The Dogmas of Social Morality Versus the Esoteric Spiritual Teaching That Is At the Origin of Traditional Religions – Up? Beyond the Beginner’s Spiritual Way of Saint Jesus and the Traditions of Mystical Cosmic Ascent via Spirit-Breath

The Dogmas of Social Morality Versus the Esoteric
Spiritual Teaching That Is At the Origin of Traditional
Religions

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
role—which 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
cult’s “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
control—in 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 people—but 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 qualities—and even to suppress ecstatic
qualities—is 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 materialism—the 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 experiencing a
kind of renaissance of Hinduism. The Bhagavad Gita is a
principal text in this movement in India—and 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
Gita—which, in its origins, is an esoteric teaching
about Spiritual and Transcendental Realization—is 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 world now commonly conceive of religion as a kind
of social message. It is commonly presumed that religion is
reducible to a kind of humanism—even 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 “TV’d” 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 freedom—and, 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 world
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 world completely independent of any kind of
religious “authority”—and, 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 Condition of
Reality.

The social gospel—and the socially positive
“point of view” that the State wants to generate
and to support by various means—is not at all about
transcending the world by Realizing the Divine Condition of
Reality. Likewise, that social gospel is not about
transcending the apparently individual self by
self-sacrifice in the Divine Condition of Reality. 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
personality—doing 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 Condition of Reality. The State is not at all in
that business, nor does the State like such teachings. The
State—and its “official” cult of the
time—did not like Jesus of Galilee. One could say that
present-day “official” Christianity also does not
like Jesus of Galilee—and 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.

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