VISION MOUND
Volume 2, Number 7
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1979
The Higher Culture of Man Is Not a Cult
The Free Communion Church should fundamentally be the
community of those who are seriously practicing this true
religious and spiritual discipline on the basis of their own
insight, their own real understanding. People should not
come here for childish reasons and continually have trouble
here because of their adolescent mentality. They should
undertake spiritual practice because they understand the
relationship to the Spiritual Master in serious terms,
because they understand and value the community of people
who practice this very discipline. Such a community can
serve all of its members spiritually and culturally if it is
rightly created and maintained.
So in the negative terms of childish exclusiveness, this
Church is not a cult. On the other hand, in the superficial
mind of the world we are considered a cult, and all the
negative associations of cultism are our inheritance. In
some ordinary sense of the term, we are a cult. We have
gathered to worship together, to practice this whole affair
of spiritual life. There is a Teacher, a Teaching, and a
community or gathering of practitioners. So in that sense we
can say that we are a cult. There is nothing negative about
that. History attests to the true function of spiritual
community.
As human beings we all are genetically disposed to
fulfill a specific destiny, but we fulfill it truly only
through the process of acculturation, not through mere
exploitation of our personal desires and ambitions. Much of
Mans genetic potential is not expressed socially or
culturally at the present time because the influences to
which we are obliged to adapt in the common world only
stimulate the lowest dimensions of Man. Nevertheless, there
is a higher culture communicated by spiritual Adepts who
have practiced and realized the higher possibilities of Man.
And these individuals themselves, or those intimate with
them, create communities of practitioners in which human
beings are obliged to adapt beyond the level of the usual
man. These communities are at first small and specifically
esoteric. As they become corrupted, becoming no longer
responsive to the Truth originally communicated, they
eventually become large and exoteric. They then become part
of the world itself and need to be criticized by future
Adepts.
Man is not going to realize his highest potential simply
because he has been born. He must adapt his genetic
possibilities through experience and true spiritual
practice. And the culture we encounter downtown is not
sufficient to stimulate such adaptation in the highest
terms. Only the higher culture, the Wisdom-Culture, obliges
us to adapt beyond obsessive use of money, food, and sex.
The Wisdom-Culture obliges us to adapt to the
self-transcending disposition of the heart and the higher
mechanisms of the body-mind. It obliges us to adapt to the
psychic fullness of the being. It obliges us to surrender,
to enter into Unity with the Reality in which the world is
arising and changing and passing.
No TV commentator or university scholar is going to ask
you to do anything remotely like that. It is the task of
Adepts to create the cultures of Wisdom. This is their
specific function. It is a specific function in nature for
certain individuals to realize the higher possibility of the
evolution and Transcendence of Man and to create a culture
of adaptation to that possibility. There are cultures of
various levels of wisdom created by Adepts of various levels
of realization. There are ordinary and extraordinary
teachers with whom you may stay briefly, and then there are
fully Awakened Masters with whom you stay for your whole
life. The principle of the relationship to the Enlightened
Spiritual Master is the principle of spiritual culture
itself, the principle of the higher adaptation of Man.