Scientific Proof
– Table of Contents
CHAPTER SIX
The Secret Identity of the
Holy Spirit of God
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.
CHAPTER SIX
The Secret Identity of the Holy
Spirit of God
A Prophetic Criticism of Great Religions
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
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 tradition) 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 conflicts 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 non discriminating mind of
“Everywoman.” 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 truly 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 sub humanity 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.
Beyond the Outer or Public Cult of
Jesus
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
But the time will
comeindeed, this is the hourwhen true
worshippers will know they must worship God, the Creator
or Father of the world, in Sprit and in Truth. God is
seeking for those who will worship God. And God is
Spirit, or the Breath of life. Therefore, if it is God we
would worship, we must worship by surrendering into the
life-Spirit, and our worship must be founded in right
understanding, or Truth.
(Adi Da’s expository translation
of the words of Jesus of Nazareth, as recorded in the New
Testament, the Gospel of John the Beloved, chapter 4,
verses 23 and 24.)
John, known as the Beloved, and, presumably, also as the
Elder, was apparently the principal disciple or devotee of
Jesus of Nazareth. His primacy was essentially within the
“inner circle” of mature converts (to whom the secrets of
the esoteric or higher spiritual worship of the Living God
were communicated). We may presume, from the indications in
John’s gospel, that he was also intended to be the principal
spiritual successor of Jesus within the “inner circle.” That
is, the full esoteric spiritual Teaching as well as the
Initiatory (Spirit-baptizing) functions of Jesus were
apparently transmitted to John, and all that John thus
possessed was intended to be transmitted through him, within
the “inner circle” or esoteric community that responded to
the spiritual Teaching of Jesus. (Jesus himself had been the
principal disciple or devotee of John the Baptist, and
Jesus, therefore, succeeded John the Baptist, after the
latter’s death.)
Some investigators have offered
evidence that Jesus of Nazareth may not have been an actual
historical figure. And the same may be true of John the
Baptist, John the Beloved, and others. Certainly, if these
figures actually lived, they may have been significantly
different from the exoteric myths and archetypes described
in the New Testament.
But there is a sufficient integrity
to the documents of the New Testament that they may
fruitfully be considered as if historical
events and persons informed the writings that have come down
to us. (And this in fact is how the writings of the New
Testament, and especially of John the Beloved, will be
treated in this essay.) Such relics as the “Shroud of Turin”
appear to support the claims of historicity (while perhaps
calling for a new interpretation of that history). And, in
any case, the New Testament writingseven though they
may ultimately fail as an historical basis for exoteric
religioncertainly do provide interesting examples of
ancient esoteric mystical philosophy and
practice.
The New Testament is designed to
appear as a single, coherent account of the life and total
Teaching of Jesus and his disciples, or apostles. However,
modern scholarship has begun to demonstrate that the New
Testament is a strategically collected and edited
conglomeration of many examples of oral and written material
from the early centuries following (as well as preceding and
including) the period of Jesus’ presumably historical
ministry. The New Testament is essentially an exoteric or
outer and public manual of instruction. And it was created
by the exoteric public cult of Jesus that became the
official Church of the Roman Empire.
What I am indicating here is that
the historical Christian Church (in its various sects) was
and is essentially an exoteric or publicly oriented
institution. And it intentionally limited its communications
to exoteric matters when it first designed and established
the New Testament as the basis of all of its instructions.
In and by that process, the esoteric Teaching and practice
was separated from the official institution, and it was
gradually and completely lost.
However, we may find aspects of the
“inner circle” Teaching described in certain texts of the
New Testament, particularly the gospel and the letters of
John the Beloved. And it was only that “inner circle”
Teaching and practice that represented the full Teaching of
Jesus and his school. The outer, public Teaching of Jesus
and his followers was not much different from that of the
other exoteric religious sects of the Middle East (such as
Judaism) at the time of Jesus. And that public Teaching was
essentially directed toward the winning of converts, who
would later be “baptized” and instructed in the nonpublic
setting of the “inner circle.”
In the writings attributed to John
the Beloved, we find aspects of the Teaching of the “inner
circle,” spoken more or less clearly. Thus, the Teaching of
John the Beloved survives as testimony to the actual
Teaching and practice of Jesus within his “inner circle” of
converts. And if one approaches that literature from the
point of view of higher spiritual understanding, gotten
through awakened practice outside the outer cultism of
exoteric religion, then the Teaching of John the Beloved can
be rightly interpreted or understood.
Throughout my lifetime, I have
entered into the deepest and most profound spiritual labor,
and thus I have uncovered the various dimensions of esoteric
realization that pertain to the native psycho-physical
structure of Man. I speak as one who has lived the
presumption and practice of esoteric Communion with the
Living Reality or Divine Source of Man and the world. I have
considered all that I have experienced and realized, and I
have compared all of it to every kind of historical evidence
relative to Jesus and the tradition that developed in
relation to him. On the basis of all of this, I have come to
the point of intuitive certainty about the essential
experience and esoteric Teaching that was shared by Jesus,
and John the Beloved, and the inner or initiated community
that surrounded them.
The religion of Jesus and John the
Beloved was essentially a proclamation of release from the
negative burdens of life in this world through ecstatic or
self-transcending union with the Living God.
The Way of that union began with conversion from abstract
belief in the “God of our fathers,” or the “God of the Holy
Book.” Jesus and John the Beloved preached that there must
be conversion from mere and idolatrous belief in an
idea of God. Jesus and John the Beloved preached
liberation from the exoteric Idol of God as a Being who is
apart from Man and the world of Man – a God who created
everything and imposed an order on everything, and thus
obliged Man and all other creatures to live by various kinds
of objective moral rules and natural laws in order to
survive and succeed during life and after death. The Way of
ecstatic union proclaimed by Jesus end John the Beloved was
the ecstatic or self-transcending Way of Life, rather than
the formal, legalistic, or self-fulfilling way of exoteric
knowledge and conformity. And that ecstatic Way began with
psycho-physical conversion, from Lifeless
abstractions of the mind and to the Living God, the Truth of
Man and the world.
John’s gospel Teaches that the
“Living God” is “Spirit.” That is, God is eternally
Present as the All-Pervading Life-Power, with which,
therefore, every living being may Commune directly. In fact,
the Living God is so intimate with Man that the word
“Pneuma” or “Life-Breath” or “Spirit” is used by John the
Beloved to describe God. And God is said to be
identical to the Spirit, or the Living Energy that
pervades the world, and that pervades the nervous system of
Man, and that every one of us can contact via the bodily
process of breathing and feeling. Indeed, John says not only
that Jesus Taught that God is the Living Spirit (rather than
the idea of God as abstracted Creator), but that he Taught
that the Way to worship God is to worship in the
Spirit. That is, Jesus Taught a method of worship that
involved ecstatic bodily Communion with the Life-Power via
breathing and feeling, based on Truth (or an awakened and
secret understanding of the Divine Reality).
John the Beloved always wrote or
spoke as an intimate devotee of a Spiritual Master. That is,
he was communicating about the Way of true worship, or
ecstatic bodily Communion with the Living God, but he always
acknowledged his own Spiritual Master (who initiated him
into the practice of esoteric Communion with the Living
Spirit) as if his Master were identical to the Spirit and
thus to God. This is a habit of acknowledgment that is
typical of all oriental esoteric societies. It represents a
profound acknowledgment and appreciation of the mechanism of
initiation, guidance, and ecstatic participation enjoyed in
the unique spiritual and esoteric relationship of the
devotee and his or her Spiritual Master.
No heresy or delusion is contained
in this manner of acknowledgment, unless, as has been the
case with the exoteric Christian Church that survived the
time of Jesus and John the Beloved, the language becomes
exoteric and exclusive. That is, if the language of the
ecstatic acknowledgment of a Spiritual Master by his true
devotees is inherited by a nominal or exoteric cult, that
individual tends to become exclusively identified
with the Divine Reality. The result of this is that the
Living God ceases to be the principle of experience
and practice, but abstracted ideas or beliefs and symbolic
personalities become, again, the idolatrous basis of the
religion. And the religion, or cult, then ceases to
understand itself as one of many possible traditional
communities involved in esoteric worship. Instead, the cult
tends to see and communicate itself as the only community
that possesses the Truth.
This has precisely been the case
with the Christian churches, most of which have become
exclusive cults of Jesus, and most of which have lost both
their esoteric foundation and their ability to see the
Divine Truth in the Spirit-Worship of all esoteric
traditions. And the Christian religion, as well as all other
exclusive exoteric and even esoteric traditions, must again
be re-awakened and transformed by the esoteric Teaching of
Truth.
To continue in this description of
the Teaching of Jesus and John the Belovedthey both
proclaimed the Way of ecstatic union with the Living God, or
Spirit. Jesus, as the Spiritual Master of John, was
identified with the Spirit, or God, since he had given John
not only the Teaching of Truth but the Spirit-Power itself,
through baptism (or esoteric initiation into the Way of
Life).
The “Spirit-Power of baptism” is an
esoteric process wherein the Life-Current in the body-mind
(and, principally, the central nervous system) of the human
individual is stimulated to a point of profound intensity
and turned about in its basic polarization or tendency.
Thus, the Life-Current is felt to press inwards and upwards,
via the spine, and towards the crown (or brain core) of the
body-mind. The effect of Spirit-baptism was an experience of
bodily conversion to a subjective movement of Life-Energy,
away from the “flesh” (the “senses,” or the plane of vital
desires in the autonomic nervous system). As a result of
such baptism, the various classical mystical phenomena
arose, and this entire procedure was called, by Jesus and
John the Beloved, “to be born again, via the
Spirit.”
The “born again” phenomenon
proclaimed by modern Christian enthusiasts is merely a
superficial mental and emotional conversion toward surrender
into belief and dependency on the person Jesus, who is
presumed still to be mysteriously present as a universal
God-Man. But the “born again” phenomenon initiated by Jesus
and John the Beloved was an esoteric procedure, involving
mystical experience and literal transformations in the cycle
of the Life-Current in the human body-mind. It was a process
communicated only to serious convertsthose who had
already accepted responsibility for the personal and moral
discipline of their daily lives. (In contrast, the “born
again” phenomenon of exoteric Christian cultism is a
conversion of mind and emotion upon which the convert is
only then presumed to be capable of true personal and moral
responsibility.)
In the writings of John the Beloved
(consisting, according to tradition, of one gospel and three
letters) “Jesus” is the name or code word for the Spirit of
God. He was also the person who was John’s Spiritual Master,
and he was the historical figure who was the ongoing symbol
of the Way in John’s religious community. But, in the
writings of John the Beloved, “Jesus” is primarily to
be understood to be the Life-Principlethe “Living
Word” or “Spirit” of God.
As the initiator or baptizer of
others, Jesus was also the “Savior” of sinners. (The fourth
chapter of John’s gospel says that Jesus did not baptize,
but had his disciples do it instead. This refers only to the
first baptismthe water or cleansing baptism of
repentance and forgiveness for turning away from the Divine
Life-Spirit of God. After that conversion had matured into
practical personal and moral responsibility, Jesus himself
might then perform the baptism of the Holy Spirit, or
initiation into the esotericism of ecstatic prayer and
surrender into the higher mind via the Life-Current within
the human body.) As one who enjoyed the ecstasy of union
with the Spirit of God, Jesus, the Spiritual Master of John
the Beloved, wasas are all others who share in his
secretthe “Son of God.” But “Jesus” is primarily to be
understood to be the “Living Word” or “Spirit of God”
personified (or represented by a human Adept or
Agent).
Therefore, if the writings of John
the Beloved are read as a Teaching about ecstatic bodily
union with the Life-Principle, or the “Spirit of God,” and
if “Jesus” is understood as the representative person,
symbol, and name of that Spirit and the Way of Communion
with that Spirit, then those writings can be rightly
understood. And only then do they represent a true and
universal religious inspiration.
The broad tradition of evidence,
including evidence presented by non-Christian sources and
investigators, generally indicates that Jesus was an
historical personality and that he survived the crucifixion
bodily. (That he was an historical personality is somewhat
in doubt, but there is no doubt that he survived the
crucifixion bodily!) The New Testament is based on the claim
that Jesus survived the crucifixion bodily, and the “Shroud
of Turin,” which is a remarkable relic, also confirms this.
The means of his survival are not made clear in any of the
gospels. There is evidence that he may have been forced into
a coma on the cross and so was taken down before he had
died. According to some theories, he later was restored to
health and met secretly with at least some members of his
“inner circle,” including John the Beloved. Then he simply
left Israel, perhaps in order both to flee from those who
would kill him and to continue to work as Teacher and
Baptizer elsewhere. There are indications that he may have
continued his work among the scattered Jews in the Orient.
And there is evidence that he may have settled in India,
with his disciple Thomas, and that he died and was buried in
Kashmir.
In any case, John the Beloved and
the other initiates and intimate disciples of Jesus all went
in various directions after Jesus’ departure. Through their
preaching, they developed unique communities, each founded
on various kinds of emphasis, both exoteric and esoteric,
and each expressing the special cultural background of the
individual who founded the community as well as the cultural
background of the members of the community itself. In the
decades and centuries that followed the lifetimes of the
original disciples, various literary documents were produced
from the oral and written traditions of the various
communities that were created by Jesus’ disciples and by
various converts and mystics, such as Paul 1
, who became associated with the cult of Jesus after Jesus’
crucifixion, resurrection, and secret departure from
Israel.
The claims of Jesus’ “ascension into
heaven” are themselves merely symbolic and exoteric
statements that veil the esoteric secrets of bodily worship
of the internally ascending Life-Current, and such exoteric
stories also served to account for Jesus’ absence from the
public scene after the crucifixion and resurrection. If we
understand that Jesus was simply the honored symbol for the
Living Divine Spirit (or Life-Principle) and also the Way
whereby every individual may worship or Commune with that
Spirit in Truth (and so become a “Son of God”), then we can
understand how the symbolic or exoteric descriptions of his
“ascension to heaven” developed. (Whereas, to believe that
Jesus somehow bodily rose into the clouds and out into the
starry heavens not only is to propose a naive cosmology, but
it is like believing that the Last Supper, or the holy and
symbolic feast of the “body and blood,” was actually a
cannibalistic orgy.)
The idea of Jesus’ ascension is
simply an exoteric or symbolic expression of the esoteric
mystical experience of the ascension of the Spirit (or
Life-Current) from the lower body to the brain core, whereby
various kinds of mystical illumination and bliss are
experienced. Thus, Jesus’ fate is identified with mystical
ascension of attention to the bodily or internal and mental
Place of God above And that same fate was mystically
reproduced in the experience of all initiates within the
“inner circle” of Jesus and John the Beloved (and,
presumably, within the “inner circle” of at least some of
the other disciples or apostles).
The method of entering into
Communion with the Spirit of God in the company of Jesus or
John the Beloved was to receive the second baptism (the
baptism of “fire,” or second birth via the Holy Spirit).
That baptism, along with certain esoteric instructions, made
it possible for the individual to “worship in Spirit,”
through surrender of body, emotion, and mind into the
internal Life-Current. After the first baptism, or water
baptism (the ritual of purification), a period of personal
and moral testing followed. The convert who “kept the faith”
and showed it in the form of personal and moral disciplines
was eventually given the Initiatory touch (baptism or
anointing) of the Master (or one of the empowered
disciples), usually during a secret meeting within the
“inner circle” of initiates and disciples.
This same procedure may be observed
even today in esoteric communities all over the world. It
involves first the development of various psycho-physical
changes in the case of an Adept, so that the Life-Current in
him is made to function in an intensely magnetic fashion,
polarized, in the central nervous system, toe to crown,
rather than crown to toe. When this occurs, the Adept
becomes fit to initiate others into the same process, and he
does so through touch, or by looking into the person’s eyes,
or through the medium of speech (including the giving of a
secret “Word,” “Name,” or magical formula to be repeated in
prayerful meditation), or by merely thinking about the
person (or regarding him in silence). Indeed, even to come
into close proximity to such an Adept, or a group of people
initiated by an Adept, may produce psycho-physical changes
in one who does so. (A case in point is the woman who is
said to have been healed merely by touching the garment of
Jesus.)
It may be presumed that
Spirit-baptized initiates were also taught esoteric methods
of evocatory or invocatory prayer, as well as other
contemplative exercises. And the name “Jesus” as well as the
names “Abba” (“Father”) and Amen were likely also intoned or
otherwise used as a mystical means of entering into bodily
Communion with the Spirit within the “inner circle” of
Jesus, John the Beloved, and the others. The esoteric
sacrificial feast of Jesus’ “body and blood” was also
practiced as a kind of common meal among the initiates, and
it signified the act of taking on the Way of Jesus, which is
the Way of self-surrender, love, and spiritual dependence on
the Living God.
John the Beloved (or the Elder)
apparently survived the longest of all of the original
members of Jesus’ intimate circle who remained in Israel
after Jesus’ departure. Perhaps for this reason his writings
contain the most direct expression of the esotericism of his
traditionsince all other early Christian writings seem
to have reflected only or mainly the esotericism of the
earliest public work of the disciples. John apparently
survived long enough to communicate beyond the earliest
period and in geographical areas where an esoteric Teaching
was less threatened by hostile exoteric cults as well as
hostile political cults. John also appears to have been
inherently of a more innocent and mystical mind, and less
interested in adapting or proclaiming his message to a
hostile and immature public.
It was said of John that he would
survive until Jesus came again. And so he did. He survived
until old age, and fully demonstrated in himself and in his
own “inner circle” of devotees that Jesus was simply the
Spirit, and that the Spirit remained Alive even after Jesus
had departed from the scene. It may also be presumed that
John’s own devotees realized the Spirit was still Alive for
their benefit after John’s own death.
I have written this special
treatment of the exoteric and esoteric cults of Jesus
because the Christian tradition currently predominate in the
Western world. I wanted to clarify the difference between
exoteric, archaic, and ultimately childish (or superficial)
beginner’s beliefs and the true and even ancient esotericism
that belongs to the higher Wisdom-Culture of mankind. The
same consideration I have brought to the Christian tradition
could and should be brought to any and all other popular
exoteric cults of religion. We must do this, or else we
cannot go beyond the childhood of Man. And we must also
exceed the adolescent reluctance of Man (in the form of
scientific materialism or any other kind of superficial
intellectual point of view) to yield beyond objective
knowledge and into ecstasy, or self-transcending Communion
with the Living Reality.
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
John the Beloved may also be heard
to speak to the rational scientific mind of our age, if we
read and rightly interpret the beginning of the Gospel:
At the Origin of everything
is the Creative Spirit, the Intelligent Life-Principle,
the All-Pervading Matrix of the total world. And the
Living Spirit-Breath of God is always united with very
God, the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness, the true
Heart of the world and the Truth of all beings. Indeed,
the Spirit is God, for God is the Creative
Life-Principle, the Eternally Free Transcendental Reality
in Whom all beings and things arise and float and change
and pass out of sight.
All things and beings come to
exist through the Agency of the Eternal Life-Principle,
and not otherwise. And whatever or whoever exists because
of the Living Spirit is indeed Alivebecause
everything and everyone is presently and eternally
Sustained through surrender into that Living
Spirit.
The Life-Breath that sustains Man
is also the Light that can show him the Way through the
darkness and blindness of the world. That Light is now
and always has been shining in the world and even in the
body and mind of Man, and no darkness has ever quenched
it.
(Adi Da’s expository translation of
chapter 1, verses 1-5, of the Gospel of John the Beloved)
Footnote:
1. According to the New Testament
Paul (A.D. 0-5 to 67 or 68) was one of the principal
apostles of the new religion that was formed around the life
and Teachings of Jesus. Paul was not a personal disciple of
Jesus, nor did he ever meet him personally. After Jesus’
death, Paul was a persecutor in the growing Christian
movement, until he was converted by an overwhelming mystical
experience, which he interpreted to be the spiritual Light,
Presence, and Voice of the Ascended Jesus. From that time
until his death he was one of the most energetic of the
apostles, journeying throughout most of the Mediterranean
coastal lands and the Middle East to preach the new “gospel”
of Jesus the Christ. He was imprisoned many times, was
nearly assassinated by hostile Jews, and, legend has it, was
finally beheaded during the persecutions of the Christians
by Nero, Emperor of Rome.
When the official councils of the
Christian Church were convened by the Roman State to create
the foundation of Christianity as the official State
religion, the beliefs of Paul, relative to Jesus’ personal
and ultimately superphysical survival of death, became the
dogmas of the Church.
The Good Principles of
Jesus
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
Jesus apparently renewed, for his
time, an ancient psycho-physical conception of the nature of
the realm or world in which we appear. The mood of ordinary
experience conceives the Principles of this world to be
separation, negative results, and death. Jesus communicated
the view that the Principles of this world are prior Unity
with God, renunciation and forgiveness as a means of
purification, and an individually conscious Life that is
ever changing but never destroyed.
The significance of his entire life
is the argument of this communication. He argued that we
should accept these “good” Principles, which make those men
good who believe or accept them, rather than accept the
conventional and “evil” Principles, which only make all who
believe or accept them into fearful, deluded, and wretched
beings.
Jesus represents only the argument,
the conviction, and the confession of this good assumption
of Good Principles. He does not represent any independent
historical Act that makes it unnecessary for any one else to
accept and be responsible for these Principles. In other
words, the Principles of our Life are Good, but these Good
Principles are only as effective in our own case as the
degree of our acceptance and responsibility relative to
them.
All who accept these Principles must
be wise and intelligent and humble, since their goodness, or
identity with the Good Principles of Life, is gradual, or a
process that matures and grows forever. Their Enlightenment
is always instantwhenever their presumption of the
Good and True is Realbut their lives are forever, and
forever transformed by whatever they believe, accept, or
presume.
Jesus Was a
Sacrifice, Not a Survivor
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
Jesus of Nazareth has become a
universal archetypal figure in the minds of all mankind. But
he has thereby become more a part of conventional mind and
meaning than a servant of the Real. Unfortunately, he has
become identified with personal or egoic survival rather
than perfect sacrifice of self, mind, life, emotion, and
body.
Paul the Apostle said that if Jesus
did not survive his death, then belief in him and his
Teaching is fruitless. Therefore, the bodily and personal
survival of Jesus became the traditional foundation of
Christian belief and practice. But Paul’s conception is
false. The Truth and the Law of sacrifice are not verified
by or dependent upon the knowable survival or immortality of
any man, including Jesus. The Truth of the Teaching of
Jesus, itself an extension of the Teaching of the ancients,
did not at all depend on his survival, or, more
specifically, knowledge, on the part of others, of
his survival. If it did depend on his personal or
conventional soul-survival of death, or the knowledge of
such on the part of others, he could not have taught
anything of ultimate significance during his lifetime, and
all Teaching before his time would have been inherently
false. But Jesus himself specifically denied both
possibilities.
The Teaching of Jesus is essentially
the ancient Teaching of the Way of Sacrifice. He, like
others, taught that the sacrifice that is essential is not
cultic or external to the individual, but it is necessarily
a moral and personal sacrifice made through love. It is the
sacrifice of all that is oneself, and all that one
possesses, into forms of loving and compassionate
participation with others, and into the absolute Mystery of
the Reality and Divine Person wherein we all arise and
change and ultimately disappear. Therefore, the proof of his
Teaching is not in the independent or knowable survival of
anything or anyone, but in the enlightened, free, and moral
happiness of chose who live the sacrifice while alive and
even at death.
We cannot cling to the survival of
anyone, or even ourselves. This clinging has for centuries
agonized would-be believers, who tried to be certain of the
survival of Jesus and themselves. Truly, Jesus did not
survive in the independent form that persisted while he
lived, nor does anyone possess certain knowledge of the
history of Jesus after his death. All reports are simply
expressions of the mystical presumptions and archetypal
mental structures of those who make the reports. And neither
will we survive the process of universal dissolution
everywhere displayed. Jesus sacrificed himself. He gave
himself up in loving service to others and in ultimate love
to Real God. All who do this become what they meditate upon.
They are Translated beyond this self or independent
body-mind into a hidden Destiny in the Mystery or Intensity
that includes and precedes all beings, things, and worlds.
The Christian
Idol
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
The popular Myth of Jesus is an Idol
of mass religion. It was created by the exoteric Christian
Church, when it moved to legitimize itself in the eyes of
the secular State of Rome. That Idol is worshipped by
popular belief, and many have been and continue to be
deluded and oppressed by the Cult of that Idol.
Like every Idol, the Myth of Jesus
contains a secret about Man himself. But that secret is
locked away in the features of the Image men worship. Men
worship Jesus as an exclusive human embodiment of God
because they are unwilling or unable to accept the kind of
responsibility for themselves that Jesus accepted for
himself.
Jesus did not teach the worship of
himself as an Idol of God or a Substitute for the
responsibility of each man for his own religious and
spiritual sacrifice. And even if he did, it would be our
responsibility to liberate ourselves from that
Doctrine.
The popular Myth of Jesus is founded
on archaic cosmological archetypes. Jesus is believed to
have come down from Heaven (or the sky of stars above the
Earth) and become a blood sacrifice (in the ancient style of
cults that ritually killed animals and men), and then he is
supposed to have risen up into the sky againback to
Heaven. The man Jesus is popularly believed to be God, the
Creator of the Universe, and his death is glorified as a
necessary Cosmic Event that somehow makes it unnecessary for
any believer to suffer permanent mortal death.
All of this, and more, may have made
some kind of imaginative, street-level sense in the days of
the Roman Empire, but it is nothing more than benighted
silliness in the last quarter of the twentieth century. And,
in any case, none of this Idolatry was the teaching or the
intention of Jesus or any of the other great spiritual
Adepts of the world. All of the mythological idolization of
Jesus was the creation of the exoteric and popular cultism
of the early Christian Church. And the time has come for the
world to renounce this nonsenseeven if the Christian
Church itself is yet unwilling to renounce its obnoxious
absolutist claim on all of humanity.
The Myth and the Idol of Jesus have
nothing to do with true religion or the spiritual
responsibility of Manas I have tried to explain in
these essays and in many other writings. And it is time we
stopped glorifying the martyrdom of Jesus. Even though it
seems possible that he personally survived the crucifixion
and went on to continue his work outside Israel, the popular
belief is that he died on the cross. And the persecution and
attempted assassination of Jesus by the hypocritical
religious cultists of his time was not in any sense good for
mankind. It was a grave misfortune, and a prime example of
the stupid, unillumined, and aggressive mentality that still
characterizes the popular or mass level of subhuman
existence. The world would have profited much more if Jesus
had been able to work openly and live to a remarkable old
age as a great prophetic Teacher of Israel. In that case,
the true esoteric foundation of religion might have
begun to become the basis of human culture two thousand
years ago. And, at the very least, mankind could have
avoided the long tour of domination by yet another
impenetrable Idol of the mind
The idea that the martyrdom of Jesus
was the literal and final Sacrifice of God is a perversion
of the Truth. The true sacrifice of Jesus occurred while he
was still alive. That sacrifice was of an esoteric spiritual
nature, and it is of no inherent value to any other human
being, unless that individual will duplicate that same
sacrifice in the processes of his own body-mind.
Why do we persist in a retarded and
negatively cultic understanding of religion? The Truth is
plainand it has been plainly preached and
demonstrated, not only by Jesus, but by many Adepts in every
epoch of human history. But the Idol of Jesus
persistsbecause it is one of the great archetypal
alternatives to authentic personal religious or spiritual
responsibility. It is time for mankind to awaken to Wisdom
and to the understanding of Jesus in Truth. Then perhaps
some benefit will have come to us at last from that ancient
outrage performed in Jerusalem.
Beyond the Hidden
Teachings of Jesus
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
a talk
ADI DA: The teaching of Jesus is
both exoteric, or public and outward, and esoteric, or
hidden and spiritual.
In our consideration of Jesus, we
must first of all differentiate the exoteric or public
teaching that Jesus himself represented from the exoteric or
public teaching of the Christian tradition that succeeded
him. In general, the exoteric teaching of the Christian
Church is based on a cultic, liturgical or ritualistic, and
myth bound relationship to Jesus, who is proclaimed to be
exclusively identical with the Creator-God of the Semitic
tradition. The Jesus of exoteric Christianity is useful to
Man only after his supposed death on the cross and his
legendary resurrection and ascension. The essence of the
traditional exoteric teaching of Christianity is that we can
realize a personal relationship to this legendary Jesus, the
exclusive God who will “save” us from a life of suffering,
although we may not realize the same relationship to God
that Jesus realized.
The exoteric teaching that Jesus
himself actually offered was quite different from the cultic
dogma that survived him. He taught that we must be free of
cultic religious illusions and moral reluctance. He was
willing to be of service as Spiritual Master to individuals,
but not in the cultic form promoted by the Church in the
centuries after his death. If the only relevant Jesus is the
Jesus who has died for our sins and gone to heaven, then he
could not have taught anything useful during his lifetime.
Of what service was he, then, to somebody to whom he talked
while he was alive, but who died before Jesus was supposedly
“ascended to the Father”? Does it follow that the individual
did not hear his teaching and did not have contact with the
Presence of God? Clearly, there is no truth to such logic.
Thus, the “ascended Messiah” esotericism of the Christian
tradition is nonsense.
The exoteric teaching of Jesus
during his lifetime was true, however. It was essentially a
moral teaching that clarified the centuries-old Hebrew
tradition of behavioral laws and ritualistic obligations.
Jesus communicated a single moral disposition that obliged
everyone to transcend mere adherence to the ancient,
external legalisms and, instead of observing rituals, to
sacrifice themselves in the midst of the daily
circumstances of life. Since ancient times, the way of
sacrifice has been the essential way of human integration
with God. The orthodox, cultic sacrifices of the ancient
days were ritualistic and superficialone murdered a
pigeon or a goat, performed a ritual or a prescribed
liturgy, walked around a holy place, sang hymns, and so
forth. Even today such ritual sacrifices are common to
religious practices. Jesus, like the other Adepts who
appeared before and after him, communicated the principle
behind such ritual sacrifices, which is the sacrifice of
self, the sacrifice of Man through and in the form of the
individual human being. The ritual of any sacrifice is only
the instrument, while also the evidence, of the individual’s
integration with the Living Divine Reality. The primary
sacrifice is the sacrifice of the individual himself, not of
something other than himself.
This teaching of sacrifice is the
essential and true exoteric religion that has been
communicated since ancient times. Jesus found a way to
integrate it creatively with the lives of his
contemporaries. He taught people that they themselves were
obliged to be a sacrifice, through love and self-release,
through ecstasy, through letting go, through abandoning
rigid reactivity and self-possession when confronted with
the circumstances of life.
True religious teachings oblige
people to personal as well as moral disciplines at the
exoteric or foundation level of practice. As the cultic
falsification of Jesus’ point of view has proceeded over
time, however, the personal disciplines have largely been
abandoned, and even the moral obligations have been
weakened. Today, the essence of mainstream Christianity is
that we may be “saved” through “faith,” or belief in a
cultic personal association with Jesus. We are not thus
obliged to the full degree of self-transcending personal and
moral responsibility, since Jesus supposedly will save us
from the “wages” of our sins. Thus, the true exoteric
teaching of Jesus has been diluted by the false esotericism
of the cult that followed him. Jesus himself primarily
obliged people to a life of personal and moral sacrifice,
whereby they could transcend cultic limitations and personal
pettiness in the midst of the ordinary conditions of
living.
Jesus’ teaching is summarized in the
Great Commandment “Love the Lord thy God with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind; and
love your neighbor as yourself.” How that all-absorbing,
God-Realizing love was to be accomplished was communicated
in the “inner circle,” through esoteric or secret, higher,
and mystical teaching, but the God-Realizing process
included and began with one’s life in the world, among one’s
neighbors, in intimate cultural relationship to others. One
was obliged to be a sacrifice in the management of intimate
community, daily work, diet, and health. One’s sexuality was
to be managed through concentration, through relational
love-commitment in marriage. One’s relationship to others
was to be managed from the point of view of moral sacrifice,
the life of loving and compassionate service, the
abandonment of petty legalisms in favor of wholehearted love
relations, community relations, mutual agreements, and
unreserved help.
These disciplines that were the
foundation of the way of life that Jesus communicated are
only a preparatory phase of true religious life. Yet in
Jesus’ time, as today, it was immensely difficult to bring
people to change their orientation from reactive
self-possession to self-transcending relationship With the
Living God and all other beings. Even the simple personal
and moral disciplines were more than most people could
conceive of and accept as the appropriate burden of a
religious life. Many of them spent the rest of their lives
struggling with that ordinary doctrine. Likewise, the
leaders of the official cults of that time and place had so
much difficulty with the implications of this natural
teaching that they contemplated means to defame and
ultimately destroy Jesus. To live simply and directly in the
personal and moral disposition Jesus recommended would have
negated the dependence of the people on all of the cultic
laws and temple practices by which the priests maintained
their wealth and their control over the mass population.
Jesus was too revolutionary for ordinary childish people as
well as for the parentlike priests who were their
“shepherds.” Therefore, the way of life he Communicated in
public was very upsetting and threatening to the official
cults of his time.
This is how Jesus managed his
exoteric and esoteric levels of instruction: As his
disciples traveled and communicated the radical, moral point
of view, they looked for those who were most prepared to
accept, in relatively simple and human fashion, the personal
and moral responsibilities of this way of life. The
disciples were instructed to look for the most devotional,
the most responsive and responsible, individuals. When they
discovered such men and women, they did not initiate them
into the esoteric teaching immediately, but they did bring
them into closer proximity to the esoteric core of Jesus’
work. The New Testament describes several occasions when
Jesus and the disciples spent time in the homes of
followers. Here and there they found an individual who was
physically, psychologically, morally, and emotionally
capable of the full esoteric way of life, which included
higher psycho-physical disciplines and adaptation in
addition to the personal and moral disciplines of the
exoteric teaching.
Thus, those who were prepared were
initiated into an esoteric order or circle around Jesus.
These were the people with whom he did not limit his speech
to parables and lessons of moral transformation. These
people were given the mystical, bodily secrets of the
“Kingdom of God,” the secrets of how to become the Sons and
Daughters of Godin other words, how to be pervaded by
the Divine Life-Current and “lifted up” and
transformed.
Jesus was not the Messiah that the
Jews had expected. He had no intention to be a political
figure and to purify Israel of the Roman rule. Thus, it is
true that he was not and is not the traditionally expected
Messiah of the Jews. He was a different kind of person
altogether. He denied being the worldly Messiah that his
contemporaries sought: “My Kingdom is not of this world.”
All during his ministry he avoided any obligation to worldly
power, to be warlike and politically active. He gave all his
attention to the reawakening of a moral way of life in the
world, the transformation of the relationships between
individuals, the regeneration of the relationship between
the individual and the Living Divine, and restoration of the
Law of sacrificenot the sacrifice of pigeons sold in
the hallways around the temple, but the moral and spiritual
love-sacrifice of the individual himself in his relationship
to others and to the Living Spirit that is God.
Jesus’ exoteric teaching is quite
different from the exoteric teaching of the institutional
Church of conventional Christianity. Nor is the conventional
Christian Church the bearer of the esoteric teaching
of Jesus. That secret teaching was lost in the social
circumstances of the early centuries after Jesus’ death. It
did not disappear immediately, but it disappeared fairly
quickly. A fragment of a letter that was written in the
second century after Jesus by a man named Clement of
Alexandria indicates that the writer knows something about
the esoteric tradition among Jesus followers, but it is
obvious from the tone of the letter that the higher esoteric
tradition had already disappeared by Clement’s own time. He
is a wise old man of the Christian tradition, and he knows
something about this esoteric matter, but it is already in
the past. He writes about the way it was in the
past.
Thus, within the first 150 years or
so after Jesus’ disappearance from Israel, the esoteric
aspect of his teaching disappeared. By the time the Church
councils were created to formalize the cult and its dogma
and to exalt the teaching of Paul as the official point of
view of the Church, the esotericism of Jesus had long since
ceased to be practiced. Finally, it was completely,
officially, and dogmatically eliminated. Certain aspects of
the exoteric moral and personal disciplines of life
recommended by Jesus remain in the Church, but they are not
its fundamental focus, nor are they obligatory in any
fundamental sense. The essential focus of the cult of the
Christian Church is the believer’s “saving” relationship to
Jesus as an exclusive and myth bound manifestation of God.
Only the greatest saints of the Christian tradition have
broken through the exoteric limits of orthodox Christianity
to develop an illumined, mystical, or transcendental and
ecstatic relationship with God or Christ as Living
Spiritand they have often been brutally persecuted by
the authorities of the conventional Church.
In the literature of Jesus’ time,
very little survives of the esotericism of his work. Only
some suggestion of it is revealed to a careful reading of
the New Testament, and related documents, such as the
fragment of the letter by Clement of Alexandria. But,
elsewhere on the Earth, there still remains the esoteric
tradition of which Jesus, in his time, was simply a
representative. He only applied the understanding and the
techniques of higher adaptation, prayerful meditation,
psychic awakening, and spiritual growth as they already
appeared in the esoteric cultures of the ancient world, and
he communicated or interpreted these through the traditional
law, archetypes, and mythology of his contemporaries in
Israel.
The conventional cultic and exoteric
interpretation of the life and person of Jesus considers him
to be an exclusive manifestation of God, representing a
history, a way of life, and a destiny that no one else can
enjoy or duplicate, and thus for which no one else can be
responsible. Such was absolutely not the point of view of
Jesus himself. He communicated a way of life for which each
individual must be as responsible as Jesus was in his own
case. His teaching relieved people of conventional
exoteric religious cultism, and it led true “hearers” into a
life of spiritual sacrifice of self, including the higher,
esoteric or evolutionary practice of ecstatic prayer (or
meditation on the Life-Principle via concentration in the
brain) and an esoteric spiritual interpretation of the
Hebrew tradition. He essentially communicated the point of
view of sacrifice, as a total human activity that fulfills
the Law and is the essence of the Way of Truth, and his
teaching was directed to the personal, moral, and higher
psycho-physical experience of Love-Communion with the
Life-Principle, the Living Spirit that is God.
I have criticized the cultic
Christian revision of Jesus’ life and work, since it forgets
and even anathematizes his real work and totally
misinterprets the significance of his spiritual influence.
At another level, however, my criticism must also be
directed at the inverted, self-divided, world-denying,
soul-glorifying orientation of the ancient oriental mystical
traditions as a wholesince much of the “inner circle”
Teaching of Jesus was an extension of that ancient
“gnosticism” of “Heaven-seeking” via internal mystical
techniques. Ultimately, the esoteric idols of mysticism must
be overcome, just as must the exoteric and public idols of
analytical intellectualism. Mysticism, like science, is
another way of “knowing about.” It is simply an arcane
method for acquiring certain kinds of knowledge.
On the one hand, the ancients
presumed they were knowing about and participating in the
total universe with their mystical, inward methods. This was
true only to a modest degree, limited by the mechanics of
reflection and symbol (as in all cases of mere knowledge).
On the other hand, they thought, and rightly so, that they
were viewing the inner side of Man. That is, in fact,
fundamentally and exactly what they were doing. They were
viewing the interior, subtler aspect of the body and the
subtler aspects of the brain-mind. However, they generally
attributed an independent reality to what they viewed
within.
The two most prominent doctrines of
traditional oriental mysticism were that inner visions were
direct experiences of the cosmos beyond Earth, and that the
inner being, mind, or soul of Man is not only distinct and
therefore separable from the physical bodybut that the
fulfillment of human existence is the conscious
separation of the mind or soul from the physical body and
the Earth. Therefore, mystical practitioners’ including the
“inner circle” of Jesus, commonly believed that by
stimulating these inward phenomena they could temporarily
(and even finally) escape the Earth, the human body, and
ordinary existence. (And this “gnostic” or more or less
ascetic mystical ideal was contrary to the exoteric and
world-affirming doctrines of the “establishment” Judaism of
Jesus’ time, just as it runs contrary to the world-affirming
or worldly point of view of exoteric Christianity and of
modern societies in general.)
The ultimate presumption of
conventional mysticism is not, in its traditional
formulation, simply or patently true. Mystical experience
and mystical language are rightly understood only if they
are accepted as forms of paradoxa special way of
intuiting and surrendering to the Eternal Divine Mystery,
rather than an experience that is itself taken to be
God. Most of the phenomena that are experienced inwardly are
not truly cosmic (arising outside the personal sphere of the
body-mind), and neither are they separable from the physical
body They are, in most instances, expressions of the
individual psyche, determined by the conventions of the
human nervous system. They are native to the body of Man.
They depend on the physical or elemental structures of the
human body and brain-mind. They are not truly separate from
the physical or superior to it. They do not represent
another or alternative reality that one can cling to and
thereby abandon the physical.
In any case, experiences are not
Truth. And, although we may learn and grow by experience,
experiences do not in themselves liberate us into the
Transcendental Reality or Realm of the Absolute Divine. Only
the Life-principle itself, which is the Matrix of all
experiences, is the Truth. And, therefore, the ultimate
liberation of Man is not in knowledge or experience, but
only in self-transcending and total psycho-physical
surrender into the ultimate Domain of the Life-Principle
(which we contact directly via the central nervous system,
and which is senior to every aspect of mind and
body).
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
The Truth is not within. However,
from the point of view of the ancient and traditional
mystics, the Truth is indeed within. The esoteric initiates
of Jesus were themselves essentially traditional mystics,
involved with the mystical and magical phenomena of the
“kundalini.” They used the language and symbols of their own
time and place, but the process they engaged was essentially
that of the “kundalini,” 2
or the internal Life-Current in the central nervous system,
rising from the “flesh,” from the realm of the senses, from
the lowest point or base of the body, to the brain core and
the “heaven” of inwardness.
This mystical and magical absorption
of attention in the Life-Current certainly does belong to
the developing stages and practical expressions of the
esotericism of the ultimate Way of Truth. But the phenomena
that are experienced through the method of ascending
inwardness are not the liberating Truth, they are not the
very Divine, they are not the very Realm of God. They are
simply inner phenomena, inner knowledge, subtler aspects of
the human body-mind itself. The liberating Truth is in the
Realization that “l” am not within this body. “I”
am the body. And the total bodily (or
psycho-physical) being inheres in the Living Transcendental
Divine Being. It is only when we are relieved of the
subjective being, when we are released from the illusion of
mind as a separable reality, when we are released from the
illusion of mind as an independent soul, or the illusion of
mind as another territory, another dimension of ourselves
that can be taken away from this body and separated from
this worldit is only when we are relieved of the
entire inward search, the selfward tendency, the
self-divided solution, that the radical and whole bodily
confession of Truth can begin.
Therefore, if we study and
understand Jesus rightly and in Truth, we must transcend the
sectarian limitations of the historical Cult of Jesus (or
Christianity). Thus, we will necessarily enter into the
esoteric domain of religious, mystical, and magical
religion, which is communicated in traditions all over the
world. But at last we will exceed the conventional
limitations of the esoteric mysticism of “soul-development.”
Such a course is necessarily implied in the worship of God
in Spirit and in Truth. And since such worship was
apparently recommended by Jesus himself, we can assume that
his highest Teaching embraced this very Realization,
exceeding the outer and the inner cults of Man.
Note:
2. The “kundalini,” or “serpent power;’ traditionally
viewed, is that aspect of the internal current of bodily
energy that is awakened from a dormant state at the base of
the spine, and ascends the spinal line to the crown. That
is, the process of the “kundalini,” or mystical ascent,
essentially involves the inversion of attention, so that the
nerve energy in the autonomic nervous system withdraws (from
the realm of the “flesh” or the “senses”) and is experienced
more or less exclusively in the “heavenly” terms of the
central nervous system (the spinal cord and brain). The path
of “kundalini,” or internal energy, is the basis of all
religious mysticism, and the process produces a range of
extraordinary psycho-physical phenomena that are symbolized
and otherwise described in many of the exoteric and esoteric
religious literatures of the world.
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
II
The notion that Jesus died
for our sins (rather than because of them, or merely
as part of the natural chaos of the subhuman world) is based
on the Hebrew ritualism of the Old Testament
and the ancient cults of “blood sacrifice.” Just as the idea
of Jesus’ “ascent into Heaven” does not really coincide with
the cosmology that we know to be true from our present
knowledge (but actually coincides with the traditional
mystical symbolism of internal ascent), similarly, the
ancient rites of “blood sacrifice,” of which Jesus’ death is
traditionally supposed to be the highest example, are not
really understandable in the conventional terms of modern
daily life.
If we are to find some value, or
likeness to Truth, in the biblical idea of sin, we must
examine what “sin” is in any case. The dreadfully dark word
“sin” is a version of an ancient expression which simply
means “to miss the mark.” To miss a mark, as when missing a
target with a bow and arrow, is to be eccentric, off the
center. Thus, to “sin” is to turn one’s attention away from
the Center or Heart of Existence. It is to be unattached to
God, turned away from God, deflected from God, turned
elsewhere than to God. It is to worship principles that are
not God. It is to be attached to experiences, to self, to
the body-mind, rather than to the Divine Life-Principle or
Transcendental Consciousness.
The New Testament proclaims that all
sins are forgivableexcept one, which is the sin
against the “Holy Spirit.” But the idea of a special act
that is a sin against the Holy Spirit is only a kind of play
on words. All sin is turning away from the Living
God, the Life-Principle, or the Holy Spirit. Then what is
not the ultimate sin? What is the only activity that
is “forgiven” (or permitted to find God)? It is to
meet the mark, or to worship the Living Godnot
with conventional ritualism or cultic belief, but through
Love-Communion, through feeling and breathing, through the
total, cultural, and ecstatic or self-transcending process
that is most intimately associated with one’s very existence
and with all one’s relationships. One cannot, therefore,
avoid committing the unforgivable sin by means of any
ordinary behavioral aversion, since all sins are the
sameall sins are a matter of turning away from
the Life-Spirit, or the Living Divine. All sins are equally
and absolutely “unforgivable.” Therefore, not only must
all sins be forgiven, but sin itself (or the “sin
against the “Holy Spirit”) must be forgiven, or else there
is no forgiveness (or no intimacy with God). To be
“forgiven” for one’s sin is to be released from the
consequences of sin, but, above all, it is to be released
from the tendency, activity, and consciousness that is sin.
“Forgiveness of sin” is to be released from eccentricity and
returned to the “mark.” To be “forgiven” is to be converted,
or turned about in one’s attention. It is to be released
from reactive and self-possessed (or Narcissistic) obsession
and returned to self-transcending Love-Communion with the
Life-Principle, the Holy Spirit, the Living God. Therefore,
if we will only accept the Teaching of Truth in our
understanding and turn body and mind from self-possession to
God-Communion, we are “forgiven”, or released from “sin”, by
virtue of that conversion.
Thus, it should be clear that the
process of human liberation in Truth has nothing whatsoever
to do with any cultic ritual of “blood sacrifice,” even the
“blood sacrifice” that Jesus supposedly performed by being
nailed to a cross. Such an idea is cultic and ritualistic
nonsenseexactly the kind of religious nonsense that
Jesus himself preached against. Jesus and his disciples
preached conversion to the Living God, not to the
“God of our fathers,” not to the God of cultic belief, not
to the God of priestly ritualism, not to the God of
liturgies and literal or vicarious and symbolic “blood
sacrifices.” Everyone must make the true and bloodless
sacrifice of conversion to the Life-Principle. Everyone must
be “forgiven.” Everyone must turn away from “sin.”
Everyone must submit to the living “cross,” the central
nervous system, which obliges all knowledge and all desire
to submit to Life. In other words, everyone must enter into
heartfelt bodily Communion with the Living God.
This is the single and entire
message of the New Testament. There is no other true message
there, or in any other religious tradition. That is it. The
question is, what are we going to do about it? We can spend
the rest of our lives studying the New Testament and all the
superficially complicated content of biblical faith, but
true religion still depends fundamentally on this matter of
personal and total psycho-physical conversion to the
Life-Principle, and the assumption of a truly spiritual Way
of Life, or a practical habit of existence that always (or
via all our human functions) Communes with the
Spirit.
I once functioned as chaplain in a
mental hospital. On at least two occasions I gave a sermon
on the passage in the New Testament that describes the sin
against the Holy Spirit as the only unforgivable sin. People
who are insane are often obsessed with the idea that they
have committed the one sin that cannot be forgiven. When I
preached the first sermon on this matter, I
presumed but I did not have to presume I
noticed that everybody there was completely insane! I
very quickly had to become responsible to serve people who
had not one whit of attention left over from their
mechanical, self-possessed, inward life, their turning away.
They were devoted sinners! They were not communing with God;
they were not open eyed, clear, conscious, full of
attention. They were distracted in themselves. They were
obsessively missing the mark, moment to moment. Their breath
was irregular, their bodies were all out of harmony, they
were self-possessed, dark, demonic egos. They were like any
ordinary person, except that they were an exaggeration of
the ordinary state.
It was the perfect place to preach,
a perfect setting, and the ultimate place to preach that
particular sermon. The people in the audience were doing
exactly the thing that I was talking about. The only
imperfection in the circumstance was that no one in the
audience was capable of “hearing” me and understanding what
I was saying! I was obliged to give this sermon, but they
could all do whatever they pleased while I gave it. They
were generally expected to remain confined to the room, but,
apart from this basic obligation, very few demands were
placed on them. Thus, their “sinning” was totally
obvious.
The usual man functions, he talks to
you, he often seems reasonable and intelligent. Even so, he
is also mad, because he is utterly and fearfully involved
with himself. He is creating the fake reality, the
subjective world of self, exactly as were the mental
patients to whom I preached. Like a madman, the usual man or
woman is completely involved with the repetitive ritual of
obsessive interpretations and misinterpretations, and the
chronic contraction of his or her own body from the obvious
and Radiant Reality of the Living Person, the Divine and
Transcendental Truth of Man.
The people in the mental hospital
were simply a kind of cartoon version of humanity. While I
gave this sermon, which seemed to me basically insightful,
they were aggressively busy with themselves, shouting,
playing with their noses and their genitals, and rehearsing
their bizarre emotional rituals. They were all totally out
of relationship to their environment and to me and to all
the other people in the room. Each one of them was like a
planet in a separate universe, with no relationship to any
other planets and universes. The “audience” reeled with this
tremendous movement, like a great ocean. As I look out at
you who listen to me today, I see a relatively orderly
gathering. But the audience of mental patients was not
orderly at all. All the heads and bodies were moving
constantly. Each person was a heap of gestures and a chaos
of noises and silences, acting in an eternal moment that is
without relationship to anyone or anything else.
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
They were the perfect example of
“sinners.” In that eternal and absolute moment of
self-involvement they were eternally and absolutely
“unforgiven.” The teaching and the fate of Jesus made no
difference to them. They were unforgiven because they would
not be converted in their attention. They would not, in
other words, cease to sin. They would not turn from self to
Life. They would not return their attention to the Absolute
and All-Pervading Reality. They maintained their attention
on and in themselves to the point of madness, the “black
hole” of egoic implosion. Most people have not reached that
point. Most people are neurotic and deluded, but they are
conventionally sane. They function within the same ritual
order that most other people acknowledge to be “reality.”
Still, everyone is a “sinner,” exactly as every madman who
came to watch me preach.
All of this is perhaps not quite so
obvious to the Sunday morning preacher. When he confronts
his dreadfully sane congregation, it may not seem obvious to
him that every one present is sinning at that very
moment. It is not really obvious to the preacher that
he himself is also sinning via the ritual of all his
thoughts and acts. He and his congregation have their Jesus,
and this makes them orderly, but they have no awareness of
the sinless life of ecstatic conversion to the Living
Truth! Their attention is on themselves, they are full of
concerns, and, together, they believe in the ritual nonsense
of ordinary religion, in order to alleviate the critical
anxiety of ordinary fear. They are not awakened to true
“faith,” which is literal God-Communionperhaps because
they have not yet experienced and recognized the stark
reality of their own madness, their own
sinfulness.
The deadly tendency of my own
body-mind has always appeared as stark to me as the tendency
I could see among the madmen in the mental hospital. The
Life-negative and self-meditating tendency of this human
mechanism has always been obvious to me. From the beginning
of my life, I have been dealing with this literal matter of
“sin.” However, to the usual man or woman, asleep with all
the anchormen of the TV news, the reality and effect of
“sin” is not obvious. To the usual man, “sin” is merely
conventionally “illicit” behavior, such as stealing, or
alcoholism, or sexual intercourse, or even enjoyment itself!
A false idea of “sin” only contributes to our fundamental
insanity and “sinfulness.” “Sin” is not merely or even at
all a form of behavior that may be socially inappropriate in
a white Christian suburb of puritan America. “Sin” is an
anti-spiritual gesture. It is the Life-negative gesture of
self-possession. It is the contraction of body and psyche
from the Life-Principle. It is self-attention and
self-division. It is recoil from Ecstasy, toward the inward
obsessiveness of the defined and separative self.
We are all struggling with this
chronic gesture of reactive contraction, of psycho-physical
recoil, of fear, of self-possession, of self-division, of
turning attention away from the Life-Principle and toward
all the idols of egoic experience. Such idolatry is the
chronically negative substance of everyone’s life, even of
the highest of lives. It is even part of the substance of
the life of Jesus. (This realization should not shock us. In
his ecstasy, Jesus was identical to the Spirit that is God,
but in his natural state, he was a devotee of God, a mystic,
and a man of his own time. Therefore, Jesus himself
declares, in the New Testament, that it is not Man that is
“Good” even if he is Jesusbut only God is
“Good,” and it is to God that every man and woman must be
surrendered.)
Even so, in the context of his own
moment of time, Jesus was not an idolator. He angrily
denounced the idolatrous trends of his day. He was part of
the movement in that epoch of ancient history in which all
the “great religions” were developed. In that epoch, the
cultural movement of mankind was focused on the realization
of the awakening of the undifferentiated psyche to a
position of moral and mystical self-consciousness. All the
religions of that time existed for that purpose. Thus, they
were true in their time. Nevertheless, the concrete
mysticism of the ancient cults, including the “inner circle”
of Jesus, represents only a moment or an early stage in the
ultimate drama of human transformation.
There is a kind of worship of idols
in the form of mystical experiences, just as there is in the
common idolatry of the scientific and religious worship of
the powers of Nature and all the cultic and secular frenzy
over the Gods we make from words. Once we pass beyond the
limits of our own body-mind, and, therefore, of the ancient
concept of mind, we can see that even the mystical
realization preached by the ancient esoteric cults is, as
much as any other form of idolatry, to be transcended as we
mature in Divine Communion. What is offered as the absolute
Realization of Truth from the point of view of the ancient
mysticism is simply a more highly evolved aspect of human
knowledge and experience. But the Truth is a matter of
absolute self-transcendence. The Truth is not Realized by
the confinement of attention to any form of experience at
all, but only by the release of attention, and all the
gestures of attention, into the Living Divine
Reality.
Therefore, the Truth is the
Life-Principle itself, and the Realization of Truth is never
Absolute, since the Living Truth must necessarily be
Realized in every newly arising moment of existence. The
Realization of Truth is an endless Process of constant
transcendence of self (and of the functional limits of Man)
through psycho-physical surrender into the Life-Principle.
Man himself will have become evolutionary rubble long before
the experientially reflected Light of God-Realization even
begins to produce an intimate glimmer of the Wonder that is
yet to be born at Infinity.
Jesus Is
Life
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
The historical person of Jesus is
now beyond the ordinary reach of mankind. He has gone on to
fulfill his own evolutionary destiny in the realm of Nature.
Only the Living God, or the Transcendental Reality to which
Jesus pointed with his entire life and Teaching, remains for
us to embrace in love.
We must surrender to the
Life-Principle, the Living God, the Holy Spirit, the Radiant
Self of all beings, Who is the Truth, the Way, and the
Destiny of Man. If you like, you can name that Living
Reality “Jesus,” or the ‘Christ,” but do not threaten and
deny the rights of those who name that same Principle by
other names. Every religion is simply an historical
intuition of the One and Only Life-Principle. Therefore,
people in other traditions than the Christian tradition name
that same Reality by other names, such as Yahweh, Allah,
Krishna, the Atman, Brahman, Om, the Buddha, Nirvana, or the
Tao. And it is time for us to see beyond the names we have
given to Life. It is time we surrender ourselves bodily to
the Life-Principle and accept compassionate and loving
responsibility for the Wisdom and welfare of all
mankind.
“Jesus,” or the “Christ,” is simply
a traditional name or archetypal symbol for the
Life-Principleand, therefore, in the symbolic or
archetypal sense, “Jesus” is “God.”
And the universal Life-Current
pervades the body of Man via the central nervous system.
Therefore, the central nervous system is the “Mountain of
God,” the “Tree of the World,” the “Savior of the World,”
the Living “Crucifix,” the Spiritual “Law,” the Way, the
Truth, and the Life of Man. And “Jesus” is a traditional
name or symbol for the central nervous system in its direct
Communion with the Life-Principleor Man in his
wholeness, crucified, or sacrificed to the Living
Spirit.
The Life-Principle manifests as the
mind and the bodyor the “higher” and “lower” parts of
Man. But neither mind nor body is the Truth and the ultimate
resort of Man. Only the Life-Principle itself is the Way,
the Truth, and the Like of Man.
The Way of Life is not found in the
mind itself or in the body itself, but only in the
transcendence of the total body-mind through Love-Communion
with the Life-Principle. Therefore, the Way of Life is to be
founded on the heart of Man, since mind and body spring from
the Center, or the Life-Spirit of Love, which is at the
heart of Man.
The Great Commandment of “Jesus” is
to love, trust, or surrender to God, Who is the
Life-Principle. We are obliged by the Law of Life, to which
the central nervous system and the heart of Man are
eternally bound. Each of us must Awaken to his own positive
and total functional connection to the Life-Principle. And
then each of us must love, or Radiate Life to all others, to
the same absolute degree that we are all given Life, or
love, in and as ourselves.
Therefore, since we are given
absolute Life, we must consent to e absolute Life in all our
relationships. And, since we are only love, we must consent
to transcend all psycho-physical limits in the exercise of
love, or unqualified Like-Radiance.
The
Enlightenment of Man Is in His Bodily Commitment to
Life
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
Man is mortal, and also immortal.
The individual apparently lives and dies, but his
existence is not threatened. His psycho-physical form
passes through cycles of birth, and change, and death, but
each cycle is followed by another, so that all the
evolutionary lessons may be learned. This is the
understanding that enlightens our perception of
Man.
But unenlightened men and women do
not perceive or understand the paradox of Man and the
immortality of the cycles of mortality. Therefore, the usual
individual is full of self and fear, and he constantly seeks
to protect himself against ultimate and apparently absolute
threats to his survival. And, because of his self-possessed
search for immunity from frustration, pain, and death, the
human individual fails to surrender to the full cycle of his
own existence.
Therefore, unenlightened Man lives
recoiled from his own bodily destiny. Indeed, he lives
recoiled from the Principle in which the body is arising.
That Principle is the All-Pervading Radiant Life and
Transcendental Consciousness that is the very Condition and
Self of all beings.
Unenlightened Man is recoiled from
surrender as the body and into the
Life-Principle. He is self-possessed, recoiled from Life and
even all relationships. He is, unwittingly and even
unconsciously, the enemy of the body, and all relationships,
and Life itself. He is Narcissus, the separated one, the
mind-bearer.
Thus, the human world remains
tormented and chaotic, unable to make peace or love. And
there is a deep disposition of fear in us that resists the
bodily confession of Life. Therefore, human beauty and
vitality are always tending to be destroyed, by the fear of
bodily death and the inability to surrender bodily to
Life.
The civilizations of mankind have to
date embraced cultural principles that reflect the universal
fear of death and all the self-possessed, self-protective,
and separative strategies of conventional consciousness. In
the East, the revolt against the body has produced the more
or less ascetic ideals of mystical otherworldliness. In the
West, that same revolt has produced the ideals of victorious
manipulation of the natural realm. In both cases, the revolt
and struggle against material and bodily existence is the
root of all cultural adaptation. Man revolts against
mortality by negatively manipulating his own body and the
natural or material realm. Thus, he either separates himself
from the body and the world by resorting to the illusory
independence of the inner self or mind, or else he dominates
the body and the world with an unillumined will to power
through knowledge and conventional
self-fulfillment.
Even the traditional culture of the
West, with its seemingly indomitable will to embrace the
worldly play of Nature, has associated itself historically
with the ultimately otherworldly cult of Christianity. And
no matter how hard Western man tries to “humanize” the
religion and person of Jesus, the more or less ascetic,
otherworldly, mystical, self-effacing, and body-denying core
of that religion remains to complicate the typically
self-protecting and world-exploiting tendency of
Western-born individuals.
Thus, the West has historically
demonstrated an inherently self-divided, self-destructive,
and Life-denying disposition by embracing a religious ideal
that is, at the root, oriental, or Eastern and ultimately
world-renouncing in its character. And conventional
religion, in both the East and the West, has thus provided
the historical basis or justification for negative cultural
programs that recoil from the bodily
Life-Principle.
Even so, the Life-Principle is
enshrined in the idealisms of Christianity, and Judaism, and
Islam, and even certain dimensions of Hinduism, Buddhism,
and other oriental religious cultures. It is simply that the
implications of the truly human relationship to the
Life-Principle have not been consciously acknowledged or
implemented in the broad cultural programs of the
traditional East or the traditional West. Thus, conventional
religious culture or idealism tends to be associated with
certain positive moral values (such as truthfulness,
honesty, non-stealing, non-killing, and so forth), but
traditional religious culture is also always associated with
an ultimately negative evaluation of bodily existence and
the existence of Man within the realm of Nature. As a
result, religious acculturation, East and West, always
carries with it taboos against bodily pleasure, sexual
intensity, and even the will to live a long and healthful
life.
The time has come to transcend our
ancient acculturation to the bodily negative recoil from
Life. We must transcend the ancient religions and the
ancient cultural taboos. We must be enlightened in our
understanding of the paradox of human mortality and
immortality. Therefore, we must embrace Life bodily and
surrender into bodily Communion with the Living Reality. We
must throw away all of our bodily negative, anti-sexual,
anti-Life adaptations. We must realize a truly regenerative
bodily love of Life. It is not that we are to become
libertines, but neither are we to become ascetics. We must
surrender bodily to Life, via all our actions. We must
transcend mortal fear and all of its false religious and
social dogmas. We must allow Life to regenerate us in every
part, and we must yield to the evolutionary plan and pattern
that is hidden in the body and in the play of Nature, and
which is not at all contained in the mind (since the mind is
only a reflection of previous experience and previous or
chronic limitations of knowledge, perception, and
presumption). We must transcend ourselves through ecstatic,
mind-transcending, bodily love of Life, or direct and whole
bodily Communion with the Living God. Only by doing all of
this can Man move beyond the present impasse of worldwide
conflict and subhuman idealism.
We are at the dead end of the
ancient ways, and we are suffering from the inability to
move fully into our right, human, and immortal destiny. Only
an enlightened and liberated understanding Of our old
cultural and subhuman presumptions will permit us to yield
to Life bodily, in love, and so move on in the Way of
God.
I attest to this with every cell of
my body. I affirm it with all my heart. I plead with you to
consider it fully and resort to a new Way of
Life.
top of
page – Scientific
Proof Table of Contents
|
