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THE DOGMAS OF SOCIAL MORALITY VERSUS THE ESOTERIC
SPIRITUAL TEACHING THAT IS AT THE ORIGIN OF TRADITIONAL
RELIGIONS
“The Dogmas of Social Morality Versus
The Esoteric Spiritual Teaching That Is At The Origin of
Traditional Religions (sections 1 – 2) (pages 55 – 65)” From
THE ALETHEON (Final Ruchira-Sannyasin-Order-Authorized
Edition).
…………………Adi Da
Samraj
1.
The principal Scripture (or holy book) of the tradition
of the Western “world is the New
Testament. The New Testament communicates
principles and ideas and beliefs that, more than those
communicated by any other book, are responsible for
conventional Western ideas about religion and
Spiritual life. Although Western culture includes
religious traditions other than Christianity,
the dominant religious text which, in the West,
tends to inform all popular notions about
religion and Spirituality is the New
Testament.
If you grew up in the Western (and predominantly
Christian) cultural sphere, you are perhaps influenced by
the New Testament more than by any other
religious book. Even if you are not very
familiar with the New Testament, you have
(nevertheless) been impressed, over the years, with certain
conventions of religious presumption of which
the New Testament is the source. The conceptions
associated with the traditional interpretation of the
New Testament are not only part of the
religious teaching of Christian churches, but
part of Western culture in general. Through your schooling,
through your childhood religious training, and
through the influence of those with whom you were associated
as a childeven though they might not have spoken of
religionyou have been greatly influenced
by these conceptions, some of which are directly
communicated in the New Testament itself and
others of which are simply traditions that are, by
extension, associated with New Testament
religion.
Everyone is dominated, to one or another degree, by
conceptions of life that have their origin in exoteric
religious culture. Even though scientism (or
scientific materialism) is tending to displace exoteric
religion as a way of knowing,
exoteric religion still tends to be the basis
for present-day morality and social conceptions. In fact,
exoteric religion has traditionally always been
associated with moral and social conceptions. Thus, if you
are, by birth, a Westerner, and even if you were not brought
up as a Christian, you have, since your birth, been exposed
to propaganda that is, at least in its origins, both
conventionally religious and specifically
Christian. And the basic intention of all such
conventionally religious propaganda has been to
convince youand, thus, the collective of
everyonethat certain kinds of behaviors are
appropriate and other kinds of behaviors are not
appropriate.
Every present-day legal systemand even the entire
body of social contracts by which people are related in
their daily liveshas its justification in the
tradition of exoteric religion. Therefore, in a
time when the legitimacy of exoteric religion as
a way of knowing is being undermined by
scientism, so (likewise) is the political and social order
simultaneously being undermined by scientism. This is not
only a time when individuals are moving from exoteric (and,
thus, collectively enforced) religious ways of
knowing toward materialistic and secular and
even individualistic ways of knowing, but this
is also a time when society as a whole is becoming corrupted
and made chaotic by those same tendenciesand,
therefore, new political forces are arising in immediate
coincidence with the new cultural forces.
Human beings are more and more impinged upon by the
forces of political materialismwhile, at the same
time, they are impinged upon culturally by the forces of
scientific materialism. The way of knowing in a
culture cannot be changed unless the way of keeping order is
changed at the same timeand Western society has kept
order for many centuries through exoteric
religious belief, exoteric religious
presumptions, and exoteric religious conventions
of behavior.
If, all of a sudden, exoteric religion is
discovered to be untrue, and if, as a
replacement for the point of view of exoteric
religion, the point of view
communicated through scientific materialism dominates the
present culture, then the traditional justifications for
so-called moral behavior have, as a consequence,
been abandonedand not yet replaced with a viable
public alternative. Therefore, how will the necessary public
order be maintained? A new political force is, under the
circumstances, required, to replace the moral programs of
exoteric religion. Thus, all kinds of political
idealisms arose in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuriesrevolutionary ideas, communistic ideas,
egalitarian ideas, socialistic ideas, capitalistic ideas,
all kinds of political experimentingthe basic purpose
of which is to keep people in order, to keep material
production going, to maintain public peace, to make life
somehow acceptable to the people, so that the people will
not rise in revolt, or go mad, or create chaos.
The rise of new political idealisms is coinciding with
the new cultural circumstance, and not only is all of this
dominant in the West but it is, likewise, dominant all over
the Earthwhich is now everywhere
Westernized, both East and West. This change in
the orientation of the mind of humankind has gradually been
developing since the Renaissance era in Western (European)
culture. The conventions of human orientation began to
change in the period of the Western Renaissancefrom a
sacred orientation to an orientation to the human
individual, from Deity-centeredness to ego-centeredness,
from ecstasy and sainthood to Narcissism and
ego-possession, from sacred culture to secular culture, from
a dominantly right-brained culture to a now dominantly
left-brained culture.
As this transformation has occurred in the
world, the ancient cultural supports have lost
their legitimacy. This does not mean that the ancient
exoteric religious cultural supports did not
have anything to do with what is right. Those exoteric
religious supports were, in a rudimentary (and
Reality-objectifying) sense, based upon the
general (and, in principle, right and positive) intention to
make life sacred. It is simply that the ancient exoteric
modes of the objectification of Reality have
(themselves) nowand rightlylost their legitimacy
in peoples minds. However, as a result of that change
of mind, the principle of the sacred (or of the
understanding and managing of life based upon the intrinsic
Truth of universal prior unity) has alsoand not at all
rightlybeen lost.
A way of thinking that had only secondary importance in
the ancient world has now become dominant.
Human-centeredness has become the acceptable convention of
mind. Human knowing is now devoted to analytical
reductionism, or the process of reducing everything to the
individual human being, to human processes, to humankind in
the lowest, most rudimentaryor materialsense.
Many social and cultural enterprises remain valuable, with
the potential to improve the condition of humanity, yet a
profoundly destructive (materialistic, analytical,
disunitary, and anti-sacral) philosophical enterprise is
also operative at the same time. It is this latter
development that I Criticize.
Science as a conditional method of enquiry,
as an effective practical method of
investigation for the sake of acquiring natural
knowledge (and subsequent power to control
natural conditions of existence), is, obviously, legitimate.
Yet, science, from the beginning, has also (and otherwise)
been associated with the ego-centered orientation (and,
thus, with the fixed point of view perspective)
and, altogether, with the ancient (conventional and naive)
philosophy of materialismand it has, on that basis,
also been associated with the arising of co-emerging
political movements. Present-day humankind is being both
culturally and politically controllednot only by
science itself (which has an inherent, but also inherently
limited, legitimacy), but also by the philosophy of
materialism (which is inherently ignorant, gross, merely
analytical, de-constructive, reductionistic, exclusivistic,
and naively oppressive). And, as science and the philosophy
of materialism progressively exclude all other forms of
knowing, human beings are becoming more and more
dominated by political materialismor the forces that
are keeping order independent of sacred (or unitive)
consciousness and authority.
This is not to say that the cultural means whereby order
was kept in the past were entirely benign. Exoteric
religious authority is not necessarily (or even
characteristically) associated with anything that has
remotely to do with the Truth, or with Reality Itself, or
with Divine Self-Realization, or even with the transcending
of egoity.
In the Western world particularly, the
institutional (or corporate) authority of the
exoteric Christian Church has been the principal means
whereby the State creates political and social order. Now
that the State is associated with scientific materialism and
not with religious doctrine, the State must find
other means for creating order. Thus, the State is,
generally speaking, no longer basing its own (corporate)
authority on the (corporate)
authority of the official Church.
And, for the most part (even though some still cling,
nostalgically, to the old days, of obedience to
corporate exoteric religious authority), people
are no longer politically and socially controlled (or,
otherwise, willing to be controlled) by exoteric
religious authorityat least, not
sufficiently to keep order.
In its origins, what later became institutionalized (or
corporate, and official)
Christianity was a small cult (or sect) of
cultural outsiders, with its inner
circle associated with an esoteric Spiritual teaching.
Outwardly, however, in its public preaching, even that
essentially esoteric sect was associated with more general
religious and social principlesand,
through the process of that public preaching, people were
gradually brought into the inner core of the esoteric life
of the sect. In the early centuries of the Common Era, there
were, everywhere, many sects which were (fundamentally)
esoteric sectsto one degree or another revolutionary
(or of a critical, or outsiders,
disposition) in relation to the religious
exotericism of the official religion of the
public institutions and the then-current political
conventions of the State.
After about three centuries (by which time much of the
esoteric Spiritual basis of the original
pre-Christian sect had been lost), the Emperor
(Constantine) engineered the cultural-historical shift that
formally established the dogmatic basis for the
institutionalizing of an official version of
(exclusively exoteric) Christianity, and that eventually
(within a few decades) resulted in that exoteric institution
of (thus dogmatically defined) Christianity becoming the
official religion of the Roman State. Since that
time, either official (exoteric) Christianity
has functioned as an arm of the State, or (otherwise) the
State has, in some sense, functioned as an arm of the
official (exoteric) Christian Church. As
centuries passed, the relationship between Church and State
changedsuch that the exoteric Christian Church now
plays a remarkably different role, and is gradually being
excluded, having lost its previous presumed legitimacy and
public authority.
However, the exoteric Christian Churchs loss of
power in the political and social realms is a relatively
recent development. With the original union between
official Christianity and the State of Rome,
Christianity became the force whereby political and social
order was developed and maintained in the Western
world. To maintain order (and not Truth) was its
function as an institution. Obviously, such an institution
is not intended to be communicating esoteric teachings to
the massessince esoteric communications are intended
to serve the higher, and greater, and (characteristically)
Spiritual or (otherwise) Transcendental purposes of
Truth-Realization (in the case of, necessarily, more mature
people, who have already out-grown the boundaries of merely
exoteric, or public, schooling). Because
esoteric teachings take off where exoteric teachings have
come to a developmental end, esoteric communications do not
tend to enforce political and social order. On the contrary,
esoteric (and, generally, ecstatic) teachings tend not to
bring about a conventional political and social
orderbecause esoteric teachings presume a prior (or
already achieved) state of order, at least within the heart
and mind and life of the individual esoteric
practitioner.
As a case in point, Jesus of Galilee proclaimed an
ecstatic, esoteric Spiritual message. His message was not a
program for bringing order to politics and general
societynor was such order the purpose of the earliest
institutionalized Christians, who were purposed to
religious devotion (and even to mystical life),
and who were, in any case, in no position to command the
State of Rome.
Because their guiding purpose was not of this
world (and, therefore, of no political use as a tool
of social order), Rome regarded the early Christians as
enemiesand the early Christians were persecuted by the
State, as various other (similarly unusable)
religious sects were. But when the Christians
eventually came into power as the official
authority, those features of Christianity that are
oriented to the conventions of public (and altogether
exoteric) religionthe purpose of which is
to maintain political and social orderbecame the
dominant communication of official Christianity.
When that officialdom took hold of Christianity,
its otherwise more esoteric dimensionswhich were the
real (inner-circle) force at its
originwere systematically eliminated, primarily
because esoteric teachings have nothing to do with managing
either a great State or any kind of larger common social
entity (of ordinary, and, generally, immature, or only
exoteric-ready, and not at all esoteric-ready, people). A
religion that is to be the official
religion of a great State (or even any larger common
social entity) must be essentially exoteric, and, thus,
fundamentally oriented to maintaining social principles,
social morality, conventions of behavior that maintain
political and social order, and productive participation in
work life, and positive participation in the larger
collective of community life, and, altogether, universal
subordination to the parent-like State (and to the
parent-like official State-religion)
and, thus, universal conformity to the will of the
hierarchical political (and “religious)
authority (or authority-structure)
of the time.
Therefore, the New Testament (and the
tradition of Christi-anity as a whole) must be seen in
relation to both the esoteric sect from which it arose and
the exoteric institution that largely replaced it (and even
all esotericism) with the systematic exotericism of ordinary
political and social purposes that has, traditionally, been
served by public corporate religion in the
Western world.
2.
The New Testament has a long history of
interpretation. This scripture is interpreted anew by every
generation, in every time and place. Consequently, the
interpretations tend to reflect the mood, the state of mind,
or the leading (and generally characteristic) presumptions
of the time.
However, as a general rule, all the traditional
interpretations of the New Testament tend to be
oriented toward the development of a politically defined
social consciousness. Thus, it could be said that, in terms
of its most common traditional interpretation, the New
Testament is a social (rather than an esoteric
Spiritual) gospel. The text of the New Testament
was originally compiled from (and, altogether, invented by)
a wide variety of sources, and it was constantly
propagandistically transformed over the centuries, always to
represent a point of view (and a message) that
is predominantly social and political in nature.
The process of reducing the New Testament to
a social gospel began before institutional Christianity
became the official religion of Rome. The
process was certainly intensified when exoteric Christianity
became the official religion (and
authoritative religious corporation) of the
State, but even the process of gathering (and inventing) the
early materials and making a New Testament out
of them began early on, as the Christian cult became more
and more conscious of its conventional social
rolewhich is to keep order, to inspire people to be
civil in relation to one another, to function positively and
productively with one another, to live a conventionally
moral life, and, on that basis, to look forward to the
cults official conception of rewards after
death.
Thus, even before it became an official
Church corporation, the cult (or newly emerging sect) of
Christianity was becoming more and more the servant of the
ordinary social (or worldly) life of its
members. As the Christian sect acquired more members,
assumed more responsibility, and had more social order to
create, it began to play the role of social enforcer more
and more exclusively. Thus, the newly emerging Christian
culture more and more embraced the very same limitations (of
exoteric official religiosity) that Jesus of
Galilee had himself criticized.
Exoteric religion is primarily a
communication that intends to bring political and social
order to the public world. Exoteric
religion is primarily a social gospel. Esoteric
ecstatics, on the other hand, are very difficult to
controlin the usual (conventional) sense. It is
virtually impossible, for example, to interest ecstatics in
being socially productive for its own sake. Ecstatics
generally value the practice of being civil in relation to
other peoplebut it is very difficult to get them to
labor in factories and bureaucratic business organizations
merely for the sake of worldly success, or,
otherwise, to get them excited about the mundane purposes of
a great State! Therefore, exoteric religion
tends to eliminate all aspects of “religious
communication that suggest anything but how to be a
productive and positive social personality. To reinforce
these qualitiesand even to suppress ecstatic
qualitiesis the guiding purpose of exoteric
religion.
Even though Christianity is, in its origins, an esoteric
movement, it was reduced to an exclusively exoteric
religion as it became more expansive and
eventually achieved the status of the official
(or politically enforced) State-religion of the
West. Christianity thus became an exoteric (or
conventionally social) institution, and it reduced the
teaching of Jesus of Galilee to a social gospel. The result
is that now everybody commonly assumes that, since the
New Testament is, historically, the primary
religious influence in the Western
world, religion is supposed to be a
social gospel, and Jesus must (therefore) have taught a
merely social gospel.
In this late-time (or dark
epoch)when even all cultures are being moved toward
the way-of-knowing represented by scientific
materialism, and all cultures are losing their sacred basis
for order, and are tending to be dominated (more and more)
by the forces of political materialismthe interpreters
of the religious texts of cultures other than
the culture of the West are, likewise, moving more and more
toward an exoteric interpretation of esoteric teachings.
India, for example, has, since the later nineteenth century,
been undergoing a kind of renaissance of Hinduism. The
Bhagavad Gita is a principal text in this movement in
Indiaand one of the dominant tendencies of current
interpretation conceives the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita
as a kind of social gospel. In other words, the Bhagavad
Gita is, now, publicly interpreted as a source of exoteric
instruction about how to live the way of good
works, rather than the mystically interiorized
esoteric way of life that is characteristic of traditional
Indian Spirituality.
Thus, the Bhagavad Gitawhich, in its origins, is an
esoteric teaching about Spiritual and Transcendental
Realizationis being used, more and more, to support a
cultural, political, and social movement of an exoteric
kind. In this manner of religious interpretation
within the Indian cultural sphere, the Bhagavad Gita is
being interpreted (and, thus, used) in a manner that is very
similar to the traditional exoteric interpretation (and even
the earliest exoteric inventing) of the New
Testament in the West.
To the degree that they are religious at all,
people all over the Earth now commonly conceive of
religion as a kind of social message. It is
commonly presumed that religion is reducible to
a kind of humanismeven a kind of atheistic humanism
(or a humanity-centered, rather than Deity-centered,
positive social life)or, at least, that
religion is totally compatible with the
world-oriented, humanity-oriented,
socially-oriented propaganda of the time.
You are constantly TVd into the
presumption that you are born for the sake of being born,
that you are born into this world for the sake
of this world. The presumption conveyed by TV
(or the pervasive conventional mentality) is that life is an
end-in-itself, and one is supposed to be enthusiastically
involved with things of this world. Luckily (so
the usual person presumes), there is science, technology,
and a certain amount of freedomand, therefore, it is
possible to be rightly enthusiastic about conditional
existence. People have a great deal of hope that, during
their lifetime, they will achieve more and more pleasure,
leisure, and fulfillment of their human functions. All over
the Earth now, everyone is being propagandized into social
consciousness, the positive social gospel that is now coming
from the realms of scientific materialism and its political
arms around the world. If current secularizing
trends continue, sacred texts such as the New
Testament and the Bhagavad Gita are in danger of
becoming obsolete. If that occurs, then positive and
enthusiastic social principles or ideals will, more and
more, be communicated all over the Earth completely
independent of any kind of religious
authorityand, of course, entirely removed from
any kind of esoteric teachings.
However, it is important to understand that the teachers
and the teachings that are at the origins of the true
scriptures of humankind (and of the various cultural
movements associated with those scriptures) are not of an
exoteric nature. Those teachers and teachings were not about
the social gospel which the State has traditionally looked
to religion to generate. If you understand the
real fundamental (and esoteric) teaching underlying the
New Testament and other traditional scriptures,
you will see that those scriptures are not exoteric social
gospels at all. Rather, those scriptures are esoteric
communications about transcending the egoic self
and the world and Realizing True Communion (and,
ultimately, egoless Self-Identification) with the Divine
Self-Condition.
The social gospeland the socially positive
point of view that the State wants to generate
and to support by various meansis not at all about
transcending the world by Realizing the Divine
Self-Nature, Self-Condition, and Self-State of Reality
Itself. Likewise, that social gospel is not about
transcending the apparently individual self by
self-sacrifice in the Divine Self-Nature,
Self-Condition, and Self-State of Reality Itself. The State
is purposed to have people transcend their otherwise egoic
(or even Godward and ecstatic) inclinations by
means of productive work. In other words, the State likes
the ideal of individuals who are transcending
themselves by being devoted to the purposes of the
State. The State generally tolerates the large-scale
communication of religion only if the message is
exoteric (or socially oriented). The ideal must lead the
common individual to be a good social
personalitydoing his or her job, being honest, not
making trouble, not creating disorder, not being lazy.
The State is not interested in any kind of teaching about
transcending the egoic self and the
world in Communion with the Divine Self-Nature,
Self-Condition, and Self-State of Reality Itself. The State
is not at all in that business, nor does the State like such
teachings. The Stateand its official cult
of the timedid not like Jesus of Galilee. One could
say that present-day official Christianity also
does not like Jesus of Galileeand for the same reason.
The official Church has never liked the ecstatic
Jesus, who taught everyone to be an ecstatic, like himself,
and so to transcend the selfish self and the
world (or the flesh) in the
Spiritual Divine. Nobody has ever really liked Jesus of
Galilee, except those people who are able to respond to the
Truth in Spiritual terms. Such people have always been
relatively rare.
© The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam Pty Ltd, as
trustee for The Avataric Samrajya of Adidam.
All rights reserved. Perpetual copyright claimed.
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