I didn't sleep too well, my dreams once more being disturbed by their most common intruder, my mother; I had things to do but she kept following me around and disrupting.
But later there was also an unusual intruder: J.C. himself - yes, being a Satanist I dreamed about Jesus! We weren't friends for sure but he undertook only a brief, half-assed attempt of persuading me to follow him. All I remember is me telling him something to the extent, "save your breath, I'm going to Hell!" Of course he wasn't pleased about this but he didn't object, nor did he try to tell me that I'd be suffering there or anything. It was like he could simply see I was too seasoned and too certain in my choices for him to try any further to win me over, he could see what I am and that any attempt would be fruitless and so he left it at that.
So I must say that, surprisingly, dealing with Jesus in my dream was much less unpleasant than it is with my mother who most often keeps bothering and harassing me no matter what. In real life I've been out of contact to her for nearly 7 years now and I don't even know if she's still alive or anything, but in my dreams she keeps intruding pretty frequently.
The appearance of Jesus may have been due to a talk I had the other day with a trainer at the gym in which he turned out to be a devout Christian and encouraged me to read the Bible. We first got to talk about religious subjects because he remarked about a metal shirt I was wearing, whereupon I also showed him my tattoo on the inside of my left forearm, the letters "SATAN" which I made myself with soot from a candle as a young teenager. I openly told him, as I usually do, that I'm still a Satanist, and was actually expecting perhaps some slight ridicule as I've experienced so often when talk comes to any kind of spiritual belief at all. Instead he confessed being a firm believer. We exchanged some ideas and I said that I believe every person simply has their own, very unique path in life, that there is no ONE path which is right for everyone.
I meant it,and now it seems even J.C. himself can't disagree with me there. ;) ...take this one with a grain of salt; of course I don't mean to claim it was really Jesus who personally came into my dream in order to try and convert me. More likely it was simply just a very ordinary dream caused by my thinking about the talk with the trainer.
...and then later today I learned that Jesus was actually a mushroom! :D
[Terence McKenna on Jesus]
From that side I'm not assailable at all. But I must admit to having somewhat less firm footing when it comes to militant atheism which is so very widespread these days, especially in many of my fields of interest which are of scientific nature. Even the author of the book about lucid dreaming I'm currently reading, as I mentioned in yesterday's entry, seems to hold the opinion that dreams (lucid or otherwise) are merely something that's going on inside the brain and nothing more - and by extension, that so is consciousness.
But the materialist view that consciousness is an arising phenomenon from "dead" matter is one I absolutely can't agree with.
You may argue that a living brain is not "dead" matter as I said, at least not while it's alive. But as a matter of fact your living brain is ultimately made of the very same kind of atoms as your computer or even the chair you're sitting on. And a dead brain is absolutely identical in composition to a living one, although the dead brain will soon start to decompose. And all of the atoms, in a living or dead brain as well as those in a computer or chair, are made up of 99.99% empty space.
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness."
(Max Planck)
The bottom line is, although modern science is fascinating and absolutely worthy of following and supporting it it does have a big problem with dogmatism. In part this may have arisen due to the need to counter extreme religious dogmatism (such as especially creationism) with an equally militant point of view. I ought to point out that skepticism doesn't necessarily equal dogmatism; I'm much in favor of a healthy measure of skepticism, especially when it comes to urban myths, conspiracy theories and the like (and by the way, for those who'd like to know how crop circles are created, you can certainly find tutorials online) but I just wish people would stop pretending science already knows everything when we have barely scratched the surface of everything that can possibly be known.
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