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VISION MOUND
Volume 2 , Number 9
MAY/JUNE 1979
The Old Religions, the New Scientism,
and the Awakening of the Psyche
A talk by Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj)
EDITED (italics) by Beezone (see
original talk)
Common people remain
common, not very illumined and basically have no real
sense of the nature of the universe. They cannot
accept basic truths about the universe, about consciousness,
about the psyche. Such individuals have no way of connecting
with what is real. They only go to their jobs and watch TV;
they have no consciousness at all. At the present time,
then, we do not have a higher level of culture. We have
instead a nonculture, dead humanity.
This cultural emptiness is complicated and made ominous
by constant propagandizing against the awakening of the
psyche. The psyche is kept asleep by our mechanistic
scientism and religious movements that are bereft of Divine
life, and even of etheric energy and astral vision. No
psyche remains in them. They do not permit the flowering of
the psyche, the awakening of the consciousness. Dreams are
anathema; mysticism is anathema. Enjoying ecstatic states is
anathematized by our hard-edged, materialistic thinking.
Even the old religions, having become full of doubt because
they have lost their connections with the realms of psyche
and power, are themselves influenced by the pervasive
scientific and materialistic thinking that does not sense
the etheric level of reality, not to mention the astral
dimension, or the transcendental Consciousness.
Thus, people claim to be religious and associated with
traditions that belong to a somewhat higher human culture,
but they have no sense of the powers behind the world, no
sense of the psyche, or of what it truly means to be
religious, or of how one must live in order to realize a
truly religious life. True religion is to enter
ecstatically, through higher intuitive and mystical
processes, into the realms of the psyche, the realms beyond
material visibility. It is a way of making changes even in
ones gross life, as well as passing consciously beyond this
gross life into another destiny at death. However, people do
not have any understanding of this process.
It is only later in time, in recent centuries, that
people lost their psychic connection to the universe and
religion became nothing more than a collection of moral
precepts for downtown life, for how to manage your business,
and so forth. True religion is based on the psychic
connection to Reality. There can be no religion without
psychic activity. Religion is the disposition of the psyche,
the feeling core, of Man. Contemporary religion has no
psyche remaining from its etheric origins, only verbal mind
and meaningless, heartless rituals. It is not based on a
sense of the invisible realities with which we need to enter
into right association in order to live well and to be
happy, in order not to be undone, bound up, smothered, and
destroyed by elemental movements in Nature. All true
religion and spirituality are founded in the way of the
psyche.
In order to live such a religious Way of life,
individuals must enter psychically into the play of their
experience in the universe. They must move beyond this
stupidity of the verbal mind, which has no sympathy, no
heart, no feeling, no psyche, move beyond the stupidities of
the mere bodily exploitation that we inevitably engage when
we are frozen in this mind without a psyche. The usual man
in our time is limited only to verbal thinking and
exploitation of his physical experience. Everything else is
taboo. He cannot go beyond the hard-edged appearance of the
physical body, because he is not permitted his own
psyche.
Precisely what is wrong with the universal scientism of
modern society and the forms of politics that derive from
that scientism is that the modern scientific world view and
politics do not permit the human being his psyche. Scientism
constantly forces him to stand face to face with mere
elemental experience and denies all reality to the higher
dimensions, which since ancient times have been recognized
by human beings as their fundamental resource. Scientism
denies our connection to the energies and creative sources
of the world. We are denied true religion by scientism.
Scientism is simply an activity of the verbal mind. It is
oriented toward the investigation of elemental phenomena
without any psychic participation in the world. Even when
scientists consider phenomena that are not merely elemental,
but that belong to the realm of energies and the psyche,
they do not study these things through the psyche. They
study them objectively, as if these invisibles were
butterflies under a pin. But in order to investigate such
phenomena, one must enter into consideration of them through
the medium of the psyche, through feeling, through
intuition, through all the aspects of the mind and heart
that precede the verbal consciousness.
We are not permitted to recognize and acknowledge the
invisible dimensions of existence. Nor are we permitted any
psychic connection to them, or to anything else for that
matter. We are encouraged to watch TV and go to work and
wait for science to save everyone. But science can never
save anyone. Science is not a method of salvation. Salvation
depends upon the psyche of the human individual; there is no
salvation apart from psychic awakening. Science, however, is
not a psychic activity or adventure; therefore, it does
nothing for the psyche of the individual. It is merely a
method for the investigation of aspects of the externalized,
experiential universe. It can produce useful technologies
and benign changes in the environment, but it cannot improve
our lot in any fundamental sense, because human beings are
liberated only through psychic awakening and psychic
participation in the universe. We must be awakened
psychically in order to be truly happy.
That the scientific point of view dominates human beings
is a profoundly negative state of affairs, because science
strictly anathematizes the awakening of the psyche of human
beings. The propaganda of science is most profoundly about
the anathematization of the psyche. Whatever benign changes
it may bring technologically, science represents a
philosophy that is opposed to the psychic awakening of human
beings. That is what is wrong with it. As soon as anybody
shows an inclination toward psychic life, toward the things
of the psychic world, toward mysticism, toward religion-in
the psychic sense, rather than just the downtown morality-he
is considered crazy, bizarre. The conventional scientists
appear before the press immediately, claiming that the
movement toward psychic life is nonsense, falsehood,
superstition.
The historical origin of scientism is the rebellion of
the verbal mind against the institution that tyrannized it.
Science was a reaction to religious institutions and other
movements in human cultures that prevented the free exercise
of mental activity. Scientism appeared as a reaction to that
oppression, in order to permit the free exercise of the
verbal mind. That reaction was positive, and a certain
aspect of science and scientific influence is certainly
positive. However, because of that original reaction of
science, it now supports the psychology that wants to
exclude the psychic awakening. It represents a new kind of
priesthood, a different kind of Church, against which others
must now rebel. There must be the free exercise of the
verbal mind and of intellectual inquiry, but there must also
be the free psychic exercise of human individuality. Human
beings must be permitted psychic association with their own
universe. If it is denied them, they become crazy. And that
is exactly what has happened-these few hundred years in
which the scientific point of view has gradually become
dominant have emptied human culture of its psychic
associations.
Now we are looking toward a future of technological
domination, a heartless world, a human world without psyche.
It is not only totalitarianism that is represented in the
image of the future of science fiction. It is a human world
without human psyche. It is a universe without a psychic
dimension, a merely physical universe rather than a
psycho-physical universe. The current state of our so-called
culture reflects the same lack. True culture depends on the
life of the human psyche.
The scientific community must understand that its
positive aspect is its orientation toward free intellectual
inquiry. The old religious institutions perpetuated an
understanding of the physical universe that was
characterized by mythology and nonsense. Fresh and direct
inquiry into phenomena needed to be permitted. That aspect
of the emergence of scientism was completely positive. The
religious institutions that existed when scientism began to
appear were not founded in Truth. They were downtown
institutions, traditional institutions, without saints and
without wisdom. In throwing away this half-baked religion,
however, we have thrown away all psychic inquiry into the
universe. Intellectual inquiry into experience certainly has
its social value, but psychic inquiry into the universe is
equally essential, and it is more fundamental. It is
primary.
The attention of the psyche can move in any number of
directions. There are great teachings and lesser teachings.
The so-called teaching of conventional religion and the
intelligence that one acquires in the streets and in the
school of the common world is no teaching at all. It is the
lowest form of human communication, because it denies that
the psyche is the fundamental nature of Man and that he must
live by his psyche, not by the things of the world, not by
the objects of experience, not by the elemental fleshly
life, not by thinking alone. To sin is to “miss the mark,”
to be without a psyche. It is to be enamored of things
themselves, to have lost the psychic, feeling connection to
Reality, and to be turned in on yourself without
consciousness. To be awakened from sin is to “meet the
mark,” to be awakened in your psyche, in your heart. Man
must live by his psyche, his unqualified feeling nature. He
must enter psychically into relationship with the powers of
the world, into relationship with the ultimate Power, the
absolute God of the world. If he does not, he is
destroyed.
The function of the Spiritual Master is to restore this
understanding, this awareness, to reveal all experience in
its proper light. The Spiritual Master does not represent
any single convention of human experience. He is Awake to
all experience, all phenomena of human life. Therefore, he
can establish a culture based on the perfect Realization of
Truth, in which all aspects of the structure of human
experience are recognized. Man must realize a right sympathy
with the etheric life; Man must also transcend the etheric
life in his astral consciousness; he must evolve beyond the
astral dimension into the transcendental Realization of
Reality. We cannot exclude bodily life in our perception of
the Absolute; we must become a sacrifice, even bodily, to
the Absolute Reality and Truth. Our Way of life while alive
must represent a right relationship to that Absolute
Reality, and, through that relationship, to all of the
manifestations of the universe, gross or elemental-etheric,
or astral-intuitive, or egoic, that proceed from that
Absolute. All things work together for the good of
individuals who remain in right association with the
Absolute Reality. They are awakened, they see through the
limits of their experience, and they transcend the phenomena
that bind them.
Thus, the Spiritual Master communicates the entire Way of
the psyche, the Way of life in Truth, the right disposition
toward all of the phenomena of experience. Therefore, he
criticizes all of the forms of exclusive acculturation, all
of the less than absolute religions and persuasions. You may
hear me criticize all kinds of religious and psychic and
mystical approaches, without denying what is real about
them. I criticize the exclusive point of view and the
limitation of experience and understanding of each approach.
Just so, I also constantly criticize the ordinary worldly
life, not because people enjoy themselves-enjoyment itself
is positive. But there is no psyche in the enjoyment of the
usual man, no heart, no Truth, no Life.
The whole world is obsessed with the anathematization of
the psyche, and to the degree that people become involved in
psychic life at all, they are involved in some little
compartment of it, some creepy, petty aspect of it that is
not God-Realizing. I communicate the disposition of the
heart in absolute terms, the Way of life that involves the
psychic or heartfelt relationship to everything. I
communicate the Way of sacrifice via the heart, or the
psyche, to the Absolute Reality. In the process of this Way,
through your awakening to the psyche, you may become aware
of uncommon phenomena that are not discussed on television.
You are perfectly free to experience everything from ghosts
and spirit forces to the most sublime subtle visions and
absorptions in the absolute Transcendental Consciousness-and
you are obliged to transcend it all through heartfelt
understanding and the feeling sacrifice of the whole
body-mind and all experience into the All-Pervading and
Radiant Transcendental Consciousness.
Just as scientific inquiry must be free, so also must
psychic or religious inquiry be free of all kinds of
nonsense. As it exists in the world today, religion is
largely comprised of accretions of nonsense, the archaic
ideas and presumptions of very ordinary people. True
religion is the communication of Realized individuals, or
Adepts, whose voices must be honored in the world. People
must begin to engage in truly religious forms of activity, a
truly religious Way of life. Likewise, science or free
intellectual inquiry must also be permitted its freedom, its
special function in the world. Nevertheless, it must be
purified of its anti-psychic interest. If it is not so
purified, it will continue to represent an evil influence in
the world, an influence that is dominating and destroying
the psychic potential and the psychic need of the human
being.
See FULL TALK
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