***
True religion is not about safety, or the salvation of the individual from naked confrontation with suffering and pleasure and death and love.
True religion is about the difficult evolution and ultimate transcendence of the individual, and mankind, and Man.
Therefore, we must awaken from our self-protecting illusions of religious safety, and we must surrender to the Current of life in which the body and the mind are swimming forever.
There is no “Holy Substitute” for Man.
There is no “representative” sacrifice.
There is no true alternative to awakened consciousness and unqualified love in the case of each individual.
Every one of us is the necessary sacrifice of God.
***
The Secret Identity of the Holy Spirit of God – A Prophetic Criticism of Great Religions
The religious consciousness of Western Man is trapped within an archaic structure of myths, dogmas, and social conflicts that no longer serve the true religious and spiritual process of true Man. These myths are largely Christian, Judeo-Christian, and broadly Semitic in origin, and they are held in place by the large-scale cultural, political, and economic dominance of the ancient religions of the Middle East, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
The dominance of specifically Christian cults, myths, and dogmas is especially apparent in Europe and America. And if the dominance of Judaism and Islam is less apparent in Europe and America, the power of these ancient cults is certainly apparent throughout the Middle East (with clear, practical effect on the rest of the world).
Man himself cannot awaken to his evolutionary spiritual Destiny until the spell of mythological and self-possessed thinking is broken. And the future whole bodily culture of Man, in which East and West will realize a new cultural Synthesis, cannot take place until all the old religions are surrendered to the higher Principle or Truth that is the ultimate Master of religion.
We tend to think of “religion” as a benign influence on individual thought and behavior, and this is indeed the case when the higher aspects of religious consciousness begin to inform the thought and behavior of any individual. But religion is only rarely found to be an influence of such a kind. Very few individuals become truly creative personalities, mystics, saints, or even reliably good men or women as a result of religious associations.
Religion is, in general, an exoteric cultic phenomenon that controls the thought and behavior of individuals through external and psychologically manipulative techniques. And the principal religious phenomenon that is common in the world is not true or free religious consciousness and benign behavioral habits on the part of individuals. The principal phenomenon of religion is the institutional “Church”, or all the central and centralizing institutions that contain and otherwise manipulate broad and massive segments of the human population.
The “Church” (or the primary institution within any religious tradtion) is religion, insofar as religion basically affects the world at large. And large-scale institutional religion is not primarily a benign power in the world. We have only to look at the cultural and political conflcts in Europe and the Middle East to see how the immense institutions of ancient religion have now become, for the most part, contentious, absolutist, and the sources of petty social conflicts. And the problem is made extreme by the immensity of these institutions, each of which controls millions of people.
What is more, the power of the great traditional religious institutions is, for the most part, a worldly power. That is, these institutions are actually political and broadly social agencies that manipulate the political, social, and economic motivations of the citizens of all Western nations, as well as the nations of the Middle East, and much of Africa and South America. (The nations of Asia are, for the most part, controlled by secular political institutions which tend to exclude not only religious institutions but also every kind of religious consciousness, and this pattern of secularization has also begun to spread to other areas of the world that have traditionally been under the powerful influence of ancient Middle Eastern religious institutions.)
In the popular media of our day, small non-establishment religious cults tend to be the target of hostile commentaries. But such groups are, in most cases, basically oriented toward the development of a higher or more universal spiritual and religious consciousness. It is the broadly based and worldly domain of established institutional religion that represents the more direct and practical threat to human development and to the communication of the Truth of Life.
And why is it that religious institutions, which seem to be founded on higher human and cultural persuasions, ultimately become the primary basis of social conflict and even personal neurosis? The reason is that religious institutions are obliged to deal with masses of immature and unevolved people who have very little will or capacity for the evolutionary and practical cultural exercise of higher religious or spiritual consciousness. As a result, the institutions of the “Church” develop much like institutions of “State” under the same conditions of universal human irresponsibility.
Thus, any institutional “Church” tends, except during periods of renewal by living and prophetic Adepts, to become more and more dogmatic, and eventually it becomes irrevocably associated with fixed ideas that, in one way or another, deny the religious authenticity or religious completeness of people who belong to other religious institutions or cultures. The “Church,” like any other mortal or threatened entity in the world, tends to become more and more centered in itself and devoted to its own survival.
Conventional religious institutions learn how to survive by serving and manipulating a massive membership that is largely incapable of true and practical religious responsibility. This is done by minimizing the true religious demand for literal and personal conversion of mind and action, and replacing that difficult religious demand with the “easier” and more secular demand for mere allegiance to systems of myth, belief, ritual, and dogma. Thus, the condition for membership in most large institutions of religion is allegiance to fixed ideas and other outward or superficial signs of belonging to the “cult,” whereas true religious practice is founded on conversion of the total being to the Living Divine Reality and the acceptance of behavioral disciplines that make one at the very least an outwardly moral and personally benign or restrained character.
Institutional religions of course recommend certain moral attitudes, but the practice of moral restraints is, except for a few extreme criminal acts, not made a condition of membership. And morality tends to be associated with archaic, neurotic, and petty sexual and social taboos, rather than with the obligations of love, service, and compassion. Likewise, most religious institutions today have abandoned even all ancient recommendations relative to personal disciplines of a healthful dietary naturesuch as the obligation to avoid meat or other killed food, or impure manufactured food, or toxic stimulants, and so forth. And the esoteric, evolutionary, and universal spiritual teachings that are the only ultimate significance of religion have been almost totally abandoned and even lost by the great “Churches.”
In the conventional affair of popular religion, the communication of difficult religious demands and also of esoteric spiritual understanding and practice is avoided, because conventional religious institutions are trying to survive by acquiring and maintains massive memberships. Thus, religion is promoted and sold by hyped appeals to the nondiscriminating mind of “Everyman.” But true religion is a superior human impulse, founded in self-criticism and profound psycho-physical conversion or change. Thus, over time, only false and merely exoteric or popular “religious” inventions are communicated by so-called “great religions.” And, at last, the esoteric Truth and practice of universal religion is not only eliminated as the core of conventional religious instruction, but the survival pressures of dogmatic Churchism make such Truth and practice unacceptable and even damnable. Thus, over time, great “Churches” tend in fact to become the enemies of ultimate religious Truth. This was the situation that confronted Jesus, and it was and is the situation confronted by all true religious prophets and spiritual Adepts.
Since actual and mature religious practice has been generally replaced by outward adherence to false or deluding exoteric beliefs and superficial behavioral modifications, the true esoteric core of religion has lost its use within the great traditional cults that exist in our time. The whole affair of traditional religious institutions has become dangerous nonsense, because such religious institutions long ago abandoned the practice of making true religious and esoteric participation a condition of “Church” membership. If the demand for authentic participation had been continued, the institutions of religion that we now call “great” would have remained small esoteric communities (if they survived at all). Therefore, the “Churches” chose to survive, and they adapted to the world (rather than demand that the world change itself).
True religion is a universal, evolutionary, and self-transcending psycho-physical motivation of Man. However, at the present stage in human history, only relatively few individuals in any generation are able to make that gesture. Mankind is simply, in its great numbers, not yet ready or willing to adapt to the higher moral, spiritual, and evolutionary culture of Man. Therefore, until the races of humanity begin more generally to respond to the prophetic Teaching of true Adepts, religious “cultism” (or religious culture) in its true form must necessarily remain relatively small in its institutional dimensions. This is because an authentic religious institution must be devoted entirely to the communication of ultimate religious Truth and the relentless demand for higher human transformationand only relatively few people are interested in that message! An authentic religious institution must, because of its inherent nature, remain more or less outside (or superior to) the stream of daily secular or worldly “culture.” And, until mankind in general is able to become truIy religious, religion must remain largely prophetic in its function. That is, religion must accept the role of critic in the world and not become like the world in order to become powerful and great in the world. No other role than this prophetic one is possible for authentic religion at this stage in the history of Man. Otherwise, what is truly religious is compromised and ultimately abandoned in the process of the mass institutionalization of popular religion.
When religious movements practice their critical prophetic role, they tend to be attacked by the reactions of worldly people. Thus, true religious leaders and true religious institutions or movements tend to suffer and become victimized to one or another degree by the factions that exist in the popular culture of the time and by the hypocritical attacks of foolish people, who suffer from the lack of the mental power of discrimination. (False leaders and movements may also come under attack, but not because they are bereft of allegiance to the esoteric Truth of Life. Rather, it is generally because of some more obvious human failing, or some conflict with the conventional values of ordinary society.) We find unjustified religious persecution in the case of Jesus and the early followers of Jesus, and also in the case of Moses and certain generations of the Jews, as well as Mohammed and his early converts. But the “Churches” of Jesus and Moses and Mohammed went on to achieve worldly dominion by serving and adapting to the conventional mass culture of future generations. Thus, in our time, the factions of ancient official “Church” power are among those influences that serve and thrive upon the irresponsible subhumanity of Man and even dogmatically prevent the true religious awakening of Man.
The prophets who initiated the so-called “great religions” were made to suffer the official or popular displeasure of their day. The “Churches” that grew up on the foundation of those prophets survived and grew in power by gradually accommodating the very influences that true religion and every true prophet must criticize. Therefore, true religious cultism always arises as a critical voice, not only in relation to the worldly domain of popular and secular society, but also in relation to the wide culture of hypocritical, immature, and unspiritual religious institutions.
In the Beezone Library for reading
