Religious knowledge is the perceiving of the uncontrollable source of one's
thoughts, testing this dependency, and transforming one's understanding of
personal control.

Personal control is initially imagined as a single, independent center of
control. During initiation, personal control is perceived as dependent on an
uncontrollable, hidden source of thoughts, experienced as the unchangeable
universe or an unknown agency. Personal control tries to control and defend
against the revealed source of thoughts, demonstrating that personal control
power is dependent on and vulnerable to the source of thoughts.

Personal control learns to trust the source of its thoughts. The mind discards
its assumption that personal control controls the source of thoughts. Personal
control becomes mentally integrated with the source of thoughts, and control
stability is established, in a newly explicit, 2-centered configuration of
control-power.

The easiest model of spacetime to organize thinking about personal control-power
is that the person's experiencing, including control-thoughts as a steering
agent, is laid out as a worldline-path embedded in a changeless space-time block
universe with time as a space-like dimension.

Religious initiation is the use of mushrooms to loosen cognitive functioning and
make perceptible the dynamics of personal control cognition. This perception
and loose cognition disengages the previous mental model and helps construct a
revised mental model by subtracting, adding, and transforming ideas about
control.

Myth, including Mystery Religions, is metaphorical description of the above.
Figures in religious myth are not historical, but are personifications of the
above.

Perceiving and understanding the 2-centered control-power relationship that
propels the mind has been used as a political template for structuring society,
to purportedly follow the divinely revealed pattern:
o A power hierarchy with some people standing over other people in a
controller/controlled relationship, because each person contains a control
hierarchy.
o An egalitarian democracy with each person on the same level, because each
person contains the same relationship of the two aspects of control: personal
control thinking and the source of thoughts.


Copyright (C) 2011 Michael Hoffman. All Rights Reserved.