Egyptian Mythology

[David Mauldin]

Are there still assemblies in Canada?

[Heide]

It never ceases to amaze me that we as Christians think we are always correct. I have to say this is one of those things that I dislike when I say that I am a christian. It's like lowering the boom, once that word christian is out, nothing else can be said. There are no other possibilities only Christ. Maybe it is the anthopologist in me that doesn't like christian missionaries who go into villages and destroy in the name of Christ. Maybe I am off but I gotta tell you that I respect David & Will. I have enjoyed your postings! Everytime some christian spews out their doctrine it pushes me away from christianity. It is like the same ole assembly garbage only under a new version, " I'm right and you're wrong."

I would like to hear more of Dave's experiences and why you chose this path.  

Heide

[mkoley]

Those are my sentiments as well, Heide.

[David Mauldin]

  After leaving the Geftakys ministry in 94 my euphoric experiences of God dissapeared. That is, the feeling I use to get that God was in me with me etc...I now believe these experiences were generated within me by myself and the group. I believe it is what Jung and Derkhiem call the "Collective Consciousness" Although I continoud in Christian churches I have always read everything I could get my hands on.  I read Henry James work on parapsychology and the "Variety of Religious experiences" After my experiences with the Plymouth Bretheren I stopped believing in a personal God.  To me at this point I had to admit that Churches for the most part are run by personalities.  Those who are the strongest get what they believe to be the will of God.  Most likely what benefits them and their families. Also I read lots of books on primitive cultures.  I saw so many similairities to the structure of the assembly. Also reading about other religions. I thus concluded that to hold to my Christian experience as being exclusive was ridiculous. Everyone comes into moments of enlightenment/revelation, I believe that the majority of people are functioning in the best way they know how.  MORE LATER!

[David Mauldin]

 The concept of a personal God who speaks to me and is intimatly involved in my life more real and deaper than anyone here on earth is not my experience.  Why?  If these things were true than the whole assembly experience would have never happened!  Wouldn't a personal God tell me Hey, Dave this is a cult!  Get  out!"  Yet hundreds of people who have genuinly and sincerly experienced this tragedy still claim to speak with God?  I don't think so.  I think for the most part people are speaking to their own intuition and desires.  Thus the results!  To me it is more reasonable to conclude that God is a mystery and that throughout history,  many,many people have made a terrible mistake at concluding that God fits inside of their box. Only to discover later that they were wrong. I think we need to look at everything, evaluate everything and reevaluate it.  Grow foward!  Read, talk investigate! Keep an open mind, cherish the beautiful, stand against the injustice! Love!

[Will Jones]

David,

Yes, I have recently renewed contact with one of the dear families who fellowship in Ottawa.  I don't know the details, but changes have been made in the gathering there and they have reaffirmed the basic beliefs about New Testament Simplicity.

And thanks for your brief testimony, David, and I hope you will say more later.  Indeed, when I have attended Buddhist ceremonies here in Thailand I have also felt that "euphoric feeling" that one can get in "spiritual" meetings.  However, I can also get a euphoric feeling when I go for a swim late at night when the stars are shining down on me as I float in the cool water.    But the point is that group dynamics affect individuals profoundly.  I remember watching a Bill Cosby comedy video alone and I chuckled a few times, but when I watched it again a bit later at a family gathering we were all laughing our fool heads off.  Interesting, eh?  I did not know how profoundly the Assembly's beliefs and practices affected me until I had to leave to work abroad.  Thus, I agree with the idea of the 6-week challenge.  Many scholars and philosophers, such as Bakhtin, have argued that you are you because of your environment, that is, you define who you are or who you are not based on your immediate environment.

You wrote,

I thus concluded that to hold to my Christian experience as being exclusive was ridiculous.

 I recall, before praying to accept Jesus in my teens, that I had a profound spiritual experience during my confirmation and at other times when I was in a traditional church.  I also had euphoric experiences when I dabbled in the occult and saw strange/miraculous things happen.  Any type of "spiritual experience" has the potential to stir feelings within us that is personal to us BUT others feel very similar "euphoric feelings."  Thus, one cannot prove or disprove that God is with them or not with them based on "euphoric feelings."

I am kicking myself at the moment for not keeping an article I read about how our body naturally creates these "euphoric feelings" when we encounter something we believe is greater than ourselves.  I did a web search and here is a site I found with links solely for interest sake:

http://www.unsolvedmysteries.com/usm323644.html


P.S.  I just noticed after posting that you extended your testimony.  I think you have opened up a can of worms by saying you don't believe in a personal God.  One book I highly recommend is Karen's Armstrong's THE HISTORY OF GOD.  She argues that there is a personal God--our personal conception of the God our present culture believes in.  She also argues that God has changed throughout history as He is displayed in writings such as the Bible.  Very interesting read!  However,  you can also interpret her writing as people have, gradually over time, come to a better understand understanding of who God is up until the time He was fully revealed in Jesus.

The concept of a personal God who speaks to me and is intimatly involved in my life more real and deaper than anyone here on earth is not my experience.  Why?  If these things were true than the whole assembly experience would have never happened!

Another great book to read is WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE.  I guess we are used to the idea of God intervening in the affairs of mortals when we read the stories of the Bible.  Many people struggled with the idea that God appears no longer actively involved like He used to be in the stories of the Bible.  One way that some people dealt with this without completely giving up God was the idea of "deism."  Many of the Founding Fathers, for example, were deists, that is, they believed that there was a God (or could have been a God) who may have been present in the affairs of humans at one time before Jesus, but God is now aloof and allowing us the liberty to live as we choose.  The beliefs of the so-called deist movement were varied, but were certainly agnostic and pre-atheistic.  

To me it is more reasonable to conclude that God is a mystery and that throughout history,  many,many people have made a terrible mistake at concluding that God fits inside of their box. Only to discover later that they were wrong. I think we need to look at everything, evaluate everything and reevaluate it.  Grow foward!  Read, talk investigate! Keep an open mind, cherish the beautiful, stand against the injustice! Love!

AMEN!    "Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light in accessible, hid form our eyes!"

[Will Jones]

Verne,  

The verse in 2 Timothy that says "All Scripture is inspired by God" has been interpreted in many different ways.  Some take "Scripture" here to mean the Old Testament Scriptures because the Church did not officially decide which Scriptures were inspired for hundreds and hundreds of years.  As I mentioned in other places, many different church groups used different scriptures, some of which are now not deemed inspired and canonical.  In fact, the Book of Jude (which some Christian groups did not deem authentic and the book was almost excluded from the Canon--read Eusebius' CHURCH HISTORY for this and other books that almost did not make it into the Bible) in verse nine there is a quotation from a famous book called the Assumption of Moses which some church groups deemed as inspired.  I have read fragments from this book and it is quite the read!  There are also many books in the Old Testament that tell the reader to find out more information in various "lost books of the Bible." (Check this link for a list:  http://www.pastornet.net.au/jmm/abss/abss0148.htm.)
Jesus also quotes a prophecy that does not exist in the Bible we have today and so do some of the New Testament writers.  Thus, if you believe the Bible is inspired and the Bible quotes these other works as authorities, then this expands the notion of inspiration, i.e., there is a possibility that God has inspired more than just the Books of the Bible.  

I have a much broader notion of inspiration than most Fundamentalists do.  I believe that God has inspired more than just the books of the Bible.  Early Christian groups believed that certain books they used were inspired.  I also believe that God still inspires people to write things.  Will anyone disagree with me that the poem "Footprints" has not been inspired in some way by God?  Have you ever felt "inspired" to do something because you felt enthusiastic or lead to do something?  "Enthusiastic" comes from two Greek works meaning "the indwelling of God."  But I am getting ahead of myself and will describe how I believe God can inspire us today after I deal with the notion that inspiration = inerrancy.
 
The verse I referred to above in 2 Timothy is often linked to the word "the breath of God" or "God-breathed" that is used in Genesis 2 (the second creation story) where God breathed life into the clay that became human.  Some use this possible link to argue that God made Adam and Eve perfect so that means the Scriptures are perfect.  This is a giant leap in logic.  God made them "complete" or "perfect" as humans beings who are not capably of God-like perfection in all their thoughts, words and actions.  Well, if you want to believe that perfection here means the same as inerrancy, Adam and Eve were also human and they were capable of making mistakes and did make mistakes because they were given free will.  They did not have perfect knowledge or perfect writing abilities as far as we know.  God, after giving them the breath of life, never controlled them or make them act certain ways.  Just as I do not believe God controlled the writers of Scripture when they penned the Books of the Bible and the other non-canonical works that were and still are in existence.

Now we get to HOW Scripture was written.  I have written short stories, essays, books, and novels.  There have been times when I felt so inspired and the words came to me like a kind of magic.  However, I have made many technological mistakes and errors in fact, spelling, grammar, etc. when in this kind of state.  Poets and playwrights, especially in the time of Wordsworth and Coleridge, had much to say about this mystical kind of inspiration.  This could be the kind of inspiration that the Bible is talking about.  This is NOT a kind of automatic writing.  My personality, ideas, knowledge of the present world, my personal biases, etc. still shone through my writings.  Did God dictate Scripture to the ancients in a way that compelled them to write perfectly?  The Vatican II document Dei Verbum states that "God" is the "author" of Scripture (and the Catholics have a different notion of Scripture than do the Protestants!) but the writers are "true authors" of what they have written: "God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted."  Thus, the authors "made use of their powers and abilities" when writing according to the knowledge of their time, e.g., they used incorrect cosmological references, etc.  If you continue reading the document, you see that "those things which He wanted" were "that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation," not inerrancy in matters of science, etc.!  The context of 2 Timothy is that God inspired the Scriptures to be profitable/good for matters of doctrine and spiritual practice, not to be inerrant in matters of science and history.

Inspiration, in my mind, does not mean perfection like Fundamentalists do when they (more or less) lump inspiration, infallibility and inerrancy into the same boat to attempt to prove their relatively modern stance on how to interpret the Bible.  As I have said before, church history that demonstrates Christians made comments on errancy in the Bible, modern science that shows the cosmological views of the ancients to be incorrect, and the Bible itself that never claims to be inerrant demonstrates that the Bible was written by humans who are not perfect because there are discrepancies in the Bible if the reader is observant and honest to themselves, discrepancies that some have made an attempt to deal with.  Some can be argued away; others cannot.

I have given more examples in the past, but I will repeat myself.  The two creation stories of Genesis 1-3 contradict each other about the order of creation and what we know to be true from an observation of the world.  The Gospels do not agree on words and details.  For example, I did not believe it when I read it that the differences Crucifixion and resurrection narratives could not be reconciled until I spent many months trying to unsuccessful make them jive like so many others have.  Until you try it yourself, please don’t bother to tell me that there are no discrepancies because there are.  So how do you deal with it?  You deal with it by having a historical understanding of how the Bible has been perceived by other Christians, not just the Fundamentalists.  Here is a neat site I found a few days ago:

Any close reading of the Gospels will illustrate differences in the specific details of the words and deeds of Jesus that have been reported. For example, a parallel Gospel text or source criticism will quickly illustrate that the "Evangelists" did not provide and were not obsessed with the literal words of Jesus. Rather they believed they had the authority to interpret the Gospel message, and they felt free to paraphrase Jesus' sayings and add details in order to convey to their intended audience the significance of what He taught. Sometimes there are even blatant errors. For example, Mark recorded that Abiathar was high priest when King David ate the sanctified bread in the Temple (Mark 2:26) when it was actually Ahimelech (1 Sam 21:1-6). Origen (ca. 185 - 254 CE), in his Commentary on John (10:2-4) wrote:

"The spiritual truth was often preserved, as one might say, in material falsehood."

Origen clearly believed that there were historical and chronological errors in the Gospel accounts, and that allegorical and analogical interpretations were required to find the truth they contained. Saint Augustine (354 - 430 CE), in discussing the differences between Matthew's "Sermon on the Mount" and Luke's "Sermon on the Plain" in his De Consensu Evangelistarum (2.19.44) wrote that the evangelists may have expressed "...these utterances in somewhat different terms, but without detriment to the integrity of the truth...

Taken from http://www.cesame-nm.org/Viewpoint/contributions/bible/IIII.html

If you check out this link I will give you in a minute, you will see it is a lament by Fundamentalist that not many theological seminaries, scholars and Christians are believing in an inerrant Bible:  http://www.bible-researcher.com/niv-inerrancy.html.  There is simply too much evidence against it in the face of church history, modern science and a close study of the Bible itself.  

Yes, the Bible is inspired but written by humans who were not perfect.  Imagine inspiration or how the Bible was written like this:  God speaks to the writers who then, later, write it down.  Will they remember everything as it was written?  No, they will tell it in their own words, as they understand it according to their time and culture.  My last statement will only bother you if you hold to a relatively recent invention of the "inerrancy and infallibility of the Word of God."  But, many Christians such as Luther, Augustine, Origen and others did not discount the message of the Bible simply because they believed it erred in matters of fact.  The Bible relays truth, not THE TRUTH.  It contains what scholars call the Kerigma or Kerugma:  the gospel, the good news of salvation that God loves us and will forgive us.  

[Heide]

Intuition is an interesting word in our society today. People don't listen to it and they don't think they have got it. It's like that gut feeling, instinct kinda thing. I'm sure many people will tell you that they may have had some kind of gut reaction to the assembly teaching but didn't know how to interpret their own feelings. We are a culture who has been taught to lay our instinct and intuition aside because they are "feelings". We feed ourselves what we want to hear, whether it is justified by our feelings or desires then we put a twist on it and christianize it.

From what I understand about buddhism it isn't considered to be a religion, more of a philosophy of how to live your life on a day to day basis. Is that correct? If you are already a buddhist then why study other religions(?) Is it just to find a better answer? I am all for living a different way of life, one that is not condemning or judgemental.

Heide

BTW, this ought to ruffle some feathers but I do notice if I walk into certain groups and say I am a christian I automatically close the door in communication. People assume that I will not listen or hear. I really dislike that!

[David Mauldin]

Yes I believe you are correct in saying that Buddhism is not a religion, yet some people make it into one. From what I understand Buddha stated that his ideas were helpfull but not the only way.  I have attended only a few Buhhdist groups.  Hacienda Hieghts Temple and L.A. Darhma.  Much that I have learned as a Christian has really helped. If you read the life of Buddah you will see amazing parrallels to the life of Christ.  His quest was to conquor death!  He faced and overcame three temptations in the wilderness.  He was filled with compassion and made great sacrafice. I also attend The Philosophical Research institute (not a church ) was founded by Manly P. Hall this guy spent his life studying and gleaning from all religions. I find his books and lectures very deep and interesting.  I just attended a lecture by Matthew Fox  Look him up on the internet he is very interesting.  More later

[brian]

Intuition is an interesting word in our society today. People don't listen to it and they don't think they have got it. It's like that gut feeling, instinct kinda thing.

i trust my intuition/instincts completely! maybe its my spirit, maybe its my subconscious - i don't pretend to understand it, but i do trust it. it is what lead me out of the assembly, completely on my own, alone, without real concrete reasons - and this after i had been raised in the assembly, and was saturated in its teachings. i never went through the famous "rebellion" phase. i just followed that still small voice inside. leaving the assembly is one example, but that little voice has made all the difference many times in my life. that is not to say that i suspend the thinking, rational part of me in making decisions either. like so many things in life, there is a balance that must be struck.

[David Mauldin]

Maby I was wrong to use "intuition"  Yes  I have heard a lot of talks on listening to it but for some reason I feal mine let me down! I guess I use every possible resource I have before making a descision.

[Will Jones]

Verne,  

Would you then say that the original autographs then would not necessarily have to be free from factual error to be considered "God-breathed?"

Interesting question!  This is sort of like asking whether dinosaur meat tasted like chicken.  One can't answer the question with absolute certainty because there are no longer any dinosaurs in existence just as the original autographs, the original manuscripts of the Bible, no longer exist.  However, we have the next best thing in both cases.  There are lizards and crocodiles that we could taste that might give us an idea what a T-Rex would taste like and we could have a look at the apographs, the manuscripts of the Bible that we have now that are hundreds of years older than the original autographs.  

If you believe the common Fundamentalist and Evangelical argument (which I believe in) that great pains were taken to preserve the Scriptures and that the Bible, apart from minor copying errors and slightly different versions, has been delivered to us as it was originally written, THEN we can expect the apographs, the many MSS we have today, to be VERY similar to the original autographs.  I believe that apart from a few minor errors in copying and slightly different versions, we can accurately piece together the Books of the Bible.  

With this in mind, it is clear that the many incorrect, ancient references to cosmology in the Bible indicate errors in matters of science.  A study of discrepancies between the two creation stories of Genesis 1-3 and the numerous discrepancies of fact in the synoptic gospels also indicates errancy in the original autographs.  This, again, should not upset anyone's faith unless of course they have put their faith in the sand of Biblical inerrancy.  

I have been surfing the internet to refresh my memory in the history of Fundamentalism and the writings of the Princeton scholars.  I remember the main points like how Princeton Theology ended up painting themselves into a corner as they tried to deal with the rising interest in science and a new way of studying the Bible, Textual Criticism.  With new discoveries of MSS, cultural artifacts, extra-Biblical writings, etc., differences of opinion regarding different passages or historical events began popping up.  As I have argued on this thread, many Christians in the past saw the truth in the message the Bible conveys (rather than the Bible as word-for-word Word of God or THE TRUTH) so a concern for inerrancy was not an issue until many apparent discrepancies or errors in fact were discovered by scholars, scientists, archeologists, etc.  It was at this time that major discoveries like the age of the earth, dinosaurs, the theory of evolution, etc. were radically changing the way people were looking at the world.  People such as scholars involved in Textual Criticism were seeing that many factors affected the development of what we know as the Bible today when non-canonical books were discovered like the Assumption of Moses, etc.  For example, some began to advocate that more people than Moses wrote the Pentateuch, that there were problems with reconciling different events in the gospels, etc.  In sort, it was a time of great discovery in the minds of scholars but a time of great upheaval for conservative Christians who felt that "the Book" was being undermined by "liberal" or secular probing.

It was only in the late 19th Century that certain views on the nature of the Bible arose from Princeton to try and place the authority of the Bible over the findings of science and Textual Criticism.  There was quite an uproar when dinosaurs were found, the date of the earth was seen as much older than the Bible seemed to indicated, etc. and some Biblical conservatives responded by stating that the new findings were wrong because it contradicted Scripture.  Luther had also rejected the new heliocentric or Copernican cosmology that was gaining popularity in the circles of “natural philosophy” (what we now call science) because he believed that it contradicted many passages in the Bible.  Other scholars rejected the “Copernican revolution” because it went against what Plato and the gang of Greek philosophers taught.  It was not until a few years back that the Roman Catholic Church publicly admitted that Galileo had been right and they had been wrong!  

Now, thanks to a web search, my memory has been refreshed as to the specifics, which I will now mention.  Benjamin Warfield used this notion of "the original autographs" as a fallback position to protect the Bible from those who were studying the apographs.  Benjamin Warfield was the person primarily responsible at Princeton for the what is called the "plenary-verbal inspiration" of the scriptures to assert the authority of the Bible over the claims of science, history, etc.  Instead of just matters of faith, like most Christians before him believed, the Princeton scholars and the Fundamentalists of the 20th Century basically attempted to steam roll over scholarly findings to proclaim that the Bible was inerrant in all matters like science and history.  And this brought about the general disrespect or disregarding of the Bible as any type of authority that we witness today.  When I was refreshing my memory with background reading, I also remembered that it was Warfield or one of the Princeton scholars of the 19th Century who first started using the word "inerrant."  I checked my dictionary and the date it gave for the first time the word was used was 1837!  If you check your pocket dictionaries, you might not find it because it is a word that the Princeton scholars helped popularized in the context of the Scriptures.  "Infallible" was used before "inerrant" and, if you study the meaning in the context of theology, it meant without error when it came to the authority and reliability of teachings on faith and morals.  If a person reads 2 Timothy in this context, it says that God inspired the Scriptures to be profitable/good for matters of doctrine and spiritual practice, not to be inerrant in matters of science and history.

The reality is that inerrancy is a relatively new word that was used to describe a new way of looking at the Bible that Augustine, Luther, Origin and many Christians did not support.  They saw that the message the Bible conveyed was the truth and they felt free to point out what they thought were discrepancies or errors.  However, Princeton Theology, when more and more discoveries were demonstrating discrepancies or errors in matters of fact (NEVER FAITH), began to look bad.  As a result, Warfield, for the first time in Christian history and as a fallback position, created a new argument to protect Princeton Theology’s new notion of inerrancy by stating that it is in fact the original autographs that are inerrant.  Thus, any errors that Textual Critics, historian, and scientist find in the apographs must simply be a result of incorrect human interpretation or a copyist error.  Now Warfield might have tried to protect the new (and, in my opinion, incorrect) belief in inerrancy of the Bible, but, as I have argued on this thread, this belief is now a stumbling block for many people to accept Christianity.  Because a majority of people in Western society today believes the Bible is just a book written by man that has errors like any other book, they will disregard the gospel because popular Fundamentalist/Charismatic/Conservative Evangelical beliefs tend to associate accepting the gospel and the Bible as THE INERRANT WORD OF GOD as synonymous of what it means to be a “true Bible-believing” Christian.  As a result, people sent me messages or emails concern that I had lost the faith or was not even a Christian.  On the contrary, I think many Fundamentalist/Charismatic/Conservative Evangelicals have departed from a historical view of the Scriptures.

I will end this with a link that I found yesterday that is quite interesting and contains some of my views:  http://members.ozemail.com.au/~pballard/errancy.html

[Will Jones]

Verne,

How would you reconcile this position with 2 Peter 1: 21?:

For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

Great question with a straightforward answer:

(1) Have a look at these links and form your own opinion:
http://www.geocities.com/intheword1/2_Peter.htm
http://www.bible.org/docs/nt/books/2pe/2pt-intr.htm

(2) There was no agreed upon Bible or standard collection of Scriptures at the time 2 Peter was written so something else is being referred to as I will talk about in my next point.

(3) This verse you quoted concerns the act of prophecy itself, not the act of recording the prophecy.  Note the context of 2 Peter 1:21 is that the promises of God can be trusted and here it seems to be mainly talking about the actual spoken words of God to Jesus, the Apostles and to the gift of prophecy that God gave to the Church in verses leading up to the one you quoted above (Cf. 1 Peter 1:10-12, Rom. 12:6). In verse 19 it says "the prophetic word," verse 20 it refers to "prophecy of Scripture" and in verse 21 it is referring to the act of "prophecy."  God speaking to his prophets of the future or a soon-to-be realized promise is not directly related to do with what I was discussing, namely, how the Bible was written or inspired and whether or not it is inerrant.  

Verse 21 is simply saying that when God did speak to someone the Spirit carried them along, much like a boat is carried by the waves.  This could be similar when a Christian feels compelled or inspired to share the gospel with someone or feels lead to share a particular subject during ministry.  But they then, with the help of the Spirit, speak the message they believe God wants them to say.  If you take Moses for example, God gave him the 10 commandments and he talked with God on top of the Mountain, but there were many times he spoke on behalf of God when he was with the Israelites.  The Prophets also claimed to speak “from God”--on his behalf and as His mouthpiece--what God had put upon their hearts to say.  But the point is that time elapsed in most cases after they spoke on behalf of God to people and when they picked up a pen to write it down.  Regardless, being inspired by God or directed to say things as it says in 2 Peter 1:21 cannot back up a belief in a Bible that is inerrant in all things because it is talking about the act of prophecy, not the writing of Scripture and the errancy or inerrancy of the Bible, which did not yet exist at the time 2 Peter was written.  

So, no, 2 Peter 1:21 cannot be used to justify a Fundamentalist view of the Bible as inerrant.  If you accept the Bible at face value, then accept that fact that the Bible never says it is inerrant, only inspired by God and "profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in righteousness. That the man of God may be complete, furnished completely unto every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16-17).  Not that the man of God might have accurate understanding of scientific facts that have nothing to do with salvation and matters of faith.

[Heide]

Since you are discussing scriptures, I think I can put this question in....

Why were some books left out of the bible? I was just reading a history book about the gospel of Phillip (?)  that never made it's way into the bible?

Heide

P.S. What's the difference between a zen buddhist and a regular one?

[David Mauldin]

I've met some Zen Buhhdist, It is a much more disciplined form/exercise of meditation. I listened  to a man who when on a pretty extended Zen retreat.  During the time he had a pretty strict routine of meditation, prayer etc.. I think the goal was to achieve enlightenment which means "seeing things as they truely are"- no douplicity everything is one- no attatchment- freedom from  desire. I could relate to his experiences from my own living in the Geftakys community. More later