Lightpyramid

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Light Pyramid: Divinity Trapped in Form

The Ligtpyramid glyph represents divinity trapped in form. In the center of the light pyramid sits the Buddha... the Christ... the anointed one who has returned, not to show us what we can become, but to remind us of who we actually are but, for various reasons, have forgotten. The pyramid within which he sits represents the third dimension... corporeal form... the "tomb of death". The flames enveloping the pyramid represent the diffusion of the invisible light source into discrete rays of multicolored light - as through a prism - representing our temporary corporeal manifestation into distinct and diverse expressions.

The sleeping Buddha slumbers blissfully knowing that he will soon awaken from this temporary dream and return to the Nirvana from whence he came. For unless a seed falls into the earth and dies it gains nothing. It is this analogy that the baptism represents... a conscious journey from immortal life, submersion into "death", then resurrection... a return to our immortal origin once again. It is within this context that the ancients and the first century believers understood the death, burrial, and resurrection allegory found in the scriptures as well as countless other ancient esoteric mythologies and religions. (please see the essay excerpt below for more details)

The Lost Meaning of Death - Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph. D.
(download the full 27-page essay HERE)

In presenting to the public the thesis of this particular address the speaker is overawed by a twofold realization. He is aware, first, that the interpretation of all ancient Holy Writ which he here offers will be disruptive of the established creedal religions of the Western world. And, in the second place he knows that the presentment will fall with such astonishing force upon Occidental religious thought as to seem incredible in spite of an array of positive testimony certifying its correctness. He may well be pardoned a feeling of hesitation and dubiety in making the revelation, for it has involved him in a daring incursion into interpretative terrain whither no scholar has penetrated before him. From the penetralia of that little-trodden domain of ancient religion-mystery he brings forth into modern light a discovery that will severely tax all the resources of common acceptance. Traditional norms of thought do not readily relax their grip on the general mind. It is scarcely to be hoped that an announcement so subversive of accepted ideas in religion and theology will be received without scepticism or resentment, since it invades a field in which conservatism is most stolidly rooted. Traditions long institutionalized do not easily bend to correction of principles basically vital to their very existence. Yet truth demands insistently from her devotees her inexorable tribute of sincerity and courage, and scholarship must flinch no duty in the line of truth-seeking.

Christianity, as a system of exclusive sacred truth or a unique revelation of divine wisdom, is already reeling under the impact of one blow after another dealt it by the study of Comparative Religion and Comparative Mythology. The "deadly parallels" found to run so consistently and so strikingly between the life of the Gospel Jesus and the legends of some twenty or more antecedent Christly figures or Sun-gods, in the role of world-saviors, are rapidly piling up the evidence that tends to jeopardize the validity of the entire body of Gospel narrative as history. It is beginning to dawn on intelligent and informed students that the New Testament Gospels are not the biography of any "person" or living character at all, but are old dramatic books of the religious Brotherhoods, portraying, not the "life" of any man, but only the spiritual history of a typical figure. All previous Messianic characters, or Sun-gods, were only such typal dramatizations of mans inner life, under the form of a representative "history". The Christs were simply ideal figures held up before men to provide them with an inspiring picture of their own attainable perfection.

Unbelievable as it may appear, it is the fact of history that with the lapse of time and the decay of philosophical culture, the more ignorant came to take these dramatic heroes for actually living persons. And a designing priestcraft, either itself now sunken in similar ignorance, or motivated by piety or knavery, or both, found it advantageous to the interests of a worldly ecclesiastical system to connive at the misunderstanding. At any rate, the Gospels, which were only spiritual allegories (see the writings of Philo, Clement and Origen, and note Pauls statement that the story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar "is an allegory"), were about the third century converted into literal history. And it was at this juncture that the ancient meaning of the term "death" passed out of the ken of even the most learned of the leaders of Christianity, and with it fled all possibility of retaining or regaining the deep inner sense of the scheme of theology.

Speaking advisedly, one may still freely assert that the obscuration of the inner meaning of "death" has utterly wrecked the science of theology. It has been the primary well-spring of that total illogicality and natural unseemliness in the scheme of theology which has so widely deprived it of intellectual support in the modern age. To a somewhat less extent, but still more considerably than has been surmised, it has militated likewise to hold in confusion some elements of the occult interpretation. It seems indeed to have escaped discovery universally, and all spiritual teaching everywhere has suffered in consequence.

The first hints in the direction of the discovery were picked up when in the study of the great system of Greek thought known as Neo-Platonism, with its interpretations of Greek mythology and religion, one became aware of a peculiar handling of the idea of death. To convey just what is meant by this statement it will be necessary to quote a number of passages from the Greek writers themselves. They are in themselves quite valuable and should be more widely known. The most lucid renditions of Neo-Platonic ideas come to us though the translations of Thomas Taylor.

We begin with a comment of Taylors own on Greek ideas regarding human life as a kind of death:

"They believed that human souls were confined in the body as in a prison, a condition which they denominated genesis or generation, from which Dionysus would liberate them. This generation, which linked the soul to body, was supposed to be a kind of death to the higher form of life. Evil is inherent to this condition, the soul dwelling in the body as in a prison or a grave. . . . The earthly life is a dream rather than a reality . . . the soul is purified and separated from the evils of this condition by knowledge"--or what they called "philosophy".

The great Plato is himself found saying that "men are placed in the body as in a prison" and that he considered "the body as the sepulchre of the soul". Taylor in discussing an opinion of Macrobius ascribed to him the conception that "the soul in the present life may be said to die, as far as it is possible for a soul to die; occultly intimating that the death of the soul was nothing more than a profound union with the ruinous bonds of the body."

One noted that the incarnation or entry of the soul into the body was often alluded to as a burial! Then Pythagoras had written that "whatever we see when awake is death". Likewise the great Plotinus had given hints such as the following:

"Death to the soul is to descend into matter and be entirely subjected to it. This is what is meant by falling asleep in Hades."

As from an oppressive dream we wake now to perceive that the light that sould have streamed from these tomes of truly sacred lore and irradiated every dark recess of the human mind has been extinguished for over sixteen hundred years. By what mishap and through what culpable agency this bewildering catastrophe was precipitated, let research and inquiry determine. The staggering realization is that it did occur, with consequences that no mind is able to measure.