@Pilgrim the general idea of what you are talking about, which I would express as the "outward manifestation of religions", and I basically agree with with most of what you say. They are systems of control. Power hierarchies. It's why the priesthood went as far back as the first rulers, and perhaps even further. What, generally, I am looking at is not this though. It's something underneath that, and I would say that the reason why the systems of control via religion even exist is because those who seek power have found a way to tap into those core underlaying human experiences, and turn them into that system of control.
I rejected organized religion at an early age - first communion to be precise. I had series of questions that stemmed from experiences I had before that (ages 5-6), and the discussions with the priests did not give me answers, or even lead me towards answers. I had told my parents afterwards, and they were I think understanding, but utterly unaware of what I was talking about in the first place. A direct experience of reality, as far as it is possible without the filters (although now I would say there is always some level of filters associated with the experience in one way or another), and I was seeking answers and resolutions of this experience, because it also related the the first dreams I can remember, which must have been from when I was around 4 years old. I also had a series of experiences as an early child, prior to being 4, where I had "memories" of being some one else, and thankfully my mother had recorded this on cassette tape, as she recorded many of our conversations, "playing", and other such things. These experiences, and that search, now nearly 50 years ago, is still the driving force, and it has shaped my life. That is part of my own narrative, and I share this just to give a bit of insight. I am not a religious by any means, but I have experienced that which, for lack of a better word, we call the spirit world, the fabric of perceived reality, etc.
That microcosmic <-> macrocosmic interface is not just a series of words, or an idea, it is an actual experience, which in more modern terms can also be called boundary dissolution, if one shifts from one to the other, or lets one into the other. One can experience the macrocosmic phenomena personally inside, or alternately see ones own inner personal universe play out in the macrocosm, in such a way that while perception is that which senses it, other peoples perceptions can also sense it, because it is becomes part of the "external objective reality" of others as well. Too far into this realm is the realm of madness, yes, but that is not what I am wanting to point out, but rather that there are shared narratives that are "external / objective" which are connected to narratives that are "internal / subjective".
Now, whether these narratives are seeded into us, that is, influenced by others due to learning and programming, or are innate, I don't bother to differentiate, because a narrative has to exist one way or another. The narratives co-exist with more refined levels of consciousness.
We are born empty, with sensors and systems that record everything around us, sights, smells, sounds, feelings, tastes and so on.
I had written about this before, the is the blank slate camp, and there is a pre-primed camp. This divide which is well expressed in psychological studies goes back to the philosophies of Aristotle, of the "tabular rasa", and of Plato, who argued that certain functions are innate and not learned. One can choose which point of view they adhere to, and explore them and see which speaks as being more accurate according to their own experience and understanding, but it's subjective either way. Still, yes, we need to be "brought up to speed" to a degree, and without that, there is no higher level of consciousness anyway.
Take for example, cases of young children who were abandoned early on, and were in one form or another, "raised by wolves" or became what is known as "feral children". There are many examples of such who were the subject of intense psychological study. Most never developed the ability later in life to speak. All had severe forms of mental development and neurological disorders. They did not inherit culture young, that is, did not inherit language, customs, emotional regulation, or any of that stuff. They are likely not capable of forming internal narratives either. So certainly this is case arguing in favor of Aristotle and the blank slate.
Yet these feral children did survive - they found what they needed to continue living one way or another, as a reaction to a felt urge. That is the innate processes of Plato. So it's a bit of both - there is that which is innate, and that which is learned, or in the more modern terms, nature
and nurture.
Were there just a single man living on earth free to do as he pleased and no-one else to worry about, no-one else to restrict what he does, that man would have no concept of messiah or gods. He may wonder why he is there, who or what put him there, where he is going, but he would be largely free from the divisive paradigms that most humans are pre-programmed with.
If that single man did not develop as a function of the larger system of cultural "programming", as in if he were not taught to speak, he would lack the capacity to think, or to form memory, or to have higher order narratives, or even likely to have any higher level consciousness. The very tools we use to reflect on our conditions (be they internal levels and types of consciousness, or external commentary on the world around us), entirely depend on first having received a "programming". Yes, these are all false by default, in that they collect the various forms of subversion inside them that are designed to create power imbalances (master-slave dynamics), because it is only this way that societies can ultimately be ruled. I'm not disagreeing with that.
What I am suggesting is that, it is through language, thoughts, and to varying degrees emtions, that we understand and related to ourselves and the world (and later on we can build more complex structures on top of this, such as archetypes), but the basis for thoughts is language, and the basis for language is the communication of narrative concepts. In the very basest form we can ask the question, of what the use is for nature to have developed communication? It is a signaling from one life form to another, expressing a want or need. A signal, any signal, is an expression of a sort of a time based differentiation. All signals are narratives, that is, they communicate a message.
These narratives can be small or large, but they are still entirely that. We may think of culture as a preferential collection of themes, which is sub-set of the larger human "history", which is just the ever running receipt-tape of collected narratives. Ones own personal history is a subset of all this as well, and narrative runs through it. If you think back to your life, you can pick and choose out a nearly unlimited amount of memories with causality attached to them that tell a story. This is why I say:
"as it is encoded into the causalities of our functioning (for example memory)."
You're saying that our memories have an archetype encoded in them somewhere, and that all narratives must have the archetype in them? Why?
Some archetypes can also be understood as grammatical operators. If we think of binary code, there are simple operators and logic gates which do the act of modifying or transforming the data stream, and it is through these acts of transformation that calculations can be done, which leads to a code that can execute some function. Within the structure of language, these archetypes present themselves as verbs and conjunctions of verbs, as adjectives, and it all happens to the pronoun (or some noun). It's the structure of data streams, and the structures of all narratives and all communications, that there has to be a signal whose function is to modify another signal. These are all, in their own specific ways, transformative operations.
The transformative operation outputs a modifications of a signal in such a way that its methods of modifications are opaque, and if we wish to actually see and understand how it modified the signal, we must then make our nature similar to the nature of the operator. If we do that, then we understand why the operator transformed the signal, because we took in part of the nature of the operator ourselves, and with it incorporated the underlaying logic whereby it functions.
Now granted, one may say: "Sure Lux, but you are describing such a miniscule aspect of a small part of the structure of language, and it doesn't really related to larger scale phenomenon such as overall culture, language, power dynamic, politics, and so on", and yes, you are right, I am merely described some very small subtle operation within language, but I would argue that there is nothing else than this. It's the very basis for the computation that all language, all code, all communication does. Anything else that exists does so as layers on top of this base reality, just like LLM and AI's only exist as complex layers under a very simple set of binary operations.
I can show you an oak tree, thereby we know that oak trees exist or at the least an illusion of an oak tree exists. The concept of a messiah is something completely different.
Krishnamurti had an interesting thing to say: "the day you teach the child the name of a bird, the child will never see that bird again". It doesn't matter whether we agree with what he did with his life, or if we believe in Theosophy like he did, what matters is whether we think this message is true, and if we understand what it is saying. Within linguistic philosophy, the Whorf Hypothesis basically states the same thing, which in a very oversimplified way can be stated as: language determines and limits thought. My favorite expression of this is actually the way Terence Mckenna put it:
I’ve made this example before: a child lying in a crib, and a hummingbird comes into the room, and the child is ecstatic, because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention—it’s just wonderful. I mean, it is an instantaneous miracle when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper of the nursery and so forth. But then mother, or nanny, or someone, comes in and says, “It’s a bird, baby. Bird. Bird.” And this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile and places it over the miracle and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum. And from now on the miracle is confined within the meaning of the (Text sourced from https://www.organism.earth/library/document/man-thinks-god-knows-god-knows-man-thinks) word. And by the time a child is four or five or six, no light shines through. They have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation. Full transcript here.
We understand the oak tree because we have reduced it to a symbol, and we can now treat it as a syntactical piece of code within communication. Apart from that, we don't "understand" what the oak tree is at all. Its very existence beckons the most primal question that either exist before the advent of consciousness, or co-exist with the first awakenings of consciousness: "why does existence exist at all? What is this place? What am 'I'???"
The messiah is just another part of the code, and I do agree that it is used externally as a method of control, just like in the second Matrix where Neo realized the same thing, when he learns that the machines need "The One" as part of a reset subroutines to maintain dominance, but my argument is that it being used as a method of control is a form of subversion of a process that is innate to all narrative (all code, all language, all communication). That the general understanding of "the messiah" has become a bastardized joke used to control I agree with wholeheartedly, and enough people have a sour taste in their mouth surrounding that topic that it is difficult to explore deeper into what it is. It is the resolution of the narrative, and in light of a larger scale historical / political / religious framework, it takes on those elements of that framework. Within a much smaller framework, such as the context of a simple line of code or a simple sentence, that resolution of the narrative still exists.
Religion and any human constructed system of belief or behaviour should be seen for what it is. It is not reality, it is human narrative created for a purpose. Part of that purpose is always to chain the mind, limit thinking and steer people in a certain direction. That is not the route to liberation or freedom.
I deal with symbols and ideas and illusion. I do not believe there is any "real" reality outside of this. Everything is story, whether it was programmed into you by someone else, or you built yourself. Liberation in the grand scheme is complete liberations from all of this.
Granted, one can select specific things to be liberated from, while still accepting other things one does not feel they need liberation from. Comfortable with certain levels of the illusion in order to continue partaking in the system in some meaningful way, or aware of the total illusory nature of the reality but still choosing to interact with it for some purpose. This is, for example, the structural divide between buddha / bodhisattva.
@Pilgrim if I am able to communicate well enough, you understand I do not disagree with what you are saying as a whole. To reiterate something I have often written about, I think all models are useful if they aid us in traversing whatever territory we are traversing. If one is traversing territory, that is what matters, as there is movement, progress, transformation. The experience explains itself, to yourself, even through the falsities of the symbols and understanding which are themselves all illusions.
It's all smoke and mirrors, but that is not to say one cannot use these to build a temporary scaffold that falls away once one is done using it. Where you fly is up to you.
