Keeping the past to grow the future

So quoting the Bible is a big fad now. It used to be just the atheists quoting ridiculous stuff to discredit they think one of the world's major religions. Now I see a new twirl: on a friend's facebook page -- the text from Leviticus 19:27

Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard. 

 and also the same day another friend posts a quote of Deuteronomy 22: 20-21.

...if this thing be true, that the tokens of virginity were not found in the damsel;... then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones.

 My friends have a subtler purpose than most recent quoters. And I read these quoted words with interest. 

I myself am thrilled to recall this evidence of where I came from -- to be able to read some approximation of the words of my fathers and get a sense of where their center of gravity was millenia ago and be astonished at how diligently and brilliantly they analyzed the major questions -- of origin, of purpose, of how we go about living. 

It is interesting how with change all about, a whirling chaos then, when the people were writing, and now, their children, often unable to imaginatively grasp that with different cultural boundaries for the arguments, there might be results that seem strange, even perverse. This whirling of all into everything, is minimally, disquieting often, and so disturbing that words are very popular among humans: words seem to profess a stability that makes the words always misleading if they are taken too seriously. Yet we must, take the words-- as the whole story, at some point. It was called by Gurdjieff, being asleep, that is assuming words can point to something stable when really words must always be tools, be partial. Both Gurdjieff and Jan Cox pointed out you must go to sleep, as part of the process of growth. 

Back to my main point though, she said -- we have this book called a Bible, and apparently all these smart people, think it is one solid thing, when of course, it was written over many centuries by many people. A variety of insights, things observed, preserved in one place, in some editorial process, for which I am so grateful. And who knows, maybe some of the things that seem crazy to us, were kept with the mostly astounding record, to give people a poke, a clue that they -- the readers -- have to think for themselves. That after all is where the words of the Bible came from. People understanding that the truth is a result of Real Work. 

So many ways to go from here -- maybe next time. In fact I have been planning a little essay on --- how there is no god, so to speak. So stay tuned.