Meetings with Christianity

It must be because it's Easter or thereabouts, but the Christian "daimon" has been trying to contact me it seems!

First I received an email from "R.", an evangelical Christian, who wanted me to read over an essay he had written.  Well, if a literalist Christian contacts me - having seen my website and knowing what i think! - he must be a very decent fellow!  So I had a  look at his essay, but was dissapointed to discover he was essentially trying to prove that Jesus is the one and only through a very simplistic application of rigid either/or logic (beginning with physics and progressing to the bible).  So I wrote back and told him what i thought, and he wrote back (and sent another essay, which i liked a lot better, because it was just about Faith, and not this intolerant either/or stuff) , and we had a very decent conversation, the reason being because I could see R. is a very nice and decent guy - he seems to have a very well developed heart consciousness, as many sincere and decent evangelicals do - and I wrote to him with respect and politeness, genuinely trying to see his point of view, and he wrote back likewise. 

Obviously, neither R. nor myself budged one millimeter.  Let's face it, there is no way I am going to suddenly believe that every other philosophy and teaching in the whole world is 100% wrong and only a literalist, fundamentalist very narrow and word for word literal  reading of the New Testament is absolutely true, and that that is the one and only Divine Revelation in the entire cosmos for all time.  It's just not going to happen!  Likewise, no way in the world will R. broaden his understanding to accept that other faiths have equal authenticity and Truth.  And should he even do so?  He has his spiritual path, it is right for him.  Who am I, why do I have the arrogance, to question that?

Also, why am I even bothering?  I know it is just the "vital being" (Sri Aurobindo), and samskaras from a past life (probably my 19th century English life, when I was raised a British Israelite), getting me stirred up.

Oh, how tempting it is to argue, to debate!  And how futile!!!  And it's not just me that falls prey to this.  I set up several email forums and we see this all the time; the original Peace and Tranquility is lost and people get stirred up in mental arguments, thus losing sight of the Light of the Soul

So in the end I politely said to R., we have to agree to disagree, goodbye,  (he still sends me stuff though)

Anyway, after I had written that, and turned off the computer, and went to bed and was reading Sri Aurobindo's Synthesis of Yoga,, and what do you know, just the part I was reading happened to have an exact description of the True Essence, the True Light of what Christianity and all these other monotheistic religiosn are saying!!!  Here it is, I'll quote it

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"But the individual relation with the Divine does not always or from the beginning bring into force a widest enlargement or a highest self-exceeding. At first this Godhead close to our being or immanent within us can be felt fully only in the scope of our personal nature and experience, a Leader and Master, a Guide and Teacher, a Friend and Lover, or else a Spirit, Power or Presence, constituting and uplifting our upward and enlarging movement by the force of his intimate reality inhabiting the heart or presiding over our nature from above even our highest intelligence. It is our personal evolution that is his preoccupation, a personal relation that is our joy and fulfilment, the building of our nature into his divine image that is our self-finding and perfection. The outside world seems to exist only as a field for this growth and a provider of materials or of helping and opposing forces for its successive stages. Our works done in that world are his works, but even when they serve some temporary universal end, their main purpose for us is to make outwardly dynamic or give inward power to our relations with this immanent Divine. Many seekers ask for no more or see the continuation and fulfilment of this spiritual flowering only in heavens beyond; the union is consummated and made perpetual in an eternal dwelling-place of his perfection, joy and beauty."
 
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The above describes things so well, the pure essence of what they are on about!  For me, i always used to be into the Impersonal Side, but reading Sri Aurobindo has shown me that i have to acknowledge the personal side too.  This is why i am respectful of sincere believers, even if they are incredibly narrow minded and infuriatingly inflexible,  As long as they are sincere (as R. is for example) and not hypocritical (as so many televangelists and other fakes are)

However, the theistic mystic truth is not the be all and end all that its believers (whoi are stuck at that level and unable to go beyond it) claim.  As Sri Aurobindo continues:

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"But this is not enough for the integral seeker; however intense and beautiful, a personal isolated achievement cannot be his whole aim or his entire existence. A time must come when the personal opens out to the universal; our very individuality, spiritual, mental, vital, physical even, becomes universalised: it is seen as a power of his universal force and cosmic spirit, or else it contains the universe m that ineffable wideness which comes to the individual consciousness when it breaks its bonds and flows upward towards the Transcendent and on every side into the Infinite. "

Synthesis of Yoga, p.257
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Amen to that brother!  :-)  Yes, beautiful as the mystic experience of God is, it is not the final goal.  Just like the Impersonal Liberation, these are just stepping stones on the road to Supramentalisation (but many get stuck there)

Well, I though that explained things.  These narrow-minded believers have a sincere experience of God, but they are mentally stuck in their experience, they think it is the only experience, because it is so true and powerful and beautiful and life-changing to them, so they cannot realise - indeed it is too terrifying for them to even contemplate, because why else apart from the admirable exceptions in the ecumenical and perennialist movents do they shy away so strongly from exploring this?  - that there are others who have experiences that are different, even contradictory, to theirs, but are just as beautiful, just as life-changing, just as numinous and awesonme.

And even the sincere people cannot realise this, how could the insincere ones - the hypocrites and warmongers, the Christian Right and the Wahabists, the fundamentalists and bigots that give a bad name to every faith, who cannot see their own darkness so they project it onto others who are outside their cozy little group - how could these deluded bigots possibly realise it? 

Well, there was still a further lesson the Christian daimon wanted to show me.  A lesson of utmost perversity.

It being Easter, on TV they were going to show Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ.  Well, I hadn't seen this movie, i had refused to pay to see it, because I knew it would be idiotic.  But hey, TV, free, a special showing without ads, if I didn't watch it now I never would.  So, I thought what the heck, it's a sociological phenomon, let's see what it's about.

...

Wow, I tell you, ol' Mel has some seriously strange ideas (and he was so good in Mad Max 2!).  Ok, it's not Mel's fault... hey, funny isnt it how we use first names to describe celebrities, people we don't know and will most likely never know, and tvice versa,  as one columnist once said, we have more celebreties than friends.  But yeah, as I was saying, it's not Mel Gibson's fault.  He's just following (and trapped in) his thoughtform, just as R., my evangelist friend, is following his.

I have no doubt that millions of people think that Gibson has made a sort of CNN live as it happened report of ancient Palestine (as the Pope reportedly said "it was as it is", although his people denied he said this, so who knows).  This is because so many people today are unable to distinguish movies from reality; they think the movies ARE reality!  But even ignoring the serious self-contradictions in Fundamentalist Christianity itself (and of course ignoring technical facts like the unrealistic way the crucifixes are shown, etc etc) , Gibson's movie is not even accurate as far as the literal text of the bible goes.  It is actually fundamentalist Catholicism, or maybe not even that, as it is based on a book by an 18th century stigmatic, Anne Catherine Emmerich, although it is not clear whether the antisemitism in her visions (and hence in the film) were her own or added by the guy who transcribed her experiences.

If The Passion has a message, it is this.  That many Christians in the world are so terrified of the real message of Jesus, the life of Jesus, that they would prefer to morbidly obsess over his death, and mythologise it, and make it into some sort of sadistic torture show.  Or as one wit described Gibson's film, the Jesus Chainsaw Massacres.  That's what it's all about; Jesus' life and teaching are relegated to a few flashbacks, the rest is a study in torture.

And where does all this leave Sri Aurobindo's beautiful summation of belief in God?  And where does it leave R., a sincere, well-meaning, good-natured guy with an inflexible evangelical mindset?

Well, one possible explanation is as follows.

The original experience, the innert core and essence of Christianity, is true, and good, and Light, and it is how Sri Aurobindo describes belief in God.  And this is the same for the Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Wiccan, whoever.  It is only the form of the external form of the revelation that differs.

But this revelation has to work through the intermediate zone and the astral realm, and there are lost of antidivine forces there which can distort things, and put their own twist on things, and these suggestions are implanted in sufggestible humans, and that is where religions go seriously wrong, and one reason why the world is in a  mess today (there are others too, obviously). 

Anyway, all these experiences, meeting R., reading what Sri Aurobindo says about the relationship with God (or rather, the Individual aspect of the Divine), and watching Gibson's Passion story (i stiull have a few more things that i could say about it, but ok,m enough is enough), have made me think about the Christ revelation a bit.  So I decided I should get hold of a book by Matthew Fox, the author of the Creation Spirituality movement.  He is completely against this guilt-ridden fall and redemption type of theology that goes back to Augustine, and instead offers an "Original Blessing" theology to counter the Original Sin (yep, Passion of Christ, all that) mentality which he sees as the cause of the current destructive attitude towards the Earth.  (I only recently became interested in Matthew Fox through the short summary on him by Wouter Hanegraaff in his book New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought.  I just got the book from Amazon a few days ago, just before the Easter Weekend).  But seeing that Gibson movie has made me more interested in finding out if there is a wholesome side to the Christian revelation, a side that isnt obsessed with blood sacrifice and original sin and exclusivity.   Teilhard de Chardin goes part of the way, but he doesnt go far enough, imho.  Steiner is another one, his Cosmic Christ concept is interesting, but again, I have some doubts (when it came to teh Gospels Steiner seems to have been too caught upo in literalism; i think he was clairvoyantly "seeing" what he wanted to see, it was all his own imagination) Maybe Matthew Fox is the key?  He certainly does seem (from my brief reading in Hanegraff and the book contents page on Amazon) to love nature amnd the Earth as much as I do!