I was wondering the other day that Sells had not been featured on this site for a long time.
This reference provides a detailed description of the subtle psycho-biological structures of human being the awakening of which provide the key to the evolutionary development of each and every human being.
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds6.html

Among other things essay titled Jesus & the Teaching of Truth About Man also features descriptions of the subtle (evolutionary) structures of the human brain and nervous system
http://beezone.com/current/ewb_pp436-459.html

Unfortunately, with very rare exception most/all of us are living way way down on the scale of our evolutionary potential - this includes me.
This essay describes the situation
http://beezone.com/latest/stresschemistry.html

This essay provides an Illuminated Understanding of Adam & Eve in the garden of Indestructible Light
http://beezone.com/adida/adidajesus/adamnervoussystemeveflesh.html

These two references provide an Illuminated Understanding of death and dying.
http://www.adidaupclose.org/death_and_dying/index.html
http://beezone.com/latest/death_message.html

It’s good to see Sells back on these pages – I hope he has returned as a regular contributor again.

This one was heavy going though!

Jaynes’ theories may have some interesting overlaps with religious understandings of the self, but I’d be cautious about drawing too close an analogy.

It’s a long time since I studied theology, but a couple of Sells’ comments brought to mind authors that stuck with me back when I did.

The first was about empathy being the basis for authentic humanity. As I recall in The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong argued than many of the great religions (including Judaism) incorporated the golden rule - do unto others as you would have them do unto you –during the Axial Age (c900-200 BCE) and it had a profound effect on spiritual practice globally. The capacity to see the “other” as a person like ourselves and those we love is central to spiritual awareness and a religious concept of compassion and justice. Jesus did not invent this – when he said “love your neighbour as yourself”, he was quoting Leviticus – but he did put it radically at the centre of his though and teaching in a way that does – or should – transcend our tendency to diminish the “other” which, as Sells suggests, can be linked to instincts about purity and community.

The second is the self-consciousness of Adam as a model of human identity. Adam and Eve are told not to eat the forbidden fruit because it will make them “like God” – able to discern good and evil. With this knowledge comes shame and self-awareness, including knowledge of our own mortality. But it is also what makes us fully human. In “Reason and Reality”, Scientist and theologian John Polkinghorne wrote of the fall as a “fall upwards”. Eating from “the tree that was desired to make one wise” represents human curiosity and capabilities for abstract and analytical thought; but it comes at a cost

Self consciousness is, in its simplicity, a natural phenomena applicable to all animal life.

Conflating self consciousness with cultural consciousness through religious belief, confuses outcomes, and I think is the reason for a confusion of ideas expressed in this article, while attempting to tie the two concepts together.

Heaven and hell as a concept, can be more accomodating towards each other by accepting the belief in the death wish: Those with a death wish could be considered candidates for Hell, and vice versa. The death wish is a subliminal state of mind, while its outcomes are concious decisions.