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    Heaven's Criminal Code: Prepare Your Defense
    Heaven's Criminal Code: Prepare Your Defense
    Heaven's Criminal Code: Prepare Your Defense
    Ebook159 pages2 hours

    Heaven's Criminal Code: Prepare Your Defense

    By Nilton Bonder

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    About this ebook

    One of the most disturbing ideas known to our human imaginations is that of the Final Judgment, the accounting we are called to give at the end of our lives. Born in the depths of our consciousness, this notion of a final judgment is a consequence of our perception that we have priorities and goals in our lives. It is a measurement of just how successful or unsuccessful we have been in the venture of life.

    This book suggests a possible set of ethics for the individual vis--vis his or her own selfethics that reflect the obligations life imposes on the living.

    Written in the form of a Criminal Code, this book both in structure and terminology mimic legal documents.

    The prime goal is to call attention to the deep psychic fusion between what we believe to be divine expectationsthat is, those of the Creatorand the expectations of our consciousness. The key postulate of the Biblical text is really this: that Creator and creature communicate with each other through consciousness. More than that perhaps: that Creator and creature blend and merge within consciousness.

    This Constitution and Criminal Code will thus have to account for projections of both God's desires and the desires of our consciousness. They are structured in the principles laid out in the Ten Commandments and in the punishments of the Ten Plagues, both found in the book of Exodus.

    The Creator's expectations and punishments correspond to similar expectations and punishments within our consciousness. Employing collective and personal symbolism and the reading of Carl Jung of the Commandments, the book steer away from the morality usually applied when judging, instead allowing the souls yearnings and aspirations to guide this evaluation of the quality and propriety of life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrafford Publishing
    Release dateNov 10, 2010
    ISBN9781426941306
    Heaven's Criminal Code: Prepare Your Defense
    Author

    Nilton Bonder

    Rabbi Nilton Bonder was trained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City and lectures regularly in the United States. Born in Brazil, he is a best selling author of eighteen books in Latin America. He leads one of Brazil most influential Jewish congregations and is also active in the civil rights and ecological causes. Some of his books have been translated in Europe and Asia and five of them in the US (The Kabbalah of Food, The Kabbalah of Money, The Kabbala of Envy, Yidische Kop -- Problem Solving in Jewish Lore, Learning and Humor and Our Immoral Soul -- A Manifesto of Spiritual Disobedience) His last book published in the US has been selected among the best 20 books on Judaica on 2002 and has been included in the Best Jewish Writing of 2002 - organized by Tikkun Magazine. Our Immoral Soul was selected as the best brazilian play of 2007 by Veja Magazine, the most prestigious in the country. His latest book "Taking off Your Shoes" on an expedition with Harvard University on footsteps of Abraham, has made the best selling lists in the country. He has led workshops for main corporations like IBM, MCI, ABN-Amro, Globo Network Television, Brazilian Oil Company and delivered lectures at Boston University, New York Central Library, American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Blanton Peale Counseling Center, Open Center, San Francisco and New York, Nationaal Vakbodsmuseum, Amsterdam, Leiden University, Omega Institute, The Learning Anex, San Francisco, Libreria L'Ancora, Milão, State of the World Forum, Brandeis University, Jewish Museum, Praga, and United Nations Peace Conference.

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      Book preview

      Heaven's Criminal Code - Nilton Bonder

      HEAVEN’S CRIMINAL CODE

      Prepare Your Defense

      to face the Supreme Heavenly Court

      This is the first question we are asked by the

      Heavenly Court:

      Were you honest in business?

      Talmud

      Nilton Bonder

      Order this book online at www.trafford.com

      or email orders@trafford.com

      Most Trafford titles are also available at major online book retailers.

      © Copyright 2010 Nilton Bonder.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

      Printed in the United States of America.

      ISBN: 978-1-4269-4128-3 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4269-4129-0 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4269-4130-6 (ebk)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2010912599

      Our mission is to efficiently provide the world’s finest, most comprehensive book publishing service, enabling every author to experience success. To find out how to publish your book, your way, and have it available worldwide, visit us online at www.trafford.com

      Trafford rev. 09/08/2010

      missing image file www.trafford.com

      North America & international

      toll-free: 1 888 232 4444 (USA & Canada)

      phone: 250 383 6864 fax: 812 355 4082

      Contents

      Introduction

      PART 1

      TITLE 1

      CHAPTER 1

      CHAPTER 2

      TITLE 2

      CHAPTER 1

      CHAPTER 2

      PART 2

      TITLE 1

      CHAPTER 1

      CHAPTER 2

      TITLE 2

      CHAPTER 1

      CHAPTER 2

      PART 3

      SENTENCE-CURE

      X

      SENTENCE-PUNISHMENT

      OF THE SETTINGS OF

      JUDGMENT ITSELF

      OF HELL, OF PARADISE

      YOUR NEXT INCARNATION

      Bibliography

      Introduction

      One of the most disturbing ideas known to our human imaginations is that of the Final Judgment, the accounting we are called to give at the end of our lives.

      Born in the depths of our consciousness, this notion of a final judgment is a consequence of our perception that we have priorities and goals in our lives. It is a measurement of just how successful or unsuccessful we have been in the venture of life.

      This book suggests a possible set of ethics for the individual vis-à-vis his or her own self—ethics that reflect the obligations life imposes on the living.

      I have written the book in the form of a Criminal Code, so its structure and at times even its terminology mimic legal documents. It is in fact a kind of Personal Constitution, which includes the possible consequences of any breach of its terms.

      My prime goal is to call attention to the deep psychic fusion between what we believe to be divine expectations—that is, those of the Creator—and the expectations of our consciousness. The key postulate of the Biblical text is really this: that Creator and creature communicate with each other through consciousness. More than that perhaps: that Creator and creature blend and merge within consciousness.

      This Constitution and Criminal Code will thus have to account for projections of both God’s desires and the desires of our consciousness. I have structured these in the form of the principles laid out in the Ten Commandments and of the punishments of the Ten Plagues, both found in the book of Exodus.

      The Creator’s expectations and punishments correspond to similar expectations and punishments within our consciousness. Employing collective and personal symbolism, my intention has been to steer away from the morality usually applied when judging, instead allowing the soul’s yearnings and aspirations to guide this evaluation of the quality and propriety of life.

      How would you be measured pursuant to a jurisprudence of the soul? What verdict would be handed down if you stood before laws of essence and not of morality? What sentence would be appropriate from the perspective of your life as a whole?

      The following pages endeavor to illustrate and illuminate these and other questions. Step into this landscape of nightmares, regrets, and remorse not as if entering a sadistic purgatory of horror and fright but as if seeking to wake up even wider awake.

      An awakening that absolves and saves...

      That saves us from the harshest and most recriminating of all judgments: our own.

      PART 1

      OF HEAVEN’S JURISDICTIONS

      Let us begin by drawing a clear distinction between Heaven’s jurisdiction and Earth’s.

      Earthly justice is concerned with the reciprocal relations between two or more beings. When something happens that characterizes an illegal or unfair act, the main goal of earthly justice is to identify any injured parties or offenders, or point out rights and wrongs—or what is more right or more wrong. Its tool is the ability to tell good from evil.

      Earthly jurisprudence takes as its basic assumption that any contact between two or more agents can lead to the filing of a suit or lodging of a claim. Yet this is not an absolute external justice. It is societies themselves that establish norms and standards in an effort to assuage their citizen-members’ biggest concerns and fears and protect their safety and well-being. And so societies judge, condemn, and punish. Rights are human constructs that go through constant transformation.

      When earthly justice investigates the question of ‘good and evil’, one of its greatest challenges is to avoid slipping into judgments of individuals themselves rather than of their actions. The quest to find a ‘guilty party’ can easily sidetrack earthly justice from the quest to understand relations and interactions between individuals, thereby reinforcing the illusion that some essences are better than others. We move from a justice of ‘good and evil’ to a justice of ‘good and bad’. Herein lies the source of all prejudice. The desire for justice becomes subverted into a desire for special privileges and prerogatives.

      Heavenly jurisprudence, on the other hand, deals solely with issues between creature and Creator. Quite unlike earthly justice, Heaven is not interested in the justice of interactions. All actions are legitimate even when illegal because they derive from our use of free will. Heavenly justice does not recognize the notion of ‘good or evil’ because this idea represents a relation, that is, it emphasizes a personal perspective. Heavenly justice is absolute. Even the perspective of an entire society, or of a majority, is always a personal perspective, a parallel reality constructed for purposes that are never absolute, no matter how noble they might be. Because earthly justice is non-absolute, its rules are invented, distinct from the true rules of life or from the rules underlying the purposes of Creation. In heavenly litigation, it is not relevant to identify an injured party and a perpetrator, for once judicial proceedings have been initiated, both identities are known a priori: perpetrator and victim are always one and the same person. The injured party is the Creator, represented by Its creature, and the defendant is the one who uses free will, that is, this very same creature. Therefore, heavenly judgment is the judgment of yourself by yourself.

      Religion and morality have in fact projected onto heavenly jurisprudence twisted illusions derived from earthly justice. Worse yet, they have projected an earthly justice of questionable quality, a utopian justice that grants ultimate privileges to morality in that it affirms there is no impunity. In this authoritarian conception of reality, ‘good’ vanquishes ‘evil’—clearly reflecting morality’s thirst for exultant vengeance. And without any doubt, heavenly jurisprudence is most brutally distorted when it is painted as a forum for identifying who was good or who was bad. A justice that lies above good and evil, after all, would have no interest in labeling some people good and others bad. Whether creatures are all good by nature, or all bad, or able to perfect themselves and become good, or tend to degenerate into bad—these are relational concerns typical of earthly justice. Better put, they are the concerns of a justice governed more by conventions and even biases than by absolute impartiality.

      For us to understand the concerns of heavenly justice, we must first free ourselves from the propaganda that has transformed Heaven into a repository of earthly fantasies. The garbage floating about the ‘heavens’ of our unresolved earthly issues keeps us from perceiving our real commitments to transcendence. At the center of this ‘propaganda’ lie the concepts of paradise and hell. The biggest problem with such simplistic, childish concepts of justice is that they discredit the concept of a heavenly justice. The wise know that, compared to the absolute, any reality explained or justified by a punitive logic will always be based on prejudice and immaturity.

      This is the great theological problem we find in the Book of Job. An honest, charitable man, Job gradually loses all of his material goods, his family, and even his good health. The drama of the book revolves around its protagonist’s efforts to explain his misfortunes by projecting onto the Heavens a conventional justice like that established by men. Job’s troubles and misfortunes can only lead him to one simple equation: either I’m bad and I deserve what is happening to me, or I’m good, and the Creator is either bad or not omnipotent. When Job opts to assume a posture of humility and piety, he sees himself as bad, yet he can’t bear the weight of this interpretation. By being so self-critical and intolerant of himself, Job loses his direction, and himself. When he chooses a posture of self-esteem instead (I’m good), Job finds himself faced with a chaotic world hardly worth living in.

      What Job fails to realize is that he is neither

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