Adelphiasophism
Wise Women's Wisdom
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Wednesday, November 24, 1999
Self-Preservation
It is hard to forever forgive those who spitefully continue to do wrong to you, but though you find it impossible to forgive any more, do not bear malice or compound the wrong by doing wrong.
No one can foresee what the future holds, despite the impression that some experts like to give to the contrary, and, as long as our knowledge is limited, we must follow our cautionary instincts to keep Nature as it is.
The scientist is as much a spectator as an actor in the great drama of existence.Neils Bohr.
When scientists begin to modify the genetic code of bacteria, plants and animals, we have to be on guard because living creatures have a strange property—they multiply—and, unless the most stringent care is taken, any change could spread into general populations with quite unpredictable consequences.
When exhaustive tests have been done, a degree of assurance might be possible, but we can rarely be certain and especially when the systems involved are so complicated. We must respect our instinct for self-preservation and that is an instinct for a natural state.
Common sense alone is enoughto tell us that the destruction of a town by a pound of metal is an evident impossibility.Raymond Poincaré, French leader.
Tyrant Companies
Would you be a pilgrim on the road of love? Then first make yourself humble as dust and ashes.Ansari of Herat.
Adelphiasophists do not consciously choose wealth or poverty as a way to live, they choose minimalism—what is needed and nothing more—because excess consumption destroys the Goddess. We do not consciously choose socialism rather than capitalism but we recognize that multinational corporations are beyond the law and therefore out of control—they are tyrants.
Small is beautiful. But large is predatory, and the whole world is its prey!
The US used to have a stringent policy of regulating monopolies and cartels but, if they still do, it seems singularly ineffective. Yet, the US is in a prime postion to control the size of these predatory tyrant companies. No company should be bigger than a prescribed size and no company should have more than a prescribed market share. Both should be small enough to make sure that there are always several companies in genuine competition, and, if the prescriptions are broken then the companies should be compulsorily split up and sold off to new owners.
In practice, this action by government would rarely be needed if the rules were clear and the action automatic, because the companies would prefer to make their own adjustments rather than being compelled by government appointed receivers. If the costs also came automatically from the assets of the tyrant companies, we could be sure none would risk illegality.
Wise or Foolish?
An anthropologist had been told that the poor Haitian women would speak to a tree to send a message to their husbands in the fields. While in a village, he sees a poor housewife come from her hut to the edge of the village and speak to a tree. “Tell me,” said the scientist, “Why do you speak to the tree?” “Alas, it is because I am poor,” said the woman. “If I were rich I would use a telephone.”Jean Cocteau.
One Life on the Reef
You are part of the Goddess, a polyp in her endless reef. You might be the polyp that leads to a whole new bank of the reef, or a spore that will unltimately be a brand new reef elsewhere. You might be vitally important to future evolution. Why then can you not see your kinunity within the Goddess? Why do you not see how you have evolved within her kinunity? Why do you not test the potential the Goddess has put within you? Would you rather neglect that potential and instead live a life of personal selfishness to thwart the Goddess?
You have the Goddess within you and, if you ignore her, you might stop birds from singing, fish from swimming and babies from crying, just as if you had polluted them by poisoning the air, the oceans and the human race. You are one of the Goddess’s links between the past and the future. You might be a genetic link or a cultural link but you are a real link not a myth like Adam and Eve or Noah.
You have a sacred spirit within you and it might be the future of humanity, even if indirectly. Do you want to reject this and waste your life in the febrile pursuit of pleasure, the artificial stimulation of the brain or the besotting of it or, worst of all, joining the wreckers of the world in the abolition of the future? You have one life on this reef, and what you do with it is your own choice.
If it hasn’t happened, it will happen! So take care.J B S Haldane.
Everlasting Life
When I am, death is not, and when death is, I am not.Epicurus.
Disregard those who offer everlasting life, for life that is static and unchanging is not life, and what is heaven but a hypothetical static and unchanging place? Life and death are natural and necessarily partners, so that there can be no life without death, just as there can be no death without life. For thinking conscious animals like humans, the key to life is finding out what you have to “do” in it. Length of life is not what matters but quality of life. If you find your purpose in life and pursue it to the full, you will find that death can be faced gladly.
Of all the arts, the living of life is the greatest.Kathleen Raine.
Death is being a mother’s milk.Magi Michael
Nothing burns in Hell but Christians
Christians, of course, will be deeply offended by this little truth. Yet how can it be otherwise? Christians cling on to their absurd belief in hell despite the best efforts even of their theological leaders to wean them off it. Nowadays hell is simply not resting in the bosom of God, or Jesus, if you prefer it. Heaven is, of course, resting in the bosom of Jesus, er… or God. That is what modern theologians from the Pope down tell us in contradiction to what they formerly taught and what most Christians refuse to let go of—hell is a place of boiling sulphur and everlasting torture. Well, Christians prefer it that way, so let them believe it. Lovers of the Goddess do not. So, burn in hell, wicked Christians, we shall just submit ourselves to the Goddess’s system of recycling. We become her kinunity, being eternally reborn, in fact!
The Goddess is eternal life! No individual “self” can be immortal. It is the whole of life that is immortal—within the duration of the universe. All life is coextensive as genetic replication and evolution have shown. This is the kinunity of the Goddess. All of life is united within her. Out of the phenomenon of time, we seem to bud from her in life and then merge again with her physically and psychically at death. If time is thought of as another dimension, it immediately is clear that we are all coextensive with each other and all other live in the cosmos, especially as it seems likely that life came to this corner of the universe from space. So while we are experiencing our small allocation of time in which to live, we can take comfort in moments of vulnerability and stress that we have a wider “self” which can help to strengthen us. Experiencing this gives us a psychological boost in a thoroughly natural way. This is how the Goddess answers our prayers—through our psychological awareness that we are supported by the full extent of the reef of life in the Goddess.
When things seem dark and lonely, remember that the Goddess and her kinunity are with you. Her sun still shines. Her birds still sing. You too have a purpose.
No one is good who does not honour the Goddess. Veneration of the Goddess fosters respect for the sacredness of all living things, of ecology, of harmony with Nature, of symbiosis. Those who deny this sacredness and those whose philosophies deny it are the wicked.
Wise Women’s Wisdom
The Goddess seeks the selfless. To find the Goddess you must first lose your Self, then she will find you.
You accuse us of worshipping the dark god of intuition and the pale god of intellect but we worship no gods, and intuition and intellect are gifts of the Goddess not to be worshipped but used wisely to seek her truths. It is you who worship a dark god and a light god. The dark god is so dark he cannot be seen except in your imaginations and then he appears as a light god, a fanciful sun shining invisible and undetectable goodness. The Goddess does not shine goodness, she has already put it inside you together with badness. The winds of fate might incline you towards one or the other but the choice is yours. No Sun of Righteousness will take away your need to choose.
Mankind is like a man swimming peacefully in the gentle current of a tranquil river. He does not realise he is approaching a fearsome waterfall until he feels the pull of the current strengthening and the roar of the deluge. Then he had better be able to swim hard, with strong will and determination, else it is already too late.
So, you aspire to the Higher Life. You judge yourself of the Highest, but pride is not of the Highest. To achieve the Higher Life you must be humble, for the Highest is the Lowest, but the Lesser is the Greater.
The poor and the simple hold hands with the Goddess knowing nothing. But you must first sup of her fount of science that you might take her hand knowing what is True.
If you would have knowledge, do not believe the Goddess is there and you here. You are within the Goddess and she within you. You must know what is without and what is within, and you cannot know what it without without knowing what is within, nor can you know what is within without knowing what is without.
You seek Truth and complain it is hard to find. Yet you ignore the brilliant light which illuminates it and instead look in dark corners because they are mysterious. Only falsehood hides in the dark. Truth is plain to see. Just seek it in Nature’s light.
What is untouched by time and flesh. Only what itself cannot touch time and flesh. Yet you call it Spirit. Spirit neither knows, nor can be known. Spirit does not live in the dead. It never lived.
Hitherto natural life has been a life of various selfish appetites, hungers and wants pursued unconsciously and therefore only to satisfaction. Only with the evolution of consciousness are we faced with greed. Greed cannot be satisfied and will eventually exhaust the world and lead to our extinction. Consciousness allows us to realise this and make a moral choice—shall we determine to be content with less and leave our children with a future of their own, or shall we take everything for ourselves?
All is in all, all is united and all is Nature—the Goddess.Saviour Shirlie
When the Goddess has found you, you will look equally upon all creatures and see her in them all.Saviour Shirlie
You serve your God by hymn singing, tear shedding and natural tenderness. We serve our Goddess by humility, fairness and self-sacrifice. And our tenderness is Natural.
Why doest thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.Meister Eckhardt
Religious and spiritual speculation will give you a voluptuous image of Truth but the pure aesthetic of her elegance can only be had by science.
Sell your certainty and buy bewilderment. Certainty is merely opinion. Bewilderment is the seed of Wisdom.Jalal-uddin Rumi
Reason is the fall of leaves in an autumn gale. Intuition is the sound of the wind in the trees. The Goddess is the power of the air.
Hitherto in living creatures, ignorance has been natural. In man, it is supernatural.
Do not decry amulets, charms and spells. Calling upon Jesus is no more than invoking a spell. They are aids to intuition, to focusing your own psychological powers and to concentrating your attention on to Nature and her kinunity. As a psychological aid they have no power of their own. They simply reflect the power you have yourself. Never forget this.
Be still beneath the spruce and fir.
When no wind blows, be still!
Somewhere you’ll hear the Goddess stir.
Nature’s voice will silent tell.
By listening carefully to the voice of Nature, hearing what she says and appreciating what she means, we shall be able to work with the Goddess in healing the earth instead of continuing to scar her.
There is a growing awareness that we are doomed as a species and as a planet unless we have a radical change of consciousness. The Goddess is the symbol and the metaphor for this transformation.Elinor Gadin
An Adelphiasophist shrine is like the Jinja of the Shintoists of Japan. It is a natural space that is cultivated to illustrate the peace and natural beauty of the Goddess, and to inspire a deep reverence for her.
Humanity could be the noblest creature of Nature’s kinunity through our capacity for wisdom, but only by using our wisdom with humility and respect for the rest of Nature shall we prove it.
It is our human duty to kiss frogs. Our kiss will not transform the frog, but it will transform ourselves.
Humanity is the compassion of the Goddess, and in human pity, she expresses hers.
For animals, life is emotion. For humans it is also wisdom. We are all born with the spark of the wisdom of the Goddess, and it is our duty to allow it to burn as brightly as we can in our lifetimes. We can become the hands, the eyes and the intellect of the Goddess, but not by despising her in favour of infantile constructs of the human imagination. Those who think the products of their imagination are more real than reality are, frankly, insane. We must rid ourselves of the insanity of imaginary fathers and begin to realize our proper destiny. Our position and purpose in life only come to us by realizing that we are in the kinunity of the Goddess, and by working in symbiosis with it, not trying to batter it into submission or even to kill it off as a troublesome annoyance.
We must save the Goddess from ourselves, but who but the Goddess could be her Saviour. Since only the Goddess can save the herself, we must realize that we are her saving hands, eyes and thoughts. We can follow our proper purpose by accepting this and behaving accordingly, caring and cultivating, or we can continue in our religious insanity, tearing, burning and destroying the world and ourselves. If we are wise, we shall engender correct emotional behaviour. If we care for her, she will care for us.
We are merely fragments of the vast hologram that is the Goddess, but we need only a fragment to see reflected the whole, and just a sherd of it to look ourselves in the eye.
The Goddess is democratic—we are all free in her world. Only humans enslave.
Worship, in the kinunity of the Goddess, need only be right living—living modestly, with adequate allowance for the needs of Nature’s kinunity. Worship without right living is hypocrisy.
Being satisfied that the supernatural does not exist, man should turn his entire attention to the affairs of this world, to the facts of nature. And, first of all, he should avoid waste—waste of energy, waste of wealth.Robert Ingersoll
Unless we learn to act out of global consciousness and respect for future generations, our children and their children will inherit a planet that is poisoned, desecrated and mortally wounded. Our choice is this—to pass on life or to pass a sentence of death on the heads of future generations.Captain Jacques Cousteau
We live in times when overpopulation, pollution, the greenhouse effect, the thinning of the ozone layer, the deterioration of the environment, the destruction of the forests and of wildlife, and the dangers of multiplying nuclear armaments all threaten us with the destruction of civilization and radical reduction in the very viability of Earth. If our only answer to all this is a superstitious reliance on something outside ourselves as a solution to all those problems, we are making that destruction certain.Isaac Asimov
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming, “This is the answer, my friends. Man is saved!” we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.Richard Feynman
To love justice, to long for the right, to love mercy, to pity the suffering, to assist the weak, to forget wrongs and remember benefits—To love the truth, to be sincere, to utter honest words, to love liberty, to wage relentless war against slavery in all its forms, to love wife and child and friend, to make a happy home, to love the beautiful in art, in nature, to cultivate the mind, to be familiar with the mighty thoughts that genius has expressed, the noble deeds of all the world, to cultivate courage and cheerfulness, to make others happy, to fill life with the splendor of generous acts, the warmth of loving words, to discard error, to destroy prejudice, to receive new truths with gladness, to cultivate hope, to see the calm beyond the storm, the dawn before the night, to do the best that can be done and then to be resigned—this is the religion of reason, the creed of science.Robert Ingersoll
Visions
I see a hot misty world with cloudy white skies and rain—endless torrential rain. Large fields are drained by sinuous ditches and grazed by unicorn-like cattle making noises like coo-loo-woo, loo-hoo-hoo. It is an alien world. Here and there are strange trees, some of them broken. But across a broad shallow river is dense woodland. Here and there are groups of large rocks but in the distant mist is a city built of cyclopean stones. Is it a city or just a rocky outcrop? A city, though I do not know its name. No.
The nameless city must have been built long ago… or perhaps it has yet to be built. A race of strange grey-green reptilian cretures appear in sculptured reliefs on the monumental stones of the ancient city. They might just seem reptilian, and the greyness and greenness could be just the moss growing on them, like a patina on old bronze. Yet they look somehow human. They had the power of magic, a subtle and sophisticated technology? They abhored rectilinear structures, preferring organic shapes. Had they somehow learnt how to “grow” their buildings, their technology?
The scene is changing. The mist has thickened and the sky darkened. The sun is fading and now can only be seen occasionally through smoky black clouds. The distant city has blackened before my eyes and is now covered in soot. The reliefs can no longer be seen. The grazing creatures are falling dead on the sward. They are dead and decaying. The ditches have putrefied to an oily stinking mass of corruption. I cannot see across the broad river. It has silted up completely leaving a morass of black bubbling sewage. I get faint glimpses through the gloom and can see the trees of the forest. They have changed. They stand like stick insects at strange angles, charred and dead. Some seem to be on fire.
Some great alien civilisation has been destroyed. Or is it a future civilsation?
I am laying on a large slab of cold stone in a sepulchral grotto or cavern. The light that illuminated the scene is faint and green as if transmitted through sea water. The cave was of huge stones cut with the low reliefs. Though the stone was hard and cold, I feel warm, comfortable and peaceful. I am surely asleep. The green colour is getting yet darker. The smell of decay has grown overwhelming. Great gobs of mud or tar are beginning to drip from the cyclopean rocks. They are smeared with festering putrefaction. I am stiff, uncomfortable and terrified. I hear a word echoing through the cavern, gradually getting louder from the total silence: “Awake! Awake!” But I cannot. I cannot awake.
I am floating as if on a magic carpet, lying in the sun, warm and secure. All I have to do is imagine something and it appears. At will, I can create rainbows and firework displays, floating billiard balls dancing before me and kalaidoscopic patterns. Now I have turned over and found myself floating just above the earth which was grey and sooty. Buildings stand derelict and decaying around me. At my feet are oily puddles full of trash and rusting cans. A distorted rat-like biped suddenly scurries from behind a broken-down building. It stops when it sees me. Its eyes open wide in terror, and it jabbered horrifically, stumbling backwards. I feel sick with revulsion for the stunted horror and its disgusting world. It is disgusting, a failure of evolution. I must kill it.
I am moving through vast canyons of monumental stones. Unrecognised friends pass me with a friendly greeting. The air is warm and clear, with beautiful scents of flowers drifting in from the nearby forests. Suddenly a rat scurrying behind a stone startles me. It seems unimportant and I walk on joyfully through familiar pathways. But again a scurrying creature surprises me, then another and another. They are emerging from everywhere—loathsome, naked, skinny, rat-like dribbling things like mole rats. They are a plague of locusts or soldier ants, running beneath my feet and beginning to scramble over me. They are inundating me, biting, tearing off strips of flesh. They are staring into my face grinning malignantly. I am screaming and fall, consumed by them.
There have been ages when other things ruled on the earth, and they had great stone cities. Remains are rarely, but still to be, found as cyclopean stones scarcely recognisable as constructions. Their builders all died vast epochs of time before man came, but there were conditions which could revive them when the cycle of being turned once more into the correct quadrant, when their successors proved to their makers that they had forsaken all responsibility for their tenancy as guardians of the earth.
And so it is not to be thought, that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters. His predecessors wait—not in the world we know but at its edges. They rest asleep—tranquil, elemental and—except when they stir—unseen. For, after the Helliconian Spring of love and lust, the son-lover begins to sere the earth and the serpent is yet poised, motionless but alert, for its the moment to strike.
It is the serpent that conquers and enjoys the fruits of the tree of life. Must it ever be so?
The Simple of the Lord
Evil people in the world who actively savage Nature or passively condone it are worshippers of the Lord, an imaginery, false and deceitful spirit. His followers say he is jealous and so will accept no other outlook on the world.
- The simple of the Lord think the Lord is God but in fact they are soulless beings with only hypocritical regard for spirituality, and a figmentary God satisfies them.
- The simple of the Lord believe that raking through beautiful mountains making heaps of spoil and polluting springs of pure water to find small pieces of stone they can polish and admire and wear for decoration is acceptable to their Lord.
- The simple of the Lord believe that hunting and trapping innocent animals for their fur or for exotic delicacies, the rest being left to decay, is acceptable to their Lord.
- The simple of the Lord have no compunction in burning or chopping down the Goddess’s trees that have taken a thousand years to grow to use their wood for furnishing rich men’s homes and carriages, and to leave sterile grasslands to graze cows for rich men’s dinners.
- The simple of the Lord consider it desirable to build endless miles of roads cutting through and despoiling the Goddess’s timeless landscape, the habitats of innocent creatures, to let them travel faster in their fuming vehicles.
- The simple of the Lord believe it is a tribute to their ingenuiry that they can fly through the Goddess’s pure air belching and polluting chemicals from their monstrous air planes.
- The simple of the Lord say their Lord has given them the right to do as they want with no thought of consequences in this world but only rewards in the next for doing what is prescribed however wicked it may be. This Lord can find no place in his scheme of things for women or knowledge. Only men and revelation are important.
- The simple of the Lord think their Lord will give them eternal life after death but they are already spiritually dead, having no regard for the awesome world they live in, the source of all spirituality. Nature is spirituality. Human soirituality is the conscious awareness of the human identity with Nature. When the simple of the Lord begin to feel in themselves every destructive blow and choking poisoning of Nature, then their spirituality will be returning.
- And the simple of the Lord wonder that Nature has started to react against them. It is not their absurd concept of the Lord that takes vengeance for intended and thoughtless behaviour, it is the Goddess, Nature Herself, whose cybernetic systems have evolved to regulate temporary excesses.
These simple people who have rejected true spirituality are manufacturing their own extinction. The Goddess will feel no regard when the simple of the Lord have gone, and nor will they because they are deluded that they will live consciously after death.
We, the Adelphiasophists, ask them to feel their regret now, while they still live, and change their evil ways while there might still be time.
