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Beware of Those Who Criticize but Do Not Practice
Religion
DA FREE JOHN: Members of departments of
comparative religion in universities, along with other
intellectual commentators on religion, have become the
popularly acknowledged “authorities” in the field of
religion. They seem to take a systematic and intellectual
view of their “subject,” and, because they have university
degrees and may even be professors, they possess the glamour
of the scientist, who is the model of the ultimate authority
in our society. However, if we examine the point of view of
these people (and there are many, as it is a common kind of
scholarly profession) we can see that their view of Mans
existence is different from that expressed by their own
subject of study.
We would presume, because they study religion and new
religious movements, and because they appear to be people
who possess a thorough understanding of religion, that these
individuals are congenial to the possibility of
participation in a truly religious Way of Life – but, most
typically, they are not! Like the scientific and university
establishment in general, they tend to work against
authentic religion and spiritual practice. Like most
scientists and university intellectuals, they represent a
left-brained, exclusively verbal mentality that is addicted
to analysis and comparison and to the fixed disposition of
one who analyzes and compares. Therefore, they do not
represent the consciousness or the state of adaptation that
may become truly religious, or committed to the practice of
a spiritual Way of Life.
These so-called authorities on religious life represent
the adolescent mentality that pervades the scientific and
intellectual establishment in general. In the mood of
adolescence, people cannot commit themselves to the higher
evolutionary activity of the whole body and to surrender to
the Transcendental Reality. Indeed, such people are
primarily interested in maintaining their position of
strategic superiority to the childish (or dependent)
mentality with which they are always struggling. The
professional intellectual is, in most cases, not
fundamentally devoted to higher Truth and evolutionary
responsibility, but he is basically devoted to a struggle
with his own primitive, preverbal mob-consciousness, the
childish consciousness that always seeks a lie on which to
depend, as on a parent.
In our society there are basically two characteristic
mentalities: (1) the childish mob-consciousness of the
uneducated (or merely “officially informed”) mass of popular
culture; (2) the adolescent mentality of those who comment
on the childishness of popular culture, and who try to
analyze that culture and awaken it to the independent mood
of adolescence. The adolescent, by virtue of his acts of
self-definition (or defensive separation from all outside
forces), remains perpetually independent of childishness and
psychological dependency, yet he never matures into higher
or truly human development and, ultimately, to evolutionary
spiritual responsibility.
The intellectual study of religion, which is the analysis
and comparison of the religious movements and cults of the
present day as well as of the past, has potential value. And
it might even help humanity to outgrow its childish and
adolescent consciousness about religion, were it not that,
in general, those who make the analysis themselves represent
the dogmatic and rigidly analytical state of mind of the
adolescent (rather than the liberated understanding of the
true practitioner and the true Adept). Thus, at best,
scholars of “comparative religion” are critical of childish
motivations in religious movements. Yet, even these analyses
are relatively superficial, because the critics do not
represent the disposition of the subject they study. They
are not, in general, practitioners of a religious or higher
spiritual Way of Life, although some may attempt to be
practitioners on the basis of merely intellectual
presumptions about the various traditions. Because of their
personal background or their “student” view of the world,
they may harbor casually friendly feelings toward the most
superficial aspects of a particular religious tradition,
such as Christianity. But, for the most part, these
professional critics are engaged in the eternal study of
“comparative religion”-in which basically no commitment to
religious and spiritual practice is ever made, but, rather,
religious and spiritual movements are forever contemplated
and analyzed and compared.
The nonparticipatory, analytical disposition of
scientific intellectualism has become so much the standard
point of view that whenever a “reporter” within the
mainstream of the popular communications media wants to
learn what is happening in the world of religious movements,
he consults the professional critics. Whenever young people
consider seriously, perhaps for the first time, their doubts
about religion, they enroll in the department of religion at
a university, to study comparative religion and to meet the
same critics. Whenever the ordinary man is engaged in
considering the matters of religion, he buys the books of
these same critics, whose works are published under the seal
of major publishing houses. Thus, the charisma of authority
in religion has been vested by our society in the
intellectual establishment, and those who actually practice
and Realize the Truth are regarded suspiciously, as if
practice and Realization disqualified them from a true or
“objective” understanding of their own most direct
experience and intuition.
In the mature levels of human culture, adolescent
analyzers are understood just as clearly as children, and
they do not become acknowledged as “authorities.” In such a
mature culture, it is not the anti-religious or
conventionally religious analyzer of religion who becomes
the authority about religion, but it is the true mystic, the
saint, the experienced yogi, the true prophet, the full
Adept, and the Spiritual Master who become the resort of
those who are seriously interested in the matters of
religion. The work of bringing the insight of higher Wisdom
to the childish and adolescent motivations and tendencies of
the subhuman world belongs to those who have realized their
true humanity and who have also transcended their mere
humanity through self-sacrifice in the Living Truth.
However, in our modern scientific society it is the
out-of-balance man, the adolescent, the one-sided man, the
man who is yet to find wholeness, and who is yet to
surrender to Truth, who represents the highest level of
development that is popularly conceived. More highly evolved
individuals, who have realized the maturity of the higher
stages of human and super-human development, are generally
relegated to the world of “kooks” and social outcasts, and
they are identified with all the childish, antisocial
qualities of dropouts from society.
The sophistry of the “pharisaical” commentators who are
the conventionally acknowledged “authorities” on religion
can be summarized as follows: “Religious movements are an
answer to a need. People who become associated with such
movements are motivated by a genuine need that is not
satisfied by the buttoned-down, media-mad culture of our
daily existence. They seek to fulfill this need through the
experiential revelation of religious and spiritual
phenomena. Since established religions are not generally
oriented toward experiential realization, people may tend
toward religious movements that involve experience.” In this
manner, the commentators on religion seem to support the
religious search for Truth, and they seem to consider
religion to be an “appropriate” human activity.
Ultimately, however, the intellectual critic of religion
is likely to caution his audience against actually finding
an ultimate “answer,” a solution, or a commitment that ends
their seeking. Thus, the master of comparative religion is
as effective as a doctor who tells his patients they are
sick, and even provides them with a detailed analysis of
their disease, but at last recommends that cure be avoided
at all costs! On the one hand, such caution is, to a degree,
warranted. Many, and perhaps even most, religious sects
thrive by stimulating the childish and irresponsible
motivations of ordinary people. On the other hand, the point
of view of the intellectual authority on religion ultimately
would prevent serious inquirers from going beyond childish
and adolescent conceptions of life and religion and becoming
truly committed to higher religious and evolutionary
spiritual practice. Yet, such higher or unconventional
practice is indeed possible and available today.
The intellectual masters of comparative religion
generally fail to differentiate between the negative
manifestations of popular religious cultism and the positive
manifestations of higher spiritual culture. The adolescent
fear of being parented is a kind of disease that prevents
mature commitment to the higher Way of Life communicated by
Adepts, as well as commitment to the initiatory and guiding
Company of Adepts themselves. Professional commentators seem
to be possessed by a most profound and critical fear of
Spiritual Masters, of full and complete spiritual Teachings,
and of spiritually oriented communities. They are
fundamentally and personally unable to yield to these three
kinds of good company. They are rigidly fixed in the
separative, adolescent, and analytical position, from which
they strike out at superficial failings and secondary faults
and engage in nondiscriminating attacks on unconventional
Adepts, true Teachings and practices, and communities of
practice. In this sense, the commentators on religion belong
to the same popular culture and mob-mind that they
criticize, and that is perpetually struggling against the
Living Reality by which Man may evolve and transcend
himself.
But the critics almost never fail to offer themselves or
their point of view as the ultimate resort of those who
consider religion! They have become the new charismatic
authorities! They are the small-minded gurus of the
mob-culture of our TV world. The ultimate practice to which
they lead those who would become like themselves is the
relatively sophomoric educational program of an eternal
course in comparative religion. The “curriculum” is the new
Cult of religious intellectualism. And the curriculum
requires the student only to make analytical comparisons
between religious movements, while yet remaining eternally
uncommitted to anything except the procedure of analysis and
comparison. One who persists in this “yoga” ultimately
becomes the enemy of his own subject, because he cannot
commit himself to the process he is studying so obsessively.
He is only committed to the obsessive study itself, which is
motivated by the fear of commitment, the fear of becoming
parented and losing the self-indulgent liberty of
adolescence.
This discussion has been a very critical and even
negative summation of the intellectual and scientific
establishment-and it is not made casually! In fact, it is
made urgently. We have arrived at a time in the history of
our technological society when the adolescent state of Man
has become the model for human existence. The higher culture
of Man, which is attainable only when both childhood and
adolescence have been transcended, is more and more
profoundly suppressed by the adolescent intellectualism and
materialistic scientism that are now in league with the
State everywhere in the world. If the criticism that Adepts
bring to human acculturation is not heard more generally in
the world, then the higher culture of Man will be more and
more suppressed by the official Cults of worldly
understanding, until the true Way of Life becomes “secret”
again, and disappears from the common world.
Scientific
Proof – Table of Contents
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