a dramatic shift in human consciousness.  Some of the famous European caves include Chauvet, Lascaux, Pech Merle, and Altamira, and in South Africa, a cave called Game Pass Shelter is just one of over 500,000 such sites.  Most who are familiar with the paintings in these caves know that they contain typical drawings of Prehistoric mammals.  But, a critical detail that’s largely unmentioned is this: many otherworldly beings also appear, as do geometrical patterns that match perfectly with what is often reported in visionary states under the influence of entheogens.

And this only the beginning.

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“Shamanism is an ancient, coherent, and broadly diffused mental paradigm.  The most important premise is that the spiritual force that every human has personally experienced is nothing more than an extension of our humanity; it’s of the world, the cosmos, and everything within it.  Birth and death are simply tangible examples of the capacity of spirit to move through material forms.” – Quote from Maya Cosmos

What is Shamanism?

To me, it’s clear that shamanism not only is as inherent within our human coding as is the universal desire to seek altered states of consciousness, but that it’s also a most powerful pre-religion system that allows each one of us to reach beyond these limited frames to interact with the greater whole as perhaps was originally intended.  Due to the overwhelmingly large and growing evidence, it’s becoming clear that to deny shamanism is to deny much of our own humanity and history.  This then only begs the question as to why true importance of shamanic ritual as well as the tools used to help gain access to altered states of consciousness is typically glossed over or outright ignored when it comes to religious, archaeological or scientific discussions on the topic.

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Rarely have I felt as though I’m banging my head against a wall more than when engaging in discussion with Christians in relation to Bible as a source of morality.  I’ve constructed detailed arguments (See “The True Christian Job Description” for more), I’ve read the Bible in several translated versions so I’m as clear as I can be, I’ve used both analogy and statistics to make things more obvious, I’ve put examples into a personal context, I’ve framed them in every rational way imaginable, but no matter how factual my arguments have been, I get the same result: Flat out denial or anger of the facts I present, and on the rare occasion; threats.

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“Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.” – Jesus, “Prince of Peace” (Matthew 10:34)

Something odd that I find myself doing more often than I ever imagined is alerting Christians, whether fundamentalist, moderate, true, or modern, of what their universal “job description” as described in the Bible.
 
The most common argument is that once Jesus came, he annulled the Old Law (Old Testament, Old Covenant), and ushered in the New Law (New Testament, New Covenant).  This belief is directly opposed to what Jesus taught (Matthew 5:17-19, Matthew 23:1-3).  Also, many modern Christians argue that the Old Testament only applies to Judaism and Jews, and the New Testament is for Christians.  This again, is a false claim as borne out in the words of the Bible in more than one example, including (2 Tim. 3:16-17), where followers are reminded that ALL scripture is inspired by the God of the Bible, even by Jesus Himself who swore to uphold the law. Read the rest of this entry »

• “Whenever we read the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind. And, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.” – Thomas Paine

The overwhelming facts have convinced me beyond any shadow of a doubt that the timeline in the Bible, for both the amount of time it took to create the universe as well as the time humans have existed on the planet is simply not true.  After exhaustive and continued research, which included Darwin’s “Origin of Species”, the Bible, and countless books arguing for or against evolution, intelligent design, creationism, god, and everything in-between, I don’t doubt that evolution happened. Read the rest of this entry »

Shaman were held in extremely high esteem by the Ancient Mayans and for good reason; not only were they healers who utilized the vast storehouse of plant life that circled them in the lush rainforests they called home, but they were the ones who communicated with the Divine in order to get answers to everything from the source of illnesses to discovering the will of the gods.  As a matter of fact, all of humanity (at least according to the Popol Vah) was created in a divinatory ritual conducted by the gods.  And divinatory rituals were, at least in early Mayan culture, performed exclusively by Shamans.

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