Cultural Traditions

This section explains the various ways the Beatific Vision is shown throughout the world’s cultural traditions and how the same spoked wheel or spiral pattern can be found within each tradition that continues to be practiced or celebrated.

I did a quick look-see regarding the history of the Dia de los Muertos and there was nothing inherent that I could see regarding it as it pertains at least to my placing it in this section.  Clearly, all you have to do is look at the eyes on any of the calaveras—the skeletons— on here to see why these were used, again whether unconscious or not by the modern practitioners of the tradition or its original inventor.

As I’ve done elsewhere, try to imagine whoever it is that at some point came up with this honoring of the dead festival, whether in Aztec times as it says is its origin or a later or more recent tradition.

I will open up my Season Two podcast with the tale of my first mystical experience and vision but since some of its contents pertain to something like Dia de los Muertos, I’ll mention at least that part of the story here.  When one has the negative version of the experience, or perhaps it simply occurs as a consequence of having this first Awakening experience I’m not entirely sure, since again I only have theories on why what is seen is seen.  It has to do with one’s own subjectivity and symbolic knowledge, conscious or unconscious, or again, due to one’s own inner turmoil if one stumbles into this deep realm of beyond thought and this is that madness that Rabbi Akiva speaks of that begins to manifest.

Or if God is just going to show you what God is going to show you since in my mind, the entire rationale I just gave doesn’t really make all that much sense when I think about why St. Faustina was given her vision of hell since she most certainly wasn’t on drugs . . . unless sisters or nuns be getting crazy with drugs in their monasteries.  Or if we wipe away the nice rosy stereotypical image of like happy peaceful nuns and instead contemplate if St. Faustina had a tormented mind or soul in some way.  I haven’t really studied any of the saints to any depth beyond St. John of the Cross so I’m not entirely sure if there’s anything on her personal history or journal writings or anything of that nature.  So, I’ll have to put that one on my to do list when I start working towards understanding in greater depth what may or may not create or generate this negative death and hellish version of the vision.  My assumption is drug use or something overpowering the mind like that since that’s what I had going on during this negative experience of the mystical vision at the Awakening.

Anyways, when one reaches this inner place of beyond thought or enters into the breach as I’ve quoted it stated in the Book of Ezekiel, it can be like seeing the dead.  But not dead people rising out of the Earth or something like that but that the dead are alive or that people that are alive are dead in a way, and I think I said somewhere than I’m positive this is where the idea of and for the zombie came from: by other people that have had this similar mystical and or drug experience and then tried to speak on it in some way.  Since when I was looking at these people around me during this experience, it was like seeing the world as well as these people in slow-mo and what I was seeing was the decay of the skin of the people around me.  It wasn’t that typical acid-trip melting or morphing of the face that acid trippers speak of especially since I wasn’t on acid.  But more like my mind was moving so fast and everything else was moving so slow that I was able to see the dust or the flakes of dead skin cells coming off of the skin of the people around me, primarily their faces of course since that’s what I was mostly looking at.  Let’s use maybe a more known image.  It was like seeing Pigpen from the Peanuts but instead of his dust clouds surrounding him from the dirt on his clothes or the dirt from the ground, the aura or cloud that I was seeing upon the people around me was of their skin cells.  And then when I looked at my own hand, I could see the skin flaking off my hand as well.

I’m not sure why I instantly thought and or realized that from seeing this these people were dead and so was I, instead of thinking I don’t know . . . something other than this.  But that was the instant thought that I had: that all these people were dead, I was dead too, and this was the land of the dead.  That where I was at that moment was the actual land of the dead and it wasn’t a positive place since everybody existed in utter misery.  I’m not sure if I thought it to be hell or purgatory at that moment yet but I’m pretty sure fairly quickly after this experience when I began to contemplate on it I began to see it and where I was as some type of living hell, not just due to this experience but to a previous drug experience that had led up to this one which I’ll further dive into in the Season Two podcast of the Logos of Experience and Truth. . .