> I think it would be safer to say that illumination is _a_ transcendant
> path and that other such paths are known to exist (ie Draconism, Kralori
> enlightenment, Cult of Silence, Arkatism, Near Ones etc).
Definitely, although I would personally use "similar but different" instead of "such".
BTW, a confession of ignorance : Who are the Near Ones?
> >But, IMO, illumination, that is the "light" side of it, does lead to the
> >religious feeling I clumsily attempted to describe.
>
> There is a 'dark' side to illumination? Given that illuminates
> transcend good and evil, how can one tell if a 'bad' illuminate
> is not experiencing the same religious feeling?
Oh, there is *definitely* a "dark" side to illumination. (I must in fact write about this for the first issue of Entropie, so your query is actually VERY well timed !!). Simply, someone who has become illuminated by transcending an us/them dichotomy is a "light" side illuminate. Someone who has become illuminated by transcending a mine/yours dichotomy is a "grey" illuminate. Someone who has become illuminated by transcending the Death/Entropy dichotomy is a "dark" illuminate. (These are obviously just examples, not definitions.)
Religious feeling is not defined, I think, by a quality of one's personal feelings, but by a correspondance of these feelings with an absolute Good (not a culturally defined version, because we are discussing illuminates), which CANNOT be transcended, because it is a universal and elemental Truth. Now, very few things would fit into our notion of universal Goodness. Being, for instance, isn't a universal Good, as Kralori Mysticism shows. Creation, however (ie the fact that a universal Creation occurred), is Good, pure and simple, and in spite of the fact that there is a Creation/Destruction dichotomy. That the world has come into Being is Good.
Truly religious feeling, then, is the presence of universal and eternal Goodness *within*, IMO. Not all illuminates can be described as being possessed of this presence.
> >> One would have to show first that Hrestol was illuminated.
>
> >But lots of Hrestol's actions while he was alive definitely *sound* like
> >they were commited by an illuminate, don't you think? All that transcendance
> >of caste boundaries ...
>
> Malkioni can and do commit castecrime even when not illuminated.
Certainly. They are two different things.
> The
> key distinction however is that non-illuminated Malkioni tend to suffer
> nasty curses and penalties for doing so. In Hrestol's case, by breaking
> his Brithini Taboos (among other criminal acts), he was visibly growing
> older.
Given that not all illuminates gain all the possible benefits of illumination, we cannot really prove anything one way or the other IMO.
> >> I myself do not believe that Hrestol was illuminated given that his
> >> revelations can be and are understood as part of materialistic Malkioni
> >> philosophy by everyone since his death.
>
> >Are they understood? I believe that this is matter for some contention
> >among the Malkioni ...
>
> The only people who claim that the true understanding of Hrestol's
> message has been lost are the Perfecti.
Not true. The Rokari, to start with, claim that such understanding (lost during the period of the God Learners), was returned by the personal Revelation of Saints Hrestol and Malkion to St Rokar in the fourteenth century.
> Given that their claims
> are used to justify cultic practices that are demonstrably non-
> Malkioni in origin, orthodox Malkioni have little difficulty in
> dismissing them as deluded idiots.
"orthodox Malkioni" ? Which ones?
Politically, and theologically, I don't think that such dismissal can be as easy as you claim, except of course for pedantic and small-minded fanatics.
> IMO the RW parallel would be to say that the gospels are completely
> wrong and that Jesus said something different
But many people *have* indeed believed just such over the centuries.
St Augustine seemed to believe that many within the Church weren't christians at all, and that many who were without were far truer to Christ.
Religious messages are NOT, in fact, universally heeded as you have suggested, even among "orthodox" Malkioni, whoever they are.
> based on following
> mediation practices from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
No.
Julian Lord
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