Paullas
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Well I guess since the domain is now sold (and congratulations to you Nigel, what a bargain price!), the discussion can now continue without risk of annoying those who only wished to bid without any religious discussion.
Elohim is actually masculine and feminine as well as being plural. Some have translated it as 'gods and godesses', others as 'god and godess' (i.e. one of each), however I believe the great celestial beings have a dual male and female nature as we humans do so the distinction is unimportant. Yoga and its Western counterpart alchemy are largely concerned with balancing the male and female aspects of our being.
But your quote again emphasises my point as it is again taken from a second-hand TRANSLATION, and in my opinion from an elite group with an agenda.
Let us consider the original Hebrew of Deuteronomy 6:4:
Shema Yisrael YHWH Eloheinu YHWH Ehad
Hear, O Israel, YHWH (is) our god, YHWH is one
Elohim means 'gods', the plural formation of 'eloah' which means 'god' but can also mean 'godess'. The '-nu' or '-enu' suffix means 'our'. Thus Eloheinu means 'our god'.
This does not say that the Elohim are one. It says that YHWH who is 'our eloah'/ our god, is one.
(In Bibles, YHWH or YHVH is often translated variously as Yahweh or Jehoveh - since w and v are interchangeable, as are j and y - and often as 'the Lord' because in Judaism YHWH is replaced with Adonai which means 'Lord', as Jews consider the true name YHWH ineffable and unpronounceable.)
But of course if you are going from an English translation, you would not see any of this. You would be told what to think by the translator and be denied the right to come to your own conclusion about the meaning. Considering the history of the Christian churches, with all the millions who were murdered, tortured and burnt at the stake during the inquisition, the crusades etc can we trust the authorities who oversaw this bloodshed and who also oversaw the translation to have done a faithful job? They don't sound very reputable to me! They sound like the warmongerers in the world today, clearly on the wrong side when it comes to spiritual matters. So I'd rather absorb the wisdom within the ancient scriptures, including the Bible, but have nothing to do with these kind of people.
There is also something else which gets lost in all translations from Hebrew to other langauges which really is fundamental to the original. Each letter in Hebrew has a numerical value and the words therefore equate to numerical values too - this is known as gematria. Where two words have the same numerical value they are considered specially related. Dod meaning love has a value of 14. Zahav meaning gold, a symbol of spiritual attainment also has a value of 14. Other connections exist too. The Hebrew word for father has a value of 3. Mother has a value of 41. Child is 44, the combination of both. The cryptic reference to the Number of the Beast in Revelation is a direct prompt to use gematria to unfathom the hidden meaning.
Other hidden messages exist within the Bible too. Exodus Ch 14 vs 19, 20 and 21 each contain 72 letters. When these verses are written on top of each other so they appear as 72 3-character columns, they give the 72 secret names of God known as the Shemhamphorasch.
This use of language laced with hidden messages and meanings is called in Esoteric circles the Green Language or the Language of the Birds and for thousands of years has been used by initiates to communicate esoteric practices and knowledge to other initiates while consealing it from the mundane populace. The Torah and the Bible are repleat with such hidden language. Nostrodamus used it. The alchemists (like Isaac Newton who translated the Bible from Hebrew himself to get to the truth) used it heavily in their seemingly incomprehensible texts (which I might add were nothing to do with converting material lead into gold).
If you become an initiate in one of the spiritual orders, the esoteric meanings will at some stage be revealed to you. But of course much of this is lost when it becomes translated into other languages and much can be deliberately obfuscated if the translator so wishes.
Every religion has two groups, the masses and the inner cabal who are initiated into the esoteric knowledge and who are members of secret orders. The masses are encouraged by the authority figures in the cabal to take the scriptures as literal and to steer clear of occult practices, astrology and the like. There are two reasons for this. Firstly ignorant, unprepared people can cause harm to themselves and others if availing themselves of and misusing the esoteric knowledge. Secondly some members of the elite in the cabal wish to keep the esoteric techniques which dramatically increase intelligence, health, willpower and can give various occult abilities, to themselves and prevent others so they have a massive advantage over everyone else. If you want to know more about these esoteric practices, the yoga community is pretty open about it since true Spiritual masters live a humble life and want to share their wisdom to uplift others. When you see religious leaders adorned in gold sat on thrones in palaces alarm bells should ring!
In the Christian religion there are many orders teaching esoteric knowledge to their members who are in senior clergy positions in Catholic and Protestant churches including the Jesuits, Rosicrucians, Freemasons etc. This two-group system has been going on in every religion since time immemorial. We also know from the Bible that the wise men were astrologers and practiced rituals. There are many references indicating specific meditation practices too such as turning a staff into a snake that spiritual adepts such as Moses were practicing - this is a Kundalini Yoga technique using the same cryptic terminology. (In Yoga and other Esoteric traditions, a man's spine is referred to as his staff, and the advanced practices involve awakening a massive charge of energy called the Kundalini located at the base of the spine, and moving it up the spine and into the brain either to the top of the head or the 3rd eye area. This charge of energy resembles a serpent as it slides up and down the spine and is usually visualised in the form of a serpent in meditation. The practice unblocks energy centres known as chakras within the spine and awakens the latent spiritual genius within. Both the caduceus symbol, adopted by the British Medical Association, and the Uraeus found on Egyptian statues and masks, depict the serpent on the staff and in the 3rd eye area respectively).
Should the Bible be taken literally? Not everything in it should. There are many historical references in it but many instances of analogy. Analogic was much more common in Biblical times than logic which was not developed much prior to Aristotle, and it is common in other spiritual texts such as those in Hinduism and Buddhism. Jesus himself often spoke in parables and analogies. Spiritual masters of all traditions today also use analogies to explain Spiritual truths because things are mirrored on different levels. The other Spiritual masters who preceed Jesus clearly used analogic, metaphors and parables as well, and of course the advanced practices which could pose a danger to the uninitiated had to be consealed. So we can't take the whole thing literally. But as a person evolves spiritually and becomes more aware of the deeper aspects of his being - the astral body, the chakras etc - and as he gains more esoteric knowlege and sees parallels between scriptures from different cultures, it is possible to spot the esoteric meanings among the historical narratives in the scriptures.
i hope your taking the piss by posting that
