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In one of the gospels (I forget which one) Christ is shown a crippled man and asked, "Is this man crippled because of his own sins, or the sins of his father?," to which Christ replied, "Neither. The only purpose served is in the healing of his condition, which shows the mercy and power of God."
The mercy and power of God are pitted against suffering; this is stated explicitly in the N.T. Christ's healing miracles were the substantial indication that the Just Kingdom had arrived; other kinds of miracles meant little or nothing. If the mercy and power of the Urgrund is pitted against suffering (illness, loss, injury) as explicitly stated in the Synoptics, then man, if he is to align himself with the Urgrund, must pit himself against the world, from which the suffering comes. He must never identify suffering as an emanation or device of the Godhead; were he to make that intellectual error he would be aligned with the world and therefore against God. A large portion of the Christian community over the centuries has fallen victim to this intellectual snare; without realizing it, by encouraging or welcoming suffering, they are enslaved even further by the artifact. The fact that Jesus had the miraculous power to heal but did not use it to heal everyone perplexed the people at that time. Luke mentions this (Christ speaking):
There were many widows in Israel, I can assure you, in Elijah's day, when heaven remained shut for three years and six months and a great famine raged throughout the land, but Elijah was not sent to any one of these: He was sent to a widow at Zarephath, a Sidonian town. And in the prophet Elisha's time there were many lepers in Israel, but none of these was cured, except the Syrian Naaman [Luke 4:25-27].
This is a poor answer. It states a what, not a why. We demand a why. More than that, we ask, "Why not? If the Godhead can abolish our condition (of suffering), why doesn't he?" There is implied here an ominous possibility. It has to do with the power of the artifact. The servant has become the master and is, perhaps, very strong. It is a chilling thought. Shiva, whose job it is to destroy it, may be baffled. I don't know. And no one, over all the thousands of years, has given a satisfactory answer. I submit that until there is a satisfactory answer, we must reject all others. If we do not know, let us not say.
One possibility occurs to me, based on something I saw in 1974 that other people, by and large, did not see. I became aware that the wisdom and power of the Urgrund were actively at work ameliorating our situation by intervening in the historic process. Extrapolating from this, I reason that other invisible interventions have probably taken place without our awareness. The Urgrund does not advertise to the artifact that it is here. Suppose the Urgrund reasons -- and correctly -- that were the artifact to know that it has returned a second time, the artifact would step up its cruelty to a maximum degree. We are experiencing a subtle invasion, taking place in stealth; I have already mentioned this. Mass amelioration would disclose the Urgrund's presence, just as Christ's miracles made him a target at the time of the First Advent. Healing miracles are the credentials of the Savior and an indication of his presence.
Once you have posited a strong adversary to the Urgrund, one so enormous that it is capable of projecting and sustaining an entire counterfeit universe, you have also put forth a possible clue to the need for stealth and concealment by the Urgrund. Its activities in this world resemble the covert advance of a secret, determined revolution against a powerful tyra
Maybe this is so; maybe not. In 1974 I saw it take aim at the center of tyra
In a very real sense the pain we feel as living creatures is the pain of waking up. Put this way, the proposition accounts for one of the most distressing aspects of suffering: that we are forced to suffer without knowing why. We do not know why precisely because we, as pluriforms of the Urgrund, are still virtually unconscious. It would be a paradox if an unconscious entity were aware of -- conscious of -- itself and the reasons behind its condition. Discerning the cause of our suffering equals fully waking up. It may be the final thing we learn.
At this point the analogy of the artifact to a teaching machine fails. This is not a lesson the teaching machine -- if it is that -- can teach us, because it does not know the answer. But we ourselves, as pluriform images of the Urgrund, will a priori know the reason for our situation when we become adequately conscious; we will remember. Knowledge of this sort lies in our own intrinsic long-term inhibited memory circuits.
Viewed as a puzzle we ca
When the time arrives that we can explain the ubiquitous suffering of living creatures, we will, I am positive, have fully retrieved our lost memories and lost identities. Did we do it to ourselves? Was it inflicted on us against our will? One of the most intriguing explanations -- by the Gnostics -- is that the original fall of man (and hence creation -- in this model falling under the dominion of the world-projecting artifact) was not due to a moral error, but to the intellectual error of confusing the phenomenal world for the real. This theory dovetails with my proposition that our world is a counterfeit projection; to take it for something ontologically real would indeed constitute a dreadful intellectual error. Maybe this is the explanation. We got entangled in enchantment, a gingerbread cottage that beguiled us into enslavement and ruin. Perhaps a major premise of my cosmogony-cosmology is wrong; the Urgrund did not create the artifact, but somehow allowed itself or parts of itself to fall victim to a snare, an alluring trap. So we are not merely enslaved; we are trapped. The artifact deliberately projected an illusion that would entrance us and lead us in.