#we should just accept them as immutable facts of the universe that can never ever change

[edelgarfield]

it's all "be gay do crime" until someone posts a link to their ko-fi on ao3.

[thewrongexecution]

thinkin’ ‘bout final fantasy

I go by Not The Author for exactly the reason that I ain’t no expert on any given work of fiction, but I do like to make connections what make me seem smart: an illusion, haphazardly crafted by incident accident and supplemented by precocious pretentiousness. All the same, here are some fun thoughts I had that you might also enjoy!

I do have a point, that I do get to. I feel like I should say that ahead of time, all things considered. Like, I can appreciate if you can’t appreciate a shaggy dog story? But there is a point to all this.

...Eventually.

Spoiler Warning:

Final Fantasies 1, 6, 7, 7R, 13 and 15

Content Warning:

Discussion of death

Cussin’

Length warning:

5621 words

13 sections

16 digressions

Let’s dig in.

- - - - -

Final Fantasy 1 was not my first Final Fantasy experience, but I think it was the first I ever played by myself? The remaster for the GBA, came bundled with FF2 on the same cart, which I played briefly but did not complete and do not remember, except that it had Cid.

FF1 doesn’t have a Cid, but I really loved the narrative anyway, straightforward as it was, because it was very specifically about spitting in the face of an uncaring god who would doom the world for a laugh. Take these chains that bind us to darkness and, though we be forgot to history, strangle with them that selfsame darkness to bring an end to its tyranny.

((it is a terrible curse, to love time travel. so many grand expectations, so few ever met. play ghost trick, chrono trigger, radiant historia, majora’s mask, outer wilds. have you any recs yourself, lemme know! I digress.

((I digress a lot, as I may have mentioned. they’ll be noted in parenthetical, like this.))

This is the foundation upon which Final Fantasy is built, and while any student of architecture could tell you of many and varied perfectly valid construction techniques, it resonates. Grappling with an immutable past to course-correct an uncaring future is, too, an apt description of personal growth; a theme as universal as being alive. And I, as an impressionable youth, ate that shit up.

((I assume I was young, at any rate. my love for time travel, be it era-spanning or moment-stretching, is, I suspect, not entirely coincidental to my terrible temporal memory.))

And that was the tale of the studio, too. Final Fantasy was so titled because, the story goes, the developers knew they would shutter if it didn’t make bank. Staring your imminent demise in the face, knowing your fate is doom, and giving it your all, all the same.

And then they made another twelve, plus two-and-a-half MMOs, and god knows how many mobile games and spin-offs, and now the Fantasy is that there could ever be a Final one. so say I: life parodies art.

((the half-an-MMO is FF14 1.0, which no longer exists and is a fascinating tale, a rally against bleak futures all its own. I’ll [link] Noclip’s three-part documentary covering the developer’s side of things, because that’s the one I’ve seen. there’s plenty other material to hunt down, though, if you wanna.))

- - - - -

Final Fantasy VII is a game about fate, too. Particularly Death, that most ultimate of fates. Tragic, to be sure; preventable, or at least delayable, in many cases; necessary, at times, for the growth of something new.

Unrelenting. Unstoppable. Inescapable.

Death, and the fights against it, take many forms. There are the fascist death squads that hunt down your ragtag band and any dissent against their cruel masters, but these will only truly stop by cutting off the hydra’s head and building an entirely new society; eight dudes and their dog, faced with a corporate private military, can survive but never win. There are such disasters as do slay that hydra, be they natural or man-made. There’s the space alien and the apocalypse it ushers. There’s literal illness and injury, physical or otherwise. There are the deaths of loved ones, friends and family, that lead to some subtler deaths within those that survive them. The deaths of relationships, by neglect or abandonment. The ideological deaths we inflict on ourselves, accepting ever-growing lesser evils in the name of some impossible ideal.

Every day, the person we were becomes the person we are, and soon, the person we are will give way to someone new, and this, too, is a sort of death. In this sense, we tally Cloud’s deaths at least five: failure to become a Soldier and rebirth in shame, the massacre of Nibelheim and rebirth in grief, arrival at Midgar and rebirth in delusion, his cratering at the Crater and rebirth in nihilism, and his death and rebirth in the Lifestream of Mideel.

((you could prolly hunt down another two if you wanna be cheeky, but I lack the knowledge, motive and patience. frankly, this whole thing is to create a leading line of logic and probably isn’t, uh. academically ethical? or whatever the term is. I’m not necessarily wrong, but I’m definitely scuttling nuance. oh well!))

Now, I say “rebirth,” because that’s how deaths of identity more-or-less work. There’s usually some new identity waiting in the wings to take over. And rebirth is itself a notable theme, inasmuch as it is one outcome of death. But death is oft more final than that, and what people do in its imminence and wake is key here, too. Wutai’s collapse into an insular tourist trap. Avalanche’s vengeful fervor, in general and post-plate drop. Bugenhagen trying to pass his knowledge on to Red. The whole party’s ongoing post-traumatic depressive episodes.

Ultimately, death is the inescapable fate of all things. It’s what we do, in light of that, that makes us who we are.

- - - - -

Final Fantasies 13 and 15 are the only modern Final Fantasies I’ve beaten, and I bring them up because both deal very prominently with fate and death, and as Square’s most recent mainline FF titles, Remake can’t exist without comparison to them. Here’s what I remember:

Final Fantasy 13 was a game I enjoyed. The stagger system mixed up my casual FF tradition of Get The Big Numbers by putting a prominent UI element onscreen that says You Can’t Get The Big Numbers Unless The Bar Is Full. Suddenly there’s a natural-but-enforced ebb and flow to combat built in, where you gotta juggle chip damage, survival, and crowd control while keeping resources enough to burst down a staggered foe, but maintain situational awareness to swap back into survival mode if you’re not gonna down your enemy, all in something close to real-time. Very obviously a direct precursor to the combat of Remake. I didn’t realize the depth of it, but it was still super fun.

People at the time didn’t like the linearity of the game and, I can see that in retrospect? I think it’s closer to, there weren’t breakpoints, there wasn’t variety. It was cutscenes, combat, and the stretches of land between them; the only real thing for the brain to get a workout on was the combat, and eating only one kinda food is gonna make that food taste bland.

((I didn’t mind, but I like idle games, and, also probably had depression around then. Take that how you will.))

The story, though, I loved. You got your uncaring gods forcing mortals to do their increasingly-impossible bidding, cursing them to agonized unlife if they take too long, and with blissful, beautiful death if they succeed. It sucks! And here you have a ragtag band of incidental idiots trying to rebel against a system that, actually, wants them to? Like that’s the plan? Have mortals kill god and summon the devil to destroy all life, because god, doesn’t.... like life anymore?

((The lore gets more than a little impenetrable, and I remember bouncing off it a couple times. The throughline of God Sucks And Makes Zombies was good though.))

The biblical parallels are obvious, and if they weren’t, the final boss’ design will clue you in, god that’s a good design. hang on I can add pictures and already tossed a spoiler warning, here, look at this:

(per the Final Fantasy Fandom Wiki [X])

That’s literally The Holy Trinity But A Sword The Size Of A Building. It’s perfect.

Anyway, I love this game, because the heroes win, which is what God wants, so in winning, they lose, as was fated to be, right? Fuck All That, say the lesbians from space australia, as they turn into satan and, as satan, stop God’s shitty metal moon from crashing into space australia and destroying all life.

((this awakened something in me, though, as is becoming a theme, I wasn’t aware of it at the time. actually hold up I’m gonna rewatch that sequence.

((yeah okay wow on review that was aggressively cheesy and had a whole bunch of weird emotional whiplash that just leaves a super-bad aftertaste. I don’t really like it as an experience, but big bazonga lesbian satan with arms for hair is still a look-and-a-half.))

The whole thing is not entirely unlike if meteor was also Midgar, and there’s more than a few points where I went, hang on, are they trying to evoke 7 here? “Lightning” is ex-military and bad at emotions, Sazh is a black dad w/ guns and emotional trauma and I love him, quirky pink healer girl who might be an alien is here, the game starts on a train and leads into a robot bug fight; obviously it’s not one-to-one but the connections are there for a brain like mine to make, and only more prominent for the fact that FF7 was the more satisfying game.

((I cannot speak to 13-2 or -3; 13-2 was fun up until the enemies were abruptly 30 levels higher than me, more or less a mandate by the game for me to do all the side content, which I was not on-board with. I skipped 13-3 entirely, especially when I learned the whole game is on a timer. did not and do not need that stress in my life.))

- - - - -

But okay, FF13 was “too linear” and wasn’t doing super great. Enter Final Fantasy Versus 13, by which I mean enter Final Fantasy 15 actually, we don’t need any more of this 13 crap. And once again, I enjoyed it! ...Right up until it was bad.

Final Fantasy 15 was not a finished game, and we know this for certain now, because all its DLC was to make it a finished game. At the time, though, there was uncomfortable and inconsistent story pacing, only one playable character, relatively sparse combat mechanics... but it was open-world, and hey, that’s what you wanted, right? open, non-linear environments? I picked it up because, Teleporting Swordsman With a Motorcycle Sword. I am of simple pleasures, and those are they.

Of the little I remember, one point that’s stuck with me is the sequence following the Leviathan fight. See, we’ve been talking about fate and destiny and how Final Fantasy likes to spite them. Here in 15, our main man Noctis doesn’t want the destiny he’s been burdened with, to Become The King and Save The World from the Coming Darkness, or whatever. He’d really rather be doing, anything else? like hanging out with his buddies or actually getting married or, I dunno, grieving the death of his father. Nope! You don’t get to do that. Go find the ghost armaments of your dead ancestors so you can ~saaave the wooorld!~ I would have been in college around then, so, eminently relatable.

Now, on this journey, you meet a guy called Ardyn. He’s the sort of character that was built as an attack on me personally: sleazy, charming, possessing airs of casual familiarity with people he’s never met, kinda helps you out in tight spots, and also, by the way, vizier to the empire that killed your dad and wants you and your friends dead too. But not in the “secret good guy” way, he just likes fucking with you! he’s perfect.

Right up until the Leviathan fight.

See, Lunafreya, your betrothed--

((I’m so mad about this stupid, stupid garbage. I love Lunafreya on principle, but the game doesn’t bother to give her screentime. you only ever hear about her incidentally, which can be cool if you then meet the character and get to compare/contrast what you’ve heard, but the initial release only has her show up for this one chapter, and your party doesn’t really get to interact with her that much.))

Your betrothed is here and she’s some symbol of the peoples’ hope, right? she’s got light magic or something, and can actually commune with the gods. the gods are on your side, but you can’t actually understand a word they say, but she can, and that’s sick as hell. anyway.

You lose the fight against Leviathan, because you’re a shitty emo teen who doesn’t know how to use your ghost swords, and she got beat up earlier when Levi got all pissy at being summoned. And then Ardyn shows up in his magitek dropship.

Now earlier, Ardyn had Luna as his captive, completely at his mercy, and right now, he who would be king of kings, destined to save the world from darkness, is clutching at rock in a hurricane, beaten, wounded and dying.

Of the two, which do you think he stabs to death?

if you thought, “the protagonist, which will allow him to win, and subvert Final Fantasy’s themes of defying fate by having the villain be the one to do it, forcing everyone else to scramble for some alternate solution and deal with the fallout,” congratulations! You win disappointment, because that idea’s cool as hell and they didn’t. fucking. Do it.

((Ardyn, before this, had given me major Kefka vibes, and thinking on it now, the world descending into darkness in the 15 we never had could have played with even deeper parallels to FF6... but I never played 6, and that FF15 doesn’t exist, so... I’ll leave that analysis to better scholars.))

now, with the benefit of hindsight, that was never going to happen. too long in development hell, game had to ship, had no time or budget for mid-game upheaval. but at the time? made me lose any interest I had in Ardyn, made me mad at the developers for passing up on fulfilling the themes their series had explored in past, made me almost stop playing the game. I’m still mad about it for crying out loud!

((thinking about it gets me tensed up, coiled, with that sort of full-body thrum that’s best conveyed with letters that jitter around. best I can do here is bold italics, but it doesn’t have the right energy. it’s a fleeting feeling, but when it’s here? god. given the men that wrote this scene I would fight all of them and win.

((inhale...

((exhale...

((and move on.))

We, the player, never really meet Luna, so there’s no real... impact, no substance to it. It’s sad, but impersonal. villain kills damsel to inflict manpain on hero. that’s it. we’ve seen this song and dance before.

But kill Noctis? The character the player’s been controlling all this time, who they know intimately? Now it’s personal. Now your party members’ grief is a mirror to your own. And now you get to play as Luna, maybe? give the game time to flesh her out, have her bond with your old companions over their shared grief, and maybe use her connections and public speaking skills to rally the people of the world, in a perhaps-vain attempt to resist the oncoming darkness, while simultaneously using that public-facingness to drive her to hide her own fear and hopelessness...? That’s a complex character ripe for drama and tragedy right there! And then her, at the head of a story about people coming together to solve a global calamity themselves, rather than await their appointed savior?

Even then, but especially now... You can see the appeal, right?

- - - - -

Lemme step back and zoom out for a moment, because there’s one more kind of Fate to discuss before I finalize my thesis. Yes, I promise, there is a point besides being mad at FF15, this is still ultimately about Remake. Bear with me a little longer.

See, Remake’s premise is that it’s not quite FF7, but that itself is predicated on Remake being essentially FF7. Certain things must be in the Remake series, or it will cease to be the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series. The developers have gone on record saying as much, that they’ll still cover the thrust of the original, and that makes a lot of sense from a development standpoint. Building on an existing framework saves loads of time, and lets them focus on details as they have in Remake.

((I think they've already set up an in-universe justification for this, too. The party may have defeated the Whispers at Midgar, but the Whispers are the will of the planet. The only way to truly defeat them would be to defeat the planet itself, which: kind of the goal of the villains!

((a bit ironic, because the villains are the Whispers’ means to keep manipulating events. Remake backends a very large portion of the plot, and I don’t think Rufus seeing the Whispers is a throwaway detail. The party chases Sephiroth by chasing Shinra in the original, so even if the party has shaken free of the direct influence of the Whispers, manipulating Shinra should in turn manipulate the party.

((on top of which, Rufus prizes power, and the power to change or control fate-- something both the party and Sephiroth have seized-- would be as enticing as anything.))

But this begs the question: How much of Final Fantasy 7 is necessary before it stops being Final Fantasy 7? Do you need all nine characters? The Weapons? Rideable chocobo? Breedable chocobo? What about locations? Can you drop the Gold Saucer? or Mount Condor? or Mideel? How many minigames am I holding up? These are necessary questions, but so is this:

“Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?”

- - - - -

Now, the phrase “emotional impact” is necessarily kind of nebulous and subjective, so lemme dig into that a little bit.

The first significant chunk of the original FF7 takes place entirely in Midgar, which is one huge city. Every screen is densely packed; movement is typically constrained to narrow corridors and industrial crawlspaces. The whole world is deeply claustrophobic and visually hostile, by design.

This is FF7 for the first few hours, before a motorcycle chase deposits you outside city limits, and then... you hit the world map, and everything changes. The world is rendered in three whole dimensions, now! (Then, a technological marvel in its own right.) There’s a sky! There’s a horizon! Grass, mountains, the ocean!

Boundless, terrifying freedom.

From a mechanical standpoint, there’s only one real destination, an A-to-B with random encounters before a small enclosure with an inn and shops, no real change from what you’ve already been doing. But the mood? Everything’s fresh and new, now. Everything’s an unknown.

So, how do we do that again, two-and-a-half decades on?

Let’s say, something like this: Remake 2 starts with Cloud and Sephiroth en route to Nibelheim. For new players, this provides immediate intrigue: why are these mortal enemies hanging out in a truck? how did they get here, where are they going? For veterans, it’s familiar: oh, we’re in the flashback sequence.

For both, it provides mechanical familiarity. We just finished last game hanging out in Midgar, a bunch of town squares with shops and cutscenes connected to hazardous corridors. Well, Nibelheim’s a town with shops and cutscenes, connected to a monster-filled anthill and capped with a reactor. We know this. We’ve done this. We can do this again.

And when the flashback ends, we’re in Kalm. Another town, maybe with sidequests this time; Midgar looming in the distant skybox as a reminder of how far we’ve come.

And then you leave Kalm, and the camera zooms out, and out, and out...

Remake is essentially 7, and you can’t have the impact of 7′s world map reveal if Remake isn’t functionally open-world too. Square has plenty of experience with open environments, however successful their more recent attempts have been; I’m confident that the have the ability, at least, to craft an expansive world that feels appropriate to FF7.

((I’d like to take a moment here to talk about FF14, which mixes both compact twisty dungeons and wide-open overworld zones, and is necessarily wildly successful to still be operating as an MMO... but though I have played it briefly, I don’t claim knowledge sufficient to go in-depth. The point is, Square not only can make a game like that, they have, and are, and apparently possess non-zero competency. I have worries, but I’m not worried, if that makes sense.))

So, can you recreate a given kind of emotional impact? Yeah!

Can scenes from the original Final Fantasy 7 be rendered into a new context, more-or-less as they were? Absolutely!

Would a one-to-one recreation of the original game have the same emotional impact as when it released, twenty-three years ago?

- - - - -

Aerith dies.

If you opened this post and didn’t know that, well. There were spoiler warnings up at the top, the game’s more than two decades old, and the spoiler itself is basically a piece of pop-culture, up there with space dad and wizard killer. There’re probably plenty of people who know next-to-nothing about Final Fantasy 7 except that Aerith dies.

Everyone knows because, at the time, it was so big a thing. This was a title that Square hyped to heaven and back to push JRPGs into mainstream western markets, and it worked. And this was before major death was so common and arbitrary as it is today; even now, Game of Thrones and its ilk are a relative rarity. The death of a protagonist or love interest wasn’t a new thing for games, or any media really, but usually you knew it was coming, or it served some purpose. Aerith’s death was sudden, arbitrary, you’re almost immediately thrown into a boss fight so you don’t even have time to process it right away, and it’s the first stone in an avalanche of other pointless arbitrary tragedy. It’s an obvious narrative setup for the endgame confrontation with Sephiroth; instead, Cloud has a breakdown, Meteor happens, and now there’s an entire Disk 2.

Fandom has always been fandom, even before the continuous immediacy of the modern internet, but... people wrote letters to Square, and got sad on message boards. There’s an entire subset of forum signatures, back when those were a thing, that you could sort as “people fucked up over Aerith dying.” And again, this was the world. Not just Japan, or Asia, but everyone.

((Or, everyone with the finances to have a PS2 and/or an internet connection. Gaming as a pastime remains way expensive, whether played or watched. But you know how it is.))

And that’s the problem with answering that question.

See, FF7 is a lot of things, but for better or worse, it is defined by Aerith’s death. It’s one of many factors, but you can’t... leave it out, right? or it wouldn’t be FF7 anymore.

Aerith dies in FF7, and everyone knows it.

- - - - -

But Remake has promised, repeatedly, that things will be different this time. Everyone is coming together to defy fate, and Cloud in particular is here to keep Aerith from dying. Bodyguard jokes aside, Cloud repeatedly has flashbacks (flashforwards?) to Aerith’s death and the events leading to it. When he meets her in the church, when they cross into Sector 6, twice in the final battle. Hell, the very first time they meet, Sephiroth taunts him about not being able to save her. Even from a metatextual standpoint, since everyone knows Aerith dies, that’s like, The Most Obvious Fate To Change.

If, after all that, Aerith still dies? It’s not just tragedy, at that point. That’s the developers, actively lying to the player about their intent in making this game series. That’s frustrating, and immersion-breaking, and when said death is likely to still have one or more entire sequels to come after? maybe not great for sales! I know I didn’t bother buying the complete edition of FF15; I couldn’t bring myself to care enough about a game that set up this cool possibility, and then just, failed to deliver on every count.

And, Remake is being made for two audiences. I’ve said “everybody knows Aerith dies,” but that’s not really true, is it? It’s been 23 years, after all. Remake could well be someone’s very first Final Fantasy experience. That’s why they’ve been telegraphing Aerith’s death so hard. Not everyone knows, but at least everyone can guess. Is it fair, then, to this new audience, with potentially no knowledge or understanding of the legacy of this flashy new action game, to foreshadow tragedy in the future, have everyone come together to say, We’re Going To Stop This, and then... not? Is that good writing? Is that satisfying? When this is a multi-game and potentially multi-console investment of time and money, is this, as a newcomer, a story you’d want to keep playing?

And then on top of that, it’s 2020.

I don’t mean that in the current-year-fallacy, “we’re better than this now” kind of way. Rather, the way I felt about Final Fantasy 15 is even more relevant now. People, in real life, are realizing that the powers-that-be are failing them, have failed them, have been failing them for far longer than twenty-three years. The people that already knew that are actually showing up for each other, to spite what felt and feels like inescapable fate and finding that, together, they might just be able to ruin God’s day.

Game development is, of course, its own whole beast, and projects in motion tend to stay in motion; deviating from a plan takes time and money that Square may be unwilling to spend. But, under current world circumstances: is making a game where the hero sets out to save one specific person from their fated death, and following that with a game where that one specific person dies anyway, aside from everything else, a good business decision?

- - - - -

So... Aerith, shouldn’t die, right...? But, FF7 requires Meteor, and so requires the Temple of the Ancients and the Black Materia. And, Meteor can only be stopped by Holy, so FF7 requires the Forgotten City.

FF7 is a tragedy. FF7 demands blood.

...Hey, actually, hold that thought. How come Cloud can remember Aerith dying in the first place? He’s not from the future, right? He’s got a connection to Sephiroth, who is from the future... and Sephiroth can manipulate his memories...? but, why would Sephiroth let him, or make him, remember that?

Hey, how come Zack is alive, but like, in the “narrative scope” sense? Wouldn’t his presence circumvent Cloud’s delusions about the Nibelheim incident?

Hey, how come Cloud had multiple big climactic Sephiroth confrontations at what’s essentially the end of the prologue, including one that mirrors the very end of the original FF7? Shouldn’t that still come at, like, you know. the end?

Hey, how come--

- - - - -

Remake has these... Callbacks? Refrains? Like my favorite, when Sephiroth throws a train-- you know, The Fate Metaphor-- at Cloud, who absolutely shreds the thing. Or, for a more direct example:

And it frequently uses these to show that people are changing, that things can change. You know, the whole Running Theme the game has going on.

Sephiroth gets a refrain, too.

At the start of the game (give or take a reactor), in his first real appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, makes sure Cloud hates him, and tells Cloud what he wants.

At the end of the game, in his last appearance, Sephiroth philosophizes at Cloud, tells Cloud what he wants, and makes sure Cloud hates him.

Structurally, these encounters more-or-less bookend the game; thematically, it doesn’t exactly indicate change. Barret may or may not have come around on Cloud, and his admission that Cloud is important to him after all is, itself, important. Cloud, on the other hand, was always going to defy Sephiroth. He stands resolute, now, ready to fight rather than flee, but apathy was never on the table.

Now, Sephiroth’s whole Thing is psychologically manipulating Cloud to get what he wants, and as part of that, what Sephiroth wants is usually not what he says he wants.

All throughout the original FF7, Sephiroth riled up Cloud so that Cloud would pursue and defy him, culminating first in the Black Materia incident, and then again in the Forgotten City. None of the Sephiroth clones could survive the trip through the Northern Crater, so Sephiroth had to lure Cloud, with the Black Materia, to him, and then also convince Cloud to give up the Black Materia of his own accord. Mind control, memory manipulation and illusions were involved, but if Sephiroth could maintain those indefinitely, he probably just. Would have done that instead. Way easier,

The point is, in Remake, in addition to all the intermittent retraumitization sprinkled throughout the game, Sephiroth goes out of his way twice to directly ask Cloud, “hey, you hate me, right?” And, as part of that question, he tells Cloud, “this is what I want.” And Cloud? He hates Sephiroth, and will do his damnedest to keep Sephiroth from getting what he wants.

So. What does Sephiroth... say he wants?

- - - - -

One last aside before we cap off: This post would not exist without the valiant efforts of one Maximilian_dood. His devotion to the series kept myself and many others engaged and excited and, frankly, hopeful, in the leadup to the release of Remake, and his correlations between the rest of the FF7 series and Remake were enlightening and entertaining.

and had he not the gall to identify defying fate as a device to make aerith’s death more tragic, I would never have been angry enough to write this.

((I know, I know. Gaming and streaming and lit analysis are all hard individually, and I don’t begrudge losing one for the other two. And it was a first playthrough! I might have seen these lines sooner than some, but collating all this info was certainly not instantaneous. And Square can be hack writers at times-- see again my rant on FF15-- so even then, I can’t discount the possibility.

((but, still.

((Really?))

So, while I would like to believe that I have, by now, made my thesis on Remake’s narrative direction abundantly clear, here it is spelled out anyway:

- - - - -

At the bottom of the Forgotten City, at the shrine on the pillar in the lake, Cloud will find Aerith, who believes her fate immutable.

Sephiroth will descend, and Cloud will sacrifice himself, that Aerith should live.

This is Sephiroth’s plan.

- - - - -

Hey, thanks for reading this far! With my conversational tone and rambling tendencies, I’d have preferred to make this an audio post or, god forbid, a video essay, but I got a keyboard, and that’ll have to do. Diction is important to me, as the capitalization, italics and use of punctuation may have clued you in on, so... maybe you’ll get a dramatic reading sometime in the future? but, don’t bet on it.

Feel free to riddle me with questions, or point out inconsistencies with this big ol’ thing! I’m not exactly an expert, and I’m sure I glossed over, heavily paraphrased, completely forgot, intentionally ignored and/or aggressively misrepresented some stuff, but I love learning and teaching esoteric bullshit about The Vijigams. On that note, anything that sounds like it should be sourced is sourced from “I heard about it on social media or in a stream or youtube video one time, but if I actually had to hunt it down this whole thing would never see the light of day, and it has already been like three months,” which isn’t to excuse my lack of due diligence, but I do, lack diligence, so, tough.

Oh! but the Remake screens all come from [here]. Don’t care much for that splash screen, but, I Get It, so, whatever.

There were some other things I wanted to touch on but couldn’t really find a spot for. FF7 Remake as a metaphor for its own development, for example. Or, some of The Possibilities, like how Cloud’s death could very literally haunt Aerith, or how Remake sets up a more fleshed-out Midgar revisit that Cloud’s death specifically would make infinitely sadder.

On that note, if it was not yet obvious, I love speculation, and if they do go this direction, it’ll probably be their justification to go completely... off the rails? Remake only has to be FF7 until it doesn’t, after all. If there’s some wilder implications youall see for like... I dunno, a Jenova more fully-regenerated from also having Cloud’s cells back, getting into proper Kaiju-on-Kaiju battles with the Weapons, or anything like that? Feed me your brain juice, etc.

And, once more, for the road: this is interpretation; subjective, opinionated, and very much in denial of any kind of author-ity. Nor is this a claim on how things should be, or an assertion that this would be good or bad. Everything ultimately rests on Square's narrative design team and, we’ve touched on them already.

((but, for your consideration: I’m smart, and right))

Here’s hoping, whatever happens, we get the game we deserve.

thanks for coming to my ted talk, have a great day

[lookwhatilost]

breadtube types love to think that every proud boy kind of dude was, at some point, 1 good conversation away from leaning left at some angle, fully ignoring the elephant in the room – their dad's failing small business they feel entitled to inherit bc they're NOT working class.

to me, the big question is why are the breadtubers so afraid of drawing a line in the sand? why are they afraid of the possibility (inevitability) of irreconcilable material interests? have they never worked fast food or retail? this shit is so obvious. nazis are pretty much all rich. and if they're not "cash rich" they're property rich, which actually is not a lesser kind of rich. they stand to inherit something, a business or some rentals etc. if they're not part of haute bourgeoisie they're part of petit bourgeoisie which, it turns out, is still the bourgeoisie.

idk why i expose myself to this garbage. i hate anything even marginally sympathetic to these pieces of shit. if a white person whose only difference from them is sexual orientation & gender can turn out like me, it's pretty clear what the problem is so fuck any angle on how they're actually innocent uwu. ultimately i find it so offensive & fash-sympathetic (thus fascist) to say only thing separating me from them is ideology. yeah okay w/e we're all cis people etc, but they dnt work for a living, and if you ignore that shit you legitimize their framing of themselves as normal. if you rly want to pull people in that minuscule population of fence-riders leftwards in a meaningful sense you'd make them confront the fact that their class is condemned to die by history & their only hope is to betray it. if they can't agree to that, what use are they to us?

the lack of instrumental thinking is epidemic in rhetoric-obsessed communities. what utility comes from delivering another slur-vomiting cracker parroting chan memes to The Left? we have to constantly police the mf? we hold his hand until he predictably becomes an "ex-sjw"? sometimes (usually) the people who are engaged and on the border enough that they "might" have "potentially" become reluctant communists are best used as fertilizer for the gardens that provide employment to the people we serve who never ever considered being goddamn nazis.

if you insist on climbing all the way down into hell to rescue a few of the demons, you simply cannot come back to earth pretending you brought us angels, much less that you have not experienced, yourself, why they wanted to be in hell. it's silly vestigial christian cultural bullshit to see any kind of value in rescuing a fascist from themself. in practical reality, you are simply forcing naturally decent people to put up with indefinite burden of a whiny shit whose life helps working ppl less than their death. happy to agree that "privilege" analysis provides a decent framework for priority. all else being equal a more marginalized person makes for a "more revolutionary" leader, etc. this is not reconcilable with the opinion that we should recruit reluctant defectors from enemy classes as active members, much less leaders, of our orgs. idk where the pathological desire to win the enemy over comes from but it is absolutely suicidal. regardless of the organization in question, any people who joined it reluctantly should be paying their dues, not defining the agenda

you could prob convince Logic/Reason Leftists of practical immutability of material interest if you had data on nazis being wealthy but of course they trust nazis' self-reporting & nazis always do stonetoss shit linking their own lawyer-son asses to off-color construction workers. and i’m using using "nazi" ~liberally~ in this offhand opinion, bc to me, any settler-colonial fascist is a nazi, and anything that would make them "more like", idk, an italian neo-fascist, is mostly a reminder of how bad the italians failed at their settler-colonial aims, so who gives a fuck.

thanks for reading or at least tolerating the existence of this rambling stream of consciousness. i would have written a real essay with sources and arguments for everyone's edification, but i have neither the capacity for focus to write one nor the desire to publish it.

(for reference, here is a commonly-recommended video that exemplifies the empathetic zoological economically-agnostic oh-shucks-he's-just-a-sad-normal-white-boy-he-is narrative of how a young man in north america becomes a literal brownshirt nazi)

note specifically where the narrator talks abt how "far right thought leaders" may not "see themselves as" or "intend to become" such "far right thought leaders" but are ~merely~ shills for consumer products "incidentally" popular among "alt-righters". also key to this video's reconstruction of online fascist indoctrination is "politics as a set of affects, not a set of beliefs", as thought "affects" of online nazis like stefan molyneux, blaire white, etc are universally disarming, that they wouldn't seem "off" to "normal" ppl. this necessarily defines "normal" people as people in a position to ~discover blatantly white nationalist arguments w unblemished curiosity, people w no awareness of the existence of white nationalism per se - i.e. it accepts as ~normal those "white people w only white friends". the creator also describes a feedback loop wherein grifters become "radicalized" by audiences, chasing engagement etc. this is bullshit, obviously. they're not children. they're grown-ass fascists full of superficial hatred w economic bases, who should be in re-education camps at best.

at several points in nominally(?) anti-fascist narrative of "gabe" narrator describes communities where "minorities" are welcomed insofar as they avoid "identity politics". i get maybe some people can't relate to psychology of fascists but such description can only normalize it. this description necessarily frames addressing of issues of e.g. representation that affect such minorities within such interest communities as something that genuinely, in some sense, diverges from the status quo. as though at some point their marginalization was uncontroversial.

like clockwork, this angle on "alt-right" takes as axiom that communities from which "alt-right" recruits were 1st non-ideological, that fascists represent incursion of ideology &, by implication, so do ppl they oppose. political battle encroaches on something magically apolitical.

later, the creator says 

nazis act "apolitical", dropping hints to divide "our community" from "the left" 

"the left" says "you have a nazi problem, y'all" 

nazis say "jfc have you seen this? they're calling us all nazis for liking thing" 

 how stupid do you think ppl are, dude

from this perspective, communities of consumer interest have some kind of linear basis, origin, development, etc. problem here is that they absolutely dnt. they're continuous & amorphous. also this is obv abt gamers/gg & plenty of us who "played games" had no hate for zoë quinn

[itsjustmyron]

The open society and its enemies by Karl Popper (or Was Plato really such an asshole?)

For these troubles are the by-products of what is perhaps the greatest of all moral and spiritual revolutions of history, a movement which began three centuries ago. It is the longing of uncounted unknown men to free themselves and their minds from the tutelage of authority and prejudice. It is their attempt to build up an open society which rejects the absolute authority of the merely established and the merely traditional while trying to preserve, to develop, and to establish traditions, old or new, that measure up to their standards of freedom, of humaneness, and of rational criticism. It is their unwillingness to sit back and leave the entire responsibility for ruling the world to human or superhuman authority, and their readiness to share the burden of responsibility for avoidable suffering, and to work for its avoidance. This revolution has created powers of appalling destructiveness; but they may yet be conquered.

civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth — the transition from the tribal or 'closed society', with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man.

Why do all these social philosophies support the revolt against civilization? And what is the secret of their popularity? Why do they attract and seduce so many intellectuals? I am inclined to think that the reason is that they give expression to a deep felt dissatisfaction with a world which does not, and cannot, live up to our moral ideals and to our dreams of perfection. The tendency of historicism (and of related views) to support the revolt against civilization may be due to the fact that historicism itself is, largely, a reaction against the strain of our civilization and its demand for personal responsibility.

...the social scientist or philosopher has to survey things from a higher plane. He sees the individual as a pawn, as a somewhat insignificant instrument in the general development of mankind. And he finds that the really important actors on the Stage of History are either the Great Nations and their Great Leaders, or perhaps the Great Classes, or the Great Ideas.

... the central historicist doctrine — the doctrine that history is controlled by specific historical or evolution.

For the chosen people racialism substitutes the chosen race (of Gobineau's choice†), selected as the instrument of destiny, ultimately to inherit the earth.

† Gobineau championed Germanic “Aryans,” a concept borrowed from the study of ancient languages and then applied to an imagined, superior race with traces running throughout the white races.  He articulated these ideas in his lengthy Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853).

[Heraclitus] visualized the world not as an edifice, but rather as one colossal process; not as the sum-total of all things, but rather as the totality of all events, or changes, or facts. 'Everything is in flux and nothing is at rest', is the motto of his philosophy.

[Historicism is characterised by] an over-emphasis upon change, combined with the complementary belief in an inexorable and immutable law of destiny.

[Heraclitus] declares that strife or war is the dynamic as well as the creative principle of all change, and especially of all differences between men. And being a typical historicist, he accepts the judgement of history as a moral one-; for he holds that the outcome of war is always just.

War is the father and the king of all things. It proves some to be gods and others to be mere men, turning these into slaves and the former into masters . . . One must know that war is universal, and that justice — the lawsuit — is strife, and that all things develop through strife and by necessity.—Heraclitus, Fragments

[Plato] believed that to every kind of ordinary or decaying thing there corresponds also a perfect thing that does not decay. This belief in perfect and unchanging things, usually called the Theory of Forms or Ideas, became the central doctrine of his philosophy.

The social engineer does not ask any questions about historical tendencies or the destiny of man. He believes that man is the master of his own destiny and that, in accordance with our aims, we can influence or change the history of man just as we have changed the face of the earth. He does not believe that these ends are imposed upon us by our historical background or by the trends of history, but rather that they are chosen, or even created, by ourselves, just as we create new thoughts or new works of art or new houses or new machinery... the social engineer believes that a scientific basis of politics would be a very different thing; it would consist of the factual information necessary for the construction or alteration of social institutions, in accordance with our wishes and aims.

It is nearly certain, however, that Plato believed that this law of degeneration was not the whole story. We have found, in Heraclitus, a tendency to visualize the laws of development as cyclic laws ; they are conceived after the law which determines the cyclic succession of the seasons. Similarly we can find, in some of Plato’s works, the suggestion of a Great Year (its length appears to be 36,000 ordinary years), with a period of improvement or generation, presumably corresponding to Spring and Summer, and one of degeneration and decay, corresponding to Autumn and Winter. According to one of Plato’s dialogues (the Statesman) a Golden Age, the age of Cronos — an age in which Cronos himself rules the world, and in which men spring from the earth — is followed by our own age, the age of Zeus, an age in which the world is abandoned by the gods and left to its own resources, and which consequently is one of increasing corruption. And in the story of the Statesman there is also a suggestion that, after the lowest point of complete corruption has been reached, the god will again take the helm of the cosmic ship, and things will start to improve.

But he certainly believed that it is possible for us, by a human, or rather by a superhuman effort, to break through the fatal historical trend, and to put an end to the process of decay.

Plato aimed at setting out a system of historical periods, governed by a law of evolution; in other words, he aimed at a historicist theory of society...The first form into which the perfect state degenerates, timocracy, the rule of the ambitious noblemen, is said to be in nearly all respects similar to the perfect state itself... The main difference between the best or ideal state and timocracy is that the latter contains an element of instability; the once united patriarchal ruling class is now disunited, and it is this disunity which leads to the next step, to its degeneration into oligarchy. 'We must describe', says Plato, 'how timocracy changes into oligarchy . . . Even a blind man must see how it changes ... It is the treasure house that ruins this constitution. They' (the timocrats) 'begin by creating opportunities for showing off and spending money, and to this end they twist the laws, and they and their wives disobey them and they try to outrival one another.' In this way arises the first class conflict: that between virtue and money, or between the old-established ways of feudal simplicity and the new ways of wealth. The transition to oligarchy is completed when the rich establish a law that 'disqualifies from public office all those whose means do not reach the stipulated amount. This change is imposed by force of arms, should threats and blackmail not succeed ... 'Democracy is born ... when the poor win the day, killing some..., banishing others, and sharing with the rest the rights of citizenship and of public offices, on terms of equality... ' 

Plato's description of democracy is a vivid but intensely hostile and unjust parody of the political life of Athens, and of the democratic creed which Pericles had formulated in a manner which has never been surpassed, about three years before Plato was born.

The transition from democracy to tyranny, Plato says, is most easily brought about by a popular leader who knows how to exploit the class antagonism between the rich and the poor within the democratic state, and who succeeds in building up a bodyguard or a private army of his own. The people who have hailed him first as the champion of freedom are soon enslaved; and then they must fight for him, in 'one war after another which he must stir up ... because he must make the people feel the need of a general'

Plato's reiterated insistence that good rulers, whether gods or demigods or guardians, are patriarchal shepherds of men, and that the true political art, the art of ruling, is a kind of herdsmanship, i.e. the art of managing and keeping down the human cattle.

To this end, it is important that the master class should feel as one superior master race. 'The race of the guardians must be kept pure'—, says Plato (in defence of infanticide), when developing the racialist argument that we breed animals with great care while neglecting our own race, an argument which has been repeated ever since. (Infanticide was not an Athenian institution; Plato, seeing that it was practised at Sparta for eugenic reasons, concluded that it must be ancient and therefore good.) He demands that the same principles be applied to the breeding of the master race as are applied, by an experienced breeder, to dogs, horses or birds. 'If you did not breed them in this way, don't you think that the race of your birds or dogs would quickly degenerate?' Plato argues; and he draws the conclusion that 'the same principles apply to the race of men'. The racial qualities demanded from a guardian or from an auxiliary are, more specifically, those of a sheep-dog.

A law in sense (a) — a natural law — is describing a strict, unvarying regularity which either in fact holds in nature (in this case, the law is a true statement) or does not hold (in this case it is false). If we do not know whether a law of nature is true or false, and if we wish to draw attention to our uncertainty, we often call it an 'hypothesis'. A law of nature is unalterable; there are no exceptions to it... A normative law — (b), whether it is now a legal enactment or a moral commandment, can be enforced by men. Also, it is alterable. It may be perhaps described as good or bad, right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable; but only in a metaphorical sense can it be called 'true' or 'false', since it does not describe a fact, but lays down directions for our behaviour... the distinction between laws in sense (a), i.e. statements describing regularities of nature, and laws in sense (b), i.e. norms such as prohibitions or commandments, is a fundamental one, and that these two kinds of law have hardly more in common than a name.

Man has created new worlds — of language, of music, of poetry, of science; and the most important of these is the world of the moral demands, for equality, for freedom, and for helping the weak.

Biological naturalism has been used not only to defend equalitarianism, but also to defend the anti-equalitarian doctrine of the rule of the strong. One of the first to put forward this naturalism was the poet Pindar, who used it to support the theory that the strong should rule. He claimed— that it is a law, valid throughout nature, that the stronger does with the weaker whatever he likes. Thus laws which protect the weak are not merely arbitrary but artificial distortions of the true natural law that the strong should be free and the weak should be his slave.

The enemies of freedom have always charged its defenders with subversion. And nearly always they have succeeded in persuading the guileless and well-meaning.

The idealization of the great idealist permeates not only the interpretations of Plato's writings, but also the translations. Drastic remarks of Plato's which do not fit the translator's views of what a humanitarian should say are frequently either toned down or misunderstood... the title 'Republic' is, quite simply, the English form of the Latin rendering of a Greek word that had no associations of this kind, and whose proper English translation would be 'The Constitution' or 'The City State' or 'The State'. The traditional translation 'The Republic' has undoubtedly contributed to the general conviction that Plato could not have been a reactionary... What did Plato mean by 'justice'? I assert that in the Republic he used the term 'just' as a synonym for 'that which is in the interest of the best state'. And what is in the interest of this best state? To arrest all change, by the maintenance of a rigid class division and class rule.

... those who, deceived by this identification and by high-sounding words, exalt Plato's reputation as a teacher of morals and announce to the world that his ethics is the nearest approach to Christianity before Christ, are preparing the way for totalitarianism and especially for a totalitarian, anti-Christian interpretation of Christianity. And this is a dangerous thing, for there have been times when Christianity was dominated by totalitarian ideas. There was an Inquisition; and, in another form, it may come again.

Theory of forms or ideas

The things in flux, the degenerate and decaying things, are (like the state) the offspring, the children, as it were, of perfect things. And like children, they are copies of their original primogenitors. The father or original of a thing in flux is what Plato calls its ‘Form' or its ‘Pattern' or its 'Idea’. As before, we must insist that the Form or Idea, in spite of its name, is no ‘idea in our mind’; it is not a phantasm, nor a dream, but a real thing. It is, indeed, more real than all the ordinary things which are in flux, and which, in spite of their apparent solidity, are doomed to decay; for the Form or Idea is a thing that is perfect, and does not perish.

The speculative or metaphysical setting of Plato's theory of social change... is the world of unchanging Forms or Ideas, of which the world of changing things in space and time is the offspring. The Forms or Ideas are not only unchanging, indestructible, and incorruptible, but also perfect, true, real, and good; in fact, 'good' is once, in the Republic, explained as 'everything that preserves', and 'evil' as 'everything that destroys or corrupts'.... For if the starting point of all change is perfect and good, then change can only be a movement that leads away from the perfect and good; it must be directed towards the imperfect and the evil, towards corruption.

.. sensible or generated things are not perfect copies ; indeed, no copy can be perfect, since it is only an imitation of the true reality, only appearance and illusion, not the truth. Accordingly, no sensible things (except perhaps the most excellent ones) resemble their Forms sufficiently closely to be unchangeable. Absolute and eternal immutability is assigned only to the most divine of all things, and bodies do not belong to this order.

Thus it is possible... that a very good soul may defy change and decay, and that a very evil thing, for instance a very evil city, may be improved by changing it. (In order that such an improvement should be of any value, we would have to try to make it permanent, i.e. to arrest all further change.)

Essentialists (from ‘essence’) speak of the ‘nature of mathematics’, or of the ‘nature of inductive inference’, or of the ‘nature of happiness and misery’. When used by Plato, the Form or Idea of a thing, as shown above, is also its essence.The main difference between natures and Forms or Ideas seems to be this. The Form or Idea of a sensible thing is, as we have seen, not in that thing, but separated from it; it is its forefather, its primogenitor ; but this Form or father passes something on to the sensible things which are its offspring or race, namely, their nature. This ‘ nature ’ is thus the inborn or original quality of a thing, and in so far, its inherent essence; it is the original power or disposition of a thing, and it determines those of its properties which are the basis of its resemblance to, or of its innate participation in, its Form or Idea.

‘Natural’ is, accordingly, what is innate or original or divine in a thing, while ‘ artificial ’ is that which has been later changed by man or added or imposed by him, through external compulsion. Plato frequently insists that all products of human ‘art’ at their best are only copies of ‘ natural ’ sensible things. But since these in turn are only copies of the divine Forms or Ideas, the products of art are only copies of copies, twice removed from reality, and therefore less good, less real, and less true than even the (natural) things in flux.

On equalitarianism

Plato demanded natural privileges for the natural leaders. Plato quickly found that naturalism was a weak spot within the equalitarian doctrine, and he took the fullest advantage of this weakness. To tell men that they are equal has a certain sentimental appeal. But this appeal is small compared with that made by a propaganda that tells them that they are superior to others, and that others are inferior to them. Are you naturally equal to your servants, to your slaves, to the manual worker who is no better than an animal ? The very question is ridiculous!

In the Laws Plato summarizes his reply to equalitarianism in the formula: ‘Equal treatment of unequals must beget inequity’; and this was developed by Aristotle into the formula ‘Equality for equals, inequality for unequals’.

On morality

The criterion of morality is the interest of the state. Morality is nothing but political hygiene.

This is the collectivist, the tribal, the totalitarian theory of morality: ‘ Good is what is in the interest of my group; or my tribe; or my state.’ It is easy to see what this morality implied for international relations : that the state itself can never be wrong in any of its actions, as long as it is strong ; that the state has the right, not only to do violence to its citizens, should that lead to an increase of strength, but also to attack other states, provided it does so without weakening itself.

One of the fundamental tenets of Socrates was, I believe, his moral intellectualism. By this I understand {a) his identification of goodness and wisdom, his theory that nobody acts against his better knowledge, and that lack of knowledge is responsible for all moral mistakes; (b) his theory that moral excellence can be taught, and that it does not require any particular moral faculties, apart from the universal human intelligence.

[cathysims1]

The Psychology of Money – Changing your mindset

The Psychology of Money – Changing your mindset:

Knowledge You Need

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It is important to understanding the psychology of money and changing your mindset because it doesn’t make sense to show you how to get out of debt unless you can change your mindset about what is possible for you. Once you change your mindset and you get out of debt, nothing can stop you.

Most of the time when we fail to achieve what we really want, there is an underlying belief (that we are usually not aware of) that is not supporting us. Have you ever experienced self-sabotage? Have you ever failed to follow through on something that you wanted to achieve? Most likely you had conflicting beliefs that were pulling you in different directions.

But what is a belief? A belief is a feeling of certainty about what something means to you. Most of our beliefs are generalizations about our past that are based on interpretations of our experiences. In other words, they are based on how we interpreted what happened to us at the moment. Let me give you an example. Twin brothers go to an amusement park and decide to take a ride on a roller-coaster together. One walks out of that ride feeling very happy and thrilled, and these effects will be positive over his lifetime. The other, however, walks out of that same ride full of fear and shock, and those effects will be negative for him over his lifetime. It was the same ride, but it was perceived differently by them. We all perceive and interpret our experiences in a different way.

Which brings us to another very important point that you should always remember: it is not what happens to us in life, but how we interpret what happens to us and what we decide to focus on that changes our life. We need to take responsibility for where we are in life, feel grateful for it, and move on. Blaming our situation or our “conditions” will only bring more of the same. By feeling grateful for what you have, whatever that maybe, you are actually impressing thoughts of abundance upon the Universe, and the Universe will deliver to you more abundance. It may sound strange to some people, but it is one of the immutable Laws of the Universe, the Law of Attraction.

But let’s go back to your beliefs and how they affect your life. They actually affect everything you do, since all your actions are the result of your beliefs. They are extremely important to achieving success in anything you do.

You see, from the day we are born, we are bombarded with negative suggestions. Not knowing how to counter them, we unconsciously accept them and bring them into being as our experience.

For example, we are told: – You cannot do it / You can’t do that – if you don’t wear a sweater, you will catch a cold

– You don’t have a chance

– Things are only getting worse – You may get fired

– You are not smart enough

And so on. Get the idea?

Consider now the fact that in 2017, about 16 percent of the American population was 65 years old or over; a figure which is expected to reach 22 percent by 2050. Many of them are broke. They are depending on someone else for life’s necessities.

Why is it that in the richest country in the world, 95% of the population ends up broke?

If you ask these people, they would tell you that their lives were shaped by exterior forces or circumstances, by things that happened to them. This implies that they were not in control, that they were merely a leaf in the wind.

But as we said before, and it’s so important that it is worth repeating, it is not what happens to us in life, but how we interpret what happens to us and what we decide to focus on that changes our life. A person���s fortune can be completely wiped out, and he or she can build it again with the right mindset. It has happened millions of times, which proves that it is NOT what happens to you but how you react to it.

The main reason that most people never achieve financial independence is that we are not taught how to succeed. We are not taught how to achieve financial independence. We are not taught how to handle money. We are never taught that WE are in charge of our lives.

The educational system in place today was created in the 1800s and was designed to prepare us to work as employees. In high school, we are not taught how to handle money, how to invest it, how to create passive streams of income. We don’t learn it either in College or University. We grow up (most of us, anyway) believing that money is in short supply, it is hard to come by and that you have to work really hard for it. We grow up associating different things to money like “If I have a lot of money, I may lose my friends,” thereby, “money equals loneliness.”  Other common beliefs are “money changes people, they become greedy”, “If I make a lot of money, I could lose my motivation”. Or, “If I’m broke (or poor) people will pay more attention to me”.  And the list goes on and on.

The fact is that money by itself is neither good nor bad. It is what we associate with money that makes all the difference in the world.

Many people live most of their lives under a set of beliefs that controlled most of what have done. It might take you a while to identify those beliefs, but when you do, you will realize that they had such an enormous power over you that they controlled your focus, your ideas, and your acts. Before you become aware of these beliefs, you will blame your circumstances on other people or “bad luck”.

There are several ways to change beliefs on purpose. The following method involves associating a lot of emotional pain to the old belief, and a lot of emotional pleasure to the new belief. This is a process you do only once for the belief to be replaced with an empowering one of your choice.

Now let’s start the process of changing our old beliefs. Let me warn you though, that just reading this exercise will not change anything in your life! You DO NEED to complete this exercise. Believe me, it will be fun, and it will not take long. And you can do it as many times as you want, any time you discover a belief that is not empowering you.

A way to identify a belief is this: they are usually found after the word “because”, on phrases you usually say. As an example, if you hear yourself saying something like, “I will always be fat, because my father and mother are overweight, and I have their genes”. Another example, “They wouldn’t give me that job, because I am not smart enough”. Or, “I could never succeed because I never succeeded before in my life”. Do you get the idea?

Let’s start with your limiting beliefs. Write down 5 beliefs that you have about yourself and what you are capable of. What are the five beliefs that have limited you in the past? i.e., “I could never make more than $50,000 a year”,  “ I can’t get a better job”, “nobody would pay me that much”, etc.

1______________________________________________________

2______________________________________________________

3______________________________________________________

4______________________________________________________

5______________________________________________________

Now you write down 5 empowering beliefs that can now support you in achieving your goals. Do not limit yourself in your new beliefs. Think big, think bold! Also, and this is extremely important, state your beliefs in the affirmative, never state a belief that negates what you don’t want. Example: “My life is abundant” is a great example, but “I don’t have any more debt” is not, since it is not positive enough, and your brain will focus on “debt” instead of the “I don’t”. These new beliefs will replace the ones that have limited you before.

1______________________________________________________

2______________________________________________________

3______________________________________________________

4______________________________________________________

5______________________________________________________

Excellent! Feel grateful for taking this first step that can change your life for the better.

Now, get two pieces of paper. On the first piece of paper, write down the first limiting belief you are eliminating. What you are going to do first is create doubt. Once you start to doubt a belief, it becomes weak, making it easier to replace with another belief. Then, you are going to associate massive pain to have that belief, and a massive pain in the future if you continue to have that belief. In other words, you have to feel the negative emotions associated with living with that belief, and how it would negatively affect you. Then, on the other piece of paper, you are going to associate massive pleasure to the new belief that you want to adopt in its place.

This exercise is extremely powerful, so please, do yourself a favor and take it seriously. You can change your life now.

Let’s start with the first belief. You have already written this belief down on the first piece of paper; now ask yourself the following questions:

1- How is this belief ridiculous or absurd?

2- What negative consequences have you already experienced as a result of having this RIDICULOUS belief? What has it cost you emotionally, financially, physically, and in your relationships in the past, because of having this ABSURD belief?

3- What is it costing you now, emotionally, financially, physically, and in your relationships, because of having this WRONG belief?

4- What will it cost you emotionally, financially, physically, in your relationships, during the next 10 years, if you don’t let go of this belief now?

Write down everything that comes to your mind. Keep writing about all the pain you experienced in your past, all the pain you are experiencing right now, and all the pain you will be experiencing in the future if you don’t change this absurd belief now.

Make sure you feel as much pain as possible. Feel all the negative emotions associated with having this absurd belief. Close your eyes and visualize it, live it, feel it as if it were happening right now. I know this doesn’t sound very appealing, but believe me, you will be amazed at the results!

Once you are fully associated with the pain that having this belief has cost you and would have cost you your whole life, get the second piece of paper, and write down the new empowering belief that will take the place of the old one.

Ask yourself the following questions:

How will having this empowering belief affect my life?

What benefits will I get from having this empowering belief?

How will I feel and how will I act by having this empowering belief?

Where will I be in 10 years as a result of having this empowering belief?

Imagine yourself 10 years from now, and looking back at the last 10 years, how does it feel having lived with this empowering belief? Stay there for a while, feeling those great feelings.

While you are writing down each answer, make sure you fully associate with the positive feelings of having this empowering belief. Feel how much better your life is as a result of having this belief. Close your eyes and feel it in your body. How would you feel? How would you move? How would you breathe?

The key here is to experience as much pleasure as possible.

Now grab the first piece of paper containing your old beliefs, and burn it. As you see the paper burning, feel the old belief vanishing in your past, and feel the power of your new belief.

Congratulations! Feel grateful for having a great, empowering belief that will support you for the rest of your life.

Do the same with the next belief, and keep repeating until you finish replacing all your old beliefs.

This exercise was adapted from similar exercises by Anthony Robbins and Bob Proctor.

Another way to replace limiting beliefs Another way to change beliefs and counter negative suggestions that I use very frequently. It is incredibly powerful and it could help you keep focused on what you want.

In the movie “You can heal your life” by Louis Hayes, a person who got cured of cancer explained that she was repeating an affirmation 400 times a day. Four hundred times a day! That’s why it worked for her; her subconscious mind ended up believing what she was affirming.

The best way is to start the affirmations with “I’m so happy and grateful now that…” and fill in the blanks with whatever you want to achieve or get. Some examples could be:

“I’m so happy and grateful now that I’m driving my …. (name/model of the car you want)”

“I’m so happy and grateful now that I get up at 5:00 AM fully energized”

“I’m so happy and grateful now that I weigh 175 lbs (or whatever you want)

“I’m so happy and grateful now that my Credit Card is fully paid off”

“I’m so happy and grateful now that money comes easily and frequently”

Write down a list of affirmations and pick one to start with. Repeat your affirmation out loud, 200 to 400 times a day. It’s Ok to try different tones of voice since you will probably get tired after a while.

Changing your mindset

Remember what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

If you want things to change, YOU have to change first. You can be in control of your life by choosing what to focus on most of the time.

Successful people choose to focus on positive things; unsuccessful people focus on negative things by default.

So do what successful people do:

Spend most of your time focusing on positive things, NOT on negative things.

Focus on what you want to achieve, NOT on what you do not want to achieve.

Focus on what you like, NOT on what you don’t like.

This does not mean you ignore your problems. Acknowledge your problems, but don’t dwell on them.

Be thankful for the problem since, most likely, it is an opportunity in disguise. You can find the greatest opportunities of your life “hidden” in your worst moments. That’s why all successful people see problems as opportunities.

Reframe every “difficulty”.  That means that you find the good in a seemingly “bad” situation.

Always focus on abundance, not lack or problems. Focus on wealth building, not surviving. Focus on your next check, not your last one.

When you find yourself thinking about the negative aspects of your life, immediately replace the negative thoughts with a positive one, like a mantra. If you catch yourself saying, “I can’t afford it,” immediately say “I couldn’t afford it in the past, but I can afford it now. I just choose not to buy it at this time,” or something similar. You don’t have to believe it yet.  You can “fake it ‘til you make it.”

Feel abundance in your life and be grateful for your abundance. What you focus on expands. If you focus on lack, it expands. When you focus on abundance, it expands as well.

Remember, abundance isn’t just about money.  You may have an abundance of friends, health, faith, or ideas.  Look at nature. Everywhere you turn there is abundance.  Life, by its very nature, is abundant.  Just open your eyes; open your mind.

Of course, this is easier said than done, so how to start?

There are several things you can do right away:

Start meditating every day. Even if you don’t know how to meditate, at least find a quiet spot, sit comfortably, close your eyes, and breathe deeply. Focus on your breathing. Stay like this for a few minutes, and avoid any thoughts; just focus on your breathing. Then visualize a goal you want to achieve, and feel as if you have already achieved it. FEEL what it feels like to have achieved that goal. Make it as real as possible. Touch it, feel it, smell it, see it. Stay in that feeling for a few minutes, and thank the Universe for having achieved it. This is probably the most powerful exercise you can do to become successful.

Read positive books, every single day. At least read for 15 minutes, preferably for 30 minutes or more. I always read before going to bed, so I can go to sleep with positive thoughts and feelings.

Listen to positive CDs in your car instead of music (or what’s worse, the news!)

Avoid the news, negative people, negative movies, negative talk shows, and anything that will affect you negatively. Feed your mind with positive things every day.

Feel genuinely grateful for what you have. FEEL deep feelings of gratitude. This is incredibly powerful, so do not take it lightly. Feel grateful for anything you have, your car (even if you don’t like it, still feel grateful for having it), your kids, your spouse, a flower, etc. Feel grateful every day. Write down a list of things you are grateful for, and as you are writing, feel the gratitude. Do it for 5-10 minutes every day. Make sure that as soon as you wake up, you think about things to be grateful for. It’s the best way to start your day!

Surround yourself with positive people that inspire you. This is very important! One way could be to start a mastermind group, where all of you can share ideas and support each other. You can either meet at somebody’s house once a week or at a restaurant. You can even do a conference call once a week if some of you live in different cities. You can also find a mentor that can help you stay focused or new friends that share the same goals.

Feel the abundance that surrounds you. Even if at this moment you don’t have the money you want, you can find abundance if you look for it. Abundance is not just money; abundance is everywhere. Maybe you have an abundance of love? Or an abundance of friends? Look for abundance in Nature. Look at the ocean, you will see abundance. Look at trees, you will see abundance. Just FEEL abundance instead of lack, and you will attract it.

Take workshops when possible, take classes if you can. Find an Adult School. Their classes are free.

You can make your life a masterpiece. Just focus on it, every day. And always, ALWAYS, be grateful for what you have.

There is NOTHING that you cannot be, do, or have. You are a magnificent human being with unlimited potential. Do not settle for mediocrity, you deserve more!

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[free-mormons-blog]

Genesis of the Written Word -- Temple and Cosmos Beyond this Ignorant Present -- HUGH NIBLEY 1992

Genesis of the Written Word

The most interesting thing about this article is that, within a month after it was printed, a cover story appeared in the prestigious journal Science recounting the strange achievement of an Apache Indian by the name of Silas John, who not only claimed to have had a whole writing system revealed to him in a dream for holy purposes, but actually produced the system, which turns out to be a highly efficient one; an instant alphabet, not out of nothing, but out of a dream.1 If it could happen in 1904 to a semi-literate Apache, could it not have happened earlier?

Only such evidence could break the vicious circular argument which has long prevented serious investigation into the origins of writing. Many writers in scientific journals have recently deplored the way in which scientific conclusions reached long ago and held as unimpeachable truths turn students away from avenues of research which might well prove most fruitful. The evolutionary rule-of-thumb — convenient, satisfying, universal — is cited as the prime offender. Here is a test of how it works: Ask your students to write a paper on “A Day in the Life of a Primitive Man.” None of them has ever seen a primitive man or ever will, but does that stop them? Before the question is on the board they are off and running and can go on writing at top speed indefinitely. They all know exactly how it should have been; evolution emancipated them from the drudgery of research. And in all of science there never was a more open-and-shut case than the origin of writing: intuitively we know it must have begun with pictures, and traditionally we know it can have developed in only one way — very slowly and gradually from simple to more complex forms, and all that. Some may elaborate on the theme with tree-alphabets, ogams, runes and (as we have) arrow-markings, but if there ever was a hypothesis which enjoyed complete and unquestioning obedience, the origin of writing has been it. Yet the discerning Kipling, taking a hard common-sense look at the official solution, found it simply absurd. It is the same hypothesis that we now dare to question, grateful for the support of the noble Silas John.

We have all grown up in a world nurtured on the comfortable Victorian doctrine of uniformitarianism, the idea that what happens in this world is all just more of the same: what lies ahead is pretty much what lies behind, for the same forces that are at work on the earth today were at work in the same manner, with the same intensity and the same effects at all times past and will go on operating inexorably and irresistibly in just the same way forever hereafter. There is no real cause for alarm in a world where everything is under control beneath the watchful eye of science, as evolution takes its undeviating forward course, steady, reliable, imperceptibly slow and gentle, and gratifyingly predictable. According to an eminent British scholar of the 1920s,

The skies as far as the utmost star are clear of any malignant Intelligences, and even the untoward accidents of life are due to causes comfortably impersonal. . . . The possibility that the Unknown contains Powers deliberately hostile to him is one the ordinary modern man can hardly entertain even in imagination.2

In such a world one needed no longer to run to God for comfort. The matter-of-fact, no-nonsense approach of science had since the days of the Miletian school and the ancient atomists banished all childish fears and consigned the horrendous and spectacular aspects of the human past and future to the realm of myth and fantasy.

Quite recently, however, scientists have noted with a shock that in looking forward not to the distant but to the immediate future what they discern is not just more of the same but something totally different, something for which they confess themselves entirely unprepared, since it is all entirely unexpected.3 The idea that what lies ahead is by no means the simple and predictable projection of our knowledge of the present has, as John Lear points out, reconditioned our minds for another look at the past as well as the future. Since the past is wholly a construction of our own imaginations, we have always found there just what we expected to find, that is, more of the same. But now “future shock” has prepared us for “past shock,” and we find ourselves almost forced to accept a view of the past that is utterly alien to anything in the experience of modern man.4

Antiquity of Writing

Joseph Smith as a prophet also looked both ahead and behind and came up with a picture of both worlds that violently shocked and offended his Victorian contemporaries. He presented his peculiar picture of the past in the most daring possible way, in the form of a number of books which he claimed to be of ancient origin, their contents given to him “by the Spirit.” But his image of the future and the past was not conveyed in mystical utterances in the manner of Swedenborg, Jakob Boehme, or the “Urantia Volume,” whose assertions may be tested only by waiting for history to catch up with them. His story was rather to be found in the pages of ancient books that purportedly existed and either still survived in the world or had left unmistakable marks behind them.

In the first lesson of the current Melchizedek Priesthood manual President Joseph Fielding Smith brings this formidable contribution to our attention:

The Latter-day Saints are doubly blessed with the word of the Lord which has come to light through the restoration of the gospel. We have been given the records of the Nephites and the Jaredites. . . . The Lord restored much that had been originally revealed to Adam and Enoch and Abraham, . . . and it is to their condemnation when members of the Church do not take advantage of their opportunities to read, study, and learn what the records contain.5

Few people realize that in Joseph Smith’s day no really ancient manuscripts were known. Egyptian and Babylonian could not be read; the Greek and Latin classics were the oldest literature available, preserved almost entirely in bad medieval copies no older than the Byzantine and Carolingian periods. The oldest text of the Hebrew Bible was the Ben Asher Codex from the ninth century A.D. Today we have whole libraries of documents more than 4,000 years old — not just their contents, but the actual writings themselves going back to the very beginnings of civilization. It is just as easy to dig back 6,000 years as it is to remove the dust of 5,000 years; and when we do so, what do we find in the way of written documents? Let us consider three main points: (1) what can be inferred from Joseph Smith’s statements as to the nature of the oldest human records, (2) what the ancients themselves have to say about those records, and (3) what the actual condition of the records indicates.

First, if Joseph Smith is right, the written records should be as old as the human race itself, for, he tells us, “a book of remembrance was kept . . . in . . . the language of Adam” (Moses 6:7).6 Now what do the ancients themselves have to say on the subject? Surprisingly, a great deal, of which we can give only a few quotations here.

According to them, the king had access to that divine book which was consulted at the time of the creation of the world: “I am a scribe of the god’s book,” says one of the earliest pharaohs, “who says what is and brings about what is not.”7 A later but still ancient (Thirteenth Dynasty) pharaoh recalls, “My heart yearned to behold the most ancient books of Atum. Open them before me for diligent searching, that I may know god as he really is!”8 Over the lintel of the ancient library of the great temple at Edfu was a relief showing four kneeling figures giving praise to the heavenly book descending to earth; hieroglyphs above their heads show them to represent Sia and Hw, or the Divine Intelligence and the Divine Utterance (the Word) by which the world was created (fig. 59).9 In Egypt every step of the founding of a new temple had to follow the prescriptions given in the heavenly book, since such a founding represented and dramatized the creation of the earth itself.

And what does the actual state of the documents attest? If writing evolved gradually and slowly as everything is supposed to have done, there should be a vast accumulation of transitional scribblings as countless crude and stumbling attempts at writing would leave their marks on stone, bone, clay, and wood over countless millennia of groping trial and error. Only there are no such accumulations of primitive writing anywhere. Primitive writing is as illusive as that primitive language, the existence of which has never been attested. And indeed the very nature of writing precludes anything in the way of a slow, gradual, step-by-step evolution: one either catches on to how it is done or one does not, and once one knows, the whole mystery lies revealed. All the evidence shows that that is the way it actually was. “Suddenly . . . graves in the predynastic cemeteries” display “the art of writing . . . with a fairly long period of development behind it,” writes Engelbach. “In fact it was writing well past the stage of picture writing.”10 Both the long period of development and a primal picture writing must here be assumed, since there is no evidence for them. If writing did evolve in Egypt, the process took only “a few decades,” after which the art remained unchanged “for thousands of years,” according to Capar. 11Alan Gardiner notes the same strange and paradoxical state of affairs: hieroglyphic “was a thing of rapid growth,” but “once established remained immutable for fully 3,000 years.”12 So also A. Scharff assures us that with the First Dynasty “writing was introduced and perfected (ausgebildet) with astounding speed and detail.”13“There is no evidence of a gradual development of script in Egypt,” writes Elise Baumgartel,14 and yet there is no evidence of that script anywhere else. There is something wrong with this evolutionary process by which one and the same people develop a system of writing almost overnight, and then refuse to budge an inch on the way of progress forever after. Stuart Piggott finds that immediately after “ambiguous stammerings . . . on the slate palettes . . . a rapid cursive form of writing with pen and ink” is in evidence.15 Stranger still, on the most famous of those predynastic slate palettes with their ambiguous stammerings that suggest only the dawn of writing we see clearly depicted a king (Narmer) following behind an attendant (tt) who is carrying the classic two inkpots of the Egyptian scribe (fig. 60). The tombs of the First Dynasty “show that they had a well-developed written language, a knowledge of the preparation of papyrus.”16 Inscriptions found on tags and labels of First-Dynasty jars, often regarded because of their crudeness and brevity as primitive attempts at writing, are crude and brief because they were meant to be identification tags and nothing more — not literary compositions; actually, as Sethe points out, “they are written in a sophisticated cursive writing.”17 For though “hieroglyphics appear all at once in the world as an Egyptian invention cir. 3000 B.C.,” hieratic, the cursive writing of the same symbols, was also in use just as early.18

Complexity of Nascent Languages

All of which is most retrograde to tenaciously held theories of the evolution of writing in Egypt. But how about the rest of the world? Wherever we look the earliest systems of writing are somehow connected with the Egyptian and appear suddenly in the same paradoxical way. Though there is “a prehistoric connection with Babylonian cuneiform” and Egyptian, according to Sethe,19 and though J. Friedrich has demonstrated the connection by an impressive catalogue of striking parallels,20 the gap between the two systems is still too wide to allow any thought of deriving the one from the other.21 “The writing which appeared without antecedents at the beginning of the First Dynasty (in Egypt) was by no means primitive,” writes Frankfort. “It has, in fact, a complex structure of . . . precisely the same state of complexity which had been reached in Mesopotamia. . . . To deny . . . that Egyptian and Mesopotamian systems of writing are related amounts to maintaining that Egypt invented independently a complex and very consistent system at the very moment of being influenced in its art and architecture by Mesopotamia where a precisely similar system had just been developed.”22 Not only are these two systems related, but they show remarkable affinities to the earliest Chinese writing,23 as well as the Hittite, proto-Indian,24 and proto-Elamitic scripts.25 P. Mordell insists that the Hebrew alphabet is related to an Egyptian linear writing system, a real alphabet, which “evolved at a date when hieroglyphic writing was unknown, then persisted with a strange vitality, and was never absorbed or ousted.”26 This was that mysterious prehistoric “Mediterranean” alphabet which is said to be older than hieroglyphic,27 and which suddenly spread all over the Near East at the end of the second millennium B.C.28

“Evolved”? Many scholars have pointed out that the alphabet is the miracle of miracles, the greatest of all inventions, by which even the television and jet-planes pale in comparison, and, as such, a thing absolutely unique in time and place; they also agree that it was of Egyptian or West-Semitic origin.29 It is also argued that by the very nature of the thing it can only have been the work of a single inventor.30 “The gulf between the idea and the written word,” writes H. Schmitt, “could only have been bridged once, by a miracle of invention.”31

Dearth of Evolutionary Clues

Given the evolutionary hypothesis, any healthy normal growing boy can describe in convincing detail how long ago “the naive child of nature” everywhere drew crude pictures to convey his simple thoughts,32 and how out of this the process moved “everywhere inexorably . . . towards the final stage, the alphabetic writing.”33 To save our eager high-school student from undue embarrassment, we have just quoted two eminent scholars. But if it really happened that way, then we would find traces of evolving writing “everywhere”; veritable middens of scratched rock and bones and shells would attest the universal groping toward the inexorable final stage over tens of thousands of years, while the clumsy transitional forms should outnumber proper writing by at least a million to one. However, the vast accumulations of attempts at writing simply do not exist; there is no evidence whatever of a worldwide groping towards the goal. Having made his lucid and logical statement, the author of our last quotation observes with perplexity that “it is surprising that the ultimate stage in evolution . . . was only achieved in a very few spots on the globe.”34That is, we do not find a multiplicity of writing systems throughout the world; in fact when we come right down to it there seems to have been only one! We find “only a very few systems of writing,” says David, “. . . and even these are so much alike and so closely related in time and space that their independence appears at least problematical.”35 The vast world-wide corpus of embryonic scribblings that should attest the long ages of slow transition from picture writing to true writing simply is not there, and the innumerable systems of writing which must have resulted from the basic psychological need of men everywhere to express themselves can be counted on the fingers, and most probably on the thumbs, of one hand.

Pictures Not Origin of Writing

People have always drawn pictures, but was that the origin of writing? Was there ever a real picture writing? E. Doblhofer defines “pictorial writing,” which he says is “incredibly ancient,” as “a series of images [which] can possibly be ‘read’ accurately by any spectator.”36 Kurt Sethe would agree: a “pure” picture writing is one which “could be read in any language at sight.”37 And right here the issue is settled: if there ever was a true picture writing it has not yet been discovered. Where on earth is a single inscription to which any and all beholders, scholars or laymen alike, regardless of their own language and culture, would give the identical interpretation? When Sethe sought for a true picture writing to illustrate the process by which hieroglyphic emerged, the only examples he could find in all the world were North American Indian petroglyphs, which no one can “read” or interpret to this day.38 “True picturewriting,” wrote Alan Gardiner, “makes excessive demand upon the skill and ingenuity of the writer, and its results are far from unambiguous.”39 It takes special skill, that is, to execute “true picturewriting” and special skill to read it: which is to say that it is not the simple and uninhibited drawing and viewing of pictures at all. Doblhofer himself confirms this when he assures us that “the most primitive pictorial writings . . . translate . . . abstract ideas with the aid of symbolical signs,” for symbolical signs are not plain pictures but conventional devices which must be learned; that is, even “the most primitive” picture writing is not just picture writing as he defines it.40 In the very earliest Egyptian writing it is impossible to interpret the pictures as such, and there is no evidence of pictograms in Egypt at any time, according to Sethe.41 Also, we must not forget that along with the most “primitive” Egyptian writing in prehistoric times we find a genuine alphabetic writing flourishing most paradoxically.42 Long wrestling with the problem of deriving the alphabet from a syllabic writing, that is, from a system in which the names of things depicted supplied certain sound combinations, has led to the general conclusion that syllabic writing was “a blind alley which could not lead to alphabetic writing.”43

Like the earliest Egyptian documents, the Babylonian tablets bearing “the oldest written signs thus far known” are highly stylized and cannot be read.44 Granted they are picture writing, no two scholars “read” them the same. Mesopotamia offers to date the only chance of presenting the evolutionary sequence of the development of writing by a stratigraphic pattern. Only, alas, it doesn’t work. Though it is assumed, of course, that “the earliest examples of writing in Mesopotamia are pictographs. . . . Very few of these were actually excavated scientifically, so that, from the chronological point of view, there is little help to be obtained from stratigraphic connections,” according to Burton-Brown, who should also have pointed out that the inscriptions which have been scientifically excavated have a way of refuting the expected patterns, since some of the most primitive writing is found in late strata and vice versa.45

The paradox that anything as advanced and sophisticated as writing should come into the world full-blown and all at once is invincibly repugnant to the evolutionary way of thinking. Of recent years the anthropologists have taken a strong stand on the “tool” theory of civilization. The idea is that primitive hominids quite thoughtlessly and accidentally blundered on the use of this or that piece of wood, bone, or rock as a tool, and that “it was the success of the simplest tools that started the whole trend of human evolution and led to the civilizations of today.”46 It is the primitive tool, falling fortuitously into its hands, which draws mankind irresistibly forward to new levels of attainment, for “when men make a tool, they commit themselves, man depends upon his tools for his very humanity.”47 In a word, “social evolution is a consequence of technologic evolution.”48

Some of the scientific speculators, however, take the opposite position, that man “has always had reservoirs of response far more than his devices (tools) asked of him,” and that in “his attempts to transcend his biological limitations” his mind always runs ahead of his tools, not behind them.49 When men need a tool they invent it, not the other way around.50 Men themselves decide what tools they will have, so that one evolutionist notes with perplexity that “one of the most puzzling aspects of the culture” of the “Cavemen” is “their heavy dependence on tools whose use is now a complete mystery.”51 Carleton S. Coon observed that “for the simple reason that human beings are not equipped by nature to live without tools,” we must suppose that they always had all the tools they needed for survival even in Pliocene.52Petrie, in a significant and neglected study, pointed out that instead of eagerly adopting a superior tool as soon as it was made known to them, human beings have shown “a resistance of almost 100 percent” to any new tool coming from the outside.53 Though all the neighbors of the Egyptians knew about their superior axe forms for thousands of years, the only other ancient people to adopt them were of all things the South Americans.54 Petrie knows of seventeen Egyptian tools and weapons, some of unsurpassed efficiency, which are over the centuries never found outside of Egypt, and, he observes, “the converse is equally true.”55

Writing: A Gift from Heaven

Then whatever induced one people to adopt writing from another? The interesting thing here is that though the idea quickly caught on, each people in adopting it insisted on making it its own exclusive possession and devised from the first a native style that set it off from all the others. Both the popularity and the variety of ancient writing is to be explained by its religious nature. E. von Mülinen has noted that new scripts invariably appear as the vehicles of new religions,56 while Jürgen Smolian points out that all of man’s greatest inventions or discoveries seem to have the primary purpose of putting him into communication with the other world.57 If Joseph Smith was right, books and writing are a gift to man from heaven, “for it was given unto as many as called upon God to write by the spirit of inspiration” (Moses 6:7). The art of writing was a special dispensation, an inestimable boon, enabling the righteous to retain the memory of divine visitations and communications ever fresh before them, and assisting them in coordinating their earthly activities with the heavenly order: “The immediate will of heaven is contained in the Scriptures,” said the Prophet Joseph.58

The earliest records of the race have much to say “about the miracle of writing, which the Ancients regarded as a gift from heaven.”59 The Egyptians believed that writing was a sacred trust given to the king as “high-priest and scribe” to keep him and his people ever in touch with the mind and will of heaven.60 Thus the Book of the Foundation of Temples was thought to have been sent down from heaven to the immortal genius Imhotep, the Vizier of King Djoser of the Third Dynasty and the greatest builder of all time (cf. fig. 51A, p. 390), after which the book “was taken away to heaven at the time the gods left the earth,” but was sent down again by Imhotep at a later time, when he “caused it to fall from heaven at the place north of Memphis” (cf. fig. 55, p. 413).61 In Babylonia

the King is the Sent One. He has ascended to heaven to receive . . . the tablets of destiny and to get his commission. Then he is sent out, i.e., he descends again. . . . And so the knowledge is communicated to the king, it is of a mysterious character, bearing upon the great mysteries of heaven and earth, the hidden things, and is a revelation of the hidden knowledge by the gods (the god). Can we style it “primordial revelation”?62

The idea of a primordial revelation is that a complete knowledge of the world from its beginning to its end is already written down and has been vouchsafed to certain chosen spirits from time to time, a doctrine familiar to Latter-day Saints.63 The heavenly origin of writing is constantly referred to anciently in the doctrine that writing and the symbols of writing are derived from the starry heavens (fig. 61). The Tablets of Destiny which contain all knowledge and impart all authority “are the divination of the world, the stars and constellations form the writing.”64 As Clement of Alexandria observed, both in Egypt and Chaldaea, “Writing and a knowledge of the heavens necessarily go together.”65 How this is can be seen if one considers where all of the oldest writings of the race are found.

If we turn from ancient doctrine to concrete discovery we are soon made aware that the oldest writings are always found in temples. “It is in these temples that we find the first signs of writing. . . . The script appears from the first as a system of conventional signs . . . such as might have been introduced all at once. We are confronted with a true invention, not with an adaption of pictorial art.”66 For Egypt, Steindorff maintained that “the birthplace of this ‘hieroglyphic system’ of writing was the sacerdotal school of Heliopolis.”67 In Babylonia, according to Hrozný, it was in the Uruk period, 3200 B.C., that “there originated . . . from the records of business transaction in the temple enclosure, the picture writing which in later times developed into cuneiform writing.”68 Though these symbols cannot be read (i.e., they were not picture writings, but “a collection of abstract tokens eked out with pictograms”),69 it is apparent that they “were for the most part lists of commodities supplied to or delivered by officials and others concerned with the administration of the Temple.”70

Here we have a combination of business and religion which has given rise to the discussion of the rivalry of Kultschrift (cultic or religious writing) and Gebrauchschrift (practical business writing). Actually no rivalry exists between them: the consensus is that the oldest written symbols are property marks, such as arrow markings and cattle brands (fig. 62), and in order to be respected as such they have to be sacrosanct, holy symbols duly registered in the temple.71 If the oldest writing is used for business, it is always temple business, and the writing is also used for other — far more important — purposes. Examining the claims of the two, Helmut Arntz concluded that the holy or cultic writing has clear priority.72 One can, like old Commodore Vanderbilt, carry on business in a state of total illiteracy, and indeed men of affairs have always viewed men of letters with suspicion: “Writing is an art despised by the Roman businessman,” wrote Cornelius Nepos, “who have all their writing done for them by hirelings.”73 But one cannot carry on the holy business of the temple without the divine gift of writing.74 “Hieroglyphic is correctly named,” Sethe observed, being devised “only for the walls of temples. . . . It is a survival from prehistoric times.”75 It is no accident that temple architecture and writing appear suddenly together.76 The templum is, as we have shown elsewhere, an observatory, where one takes one’s bearings on the universe.77 There the heavens are carefully observed, and to be of value those observations must be recorded. Alphabet, calendar, and temple naturally go together, all devised for handling messages from the stars and planets.78 “We may think of the stars as letters inscribed on the heavens,” said Plotinus, and we may think of the heavens as a great book which men copy and project on tangible materials at the holy places.79 Recent studies by Gerald Hawkins, Peter Tompkins, Giorgio de Santillana, and others have given vivid reality to the heretofore vaguely surmised existence of ritual complexes of great antiquity where men observed the heavens and acquired an astonishing amount of knowledge about them, which, in order to use, they faithfully committed to their books.

From first to last, ancient writing remains in the hands not of businessmen but of priests; it is a holy and a secret thing, imparted only to the elect and zealously withheld from all others. “He who divulges it,” we read of a typical holy book, “dies a sudden death and an immediate cutting-off. Thou shalt keep very far away from it. It is to be read only by a scribe in the workshop, whose name has been duly registered in the House of Life.”80 “Only the prophets may read and understand the holy books” is the rule.81 Each system of writing itself is an effective seal on the holy books, a cryptogram, “a secret formula which the profane do not know.”82 The key to power and priesthood lies “in the midst of the Sea of Coptos, in a box of iron, the box of iron being (in) a box (of bronze, the box of bronze) in a box of kete-wood in a box of ivory and ebony, the box of ivory and ebony in a (box of silver, and the box) of silver in a box of gold, wherein is the book.”83 The idea of the holy book that is taken away from the earth and restored from time to time, or is handed down secretly from father to son for generations, or hidden up in the earth, preserved by ingenious methods of storage with precious imperishable materials, to be brought forth in a later and more righteous generation (i.e., Moses 1:41), is becoming increasingly familiar with the discovery and publication of ever more ancient apocryphal works, Jewish, Christian, and others.84 But nowhere does the idea find clearer or completer expression than in the pages of the Book of Mormon and the Pearl of Great Price.

What is perhaps the oldest religious book known, the so-called Shabako Stone, instead of the primitive mumbo jumbo one might expect, contains a story strangely familiar to Latter-day Saints (cf. fig. 43, pp. 180-81). It is the text of a ritual drama enacted in the temple to celebrate the founding of the First Dynasty of Egypt, and it depicts the council in heaven, the creation of the world, the fall of man, and the means by which he may achieve resurrection and be reinstated in his primal glory. The book, on a scroll, was hidden up in the wall of that same temple of Ptah of Memphis, founded by Menes, the first Pharaoh, and was discovered by a later king, Shabako, who followed the same text in the rites establishing his own (Twenty-fifth) Dynasty.85

Another king reports that “when His Majesty settled the lands . . . he mounted the throne of Horus. . . . He spoke to his noble ones, the Smrw of his immediate presence, the faithful writers-down of the divine words, who were in charge of all the secrets.”86 Writing, here shared only with his intimates, is par excellence “the King’s Secret,” which gives him all advantage over his fellows and the ability to rule them. The technique of writing is the foundation of empire, for only the written document can overcome the limitations of space and carry a ruler’s word and authority out of sight and beyond the hills, and even defeat the inroads of time on human memory by preserving the words of command and judgement for unlimited numbers of years.87 The king describes himself as the mediator and scribe of the god in heaven in the administration of his empire: “I sit before him, I open his boxes, I break open his edicts, I seal his dispatches, I send out messengers.”88 In Mesopotamia also “the supreme sovereignty of the universe connected with the tablets of destiny is thus identical with the casting of the oracles of lots,” the possession of which could give even a robber “possession of the rulership of the world.”89 The Pharaoh was authorized to rule only when “the master of the house of the divine books” had inscribed his royal names” on the true records deposited in the heavenly archives” (fig. 63).90 The archives were known in Egypt as the House of Life (cf. fig. 1, p. 12), housing the writings upon which the life of all things ultimately depended.91 It was a powerhouse humming with vital electricity, transmitting cosmic forces from heaven to earth, a place of deadly peril to any mortal not holding the necessary priestly credentials.92 Wherever the heavenly book is mentioned, the heavenly scribe appears as king, priest, and mediator, in early Jewish and Christian as well as older traditions.93 Pharaoh is preeminently “He who knows, being in possession of the divine book.”94 Like the Egyptian Thoth, the Babylonian Nabu, the prophet and scribe writes all things down in the “unalterable tablets” of destiny which determine all that happens upon the earth.95 In the earthly as in the heavenly court, everything was written down, not only to follow the divine example but to coordinate earthly with celestial proceedings. In Persia, for example,

the entire administration, as was customary from the earliest times in the Orient, was carried on by written documents, as it was in the courts of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria. . . . Everything is carefully written down; even in battle the King’s secretary is beside him taking notes; every royal remark is written down and then gathered into “Daybooks” or “Memoranda books,” such as have been found in the archives of Suza, Babylonia, Ecbatana, etc.96

The Myth of Irra, one of the oldest stories in existence, shows “that Mesopotamian theologians were not ignorant of the concept of a ‘sacred book,’ that is, of a divinely inspired, even dictated text, which contains the only correct and valid account of the ‘story’ of deity.”97 In Egypt it is “the King who is over the spirits, who unites hearts — so says He who is in charge of wisdom, being great, and who bears the god’s book, even Sia [‘the personification of intelligence and understanding’ — Faulkner] who is at the right hand of Re.”98 The relief, mentioned above (cf. fig. 59, p. 455), from the temple library of Dendera shows us the scribe’s palette, the Egyptian symbol of writing and all that it implies, descending from heaven; it is supported by two figures who strike the pose signifying “eternity” and who face each other, denoting “from eternity to eternity,” while four other figures are in the attitude of adoration; hieroglyphic symbols above the head of each show them to represent the ear that hears, the eye that sees, the mind or intelligence (Sia) which conceives, and the word of power (Hw) which consummates the creation of all things.99

The books were consulted on every occasion: “Copy thy fathers who have gone before thee. . . . Behold, their words are recorded in writing. Open and read and copy.”100 When King Djoser away back in the Third Dynasty asked his all-wise minister Imhotep to explain a seven-years’ famine, the latter “begged permission ‘that I may enter into the Mansion of Life, and may open the books and may seek guidance from them.’ “101 Interestingly enough, the most important of all writings were genealogical records, and Gardiner concluded not only that the House of Life was, properly speaking, nothing more or less than the genealogical archives, but that the Great Pyramid itself was built to contain the royal genealogical records.102 The astonishing mass and charge of ancient book making may be attributed to the basic doctrine that everything must be written down: “The Babylonian conception of Canonicity, . . . that the sum of revealed knowledge was given once for all by the antediluvian sages,” necessarily posits the existence of the Primordial Book that contains everything that was, is, and is to come, and presents “a remarkable parallel to the Rabbinic view that God’s revelation in its entirety is contained in the Torah,” according to W. G. K. Lambert.103

Knowledge: A Gift from Heaven

This is consistent with the marvelous function of writing as the great synthesizer. To write is to synthesize. The basic idea of writing is that symbols represent sounds and that smaller units make up larger units—not compounds or composites, but true units. Thus a letter by itself is without significance; there must be a reference to something which goes beyond it—other letters making a word or a name. A single letter, heraldic mark, tally, crest, or wasm has no meaning without reference to the official heraldic list of such and the names they represent. The word in turn is also meaningless without reference to other words; even a one-word sentence such as “Alas!” takes its meaning from other unspoken words. The meaning of every sentence also depends on its larger context; even a short aphorism must be understood in its cultural context. For the ancients, any self-contained message was a book. They were not disturbed by the extreme brevity of many “books,” because they regarded every book also as part of a larger context—for the Egyptians the “Hermetic” books. Every proper Arabic book, regardless of its subject, still opens with a paragraph praising God for his creation and the place in it which this particular writing occupies. Ancient records come to us not in single books but in whole libraries. These are not mere collections but organic entities, as the archaic Egyptian sign of the Book-lady Seshat attests: her seven-pointed star goes with her seven books, representing every department of human knowledge, being let down from the opened heavens (cf. fig. 46B, p. 229).104

The House of Life where the books were copied and studied had from the earliest times the aspect of a university, a super graduate-school;105 “there it was that all questions relating to . . . learned matters were settled.”106 The place was always part of the temple, and the books contain the earliest poetry, for poiema means “creation” and the business of the Muses at the temple was to sing the Creation song with the Morning stars;107 naturally the hymn was sung to music, and some scholars would derive the first writing from musical notation.108 It was performed in a sacred circle or chorus, so that poetry, music, and the dance go out to the world from the temple, called by the Greeks the museon, or shrine of the Muses (cf. fig. 6, p. 24). The creation hymn was part of the great dramatic presentation that took place yearly at the temple, dealing with the fall and redemption of man, represented by various forms of combat, making the place the scene of the ritual athletic contests sanctified throughout the world. The victor in the contest was the father of the race, the priestking himself, whose triumphant procession, coronation, and marriage took place on the occasion, making this the seat and source of government (the king was always crowned in the temple rather than the palace).109 Since the entire race was expected to be present for the event, a busy exchange of goods from various distant regions took place, the booths of pilgrims serving as the market booths for great fairs, while the necessity of converting various and bizarre forms of wealth into acceptable offerings for the temple led to an active banking and exchange in the temple courts; the earliest “money,” from the shrine of Juno Moneta at Rome, is temple money (cf. fig. 7, p. 24). Since the place began as an observatory, and all things were tied to the calendar and the stars, mathematics flourished and astronomy was a Muse. History was another Muse, for the rites were meant for the dead as well as the living, and memorials to former great ones (believed to be in attendance) encouraged the production of a marvelous art of portraiture, of sculpture and painting, which would have flourished anyway as architectural adornments, since the design and measurements (the middot) of the temple structure itself as a sort of scale model of the universe and cosmic computer were all-important; the architecture of the hierocentric structure was of primary concern. And since from that central point all the earth was measured and all the lands distributed, geometry was essential: “In the Beginning the One God promised Horus that he should inherit the land of Egypt, which was written in the Books by order of the Lord of All. . . . At the Division of the Lands it was decreed in writing.”110

The writings produced and copied in the House of Life were also discussed there, giving rise to philosophy, but concerned largely with cosmology and natural science. In short, there is no aspect of our civilization that does not have its rise in the temple, thanks to the power of the written word. In the all-embracing relationships of the Divine Book everything is relevant. Nothing is really dead or forgotten; every detail belongs in the picture, which would be incomplete without it. Lacking such a synthesizing principle, our present-day knowledge becomes ever more fragmented, and our universities and libraries crumble and disintegrate as they expand. Where the temple that gave it birth is missing, civilization itself becomes a hollow shell.

A Necessary Addition

In the short compass of a single lecture one always raises more questions than can be answered or discussed. The true origin of writing must remain, as Siegfried Schott observes, a subject of the purest speculation for a long time to come, and possibly forever.111 The fact that all the scholars are merely guessing should not deter us from the fascinating game, for as Karl Popper puts it, it is only by guessing and discussing that any science makes any progress.

Some years ago there was a consensus among students that Egypt was the ultimate home of the alphabet. The decisive study was that of Kurt Sethe, who tried to follow a strictly evolutionary line, with writing evolving inevitably from everyday human needs throughout the world as if by natural law,112 “gradually and imperceptibly,” culminating in a full-blown alphabet in Egypt.113 In the beginning, he avers, humans everywhere communicated by pictures, and to prove this he cites cases in which the white man astounded the Indians by communicating in writing without pictures; he then furnishes as a classical example of Indian picture writing the headstone of a famous chief on which three short vertical strokes represent three seriously wounded warriors while sixteen short horizontal strokes denote sixteen war-parties.114 And this is picture writing? Well might the white man have been astounded that the Indians could thus communicate without letters. None, in fact, of the more than a dozen reproductions of Indian picture writing supplied by Sethe can be read as pictures, and Sethe himself concludes that all these examples are nothing but “mnemotechnical aids” to help the writer fix things in his own mind rather than convey them to others; most of the sketches are so reduced and stylized as to be entirely symbolic, with no attempt at realism, reduced cues that mean nothing to those who have not already experienced what they depict (fig. 64; cf. fig. 58, pp. 422-23).115

This, however, is not true picture writing, according to Sethe, that being a foolproof system in which “every single element of the thought process has its own picture.”116 But if Sethe’s examples of primitive picture writing (of which he could find none in Egypt) were inadequate and even irrelevant, his examples of true picture writing leave even more to be desired—there are none. All his evidence he must find embedded in later hieroglyphic writing.117 In true picture writing, he says, every concept has its picture, so that the writing can be read by anybody anywhere in the world.118 As an example he gives the sign of the cross, which accompanying a name signifies a dead person, forgetting that it only does so as a purely abstract and highly conventionalized symbol, and not as a picture.119 But since “man thinks in words,” according to Sethe, everywhere the true picture writing was “automatically” and “very early converted to phonetic writing.”120 But if men were thinking in words all the time they were drawing pictures, how long would it take them to associate the two? Why does there have to be a gap at all? The evolutionary rule requires it: true writing, being purely phonetic, must necessarily be the last step in the long evolutionary process.121 Again the evidence is missing: all known picture writings in the Old World, according to Sethe, had already become phonetic scripts before their earliest appearance, so that we can only infer the existence of the previous primitive—and true picture writing—systems from indications discovered in the known systems.122 The only clear evidence that Sethe can find for the evolutionary process is the existence of independent systems of writing, all of which, according to him, must have emerged in the same way from primitive picture writing; he lists ten such systems, of which only three had been deciphered in his time.123 Since then the list has been extended, and in the process the independence of the various systems from each other has been brought under serious questioning. Since alphabetic writing is the ultimate perfection in the chain of evolution, it is disturbing that Sethe must conclude that the less efficient, clumsier, and more primitive syllabic writing was evolved from the more perfect alphabetic writing, and not the other way around.124

Sethe’s thesis is that the Egyptians, beginning with a true picture writing containing “originally a countless multitude of symbols”125 (which strangely enough have never turned up anywhere), through a series of inevitable and “purely mechanical” steps, “quite unconsciously and without intention” produced an alphabet of twenty-four letters, all consonants,126 from which all the alphabets of the world were eventually derived.127 The crucial step was the adoption of these characters to their own language by the Hebrews in Sinai—possibly by Moses himself.128 For Sethe, the “missing link” was supplied by Petrie’s discovery of the Siniatic script in 1905.129 From first to last “the entire developmental process of writing from pictures to letters can be viewed in the framework of natural science” (fig. 65).130

To Sethe’s famous study (based on a series of lectures, 1916-1934), Schott added an appendage in 1964. He notes that certain conclusions of Sethe are necessarily premature: the Sinai script has not yet been read with certainty.131 And he cites the later study of Hans Bauer, who, while agreeing that “the Egyptian origin of alphabetic writing is by no means in doubt” and that “anything as rare and marvelous . . . can hardly have originated twice,”132 sees the all-important transition to the standard Semitic alphabet taking place not in Sinai but in Canaan to the north.133 The split between the northern and southern schools still maintains simply because of a lack of evidence.134 Schott wonders if it is necessary to go through all that rigamarole about the various stages of picture writing, for which no rigorous test is possible.135 If we are dealing with a “rare and marvelous” invention, where must we draw the line as to the inventor’s inspiration—can he not have invented the whole thing? The trouble with the evolutionary concept in Egyptian writing, Schott observes, is that the process unfortunately runs backwards.136 The only way to account for the total lack of evidence for all the necessary long transitional phases, according to Schott, is the assumption that everything in those days was written on perishable material, a proposition which he finds untenable.137

And this is where we come in—without apologies, since everything is pretty much up in the air, and there is much to be said that has not been said. Since it is admittedly poverty of evidence that leaves us all in a box canyon, one would think that the scholars, if only in desperation, would venture to consider all of the evidence and not only that which comes under the heading of natural science. With all other ways blocked, it might be a good idea to try some of the neglected passages and ask some of the unasked questions. Here are a few:

1. How are we to account for yawning gaps in the evolutionary record, the complete absence of those transitional documents which should, according to the theory, be exceedingly numerous?

2. What about the sudden emergence first of hieroglyphic writing and then of the Semitic alphabet, each in its perfectly developed form? Why in the case of admitted human inventions, the work of obvious genius, must we still assume long periods of gradual, accidental, unconscious development if no evidence for such development exists outside of the theory itself?

3. The oldest writing appears side by side with the oldest legends about writing. Wouldn’t normal curiosity suggest a hearing of those legends? Greek tradition attributing the origin of the alphabet to Phoenicians has been thoroughly vindicated; no scholar denies that. Then why not examine other legends seriously, at least until something better turns up?

4. Why is it that the ancients are unanimous in attributing the origins of writing, including the alphabet, to a heavenly source?

5. Why are the earliest written documents always found in temples? Why do they always deal with religious matters?

6. Whence the unfailing identification of reading and writing with divination, that is, with interpreting the will of heaven?

7. “There is in the very nature of writing something marvelous and mysterious, which at all times has exercised a powerful attraction on thoughful minds,” writes Sethe.138 Why, then, does he insist that the first true writing, the process of an unconscious, mindless, “automatic” process “can contain only very trivial matters”?139Could anything so “Wunderbares und Geheimnisvolles” (wonderful and mysterious)140 have been invented in a humdrum way for purely humdrum purposes?

8. The supernatural power of the written symbol is as old as the marking of arrows. How can one comprehend the nature of the earliest writing without considering the miraculous or magical powers it exercised over man and beast?141

9. The first writing appears full-blown with the founding of the First Dynasty of Egypt, and in a form far too well-knit and consistent to have evolved, according to Schott.142 What is the significance of writing as “the King’s secret,” the indispensable implement to government and authority?

10. Why is writing always a mystery, a guild secret, a kingly and priestly monopoly? “The really marvelous things that writing does, the astounding feats of thought-stimulation, thought-preservation, and thought-transmission . . . are of no interest to practical people: business records, private letters, school exercises, and the like are periodically consigned to the incinerator by clerks and merchants to whom eternal preservation and limitless transmission mean nothing.”143 Why must the latter be given the credit for inventing writing?

Let these ten questions suffice to justify our own speculations. Schott rejects Sethe’s main thesis, that the Egyptians had a true alphabet, on the grounds that they mingled their alphabetic signs with syllabic and picture writing (the ideograms or determinatives that come at the end of words; cf. fig. 44, p. 218). But whereas the scribes make constant use of the twenty-four letters or single-consonant symbols and could not write without them, they often omit the other signs and seem to be playing with them. Schott maintains that only the Phoenician genius suddenly realized the possibility of doing without the syllabic and pictographic elements entirely; yet for ages the Egyptian scribes freely dispensed with them, now in one word and now in another—they knew it could be done. Pictures? Hieratic is as old as hieroglyphic, yet it contains no recognizable pictures, and demotic is anything but picture writing. Why retain pictures in such systems, since no one can recognize them? To an Egyptian who spoke the language, the alphabetic signs would be enough, just as the same signs, without vowels, are quite adequate for the reading of Semitic lanugages. Granted that some of the other signs are necessary, why is the whole massive and awkward machinery of both picture writing and syllabic writing retained to clutter up an economical and efficient alphabet? I would like to suggest that those who employed the “holy engravings” (for that is what hieroglyphic means) had not only their own people in mind but were thinking of others as well. One need only think of countless early funeral-steles, consciously addressed to distant generations yet unborn. Without ideograms any learned Egyptian scribe could still read a text, but we today could never understand Egyptian without those pictures. Can it be that they are put in there for our benefit or the benefit of others like us? Likewise the eking out of the alphabetic signs with syllabic forms suggests a patient repetition and emphasis for the benefit of stumbling children. If Egyptian writing, because of its compound nature, is absolutely unique, perhaps its intention was also unique—to communicate more widely than the other languages. There is a good deal of evidence to support this theory, but we cannot go into it here. For many years learned men guessed at the meaning of hieroglyphics, and when some of them, like Horapollo, Kircher, or Seiffert, made some happy strikes, it was the pictographs that enabled them to do so and which could have put them on the right track had they properly pursued them. In the 1880s Egyptologists of a number of lands, under the leadership of Professor Samuel Birch of Oxford, collected and interpreted all the available hypocephali of that time, and came up with a surprising unity of views, based on the symbolism alone. Today, as many experts are pointing out, it is doubtful whether anyone really understands any Egyptian religious text; there is still a long way to go, though much progress has been made. But the point is that the evidence is all there before our eyes and that the Egyptians have perhaps consciously supplied us with an overload of material, a safety factor to make sure that in the end the message would get across.

As for the Semitic alphabet and our own, derived from the Egyptian and often called the greatest of all inventions, the most wonderful thing about it is that it seems to have been devised for the express purpose of recording the scriptures—our scriptures. The objection today to Sethe’s suggestion that Moses himself may well have been the inventor is that the alphabet is older than Moses and seems to have been at home at an earlier time up north—in Canaan. Sethe does not apologize for citing a Jewish writer, Eupolemos, in support of the claims put in for Moses,144 and so it seems only fair to point out that by far the overwhelming authority of Jewish tradition favors not Moses but Abraham as the inventor of the alphabet, though some say he inherited it from Enoch. Of recent years a number of new alphabets have turned up in the Near East, dating to 2000-1500 B.C. and all “clearly the inventions of individuals.”145 Well, why not? Once one knows it can be done, one is free to invent one’s own alphabet; the Deseret Alphabet is an impressive demonstration of that (fig. 66). But it would seem that “the Canaanitic alphabet, which has conquered the world,” is the oldest of all, and as such is “a witness to the ancient origin of the Torah.”146 Some think it may be as old as or even older than hieroglyphic itself.147

By the most cautious estimate of the situation, it is safe to say that the scriptures are not to be taken lightly. When scholars who pride themselves on their freedom from any religious commitment are found seriously considering the genesis of the written word not only in holy writings but specifically in our own scriptures, it behooves us to pay attention. Whoever reads the Standard Works today has before him the words of God to men from the beginning, in witness of which the very letters on the page are but slightly conventionalized forms of the original symbols in which the message was conveyed. Merely as a cultural phenomenon the possibility is awe-inspiring, but that it should all go back to Israel and Egypt is too much to hope for. As members of the human race we are bound to approach the scriptures with new feelings of reverence and respect. They are the nearest approach and the best clue thus far discovered to the genesis of the written word.

Notes

*

This was first delivered as the Commissioner’s Lecture in 1972 and was published by BYU Press in 1973. It was later reprinted (without the complete footnotes) in

New Era

3 (September 1973): 38-50, and in

Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless

(Provo, Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1978), 101-27, with the preface included above.

1. This note appeared at the end of the New Era version, p. 50: Since these reflections first appeared in the Commissioner’s Lecture Series, an important study on the subject has emerged in a feature article by K. H. Basso and Ned Anderson, “A Western Apache Writing System: The Symbols of Silas John,” Science 180, no. 4090 (8 June 1973): 1013-22. The authors begin by deploring the strange indifference and neglect shown by scientists in the past toward the study of “so-called ‘primitive’ writing systems,” as a result of which the present-day world is almost completely in the dark on the subject. “Under these circumstances,” they write, “it is with considerable enthusiasm” that they call attention to an authentic Western Apache writing system that is still in use. The system is ingenious, original, and highly efficient, and is entirely the invention of one man, Silas John Edwards, who produced it in 1904, insisting that the whole thing was given to him in a “dream from God, . . . at one time in one dream,” for the sole purpose of recording certain ritual prayers and ordinances that have since been faithfully perpetuated among his people. Since the value of the writing was the power to preserve the divine instructions unaltered through time, the knowledge of the system has been “restricted to a small band of elite ritual specialists” (1015). Of course, Silas John knew about alphabetic writing, yet his system is a “totally unique cultural form . . . among the significant intellectual achievements of an American Indian during the 20th century” (1013).

The thing to notice here is that Silas John was a plain, simple, but deeply religious Indian, while the system of writing he produced suddenly in 1904 was not only highly sophisticated but has proven perfectly functional. No long ages of evolution were necessary to its emergence; the thing was given, he always maintained, in a single vision, for the express purpose of instructing men in the will of heaven and keeping them faithfully observant of it; it has never been used for anything else. Here in a leading scientific journal is a scientific description of how a system of writing actually came into being among a “primitive” people, and it confirms our own suspicions at every point.

2. Edwyn Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1921), 81.

3. John Lear, “The Star-Fixed Ages of Man,” Saturday Review 10 (January 1970): 99, speaking in particular of population and pollution problems.

4. “What is happening now is . . . an abandonment of Renaissance-inspired approaches. . . . The new approach is quite different in spirit and in method. It begins with a clear acknowledgment of the impossibility of reconstructing the original order of things human,” William D. Stahlman, “Global Myths Record Their Passage,” in ibid., 101.

5. Joseph Fielding Smith, Selections from Answers to Gospel Questions (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1972), 4.

6. Early Jewish apocrypha emphasize the close association between Adam and the art of writing, a theme which cannot be handled in the scope of this paper. He is called “the four-lettered Adam” in the Sibylline Oracles 3:24, referring to the well-known Jewish doctrine that all things were created out of letters in the first place, the theme of the Sefer Yetzira.

7. Raymond O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), no. 510:1146.

8. That this Atum is to be identified with Adam has been suggested by leading Egyptologists: Eugene Lefebure, “Le cham et l’adam égyptiens,” Biblical Archaeological Society Proceedings 9 (1893): 174-81; Alexandre Moret, Histoire de l’Orient, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses universitaires, 1945), 1:209.

9. Jean Capart, “L’exaltation du Livre,” Chronique d’Egypte 22 (1946): 25.

10. R. Englebach, “An Essay on the Advent of the Dynastic Race in Egypt and Its Consequences,” ASAE 42 (1942): 197-98.

11. Jean Capart, “Thème religieux ou fantaisie,” Egyptian Religion 1 (1933): 117.

12. Alan H. Gardiner, “The Nature and Development of the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Writing,” JEA 2 (1915): 62.

13. Alexander Scharff and Anton Moortgat, Aegypten und Vorderasien im Altertum (Munich: Bruckmann, 1950), 22.

14. Elise Baumgartel, Prehistoric Egypt (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 48.

15. Stuart Piggott, The Dawn of Civilization (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), 127.

16. Walter B. Emery, “The Tombs of the First Pharoahs,” Scientific American 197 (July 1957): 112.

17. Kurt Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben: Die Entstehungsgeschichte der Schrift, vol. 12 of Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Altertumskunde Aegyptens (Hildesheim: Olms, 1964), 27-28.

18. Scharff and Moortgat, Aegypten und Vorderasien im Altertum, 46.

19. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 20.

20. Johannes Friedrich, “Schriftsysteme und Schrifterfindungen im alten Orient und bei modernen Naturvölkern,” Archiv Orientalni 19 (1951): 251-52.

21. Henri Frankfort, The Birth of Civilization in the Near East (London: Williams and Norgate, 1954), 110.

22. Ibid., 106-7.

23. Antal Dávid, “Remarques sur l’origine de l’écriture sumérienne,” Archiv Orientalni 18/2 (1950): 51-54.

24. Bedrich Hrozný, Ancient History of Western Asia, India, and Crete (New York: Philosophical Library, 1953), 116-17.

25. J. Jordan, “Ausgrabungen in Warka,” Archiv für Orientforschung 6 (1930-31): 318.

26. Phineas Mordell, “The Origin of Letters and Numerals According to Sefer Yesirah,” JQR 2 (1911-12): 575.

27. Émile Massoulard, Préhistoire et Protohistoire d’Égypte (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1950), 323-24.

28. Naphtali H. Tur-Sinai, “The Origin of the Alphabet,” JQR 41 (1950-51): 296.

29. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 20; Friedrich, “Schriftsysteme und Schrifterfindungen,” 259; Hrozný, Ancient History of Western Asia, 166-72, looks for the place of origin in northern Syria, northwestern Mesopotamia, or eastern Asia Minor.

30. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 45-47.

31. A. Schmitt, cited in Helmut Arntz, “Zur Geschichte der Schrift,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gessellschaft 97 (1947): 82-83.

32. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 10.

33. Ernst Doblhofer, Voices in Stone, tr. Mervyn Savill (New York: Viking, 1961), 33.

34. Ibid.

35. Dávid, “Remarques sur l’origine,” 49.

36. Doblhofer, Voices in Stone, 22.

37. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 24-25.

38. Ibid., 9.

39. Gardiner, “Egyptian Hieroglyphic Writing,” 64.

40. Doblhofer, Voices in Stone, 28 (emphasis added).

41. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 28.

42. Ibid., 18.

43. William F. Edgerton, “On the Theory of Writing,” JNES 11 (1953): 287-90.

44. Heinrich J. Lanzen, “New Discoveries at Warka in Southern Iraq,” Archaeology 17 (1964): 125.

45. T. Burton-Brown, Studies in Third Millennium History (London: Luzac, 1946), 66-67.

46. Sherwood L. Washburn, “Tools and Human Evolution,” Scientific American 203 (September 1960): 63.

47. James K. Feibleman, “Philosophy of Tools,” Social Forces 45 (1967): 331-37. See also Kenneth P. Oakley, “Dating the Emergence of Man,” Advancement of Science 18 (1948): 422. Lewis Mumford, “Man the Finder,” Technology and Culture 6 (1965): 375-81.

48. Leslie A. White, “Energy and the Evolution of Culture,” American Anthropologist 45 (1943): 338, 347.

49. “Cybernation and Man,” Man on Earth 1/4 (1965): 6.

50. Amélia Hertz, “L’histoire de l’outil en fer d’après les documents égyptiens hittites, et assyro-babyloniens,” L’Anthropologie 35 (1925): 75-95.

51. Jean Hiernaux, “How Man Will Evolve,” Science Digest 58 (August 1965): 93.

52. Carleton S. Coon, The Story of Man (New York: Knopf, 1962), 64. The Leakeys would concur with his verdict.

53. William F. Petrie, “History in Tools,” Smithsonian Institution Annual Report (1918): 568.

54. Ibid., 568-69.

55. Ibid., 570.

56. E. von Mülinen, “Sprachen und Schriften des vorderen Orients im Verhältnis zu den Religionen und Kulturkreisen,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen-Palästina-Vereins 47 (1924): 88, 90.

57. Jürgen Smolian, “Vehicula Religiosa: Wagen in Mythos, Ritus, Kultus und Mysterium,” Numen 10 (1963): 203, citing as examples fire, wheels, wagons, architecture, and ships.

58. Joseph Fielding Smith, ed., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1947), 54 (emphasis added).

59. Naphtali H. Tur-Sinai, “Sitir Samê, die Himmelsschrift,” Archiv Orientalni 17 (1949): 433.

60. Hermes Trismegistus, 1, cited in Theodor Hopfner, Fontes Historiae Religionis Aegyptiacae (Bonn: Marcus and Weber, 1922-24), 393.

61. Henri Brugsch, “Bau und Maasse des Tempels von Edfu,” Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 10 (1872): 3-4.

62. Geo Widengren, The Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book (Uppsala: Boktryckeri, 1950), 21.

63. Smith, Selections from Answers to Gospel Questions, 5; Moses 7:67.

64. Alfred Jeremias, Das alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916), 51.

65. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata V, 4, in PG 9:44.

66. Frankfort, Birth of Civilization, 55-56.

67. George Steindorff, Egypt (New York: Augustin, 1943), 24.

68. Hrozný, Ancient History of Western Asia, India, and Crete, 36-37.

69. Frankfort, Birth of Civilization, 56, n. 1.

70. Piggott, Dawn of Civilization, 90.

71. See Hugh W. Nibley, “The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State,” WPQ 2/3 (1949): 329-39; reprinted in CWHN 10:2-15; Hugh W. Nibley, “Controlling the Past: Part V,” IE 58 (May 1955): 307-8; reprinted in CWHN 4:245-47.

72. Arntz, “Zur Geschichte der Schrift,” 76.

73. Cornelius Nepos, On the Great Generals of Foreign Nations XVIII, Eumenes I, 5.

74. Nibley, “Controlling the Past: Part V,” 307-8; reprinted in CWHN 4:245-53.

75. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 20-21.

76. Siegfried Schott, Mythe und Mythenbildung im alten Aegypten, vol. 15 of Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Altertumskunde Aegyptens (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1945), 10-11.

77. See Hugh W. Nibley, “Tenting, Toll, and Taxing,” WPQ 19 (December 1966): 603-7; reprinted in CWHN 10:41-43; see also Hugh W. Nibley, “The Hierocentric State,” WPQ 4/2 (1951): 235-38; reprinted in CWHN 10:110-14.

78. Scharff and Moortgat, Aegypten und Vorderasien im Altertum, 3; there is a striking passage in Syncellus, cited in Hopfner, Fontes Historiae Religionis Aegyptiacae, 74.

79. Plotinus, Enneads II, 3, On Whether the Stars Are Causes 7.

80. Papyrus Salt 825A, in Alan H. Gardiner, “The House of Life,” JEA 24 (1938): 167.

81. Heliodorus, Aethiopica (Ethiopians) II, 28, 2.

82. Étienne Drioton, L’écriture énigmatique du livre du jour et de la nuit (Cairo: l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1942), 86.

83. Francis L. Griffith, Stories of the High Priests of Memphis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900), 21-22.

84. Leo Koep, Das himmlische Buch in Antike und Christentum (Bonn: Hanstein, 1952); Widengren, Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book.

85. Kurt H. Sethe, Dramatische Texte zu altaegyptischen Mysterienspielen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1928), 1:5, 8.

86. Max Pieper, Die grosse Inschrift des Königs Neferhotep (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929), 6-11.

87. Moret, Histoire de l’Orient, 1:96-107.

88. Pyramid Text (PT) 309:490-91.

89. Widengren, Ascension of the Apostle and the Heavenly Book, 11, 10.

90. Alexandre Moret, Du caractère religieux de la royauté pharaonique (Paris: Leroux, 1902), 102.

91. Winfried Barta, “Bemerkungen zur Darstellung der Jahreszeiten im Grabe des Mrr-wj-k3.j,” Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 97 (1971): 7.

92. Gardiner, “The House of Life,” 76.

93. Heinrich Zimmern, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament (Berlin: Reuther & Richard, 1903), 405.

94. PT 250:267.

95. Bruno Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1927), 2:124-25.

96. Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1910-58), 1:42-44.

97. A. Leo Oppenheim, “Mesopotamian Mythology III,” Orientalia 19 (1950): 155.

98. PT 250:267.

99. Capart, “L’exaltation du Livre,” 25-27.

100. Alan H. Gardiner, “New Literary Works from Ancient Egypt,” JEA 1 (1914): 25.

101. Gardiner, “The House of Life,” 166.

102. Alan H. Gardiner, “The Secret Chambers of the Sanctuary of Thoth,” JEA 11 (1925): 4.

103. W. K. G. Lambert, “Ancestors, Authors, and Canonicity,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 11 (1957): 9.

104. Heinrich Schäfer, “Mousa bei Horapollo II, 29 und die Göttin Ss3-t,” Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde 42 (1905): 72-75.

105. Siegried Schott, in “Nachwort,” to Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 81.

106. Gardiner, “The House of Life,” 159; cf. 174-79.

107. Walter Otto, Die Musen und der göttliche Ursprung des Singens und Sagens (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961).

108. Fritz M. Heichelheim, “The Earliest Musical Notations of Mankind and the Invention of Our Alphabet,” Epigraphica rivista italiana di epigrafia 12 (1950): 111-15.

109. We have treated the overall theme in “Hierocentric State,” 226-53; in CWHN 10:99-147.

110. Siegfried Schott, Das Buch vom Sieg über Seth (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1929), 16.

111. Schott, in “Nachwort,” to Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 83.

112. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 2-3; the only motivating force was immediate practical need, 41, 66.

113. Ibid., 32, speaking of Egyptian linear writing; ibid., 39, speaking of the Egyptian alphabet.

114. Ibid., 4-5; fig. 2.

115. Ibid., 6, 11, 14-17.

116. Ibid., 17.

117. Ibid., 18-19.

118. Ibid., 24-25.

119. Ibid., 25-26.

120. Ibid., 26.

121. Ibid., 27.

122. Ibid., 28.

123. Ibid., 20.

124. Ibid., 29.

125. Ibid., 34.

126. Ibid., 38.

127. Ibid., 45-63.

128. Ibid., 55-56.

129. Ibid., 57-59.

130. Ibid., 66.

131. Ibid., 73.

132. Bauer, Alte Orient, 12-13; citing Schott, in “Nachwort,” to Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 75.

133. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 74.

134. Ibid., 75.

135. Ibid., 76.

136. Ibid., 80.

137. Ibid., 81.

138. Ibid., 1.

139. Ibid., 73.

140. Ibid., 1.

141. See Nibley, “The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State,” 328-44; in CWHN 10:1-32.

142. Schott, in Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 81.

143. Nibley, “Controlling the Past: Part V,” 307-8; reprinted in CWHN 4:245-47.

144. Sethe, Vom Bilde zum Buchstaben, 55.

145. Alfred Jirku, “Der Kult des Mondgottes im alter Palästina-Syrien,”

Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 100 (1950): 520.

146. Tur-Sinai, “The Origin of the Alphabet,” 296.

147. Mordell, “Letters and Numerals According to Sefer Yesirah,” 575.

[cathysims1]

Getting Out of Debt: Where to start?

Getting Out of Debt: Where to start?:

Knowledge You Need

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When you want to get out of debt, where do you start? Depending on your particular situation, there are different approaches to getting out of debt. Let’s review them now so you can decide which approach will work better for you, based on where you are financially right now.

If you have been paying your bills on time and have a good credit record (and want to keep it in good standing), and you are working or have a monthly income, then credit Counseling or Debt Settlement will not be a good choice for you.

If your accounts are past due and you cannot make the payments, then Credit Counseling (also commonly known as Debt Management or Debt Consolidation) or Debt Settlement might be a good choice for you.

It’s important to note that there is no magic bullet that will work for every debt situation. But keep in mind that in many cases, money problems are NOT the result of financial issues but rather a result of how we think.

This may sound esoteric to some people, but when you think about it you will realize that it is true. For example, take any self-made millionaire, somebody that went from poverty to a millionaire by himself or herself. If you were to take all their money away, do you think they can make it back? You bet! The reason is that they have a different set of beliefs about what is possible in life, they think differently than most people.

And when you consider that most people that won the lottery lost it all within just a couple of years, then you can see that how we think and what we believe is possible for us makes all the difference in the world.

I don’t believe in luck. I don’t believe that we are like a leaf in the wind that goes where the wind blows, with no control whatsoever over what is possible. I used to think that way, but not anymore. I believe that we are all in charge of our lives and in charge of our destinies. And I invite you to try this approach in your life, and discover that in reality, you truly are in charge of your destiny. Anything is possible for you, no matter how the economy is doing or what is going on around you.

To me, it doesn’t make sense to show you how to get out of debt unless you can change your mindset about what is possible for you. Once you change your mindset and you get out of debt, nothing can stop you.

I found that most of the time when we fail to achieve what we really want, there is an underlying belief (that we are usually not aware of) that is not supporting us. Have you ever experienced self-sabotage? Have you ever failed to follow through on something that you wanted to achieve? Most likely you had conflicting beliefs that were pulling you in different directions.

But what is a belief? A belief is a feeling of certainty about what something means to you. Most of our beliefs are generalizations about our past that are based on interpretations of our experiences. In other words, they are based on how we interpreted what happened to us at the moment. Let me give you an example. Twin brothers go to an amusement park and decide to take a ride on a roller-coaster together. One walks out of that ride feeling very happy and thrilled, and these effects will be positive over his lifetime. The other, however, walks out of that same ride full of fear and shock, and those effects will be negative for him over his lifetime. It was the same ride, but it was perceived differently by them. We all perceive and interpret our experiences in a different way.

Which brings me to another very important point that you should always remember: it is not what happens to us in life, but how we interpret what happens to us and what we decide to focus on that changes our life. We need to take responsibility for where we are in life, feel grateful for it, and move on. Blaming our situation or our “conditions” will only bring more of the same. By feeling grateful for what you have, whatever that maybe, you are actually impressing thoughts of abundance upon the Universe, and the Universe will deliver to you more abundance. It may sound strange to some people, but it is one of the immutable Laws of the Universe, the Law of Attraction. For more information on the Law of Attraction, see the Resources section.

But let’s go back to your beliefs and how they affect your life. They actually affect everything you do, since all your actions are the result of your beliefs. They are extremely important to achieving success in anything you do.

You see, from the day we are born, we are bombarded with negative suggestions. Not knowing how to counter them, we unconsciously accept them and bring them into being as our experience.

For example, we are told: – You cannot do it / You can’t do that – if you don’t wear a sweater, you will catch a cold – You don’t have a chance – Things are only getting worse – You may get fired – You are not smart enough

And so on. Get the idea?

Consider now the fact that right now in America, there are about 36 million people that are 65 years of age and older. Out of that 36 million people, over 34 million are broke. They are depending on someone else for life’s necessities.

Why is it that in the richest country in the world, 95% of the population ends up broke?

If you ask these people, they would tell you that their lives were shaped by exterior forces or circumstances, by things that happened to them. This implies that they were not in control, that they were merely a leaf in the wind.

But as we said before, and it’s so important that it is worth repeating, it is not what happens to us in life, but how we interpret what happens to us and what we decide to focus on that changes our life. A person’s fortune can be completely wiped out, and he or she can build it again with the right mindset. It has happened millions of times, which proves that it is NOT what happens to you but how you react to it.

The main reason that most people never achieve financial independence is that we are not taught how to succeed. We are not taught how to achieve financial independence. We are not taught how to handle money. We are never taught that WE are in charge of our lives.

The educational system in place today was created in the 1800s and was designed to prepare us to work as employees. In high school, we are not taught how to handle money, how to invest it, how to create passive streams of income. We don’t learn it either in College or University. We grow up (most of us, anyway) believing that money is in short supply, it is hard to come by and that you have to work really hard for it. We grow up associating different things to money like “If I have a lot of money, I may lose my friends,” thereby, “money equals loneliness.” Other common beliefs are “money changes people, they become greedy”, “If I make a lot of money, I could lose my motivation”. Or, “If I’m broke (or poor) people will pay more attention to me”. And the list goes on and on.

The fact is that money by itself is neither good nor bad. It is what we associate with money that makes all the difference in the world.

Let me give you a few examples that affected me personally.

I lived most of my life under a set of beliefs that controlled most of what I did. It took me a while to identify those beliefs, but when I did, I realized that they had such an enormous power over me that they controlled my focus, my ideas, and my acts. Before I was aware of these beliefs, I blamed my circumstances on other people or “bad luck”.

When I was growing up, money was always tight. My father lost his job when I was 8 years old. He could never get another job that paid him enough, so we were always short of money. My parents had no choice but to take me out of private school and send me to public school. I remember my parents saying to me, “we are middle class”, and as a kid, I accepted it as if it were a fact that would never change.

Growing up in an environment of lack, I felt that money was in short supply. That money only went to other people richer than me. People said that “money can’t buy you happiness”, and I believed it. I deeply believed that because of circumstances that were beyond my control, other people could have money, but not me. I believed I was “middle class”, period. I was “destined” to be that way.

Let me ask you, how do you think living with these beliefs affected my life as an adult? How did it affect what was possible or impossible for me?

At a conscious level, I wanted to earn a lot of money so I could live comfortably. But deep inside me, (at a subconscious level) I never believed I could earn good money. When I worked as a salesperson many years ago, I would have a great week, and then during the next 3 weeks I would sabotage my own success. I would not work hard until the money ran out. This was done subconsciously of course; there was always a “reasonable” excuse for not working hard.

I am very grateful to the Universe for the parents I have and the experiences I had since they prepared me for what I am today.

The truth of the matter is that all beliefs that we “inherit” from our parents are beliefs that they “inherited” from their parents.

So I now choose to believe things that will inspire me, and I do not really care if they are factual truths or not; they will become truths once I believe in them.

A couple of examples of my new beliefs are: – I am a soul with a body; my soul is infinitely abundant – I am always surrounded by abundance. Abundance is all there is. – Money always comes easily and effortlessly – I am wealth – I am abundance – I am health You have beliefs about everything. And what is great about identifying and changing your beliefs, is that you can choose to believe anything that can help you achieve your goals.

You have to look for those limiting beliefs that are controlling your life. If you are ready to break free from the chains of limiting beliefs, I will guide you through a simple yet very powerful process that will enable you to change those beliefs for good.

You can literally change anything you want.

To get the best results out of the following exercise, you will need a quiet place and privacy.

If you are in debt, you need to adopt new beliefs that will empower you. You can decide what you will choose to believe, so why not find beliefs that will help you achieve your goals? Beliefs that limit your actions can be as devastating as positive beliefs can be empowering. When we fully believe something is true, it is like delivering a command to our brain as to how to represent what is occurring. In other words, they are “filters” to our perceptions of the world.

We need to take responsibility for where we are in life. We need to stop blaming others for what happens to us, and decide to move forward.

A few good beliefs to have are: 1- Everything happens for a good reason (even if, right now, I cannot see what that good reason is) 2- People are inherently good 3- Money is easy to come by 4- The Universe is abundant and limitless, and money never runs out 5- Even before a problem occurs, it has already been solved. There is a solution to it somewhere, and I will find it. 6- I am wealth – I am abundance – I am health 7- I am a spirit with a body; my spirit is eternally abundant and wealthy 8- Being broke is only temporary.

Feel free to come up with any beliefs that will empower you, in all areas of your life.

There is so much abundance around us all the time, yet we fail to appreciate it. Instead, we are taught from an early age that all supplies are limited. Limited jobs, limited opportunities, limited money, limited everything! Then no wonder when we analyze our belief systems.

I sincerely want you to become debt-free as soon as possible because I believe that being in debt is being in financial slavery. It limits everything you do in your life: whether you will send your kids to private or public school and the education they will receive, the area of town and the house you will live in, even the medical insurance you will get! When you are in a good financial situation, you have many more choices available to you. Living in poverty is NOT the solution to the world’s problems.

Now it’s time to begin your journey, if you are ready to become debt free and live a financially stress-free life.

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from https://www.perfectrealestateinvestments.com/getting-out-of-debt/ from https://perfectrealest.tumblr.com/post/622081402246184960 from https://bettychitwood0.blogspot.com/2020/06/getting-out-of-debt-where-to-start.html from https://bettychitwod0.tumblr.com/post/622086512392192000 from https://cathysims1.blogspot.com/2020/06/getting-out-of-debt-where-to-start.html