Beyond the Beginner’s
Spiritual Way of Saint Jesus By The Avataric Great Sage, Adi Da
Samraj (this book was later published as
Pneumaton)
The Dogmas of Social Morality Versus the Esoteric
Spiritual Teaching That Is At the Origin of Traditional
Religions 1. The principal Scripture (or holy book) of the tradition
of the Western world is the “New Testament”. The
“New Testament” communicates principles and ideas
and beliefs that, more than those communicated by any other
book, are responsible for conventional Western ideas about
religion and Spiritual life. Although Western culture
includes religious traditions other than Christianity, the
dominant religious text which, in the West, tends to inform
all popular notions about religion and Spirituality is the
“New Testament”. If you grew up in the Western (and predominantly
Christian) cultural sphere, you are perhaps influenced by
the “New Testament” more than by any other
religious book. Even if you are not very familiar with the
“New Testament”, you have (nevertheless) been
impressed, over the years, with certain conventions of
religious presumption of which the “New Testament”
is the source. The conceptions associated with the
traditional interpretation of the “New Testament”
are not only part of the religious teaching of Christian
churches, but part of Western culture in general. Through
your schooling, through your childhood religious training,
and through the influence of those with whom you were
associated as a child—even though they might not have
spoken of religion—you have been greatly influenced by
these conceptions, some of which are directly communicated
in the “New Testament” itself and others of which
are simply traditions that are, by extension, associated
with “New Testament” religion. Everyone is dominated, to one or another degree, by
conceptions of life that have their origin in exoteric
religious culture. Even though scientism (or scientific
materialism) is tending to displace exoteric religion as a
way of knowing, exoteric religion still tends to be the
basis for present-day morality and social conceptions. In
fact, exoteric religion has traditionally always been
associated with moral and social conceptions. Thus, if you
are, by birth, a Westerner, and even if you were not brought
up as a Christian, you have, since your birth, experienced
propaganda that is, at least in its origins, both
conventionally religious and specifically Christian. And the
basic intention of all such conventionally religious
propaganda has been to convince you—and, thus, the
collective of everyone—that certain kinds of behaviors
are appropriate and other kinds of behaviors are not
appropriate. Every present-day legal system—and even the entire
body of social contracts by which people are related in
their daily lives—has its justification in the
tradition of exoteric religion. Therefore, in a time when
the legitimacy of exoteric religion as a way of knowing is
being undermined by scientism, so (likewise) is the
political and social order simultaneously being undermined
by scientism. This is not only a time when individuals are
moving from exoteric (and, thus, collectively enforced)
religious ways of knowing towards materialistic and secular
and even individualistic ways of knowing, but this is also a
time when society as a whole is becoming corrupted and made
chaotic by those same tendencies—and, therefore, new
political forces are arising in immediate coincidence with
the new cultural forces. Human beings are more and more impinged upon by the
forces of political materialism—while, at the same
time, they are impinged upon culturally by the forces of
scientific materialism. The way of knowing in a culture
cannot be changed unless the way of keeping order is changed
at the same time—and Western society has kept order for
many centuries through exoteric religious belief, exoteric
religious presumptions, and exoteric religious conventions
of behavior. If, all of a sudden, exoteric religion is
“discovered” to be untrue, and if, as a
replacement for the “point of view” of exoteric
religion, the “point of view” communicated through
scientific materialism dominates the present culture, then
the traditional justifications for so-called
“moral” behavior have, as a consequence, been
abandoned—and not yet replaced with a viable public
alternative. Therefore, how will the necessary public order
be maintained? A new political force is, under the
circumstances, required, to replace the moral programs of
exoteric religion. Thus, all kinds of political idealisms
arose in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries—revolutionary ideas, communistic ideas,
egalitarian ideas, socialistic ideas, capitalistic ideas,
all kinds of political experimenting—the basic purpose
of which is to keep people in order, to keep material
production going, to maintain public peace, to make life
somehow acceptable to the people—so the people will not
rise in revolt, or go mad, or create chaos. The rise of new political idealisms is coinciding with
the new cultural circumstance, and not only is all of this
dominant in the West but it is, likewise, dominant all over
the everywhere-“Westernized” world (East and
West). This change in the orientation of the mind of
humankind has gradually been developing since the
Renaissance era in Western (European) culture. The
conventions of human orientation began to change in the
period of the Western Renaissance—from a sacred
orientation to an orientation to the human individual, from
Deity-centeredness to ego-centeredness, from ecstasy and
sainthood to “Narcissism” and ego-possession, from
sacred culture to secular culture, from a dominantly
right-brained culture to a now dominantly left-brained
culture. As this transformation has occurred in the world, the
ancient cultural supports have lost their legitimacy. This
does not mean that the ancient exoteric religious cultural
supports did not have anything to do with what is right.
Those exoteric religious supports were, in a rudimentary
(and Reality-“objectifying”) sense, based upon the
general (and, in principle, right and positive) intention to
make life sacred. It is simply that the ancient exoteric
modes of the “objectification” of Reality have
(themselves) now—and rightly—lost their legitimacy
in people’s minds. However, as a result of that change
of mind, the principle of the “sacred” (or of the
understanding and managing of life based upon the intrinsic
Truth of universal prior unity) has also—and not at all
rightly—been lost. A way of thinking that had only secondary importance in
the ancient world has now become dominant.
Human-centeredness has become the acceptable convention of
mind. Human knowing is now devoted to analytical
reductionism, or the process of reducing everything to the
individual human being, to human processes, to humankind in
the lowest, most rudimentary— or material—sense. Many social and cultural
enterprises remain valuable, with the potential to improve
the condition of humanity, yet a profoundly destructive
(materialistic, analytical, disunitary, and anti-sacral)
philosophical enterprise is also operative at the same time.
It is this latter development that I Criticize. Science as a conditional method of enquiry, as an
effective practical method of investigation for the sake of
acquiring natural knowledge (and subsequent power to control
natural conditions of existence) is, obviously, legitimate.
Yet, science, from the beginning, has also (and otherwise)
been associated with the ego-centered orientation (and,
thus, with the fixed “point of view” perspective)
and, altogether, with the ancient (conventional and naive)
philosophy of materialism—and it has, on that basis,
also, been associated with the arising of co-emerging
political movements. Present-day humankind is being both
culturally and politically controlled—not only by
science itself (which has an inherent, but also inherently
limited, legitimacy), but also by the philosophy of
materialism (which is inherently ignorant, gross, merely
analytical, de-constructive, reductionistic, exclusivistic,
and naively oppressive). And, as science and the philosophy
of materialism progressively exclude all other forms of
knowing, human beings are becoming more and more dominated
by political materialism—or the forces that are keeping
order independent of sacred (or unitive) consciousness and
authority. This is not to say that the cultural means whereby order
was kept in the past were entirely benign. Exoteric
religious “authority” is not necessarily (or even
characteristically) associated with anything that has
remotely to do with the Truth, or with Reality Itself, or
with Divine Self-Realization, or even with the transcending
of egoity. In the Western world particularly, the institutional (or
corporate) “authority” of the exoteric Christian
Church has been the principal means whereby the State
creates political and social order. Now that the State is
associated with scientific materialism and not with
religious doctrine, the State must find other means for
creating order. Thus, the State is, generally speaking, no
longer basing its own (corporate) “authority” on
the (corporate) “authority” of the
“official” Church. And, for the most part (even
though some still cling, nostalgically, to the “old
days”, of obedience to corporate exoteric religious
“authority”), people are no longer politically and
socially controlled (or, otherwise, willing to be
controlled) by exoteric religious
“authority”—at least, not sufficiently to
keep order. In its origins, what later became institutionalized (or
corporate, and “official”)
“Christianity” was a small cult (or sect) of
cultural “outsiders”, with its “inner
circle” associated with an esoteric Spiritual teaching.
Outwardly, however, in its public preaching, even that
essentially esoteric sect was associated with more general
religious and social principles—and, through the
process of that public preaching, people were gradually
brought into the inner core of the esoteric life of the
sect. In the early centuries of the Common Era, there were,
everywhere, many sects which were (fundamentally) esoteric
sects—to one degree or another revolutionary (or of a
critical, or “outsider’s”, disposition) in
relation to the religious exotericism of the
“official” religion of the public institutions and
the then-current political conventions of the State. After about three centuries (by which time much of the
esoteric Spiritual basis of the original
pre-“Christian” sect had been lost), the Emperor
(Constantine) engineered the cultural-historical shift that
formally established the dogmatic basis for the
institutionalizing of an “official” version of
(exclusively exoteric) Christianity, and that eventually
(within a few decades) resulted in that exoteric institution
of (thus dogmatically defined) Christianity becoming the
“official” religion of the Roman State. Since that
time, either “official” (exoteric) Christianity
has functioned as an arm of the State, or (otherwise) the
State has, in some sense, functioned as an arm of the
“official” (exoteric) Christian Church. As
centuries passed, the relationship between Church and State
changed—such that the exoteric Christian Church now
plays a remarkably different role, and is gradually being
excluded, having lost its previous presumed legitimacy and
public “authority”. However, the exoteric Christian Church’s loss of
power in the political and social realms is a relatively
recent development. With the original union between
“official” Christianity and the State of Rome,
Christianity became the force whereby political and social
order was developed and maintained in the Western world. To
maintain order (and not Truth) was its function as an
institution. Obviously, such an institution is not intended
to be communicating esoteric teachings to the
masses—since esoteric communications are intended to
serve the higher, and greater, and (characteristically)
Spiritual or (otherwise) Transcendental purposes of
Truth-Realization (in the case of, necessarily, more mature
people, who have already out-grown the boundaries of merely
exoteric, or public, “schooling”). Because
esoteric teachings take off where exoteric teachings have
come to a developmental end, esoteric communications do not
tend to enforce political and social order. On the contrary,
esoteric (and, generally, ecstatic) teachings tend not to
bring about a conventional political and social
order—because esoteric teachings presume a prior (or
already achieved) state of order, at least within the heart
and mind and life of the individual esoteric
practitioner. As a case in point, Jesus of Galilee proclaimed an
ecstatic, esoteric Spiritual message. His message was not a
program for bringing order to politics and general
society—nor was such order the purpose of the earliest
institutionalized Christians, who were purposed to religious
devotion (and even to mystical life), and who were, in any
case, in no position to command the State of Rome. Because their guiding purpose was “not of this
world” (and, therefore, of no political use as a tool
of social order), Rome regarded the early Christians as
enemies—and the early Christians were persecuted by the
State, as various other similarly “unusable”
religious sects were. But when the Christians eventually
came into power as the “official authority”, those
features of Christianity that are oriented to the
conventions of public (and altogether exoteric)
religion—the purpose of which is to maintain political
and social order—became the dominant communication of
“official” Christianity. When that
“officialdom” took hold of Christianity, its
otherwise more esoteric dimensions—which were the real
(“inner-circle”) force at its origin—were
systematically eliminated, primarily because esoteric
teachings have nothing to do with managing either a great
State or any kind of larger common social entity (of
ordinary, and, generally, immature, or only exoteric-ready,
and not at all esoteric-ready, people). A religion that is
to be the “official” religion of a great State (or
even any larger common social entity) must be essentially
exoteric, and, thus, fundamentally oriented to maintaining
social principles, social morality, conventions of behavior
that maintain political and social order, and productive
participation in work life, and positive participation in
the larger collective of “community” life, and,
altogether, universal subordination to the parent-like State
(and to the parent-like “official” State-religion)
and, thus, universal conformity to the will of the
hierarchical political (and religious) “authority”
(or “authority”-structure) of the time. Therefore, the “New Testament” (and the
tradition of Christianity as a whole) must be seen in
relation to both the esoteric sect from which it arose and
the exoteric institution that largely replaced it (and even
all esotericism) with the systematic exotericism of ordinary
political and social purposes that has, traditionally, been
served by public corporate religion in the Western world.
and the
Traditions of Mystical Cosmic Ascent via
Spirit-Breath