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Chapter 2: We Have Outgrown the Cult of Childish
Religion
What Are True and False Religion,
Spirituality, and Meditation?
What is popularized, hyped, and commonly believed to be
religion, spirituality, or meditation is invariably a form
of self-meditation, self-glorification, and self-survival.
Such subhuman games are sold to masses of people via an
appeal to naive and neurotic needs for certainty, hope,
fascination, superiority, a positive self-image, and egoic
immunity from fear and death. Thus, religion, spirituality,
and meditation become diluted, reduced to the worldly or
self-preserving levels of less than human interest. The
typical follower is childish, ultimately irresponsible,
self-involved, amoral, experientially undeveloped, weak and
out of balance in the dimensions of action, feeling, and
thought, and irrationally attached to the enclosures of cult
and belief.
Just so, in the popular view, religion, spirituality, and
meditation are considered to be inherently different or
separable things. Thus, meditation tends to be embraced as a
merely psychological or physiological technique, even
“scientifically” respectable, without religious
significance, and often without spiritual content. Religion
is commonly embraced without esoteric spiritual
understanding or the higher responsibility of meditation.
And spiritual or esoteric notions are popularly accepted in
a vacuum, as an alternative to true religious and moral
responsibilities, and with a simplistic view of meditation
that is really a commitment to subjective illusions,
self-glorification, and self-survival rather than to
sacrifice of self in the Divine in every area of
experience.
The popular promotability of religious, spiritual, and
meditational ideas, cults, personalities, and practices
depends on the subhuman and childish state of the general
population. The responsive audience of such propaganda is
the same subhuman mass of “consumers” that is the target of
TV and the common media all over the world, and little more
is required of anyone than to dutifully purchase the
“product.” To actually use the “product” is not demanded in
any profound sense. Just buy it, praise it, own it, believe
it, and glamorize yourself by association with it.
The whole matter of the popular communication and
acceptance of religion, spirituality, and meditation is as
obnoxious and absurd as any area of vulgarity in the world.
It is all an appeal to the sense of self-divided fear and
the general absence of intelligence that keeps people
irresponsible and dependent, locked into problems, forever
searching for solutions without becoming responsible for the
problem and the need itself.
Truly, neither religion, nor spirituality, nor meditation
expresses the human relationship to Truth unless each is
directly and rightly integrated with the others. Religion,
which is founded on personal and moral self-sacrifice, or
truly human ecstasy, must maintain direct and conscious
association with higher esoteric processes, the secrets of
the spiritual adaptation of Man. And the religio-spiritual
understanding of human sacrifice in the ultimate Reality
must be associated with practical disciplines and
transcendental means of higher or more perfect human
adaptation through the full technical range of meditative
and self-sacrificial processes. And all of this must be
integrated with a right understanding and valuation of the
Spiritual Master and the radical or perfect Destiny of
devotees, or true practitioners.
The religious, spiritual, and meditative Way of Truth or
Eternal Life is a process of personal, moral, and higher
psycho-physical sacrifice. It is not a superficial and
private remedial technique, but a form of culture, a
profound and total way of life. The leaders of popular cults
tell their fanatic followers: “Meditate on yourself, in
yourself, for yourself, and by yourself. Come and get it.
What you get-and it will be easy-will make you happy,
fearless, superior, right, invulnerable, lovable, and
immortal.” But, truly, what is thus acquired only reinforces
the loveless moods of those who are already constantly
acquiring and buying for the sake of ultimate results and
satisfactions.
The Way of Truth cannot be understood by children or
fools. It is of no interest to the vulgar daily personality
refined and developed by TV and the mob of peers. It
requires the most profound intelligence, commitment,
responsibility, and moral force of persistence in practice.
It requires the most creative and easeful force of love. It
requires great freedom from the destructive force of
irrational reactivity, fear, and self-protectiveness.
Therefore, the communication of such a Way truly takes
place only in the forums and with the speed of the highest
kind of human consideration. To the degree such
communication is introduced into the media streams of
popular “culture,” it must creatively struggle, through
constant criticism and depth of information, with the
profusion of subhuman propaganda. And the useful or
effective communication of the Way of Truth requires a
continual mindfulness of the ordinary tendencies, demands,
and illusions of the subhuman mood of the usual state of
human beings.
The message is this: You, as you know or may experience
yourself, are not immortal, nor yet even fully human. What
you tend to be, and think, and live is exactly what must be
overcome-through insight, change of action, and the fullest
working out of the disposition of sacrifice. Your reluctance
to resort to the Divine and to the higher Agency of the
Spiritual Master, neither of which is within you or even
merely outside you, is a sign of the very dilemma from which
you must be liberated. Your moral and relational weakness or
reactivity is the dominant fault that binds you to the
illusion and torment that is yourself. Your tendency toward
confinement in inward and mental and physically
self-possessed states is not at all reinforced by the truly
spiritual Way. The entire Way of Truth is immensely
difficult and creative. The entire Way is a Sacrifice. The
Way of Truth is the only matter of ultimate significance in
the life of Man. Let us yield our very bodies and minds into
the Reality and Destiny that is both Spirit and Truth.
Scientific Proof – Table
of Contents
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