That's pretty good, TT.
The answer I was given was: The man had one eye and he saw a tree with two apples on and he took one apple off and left one apple on.
Same question, slightly different answer - we are both not wrong.
Not making it about right or wrong, the answer using a real tree stands out as a symbol to a greater reality using the words in the riddle than a picture of a tree.
In Vedic (Sanskrit) scripture as well as the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, the authors words were tantamount to the idea or description of the Teaching of Jesus and One-ness of the absolute in Union with the manifest world, especially the Christed individual or Conscious/Enlightened man.
Sanskrit words can have as many as 10 different meanings but you would have to know the content of the message in order to place the right meaning to the word.
Similarly when translating the biblical references to One-ness in the descriptions of Unity of the Absolute/Truth and Man/the physical universe in conscious awareness, One word in either language (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek) may not have an equal in another.
I don't know if you have ever used an electronic translator such as are available on the web to translate one idea or sentence to another language but the literal translation of words when you do not already know the context of the message is often vastly different.
For example: Using a free translator at applied language.com I translated the sentence:
Truth is the essence of the Universe and got this: حقيقة الجوهر من الكون(
Sorry this media doesn't support the Arabic font) . When you translate that back into English you get this:
Truth of the essence from the universeObviously if you take any word out of a sentence and translate it using a dictionary of any language you could say the translation of the words was right. But when it comes to conveying the essence of the original statement you could not exactly say they are the same.
The problems of translation when it comes to words used in Scripture by those who are speaking of their direct experience of One-ness such as in the Spiritual teachings of the past and present:
1. Hinduism--the most ancient.
2. The Hebrew religion.
3. Buddhism.
4. The Confucian teachings.
5. The Taoist beliefs.
6. Zoroastrianism.
7. Shinto.
8. Jainism.
9. Christianity.
10. Islam.
11. Sikhism--the most recent.
If one is not themselves having experiences of the same One-ness the descriptions would appear misleading, when in fact the descriptions are as accurate to the experience as one can get by trying to fit the infinite into a quart jar.
Have you ever heard of Gematria? Today it is labeled as a type of numerology but it was much more than that.
When in the example of the Teacher describing evil was used, the student described that darkness was a word that was given to the absence of light, but in fact darkness could not be measured because darkness was not real.
It was a word which referenced an immesurable absence of something that was real.
In regard to the early youth of Jesus there is a story of Jesus having an encounter with one of his School Teachers. It describes a disagreement between Jesus and his Teacher at the local school.
The Teacher is describing the meaning of scripture (words of Truth or the Absolute as passed on from the fully enlightened) and Jesus scolds his teacher for not having a clue to their origins and their true meanings.
The Teacher attempts to beat the child Jesus, and his hand withers and becomes useless.
Well the rest of the story speaks of the resonance of each word and that each word tells its own story.
Just as different frequencies of light are still light but have different qualities so do words have a certain resonance when written in the ancient languages of the Sanskrit, Hebrew and Aramaic.
In fact the manifest reality can be felt and intuited in its vibrational qualities.
Darkness, or the absence of the light of love has a dense vibrational resonance to it and we can feel it when we are in an atmosphere that contains either.
When there is joy and love in a room along side of dark moods such as anger and violent hatred a person can feel it, or sense it.
There was a film of a woman and her child playing hide and seek in a room. It was filmed with some kind of special apparatus or film which showed a variance in color when the moods changed with the people in the film similar to the kinds of color changes you get with kirlian photography. Anyway the room had a slight pinkish tint to it in the beginning but when the mother found the child in the course of the game and the child was giggling, the room color became a bright pink which was a definite contrast to the original mood and color when the child was hiding.
Point being that all matter vibrates at a certain frequency, and the human who also vibrates with his varying moods and states of consciousness, is capable of sensing on subtle levels, frequencies of matter that are both expanding and contracting.
When you get into the study of ancient cultures such as those of Egypt, Atlantis etc on a the spiritual level, those like Plato Jesus, Melchizedek etc. are hinting toward something much greater than surface appearances which we attune our senses to at the level of the ego of belief and opinion being the dominant indicator.
Science uses instruments that are built at the level of current comprehension and belief in the universe as it exists in a material sense, but few approach the universe at any other level such as those who know and experience it at those levels beyond the gross and dense level of belief.
If you were to take a power source, a broadcasting transmitter and a receiver back in time, to say the day of Jesus and demonstrated it to the people of that time, they would not understand the principle of the apparatus. They would probably destroy it and the demonstrator, claiming it was evil and of the devil or Satan being as superstitious as they were.
Some who call themselves scientists are of the same mind, when you start speaking of things that fall outside of democratic theory and the instrumentation of peer review based on their level of commitment and values, they become abusive and destructive rather than open to possibility other than that which falls within their own beliefs.
We as a civilization have come a long way, but superstition and disbelief still exists in the form of human intolerance.
We as a
humanity hold to our pride in understanding the universe and ourselves and let little if anything new into our awareness and belief if it does not come from some
given authority.
Unfortunately we have allowed our authority to be democratic according to peer review at the level of belief and programming that is current with uniformity or consensus that theory may stand as the rule even if that theory is wrong or incorrect.
Instead of refining the human instrument we have allowed the instrument of human invention (no matter at what level of belief it was created) to replace our intuition and subtle senses and to tell us what is real and what is not. This is dogmatism, not that different in how the church has become a corrupt institution, no longer attuned to the message of which it was formed around.
This is not unlike using a dictionary to literally translate our surroundings into meanings that are far from the essence in which they are created.
So in a sense we allow ourselves to wander in imagination by de-tuning our senses and awareness to a radio that plays only one kind of music or program. The program of strict materialism and belief determined by a dictionary that cannot tell you what the sentences mean but offer tell you what a word might mean in a sentence. From there you might get an idea in and amongst a thousand ideas where democratically you might say you are all right, but emotionally someone is going to fight for their righteousness and even kill to protect it. If what is right for one can be threatened by what is right for another, One-ness cannot be that everyone can be right when it threatens the personality or belief. It has to be something much more substantial than a painting or an idea, it would have to be absolute.
