In Yoke

"As above, so below" ~ Hermes Trismegistus , The Emerald Tablet, Tabula Smaragdina The ancient legend of the wisdom purveyor of Aegypt and Greece, Hermes Trismegistus , was a legendary person, a teacher/priest combination of two ancient traditions, the Greek and the Egyptian. He is commonly known as the originator of the hermetic tradition. His teachings were thought to have been the beginning of the ancient wisdom/art of alchemy. His premise was that the Creator was One, or the Source of Being, and incidentally, was a predictor of the coming of Christ. He is said to have existed during the same time sequence/era as Moses, the great prophet of the Israelites. Legend records that he was the engineering wizard who designed and oversaw the construction work of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Fanciful stuff. A book of modern day Hermeticism , "The Meditations on the Tarot", is a favorite of mine. The core wisdom of the ancients, in my opinion, do not dispute the scriptur...

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. -Oscar Wilde I will be 56 years old this year. I am not as young as I once was. There are some good things about growing older. Older people have much to contribute when they are able to draw on the wisdom gained from direct knowledge of life. It takes considerable experience of life to understand the fleeting nature of physical satisfactions and personal profit. I had a conversation with an old friend today who recently retired after coaching high school football for 27 years. We concluded together what he is now learning: that there is indeed wisdom in the discovery of the separation of "who you are" from "what you do for a living". This is a gift, especially for ego driven, success oriented males. In the first half of life, we all have a wide margin for error, and youth often is a time of experimentation. Certainly this was true for me. I was an experimenter for much too long. It is usually in the second ha...

23 This is what the L ord says: “Don’t let the wise boast in their wisdom, or the powerful boast in their power, or the rich boast in their riches. 24 But those who wish to boast should boast in this alone: that they truly know me and understand that I am the L ord who demonstrates unfailing love and who brings justice and righteousness to the earth, and that I delight in these things. I, the L ord , have spoken! Perhaps one of the reasons that folks from the 3 rd century on have had issue with the book of James, is that James as Yeshua’s brother, had the audacity to tell Christians how they ought to be living. Clearly, pastor James is meddling. The other clear issue to me is that James, of all New Testament works, is a wisdom treatise. There is no contradiction between what James wrote and what Jesus taught. In fact all the spiritual direction given by James is reflective on the core teachings of Yeshua, James’ enigmatic and unique b...