No tags yet.
Summary The sex scandal within the Catholic Church has reached epic proportions. There is much heated discussion of this crisis and how the problem of pedophilia should be handled on a political and disciplinary level, but the questions about its real cause are rarely approached. The crisis is so grotesque and monumental that only the most basic questioning may lead to an understanding of its underlying causes. These go back to the foundations of the Church’s attitude towards vitality and nature and the appropriate management of erotic energy. The problem is based in the Semitic/Christian split of the body and mind. The resulting war between spirit and flesh generates a rage that is deep and unconscious. Only vengeance of such a shadowy nature can throw light upon the violent and contradictory rape of innocents. Yet this split is not really fundamental, as can be shown by looking outside of the Semitic/Christian world at other religious traditions, both ancient and extant, which cultivate the consciousness that is prior to any dualistic split and manage vital energy in more wholesome ways. This split between mind and nature is fundamental to an even greater crisis now before us: the ecological state of the earth fueled by Western culture. The disposition of exploitation is at the root of the catastrophe that now threatens our very existence. The earth too shows every sign of being in a rage.
Outline:
The Unfolding Scandal
Peeling the Onion
Questions
Determining the source of the problem
Blaming homosexuality
The Fundamental Issue
The True Victims
Innocence is Vitality
The War of Spirit and Flesh
The Big Lie and the Great Truth
The Big Lie and Its Consequences
The Great Truth and its Traditions
The Greater Tragedy
What is the Church to Do?
A New Direction
What can you do?
THE RAPE OF INNOCENCE
“I loved our priest. So did my mother. We all believed that the priest and the bishop and the Pope himself were always right. They were the force for good. It was the power of God. Mother was delighted when the priest arrived to pick me up to join other boys on trips to the beach. I was too. He would grab me, tickling and wrestling like I did with my Dad. At first it was fun, but then something changed. He started grabbing me down there. I would feel him rubbing against me from behind. I got so scared. Even though he was next to God for me, I knew this was so wrong. I didn’t know who to turn to. I looked out the window. I started praying, but there was no voice to comfort me. This went on for several years. Sometimes I secretly enjoyed what we did, but mostly I was confused and depressed, until I finally told my Dad. He reported what happened, but there was no change. After some time the priest left, but it was celebrated with cake and ice cream. I was so confused and left with deep scars of secret shame. Now that people know about it they are gasping for breath. They don’t know where to put their faith. What should I do when I pray? A Victim
The Unfolding Scandal One has to pity the poor pope, wearing the Emperor’s new clothes, his ornate crown and gowns and massive golden setting growing ever uglier as the grotesque magnitude of the scandal becomes evident. Benedict’s aged rigid body raising his arms in blessing is an appropriate symbol of the pitiful inadequacy of this ancient mendacious institution in the face of the tidal wave that is sweeping over the Vatican. A roiling series of national scandals has turned into an epic test for the universal church, threatening its very existence.
This institution was created to universally embody the divine protector of innocence, the one who famously said words that now carry an awful irony, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” This Church has fomented a secret army of sexual predators, under the protection of the Church itself, who find themselves unable to resist the compulsion to exploit the power of their position to force themselves upon innocents. How are we to deal with this appalling absurdity?
It has been said that if the Church managed to survive the Inquisition, it can survive this. But these times are different. Right now, the modern world is wrapping its head around the Catholic Church in a major way. The growing evidence is so hideous and deformed, its true extent and breadth becoming daily more evident, that the Church is being driven to inevitable confrontation. The crisis will never be resolved until the real depth of the problem is identified, clarified and courageously addressed.
Perhaps in the ancient way of great crisis, this presents a great opportunity. But what is the real problem?
Peeling the Onion
Questions abound.
What kind of apologies and reparations are in order? How to answer those who have placed their most sacred trust in the church? Will the church survive the legal suits? Is the fabulous wealth of the Vatican sufficient to pay out the billions in reparations due to its victims? Will the poor of the southern hemisphere continue to finance this great outlay in addition to paying for the ornamentation, or will the church have to start selling off its gold leaf?
What to do about the guilty priests?
The Pope appears to be making progress as the church, its cover-up of the situation now revealed, is now willing to give up its protection, point to the priests, call them names appropriately associated with evil, reject them and hand them over to the law. This is seen as a step forward. Much is made of the extent to which this is done.
But how is the Vatican to deal with the cynical secrecy of the cover-up itself?
Who knew about this all these many years and did not address it according to the laws of the land?
Who participated in the cover-up and what responsibility and liability do they have with regard to the law?
We now know that Pope Benedict himself, who once headed up the modern vestige of the Inquisition responsible for dealing with this issue, grandly led the cover-up. What is to be done with such a one who is willing to protect this mendacious institution by sacrificing the well being of those it is intended to serve?
What kind of punishment is due those who have covered up this moral atrocity?
Can the absolute leader of the Imperium church publicly atone for his sins and yet preserve the theological magisterium of the papacy?
And perhaps it is no one’s fault, but rather s
ystemic to the very structure of the Church.
Much is made of this process of calling the church to account. Sinead O’Connor, the singing conscience of the church, wants all those guilty of this cover-up to stand down and allow fresh faces, “those who really believe in God,” to take their place. Would this get to the root of the problem?
Then there is the feeble attempt to address the sexual roots of the crisis. Who are these rapacious priests?
They are people who cannot handle celibacy. Celibacy is the problem. Are we to understand then that if priests are allowed to marry, they will no longer have interest in innocent youth?
Of course, there is always homosexuality to blame, and there was always plenty of that. Throughout history men who love men have characteristically taken refuge in the all male world of the clergy. One great leap forward, much vaunted recently by the church, is that homosexuals will no longer be allowed. One wonders how this will affect the already dwindling numbers of young men willing to enter the church.
But the connection of homosexual inclination and pederasty does not stand up to much scrutiny. The abuse of girls shows that desire for sex with young faithful is largely unrelated to sexual orientation. And what of the even more extensive, but less celebrated problem of priests who have sex with adults in their flock. This too, in its own way, is a despoiling of innocence.
This display is pathetic. These measures are no match for the magnitude of this problem. If this is as deep as it goes, the Catholic Church is finished. Such a collapse would be an existential trauma of such proportions for 1.2 billion Catholics and the very fabric of Western Culture, that it is understandable that the Pope should make every effort to avoid it at all costs.
The Fundamental Issue
The elephant in the sanctuary of St Peters absurdly degrades “the pride of Christ,” the mystical entity called the Church. The province of the religion is innocence. Faith in the Church is the doorway to faith in the religion. In this regard, betrayal of the innocent is too weak a concept: desecrated, defiled, abused come to mind, but “rape” is more accurate. What kind of rage or vengeance is behind this?
What conceals the true roots of the problem is the cheesy moral assumption that the priests are evil and the innocents are good. All of the so-called solutions operate within this assumption. This sets up a dichotomy that stops the analysis and obscures its true depths.
We began with the testimony of a “good” victim. Now consider this testimony of an “evil” priest.
“Ever since I was young I was drawn to God and his church. Early on I knew that I wanted to dedicate my life to God and set about preparing to enter the priesthood. I did experience sexual feelings, attraction towards my contemporaries that increased in my adolescence. But I was convinced that if I became a priest I would be able to overcome them. In seminary I did everything I was told, but still the feelings persisted. For years I prayed and confessed and resolved and did everything in my own power and the powers passed on to me in my training for the priesthood. To tell the truth, none of it was very effective. I confessed over and over, but the feelings persisted, and finally I gave into them and started masturbating. I was getting sick. My guilt became greater and greater, which perversely only seemed to intensify my lust. I began to feel more and more attracted to boys, especially 13 to 16, the same age I was when I began to have these feelings. I resisted and resisted, and finally lost confidence in my faith to be able to help me with this. I had known of fellow clergy that had gone into treatment, but they either went back into the behavior, became increasingly depressed, and/or left the clergy. I could not imagine leaving the church. What happened was a lonely spiral downward into ever increasing guilt and lust, which finally forced me into a kind of awful cynicism, a kind of impacted rage. I established myself as the champion of the youths I felt attracted to, but I found myself overwhelmingly attracted to them. At this point, I gave in and began to entice some of them into playing around with me. This led to other things. Sometimes they enjoyed it a lot, but mostly they were afraid. I too was afraid, but I had nowhere to turn. When I was finally caught it was hell, but somehow, it was a relief from the personal hell I had been in before. God forgive me.”
A Victim
If such testimony generates empathy, another perspective opens up. Of what?
The True Victims
The innocents are but secondary victims. The primary victims are the perpetrators themselves. The truth is not that they are evil, but that they are equally victims. They too are innocents who in their own way have been “raped”.
If the result of an experiment two thousand years old is the rape of the innocents, the experiment is a colossal failure. It has exposed a wound so deep, an infection so virulent, that it may finally direct attention to its true malignant source. This is so fundamental that the church in its present form, symbolized by this frail rigid Pope in his resplendent finery feebly raising his hand in blessing, cannot even approach. At the same time the elephant in the sanctuary, primordial beast that it is, makes a mockery of all the ornate massiveness that surrounds it.
The rape of the innocents has finally expressed the true problem, for it is innocence itself that has been raped by the church.
In fact the Catholic Church is the tip of the iceberg. Its power, moral authority and rigid hierarchy constitute a form of structural violence. All the arrogance of this imperial posture sets it up for the comeuppance of this scandal. The Imperium stands for St Michael who can overcome the dragon of the flesh. But the fact is that this much-vaunted triumph of spirit over flesh creates its opposite, flesh over spirit. The nemesis laughs in the face of the hubris of this authority.
The fact is that this fundamental problem exists throughout Christendom and raises its head in many churches. Since protestant denominations are less centralized and more local, the abuse by their clergy cannot be figured into statistics the way the highly organized Catholic Church can be, once their records are exposed. This is in fact a Christian problem, even deeper, a problem of Western Culture and is part of what has been called “the white man’s disease.” The Catholic Church has just become its most exquisite symbol.
Innocence is Vitality
Innocence is the purity of the given. The given of life is vitality. This givenness is its innocence. Innocence is pure vital energy. 
; It is the energy of life, the divine mover of nature. Innocence refers to the pure structure of being and of reality, which Socrates and his codifier Plato inspired us to question in order to come to know the One, the Good. The innocent vitality of a child is the force of nature itself. The innocence of pure faith is the dearest form of that vitality.
The basic problem of the Christian West is its appropriation of vital energy and the understanding and management of the economy of that energy. The way that the Christian West treats vitality imprints the way it treats the biosphere, nature itself.
St Paul put the case most concisely, “The spirit lusts after the flesh, and the flesh lusts after the spirit.” Was this a declaration of war?
The War of Spirit and Flesh The problematic area is sexuality. Here, “sexuality” refers not simply to sexual acts, desire, or permissiveness, but implies the whole integral cycle of indulgence and guilt suffered by anyone besides the fortunate few, who have grown up in cultures adhering to the religions of the Book, the descendants of Abraham.
Suppressing or repressing the vitality of sexual energy leads to pathology. Starting with Freud, researchers and clinicians in psychotherapy have demonstrated and documented this fact for 150 years. Mind making its negative judgments of the body renders the body and its energies into antagonistic “flesh” which has to be controlled by an adversarial spirit. This discontinuity generates destructive patterns of behavior. It foments a revulsion, which, set up against the primordial unity of things, becomes rage. It is this deep rage and its discontents with existence that fuel compulsive behavior. This is the structural pattern of which the pederast priest is a victim, along with every other sexual addict.
In the Christian tradition, there is only one means of access to the union of spirit and vitality, one hope of returning to innocence. That is marriage. When marriage works and a true erotic energy exists between man and wife, the bliss of the union of body and spirit can take place. It is for this reason that marriage has been raised to such a high level in Christianity and that romance, the possibility of such a union, has been raised to such obsessive importance in Western culture. If you listen to the lyrics of pop culture, you get that “love is the only hope.” In no other culture in the world does romantic love carry the weight that it does in Western culture. This is because it is the only way that the union of warring spirit and flesh can be achieved in the context of Christianity.
However, the proportion of people who can genuinely achieve this kind of union in monogamy is actually very small. Couples who can sustain it are far fewer. The ban on any other expression of sexual vitality in Christianity is a formula that does not fit the actual human condition. It comes to a “just say no” policy towards sexual expression encapsulated in the late Middle Ages by the formulaic celibacy in the church. This formula however works only in exceptional cases that have more to do with temperament than with discipline. There are those who are blessed with a love and marriage that leads to an experience of the hallowed union of spirit and flesh. There are rare individuals whose sexual economy is such that they can achieve and truly enjoy genuine celibacy. But these are few. Yet for the church, they are the only acceptable standard.
The policy of limiting sexual expression to monogamy or celibacy is simply unrealistic, a beautiful dream of purity that casts shadows proportionately ugly. The nasty form of pederasty exposed under the foundations of the church is the result of eroticism that has been suppressed and repressed to a point of deep rage, equally repressed.
Stephen Fry, British comedian and actor, recently delivered a well-reasoned and deadly serious screed against the Church at “The 2010 Intelligence Debate” in which he fused the forced abstinence and campaigns against sex together with the rape of innocents. Comparing these to obsessions with the other great human appetite, food, he pointed out the extreme and grotesque pathologies of anorexia and morbid obesity. That, he said, in a nutshell, is the Catholic Church.
“Just say no” simply does not work. Vital energy is simply too vital.
The Big Lie and the Great Truth
The Big Lie is that spirit is in opposition to flesh and that correlatively the mind of man is in opposition to nature. Therefore the only way to bring about any resolution is through control, which is monitored and enforced through religion, political authority and might.
The Great Truth is that prior to any opposition or duality of this kind, there is a primordial unity at the base of human consciousness that can be known and cultivated as the true potential for the excellence of life. Most of the religions and institutions outside of the Western World have been based upon this Great Truth.
Culture based on the Big Lie creates an ideal that wars with its greater context, the whole. Cultures based on the Great Truth cultivate the whole. In Big Lie culture, the divine, who is good, wars against evil. In cultures of the Great Truth, the war of good and evil is part of a greater whole, which itself is divine.
The Big Lie and its Consequences
The West has a characteristic attitude towards vitality and nature and therefore eroticism, which is unique and fundamentally flawed. The belief that this attitude simply reflects “the way it is,” that it represents a given, universal truth is accepted in the world purely as a function of Western cultural hegemony, but it is also fallacious. The evidence of this has been amply demonstrated in the twentieth century by ever growing evidence from world history and comparative religions, by ever deepening access to the real theory and practice of each great spiritual tradition, and by the anthropological studies of lost civilizations and the indigenous cultures still alive on the planet. This perspective shifts everything in the post modernist world onto another kind of footing.
The Big Lie goes way, way back, to the roots of Semitic culture and its turn away from vitality and eroticism. Nature got it wrong and needs to be corrected. Things can only be put right by conquest and domination. This is a declaration of war. This psycho/cultural disposition was taken over entirely by Western Culture.
This disposition of mind finds no more eloquent statement than the belief in circumcision and its practice. Abraham’s Covenant with God was sealed with this “sacrifice” of the “unclean” aspect of nature. This set off a war of the mind and spirit of man against the body and nature. Circumcision did not cause the war: it is its emblem. It is not merely that many men in the Semitic cultures have suffered this primordial physical trauma at the root of their being and the base of their memory, it is that this trauma and its practice are the stamp of a fundamental disposition: nature is fundamentally flawed and must therefore be conquered, dominated, and controlled. This was and continues to be the symbol of a war between spirit and flesh, mind and nature that has characterized the cultures of all three religions descending from this tradition, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Since Christianity is the basis of the Western psyche, it has become the prevailing view of the World.
Complementing the obligation of the male t
o slice off the end of his penis is the other great turn away from vitality and nature; the primal identification of women with sexuality and nature and their concomitant suppression, also a feature of Semitic derived cultures. Other cultures may place women in a subservient position, but in Semitically derived cultures this is done with a special virulence, a kind of vengeance. This put an end to the worshipful alignment with nature that characterized the Goddess cultures. By virtue of His righteousness the one monolithic God destroyed the nature loving goddess, reducing her to subservience and slavery.
Abraham declared a war that never could be won. He set his God against nature – a formidable adversary, in fact, as it turns out, unconquerable in the end. So great was this adversary that life itself became a militant, adversarial disposition towards, not just eroticism, or even nature, but towards all and everything except an ideal of spiritual perfection. To this day, this mentality characterizes all the peoples of the Book, but the spiritual ideal is in grave dispute. In fact, the greatest political threat to world peace is the warring between these three descendants of Abraham, inheritors of the covenant with God.
The Big Lie establishes a duality and opposition in a corruption that fundamentally sets spirit against flesh. The Western way of dealing with vitality is set in stone: the spirit is to dominate the flesh. Conquest is the solution. There have been countless conquerors in the history of humanity, as revealed in the many ruins of great empires hidden in the sands and jungles of the planet, but the people of the Book conquer with a special vengeance, because they are fundamentally pitted against an unconquerable enemy.
This is the climate of adversity in which vitality is constantly being suppressed and channeled into acceptable norms and standards. For long periods in church history culminating in the Inquisition, this was actually a matter of life and death.
The Lie sets up a fundamental conflict in human consciousness whose painful compression generates compensatory forms that we know as compulsive behavior. This pressure results in sexual compulsion in all forms, because sexual energy is never given its proper place or scope. It is to be cut, dominated and controlled, but neither vitality nor earth itself truly submits to this dominion and, over time, inevitably takes its revenge. Vitality rebels, seeks unwholesome and unacceptable channels.
St Paul’s War goes on and on. The law lusts for control. The flesh seeks revenge. The guilt from this excess and compulsion multiplies upon itself, creating more pressure and more guilt. A cycle gets generated which is constantly seeking compensation and escape. Illicit sex happens. The cycle becomes ever more vicious and, with uncontrollable contempt and internal rage, finally turns in upon innocence itself. There is no more exquisite symbol of this cycle than the “victim” priests and the force behind their rape of innocents. How else to explain this?
The climate of compulsive sexual desire and extreme puritanical reaction, the one always accompanying the other, is the reality in which westerners live, and by virtue of Western hegemony, the world. It is deeply engraved as the norm of Western, now world culture. We take it as a given, but it is actually the Big Lie.
The Great Truth and its Traditions
The Lie is so fundamental to our self-understanding that few Westerners can identify it, let alone imagine an alternative. Yet there are many. Our other great cultural ancestor, Greece, provided one.
In The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton’s eminent paean to classical culture, she quotes an ancient Greek definition of happiness: “The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.” This prescription represents a view of life deeply contrary to the Semitic view. Here, vital powers, all forms of vitality, are the great gift of Being. One cannot imagine circumcision as a part of this culture. The challenge was to afford all manifestations of vitality a scope, however it was naturally manifest, but to cultivate it along lines of excellence. This, not conquest, was the basis of the Olympic games. The challenge of civilization would be how to bring all aspects of natural vitality, certainly including eroticism, into their highest form. Areas of eroticism that have been thorny in Western Culture – including the love between men and the love of men and youths –were seen in Greek culture as vital impulses that were to be cultivated into their most wholesome form. That is to say, these are manifestations of vitality in human nature and therefore naturally have a place of honor. Men lovers are encouraged to bring the best and highest out of each other. Older men may love youths in order to help them become greater men. These are lines of excellence by which the primordial unity of spirit and vitality are accomplished and brought to completion in society.
In the imperial church, lovers of men, often taking refuge in the church where they could enjoy the exclusive company of men, were often sheltered by their sympathetic brethren, but when discovered, were persecuted and, outside the church, were often tortured and executed, and pederasts were forced into the dank cellars of the church, living the life of rats. These are the creations of the universal church, which has refused vital power, allowing it no scope, and forcing it into the slimy depths where we discover it now. This discovery, the rape of innocence built on the Big Lie, now, with all the force of cosmic justice, threatens to pull down the imperial edifice.
Greek culture was the alternative influence that the West did not take. It would seem that this insight died in the West with the Christian era. However, challenges to the Big Lie periodically bubble to the surface of Western Civilization. One such outbreak was the explosion of insight that generated the French Revolution, expressed in many revolutionary views of the time. One critic and prophet of this wave was William Blake, the British poet and theologian. In 1793, in the opening declaration of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake declaimed the Big Lie and proclaimed religious rebellion and erotic freedom.
“All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles viz: a body and a soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, and that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in these days.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight”
In the following prophetic screed Blake continues the argument with aphorisms pungent in defiance of conventional religion and morality, yet imbued with a biblical resonance:
“Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with bricks of Religion…
The pride of the Peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of a goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.”
And then a prophecy:
“The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end
of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell. For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged.”
This impulse has simmered under the surface in the West finally exploding in the cultural revolution of the Sixties and the sexual revolution. Now world culture presents many alternatives to the Big Lie.
The Great Truth is that before spirit and body, mind and earth, even good and evil, are separated and alienated from each other, there is a more primordial consciousness or spirit in which they are one. This “One” is the base of all consciousness, and may be apprehended by every human being whose path allows them to look deeply enough within. This spirit ground is the only true place to look for the divine. The wise of the world have called it by many names, including “God.”
The Great Truth is not actually some ultimate fact. Neither is there any great final sum of true things that constitutes this Great Truth. It is rather a matter of the ever-evolving unfolding of the all and surrender to all that one is. More accurately, the Great Truth is, as Robert M. Pirsig observed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the “Great Value.” It is an ultimate state of realization, which is valuable above all else that can be said to be true, the highest achievement of the contemplative endeavor.
Because of the value of this pure ground that is apprehended through contemplation, the other great religious and contemplative traditions of the world have generated a different disposition towards nature and the body. Ageless Taoism uses the imagery of nature in all its forms and manifestations to contemplate its source, the Tao. Excellence in culture must emulate the forms of this source. Personal excellence is a life harmonious with this source. Hinduism and Buddhism, particularly in their tantric forms, use imagery such as the chakras, projected into the body and representing the different declensions of the pure ground of consciousness. The body, in its multiple dimensions, thus becomes the temple, the primordial image of the divine. These are paths based upon the cultivation of primordial consciousness into its highest realization into the true nature of Being. They are forms of excellence affording full scope to all manifestations of vitality, because vitality is primordially divine. (For further elaboration of these traditions, see “The Big Lie and the Great Truth” in The Heart of Reason.com.)
While the qualitative difference between spirit and body generates a universal tendency towards their separation, traditions based on the Great Truth do not tend to generate compulsive sexuality through repression and compensatory behavior. Those traditions held out a possibility of integral development that counters the universal tendency towards the Big Lie and transcends it. Vital energy — instead of being randomly expended — is there ready to be used towards excellence, that is, in Platonic terms, toward the spiritual and luminous Good. This is the experience of the vitality of the Light of primordial consciousness, producing a sense that one’s function as a living human being, with a body that can generate and circulate vital energy, is to direct this energy into the realization of pure Light. In the context of the Great Truth one does with one’s mind and body exactly that for which they were created. This is the excellence described in the Greek prescription, perhaps culminating in the provocations of Socrates and the classical excellence of Platonism and neo-Platonism. This excellence generates a feeling of profound joy and peace unknown in the West, except perhaps to certain rebellious mystics and those in esoteric traditions grounded in neo-Platonism and other forgotten ancient traditions, deeply hidden from the Church, which have remained dedicated to the Great Truth.
In the West, the idea of living and cultivating the Great Truth is so threatening that it carries the expectation of a kind of cultural catastrophe. The Imperium Church is, in a sense, a bulwark against the anarchy generated by the explosion of repressed vitality, a consequence of the Big Lie. Its authority is understood to be necessary for society to maintain control. To relinquish all control on sexuality and vitality would be a license to licentiousness. And this is just what happened in the Sexual Revolution.
The unity of primordial consciousness includes all dualities and the dynamics between them. As we have seen in the cycling of indulgence and guilt, a great pendulum swings between all opposites — license vs. control, spirit vs. nature, good vs. evil. These oppositions themselves are therefore comprehended in the Great Truth. The victim priest complains that the more he tried to control his sexual feelings, the more the lust accelerated, and the more acceleration, the greater became his attempt to control. This is the pendulum as it works itself out psychologically. But the pendulum swings in all spheres of culture as well as psychology. The excesses of the Sexual Revolution were the extreme swing of the pendulum away from a hundred and fifty years of Victorian prudery: puritanical excess must swing into sexual excess. There is no true winner in this war. Puritanical forces exemplified by religious conservatism in the US, to say nothing of the moral condemnation of Western culture by Semitic Al Qaeda and the Taliban, is the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction. This is why the fundamental tenet of Apollo was “Nothing in Excess” and of the Buddha, the Middle Way. Excess always intensifies its opposite reaction. The middle way between mind and body, spirit and flesh, indeed all oppositions, points the way to a standard encompassing the given excellence of nature. We never heard of it in the Christian Religion.
The Greater Tragedy
The ideal of domination based on the Big Lie is fundamentally flawed. It foments a disposition to conquest. It leads to the rape of the God-given innocence of the human spirit, but also that of nature, of mother earth and her creatures. The sexual abuse of the children of the church is but the consummate and eloquent symbol of this.
The ideal of spirit dominating flesh in the battle within the soul generalizes into the intellect and will to dominate nature. Therefore, just as one is to control and master ones sexuality, one must control and master the earth. Western conquest silenced the harmony with nature, pitting man against earth. This has worked to a certain degree, giving (Western) Man true dominion over nature and the native peoples of the world, to say nothing of winning great capital wealth and progress, but because it is based in the Big Lie, it is not sustainable. Now its intrinsic contradictions, writ large by our successes and excesses, are exploding in our face.
Thousands of years after circumcision sealed the covenant by which nature is declared intrinsically flawed, the present result of this complex is not just a question of festering sexual discontents, it is a question of the entitlement by which Western progress has amplified and legitimized the human tendency to exploit nature. Other cultures have certainly done this as well. Some, like the Mayans, wiped themselves out by destroying their own lands.
But Abraham and his followers conquered with a vengeance as they generated a war against an unconquer
able enemy. Fortified with the God of their own choosing, who in turn chose them, and in the name of God’s Son, the teacher of absolute love, they generated the entitlement, the arrogance that conquered the world in an unholy mixture of self-righteousness, greed and insanity. The stories of Magellan in the Philippines, Cortes in Mexico, and Pissarro in Peru are revealing allegories of the entire exploratory and colonial enterprise. Their tragic outcomes are prophetic object lessons in the results of this unholy mixture. The Christian West succeeded in discovering the world (claiming it for their use) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, conquering and colonizing it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and setting upon the conquest of the Earth through technology in the twentieth century. In the twenty first century we will see the outcome of this war with Earth–the result of a war fought for millennia.
In the conquest of the Earth by the West, under the banner of the cross, the white man destroyed and enslaved the indigenous voices that honored nature and appropriated their lands and cultures. This characteristic disposition towards nature, amplified by science, greed, and the explosions of population, have brought the queen of nature, Planet Earth, to her knees. If these destroyed cultures were correct and she is divine, that is, having any divine will of her own, she must treat the human race as a pathogen and, in her rage, shake us off into the abyss. What does this mean? Ask the people of New Orleans. Ask the Chinese victims of massive mudslides. In a newscast from Pakistan in 2010, a man standing in the devastating flood cried out: “This is the end of humanity!” In the name of a righteous God and His son, the teacher of love, we have controlled, dominated and exploited the earth in a way that disregarded her wisdom. Now the earth is fighting back. This is turning out to be the real war of the twenty-first century.
The rape of innocence and the rape of the earth have the same root and are structurally the result of the same erroneous entitlement based on the Big Lie.
The Western refusal to acknowledge the way of nature set it against nature; now it has set the earth against us. It is all foretold in the wisdom of Greece and the notion of hubris: the arrogance and greed of man inevitably and tragically generates the nemesis that inevitably brings him down. This century will see a massive struggle with nature, whose furies have been released by the hubris of man dominating nature. The ecological traumas in the twenty-first century are the nemesis of the arrogance of Western man who thought he could dominate the force of life by cutting off the end of his penis and suppressing his women. The consequences of this attitude and disposition present the greatest challenges of the twenty-first century.
The remnants of the cultures overthrown, liquidated and enslaved by this domineering entitlement of “spirit over flesh,” exist in much of the Southern Hemisphere, and many from Western culture, seeing the trend, are turning to them and their disappearing spokespersons to interpret and find formulae for correcting the deep abuse of vitality. The voices of these suppressed cultures are rising in a chorus around the planet.
The Big Lie is that spirit and body are fundamentally split and antagonistic. The Great Truth is that prior to this split there is one primordial consciousness and that bringing to awareness this level of consciousness through contemplation and cultivation is the only real possibility to attain truly transcendent and divine states of being. The great traditions of spiritual realization and transcendence are proof and evidence of this. They do not result in the rape of innocence, but in the transcendent realization of true innocence into excellence. This transcendence of the divine is our only hope of guidance in this most perilous of all times.
What is the Church to Do?
History comes down to certain key episodes. The Church is facing one of those moments now.
To comprehend the Error of which the Infallible Pope is the quintessential symbol, one must have deep pity and compassion for Joseph Ratzinger, standing there giving his blessing in the resplendence of the St Peter’s. The emperor is wearing his new clothes. The world is aghast.
The psychology of compulsive sexuality and guilt is so deeply engrained in Western consciousness, that it is impossible to “erase,” even by those who, realizing the Great Truth, become dedicated to it. Ingrained propensities take generations to neutralize. We are all living in the heritage of the Lie. It is the Titanic, which cannot turn on a dime, but must be steered slowly to change direction towards a new course. In fact the sexual revolution and its sobering aftermath are a process that may be bringing about this change.
Given the betrayal of its utter moral bankruptcy, could the church not lead the way to make this turn? What would it take?
In fact, the Catholic Church could address this deep issue. The possibility and means are there. It would take a leadership of insight, character, charisma and yes, vitality. That vitality would require an existential and ontological honesty that could look beyond the ancient traditions of the church into the truth of Being. Such a leadership would have to be so radical and youthful in spirit and integrity that it will likely never happen.
But here are some possible guidelines:
1. Radically honest assessment, scientific rather than moral, of the effectiveness of the Church policy towards vitality.
What is the truth about the pope/emperors new clothes? What is the actual truth about his own sexuality and how he has come to deal with it? Let the top twenty princes of the Church honestly assess how they have dealt with their vital/sexual energy. This is not an inquisition, a moral investigation, but a scientific one: honesty providing data, not judgment. This is autopsis, the perfect witness observing the human spirit from within. Let each of them recount the actual history of his or her sexual development. What worked and what did not? Which aspects of the policy and the priestly training really helped them to deal with their sexuality and which only contribute to the suppression and repression that foments the rape of innocence.
From this honest account, let the church come up with a policy around celibacy, marriage, and sexual expression that does not create a climate of guilt and place an unrealistic demand on the capacity for self-control. Instead, let them create ways of dealing with these issues that reflect a cultivation of vital energy into excellence.
This focus on excellence would mean an education and encouragement of healthy sexual relationships outside of marriage. It would mean same sex relationships that bring the best out of both parties. And yes, it would mean intimate mentorships between older men and youths. Excellence is the operative word.
2. Honest and informed evaluation of the way other religious traditions deal with vitality and sexual energy.
There are many valuable sources for studying these alternative ways.
As we have seen, there is much to be learned from the other great religious traditions, such as Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, where they have not been invaded by Christian or Semitic ideals such as the Islamic and British domination of India, particularly the cultural remnants there of Victorian imperialism. Since these high cultures with their religions and traditions, have a very different attitude towards eroticism and vitality, let them provide an anthropological laboratory of alternative cultivation of eroticism. They are now readily available
and have served as such a laboratory for many who have been able to study them.
Let the church drop its silly entitlement as “the one true Religion” and study and work these other forms until they understand how they reach the divine, that is, the fundamental way of Being. How do these forms produce, by means of objective practices, an excellence of harmony that reflects the primordial unity of consciousness? (For further discussion on this matter see a study of these objective practices in “The Big Lie and The Great Truth” , in TheHeartofReason.com)
3. Recovering the Mystery of Christ
Forgiveness, Grace, the transcendence of salvation, the miracle of Christ are existential truths belonging to a genuine spiritual process. The business and authority of the Church are mere exploitation of these truths to garner and maintain power.
Hidden in the esoteric aspect of exoteric Christianity is a way that restores the unity of spirit and body by finding the nature of God prior to any such divisions and cultivating an integral unity with it. This is called gnosis. There are striking points of correspondence between ancient Christian Gnosticism and the Eastern traditions. These are the clues to the true value of Christianity.
Gnosticism is another shadow of the Church. The early history of the Church was a struggle that pitted the Gnostics who valued the state of being embodied and symbolized by Christ against the authority of control, as it was taking form under the patriarchs of the Church. The more powerful of the two, the one based on conquest and domination, won out, becoming the Imperium. But in the process it sacrificed the most authentic, universal, and enduring function of Christianity in the human soul, destroying all the Gnostic gospels and relegating this existential aspect to the obscurity of the Christian Mystery, where even today, those who are sufficiently gifted spiritually can discern it in the canon of the church.
After the Church became the Imperium, its authority was amplified and sustained by its claim upon objective and moral truth. Over the centuries the rise of the scientific method has eroded this authority over objective truth in a process that has been traumatic both for the church and for its scientists. The second source of Imperium authority was Christian morality. This too has eroded in the course of its history through its many exertions of power, featuring the Inquisition and colonialism, which were deeply corrupt morally. The rape of innocents, however, has ended its moral authority. What is left?
The early history of the church has been clarified by the rediscovery of the ancient scriptures, The Gnostic Gospels, which were suppressed and largely destroyed by the Imperium when it came into political power. Rediscovering the mystery of Christ will mean recovering and restoring the existential wisdom (as opposed to any dogma) of the Gnostic Tradition. The Gospels hold many clues to the truth of the mystery of Christ, which in no way relies upon the dominion of the authoritative church. Honoring these traditions and their wisdom will mean a new kind of respect for the teaching of Jesus Christ. (For further discussion of this issue, see “The Gospel of Judas: Who Betrayed Christ?” in TheHeartofReason.com)
A New Direction
The exposure of the rape of innocence in the church is an awesome spectacle, in a sense revealing the underlying history of the Church. I have tried to present in broad strokes the real issue behind these events. The issue is so fundamental that it is reflected in the very character of Western Culture that has over the last 500 years increasingly dominated the world.
The offense is so great as to bring down the Church. It is so fundamental that it pervades every area of our life. If we can see into its true depths, we can use it as an object lesson and a basis for bringing about real transformation.
The Church will probably never be able to rise to the challenges suggested in the three guidelines above and will simply become less and less important, except as an opiate of the people. It will be part of a greater demise of organized religion, in favor of a more atomized spirituality. This is in fact the further maturation of democracy in religion, what Walt Whitman described as “the religion of no religion.” In this, we are each on our own. However, each individual can follow the three guidelines for himself or with others who have the same mission: to roll back the Big Lie and rebuild life on the foundations of the Great Truth. This will not mean the end of Christianity, but its rebirth.
To achieve this, we must turn with a new kind of innocence to face vitality in all its forms. We must turn to the indigenous peoples whose cultures we destroyed to guide our relationship to the biosphere, within and without. We must join hands with them to turn from dominating and exploiting the Earth, to divining her secrets and complementing them. We must learn from the great spiritual traditions how to face our inner vitality and bring forth new forms of excellence to accord with it. Let those who would save us become receptive to the innocence of the given and go forward.
We can only pray that it is not too late.
What was that Greek formula for happiness?
“The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.”
To go forward let us take heart from our ancient Greek ancestors and expand upon this formula. Let us, in the conduct of our personal lives, and in the modification and creation of all the institutions and forms of our world civilization, afford the true scope of our given vitality, come to know, celebrate and be informed by its nature and laws, and create ever new ways to exercise these vital powers along lines of excellence. That would be life in the Great Truth.
RADICAL CHRISTIANITY
"THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS" WHO BETRAYED CHRIST?
NOVEMBER 10, 2009 ADMIN
The recent discovery of The Gospel of Judas seems to turn Christianity on its head. It raises Judas to the status of the most gifted and heroic of Jesus’ disciples and even seems to be mocking ritual. The document is authentic. What does it tell us about the early history of Christianity, the true nature of Christ, and the truth of betrayal?
OUTLINE
Introduction
The Gospel of Judas
The contradictions
The Background
The Crisis of Christian Faith
The Collapse of the Christian Narrative
Insufficiency of Historical Veracity
The Gospel calls into question a basic Christian story
Monotheism vs Monism
1. Who Betrayed Christ?
The Question of Judas
2. The True Betrayal of Christ
History
Early Christian Gnosticism
The weakness of Gnosticism
The suppression of Gnosticism by Imperial orthodoxy
Narrative of Patriarchal Christianity
Narrative of Gnosticism
3. The Betrayal of the True Christ
The Betrayal of the Ego
Identification of the ego with the body
Ignosis
The Clarification of the Contradictions
Conclusion
Losses and Gains from The Gospel of Judas
Radical Christianity
Freedom and domination
The Gospel of Judas: Who Betrayed Christ?
Judas Iscariot was the greatest of all disciples and the favored of Jesus. His act of turning Jesus into the authorities was the most profound dedication to the divine truth of Christ. Jesus was a comedian, so childlike he often appeared to serve his disciples as a child, but he also ridiculed their slavish observance of rites dedicated to the Jewish God.
If all of this were so, would Christianity be turned on its head?
Much has been made of the recent discovery in a Coptic cave of The Gospel of Judas. With much fanfare in 2006 National Geographic presented the story of its discovery, near destruction and authentication. Careful age analysis indicates that this document is a copy from the Third Century, but references to the Gospel in the works of the early Biblical codifier, Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, indicate that it was already in existence in the Second Century.
Numerous scholars, including Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, Gregor Wurst, and Bart Erdman, have studied the text at great length and commented upon it in the context of the complex understanding of Christ that arose in the several hundred years before Christianity was assimilated into the Roman Empire. (See Bart Erdman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, Oxford, 2006, and Rodolphe Kasser, The Gospel of Judas, National Geographic, 2006)
Preeminent among these is Elaine Pagels, the church historian who has dealt extensively with the ancient gnostic texts discovered earlier in Egypt. In Reading Judas (Viking Penguin, 2007), anyone interested in the Gospel itself will find a superb translation by Karen L. King, as well as a concise and elegant commentary and interpretation by Pagels. In this definitive work, Pagels describes the discovery of this Gospel as “astonishing” and shows how it reveals much about the truth of the history of the early church. Far from being merely bizarre and marginal as it may initially appear, the Gospel leads us right into the center of the heated controversy of the time as to what Christianity would become. She concludes that the Gospel “…offers a window onto the complex world of the early Christian movement and shows us that what later historians depicted as an unbroken progression of a uniform faith was nothing of the kind. …. the traditional history of Christianity is written almost solely from the viewpoint of the side that won, which was remarkably successful in silencing or distorting other voices, destroying their writings and suppressing any who disagreed with them as dangerous and obstinate “heretics.”(Reading Judas, Introduction xviii)
Repeating or summarizing the work of these superb scholars is unnecessary, as anyone needing further clarification of any kind will find satisfaction in these academic works. The purpose of this essay is to use the Gospel to shine a light on the living Christ within and the true nature of His betrayal.
The Contradictions
The Gospel of Judas is upsetting because in many ways it stands the story of the fate of Jesus on its head. Four contradictions are particularly outstanding.
1. Judas, betrayer of Jesus, justification for all anti-Semitism, arch-villain of Christianity, appears here as Jesus’ special disciple and as the hero of the truth of Christ.
2. Jesus sometimes appears in the Gospel as a child.
3. Jesus is often laughing and even mocking derisively his disciples at certain points.
4. The Gospel entirely omits the crucifixion or resurrection.
From these outrages, one might almost mistake it for one of those cheeky sensationalistic aberrations that appear in London Galleries—”Piss Christ” or “Virgin of the Feces” — that basically spit on Christianity. However, its historical authenticity and the distinct tone of deep reverence in the document authenticate it as a profound Christian teaching. Seen in the right light there are treasures to be found here that actually illuminate the truth of Christ in a way that no historical accuracy could ever do.
The Background
The Crisis of Faith and the Collapse of the Christian Narrative
The appearance of a Gospel that so fundamentally questions the Biblical narrative seems to be one more blow to our very beleaguered Western religion. Over the last centuries many Christian believers have been increasingly losing their faith. This has happened in many subtle ways, having to do with the real ascendant faith that characterizes our culture: namely, the faith in the material world and the science that can know it, and the belief that historical veracity is the basis of all truth.
I have heard many Christians say that if they discovered that the virgin birth did not happen or that Jesus was not in fact raised from the dead they would have no basis for faith. One might imagine that a revelation that Judas was in fact the great hero of the living Christ might prove to be the death knell of the entire belief system.
The tendency of Christians to base their faith on belief in the historical veracity of biblical events is inimical, to say the least, since there are no historically contemporary documents outside the Christian canon that confirm anything besides the existence of a rebellious cult in Palestine whose charismatic leader was put to death. At the same time, the tendency of non-believers to dismiss Christianity on the basis of historical veracity is equally blind, based on the same fundamental error: that the essence of truth is factuality and the validity and value of the Christian story is that it is historically factual.
According to present biblical scholarship, the gospel accounts written u
nder the names of the disciples were composed thirty to one hundred years after the events they recount and were only attributed to the authors whose names they bear. They are basically inspired hearsay. No one knows who really wrote them. Aside from this fact, the writers of the Gospels were never historians in our sense. History and historical accuracy, pursuing factual veracity in the past, is a conception that grows out of our modern devotion to scientific fact, historically a very recent phenomenon.
Even more damaging is the increasing evidence that the miraculous themes of the story of Jesus Christ — the virgin birth, the crucifixion and resurrection — are found in the mythologies of many middle Eastern cultures predating the time of Jesus, so that the Christian belief system appears increasingly to be a fabrication of many current mystical themes woven together over the early centuries of the Christian era.
In a scientific world where material cause and effect reign and the scientific understanding of the universe and the earth increases exponentially every year, the stories of the Old and New Testaments upon which Christianity are based appear more and more ludicrous. The church has been fighting this tendency since the Renaissance, because it threatens its power base of belief. And it is still fighting. That fight is about the “wrapping” of the Christian gift, a monumental distraction from any real understanding of the nature of that gift.
The mansion that houses man’s relationship to the divine source has many rooms. Rooms such as scientific and historical veracity as the basis of faith are the least among them. Those who worship at these minor temples have a faith that is very vulnerable indeed.
These issues are enormously exacerbated by the discovery of the gnostic gospels, and especially The Gospel of Judas.
While there have been cogent arguments in the past, particularly on the part of Blaise Pascal, that the very absurdity of the biblical stories forces the faithful to take the critical step of relinquishing slavish devotion to reasoning intelligence, history as the assemblage of facts about the past is an erroneous road to spiritual truth. What happened around the life and death of Jesus has only become a historical concern since the modern concept of history came into being. “Objective reporting” was never a concern for those who composed the gospels: their concern was spiritual, and they used their interpretation of these events to frame a symbological truth that is far deeper and of infinitely more importance than the facts. The modern preoccupation with historical truth is actually a distraction from the existential truth, which is the real import of scripture. That is to say, even if magically we discovered a way to determine the facts of the past and we could assemble the entire factual life of Jesus and his disciples, we would be no nearer to the spirit, just more profoundly distracted by a shiny new intellectual toy.
Monotheism vs Monism
To get to the bottom of the contradictions posed by The Gospel of Judas, we need to step back into the understanding of God and man that was the theological background of the time when Jesus lived.
The Old Testament tradition is resolutely theistic, specifically monotheistic. There is one God and there is His creation and never the twain shall meet. The very word “God” has this absolute separation built into it. Mankind, having fallen from his primordial union with God’s creation must recognize this separation and strive to overcome it. In Judaism this separation is to be breached by observing the Law and following the prescribed rituals and ceremonies throughout the year. In Christianity the medium by which this can be achieved is Jesus Christ.
But Christ brought with him a truth that is truly revolutionary, because in essence it is not monotheistic but monistic, succinctly expressed by Jesus in the words “I and my father are one”. This means that the oneness is prior to any separation. Monism, being spectacularly counter intuitive, presents great difficulty in the West and has done so since the time of Jesus.
By contrast to a reality ruled over by God, monism sets forth one ultimate reality that is almighty in that it is the source of all understanding, beautiful as the origin of all wisdom, true as the source of compassion, and good as the fount of all morality. Because each of us is a manifestation of this one reality, we can come to realize it as our ultimate truth. Monism underlies the great religions of East Asia, Taoism, Brahmanism, and Buddhism, as well as many of the mystical traditions of the classical world, most prominently Platonism and neo-platonism. This “God” is one with all of reality, and every human is fundamentally “made in the image” of this One. As in a hologram, each particle contains the whole of the hologram, each of us is a particle of the hologram of God, so that the fullness of the divine is within each of us: in fact this is what we are. Every human has the potential and the ultimate goal of overcoming the delusion of separation and achieving the state of realization. The origin and final goal are the same, the One. This is Monism.
To me all evidence points to the fact that Jesus was born into the proud monotheistic culture of Judaism, but realized (or very likely learned in the eighteen years missing from his biography) that He and the Father are One. With this he returned to his own culture and tried to revise his monotheistic culture into monism. This was absolutely revolutionary and created great controversy. Jesus could overcome neither the hierarchical structure of monotheism in his home culture, nor the strict political hierarchy of the Roman Empire. The political hierarchy of Rome, based on polytheism and the worship of authority in the person of the emperor, together with the hierarchy of Judaism and based in monotheism, finally brought Him down.
The struggle between oneness, the monistic experience, and the hierarchical view of monotheism continued to create great chaos in the early centuries of Christ. Those who understood this monistic base of Jesus’ teaching became the Gnostics who saw that achieving gnosis is attaining the monistic realization, the living Christ that is one with God. Those who could not lift themselves out of the monotheism of the Judaic tradition had the burden of transforming the monistic insight of Jesus into the “mystery” of Christ in a monotheistic hierarchy. These became the paternalistic orthodox Christians who merged with the imperial hierarchy of Rome and became the authoritative Roman Catholic Church and its structure. Jesus himself warned against this. When two of his disciples came to him and asked how he would structure his followers, he said simply do not do as the gentiles (the Romans) do.
What the newly discovered gnostic gospels show is that there was considerable chaos in the early church between these factions, one that was finally ended by the authoritarians, because they were most adept at wielding and maintaining power.
A monotheistic hierarchy suited and indeed justified the authoritarian structure of the Catholic Church. In order to bring order into the chaos of early Christianity these monotheistic elements first suppressed and then laid waste to the entire gnostic segment of Christianity. Once they gained political power, they systematically destroyed its communities and all their writings, so that they have been wiped out of Christian consciousness for many centuries, leaving the impression that Christianity in its catholic form was seamlessly handed down through Christ by Peter who established its church.
Nevertheless monism and the gnosticism by which it is realized is a tendency that offers direct access to the living Christ. It is the existential n
ature of Christ. Therefore this tendency has surfaced throughout Western History in the inspiration and works of great Christian mystics and reformers. It is in fact hidden just beneath the surface of the New Testament canon and discernible there, but only those who approach the state of gnosis are capable of discerning it.
While the hierarchical deployment of power based on a monotheistic hierarchy succeeded in suppressing the Gnostics, it has proven in time to be the great weakness of the church. With the corruption consequent upon such power as the church possessed in the Middle Ages, it was only a matter of time before a Luther would declare this degeneration to the world. With the development of Western thought since the time of Copernicus, the entire structure of monotheism and the authority it conferred upon the Church has slowly collapsed. As the monotheistic view becomes increasingly untenable with every scientific advance, those who identify it with the truth of Christ cling ever more desperately to it, trying to justify the Bible and its mythology with creationism and other hardened reactionary views. It could be said that in the greater justice of things, this is the ultimate result of Rome’s usurpation of the monistic realization of Christ. The chickens have come home to roost.
As this moral and intellectual collapse has been reaching its nihilistic peak in the Twentieth Century, discoveries of the gnostic gospels, hidden away in the Fourth Century as the Catholic suppression proceeded, have given a far clearer view of the early history of the church, and how the other, monistic Christianity, was violently suppressed and wiped out by the monotheistic order.
It is the gnosis, or apprehension of the living Christ, so antithetical to domination and authority, so richly expressed in these documents, that are the true existential roots of Christianity and the only hope that the truth of Christ may prevail.
The struggle of hierarchical monotheism and the monism of Christ therefore works itself out on both a political and spiritual level. This whole drama between the commitment to theism and the secret underlying the living Christ is laid bare by The Gospel of Judas.
1. Who Betrayed Christ?
Judas kissing Christ
The Question of Judas
The issue of Judas has always been up for questioning in the mind of any critically thinking Christian. Devotees of historical authenticity find troubling contradictions underlying the conventional account. In traditional Christianity, the central event is the suffering, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. This is the symbolic core of Pauline Christianity. The assumption is that Jesus in his perfection was betrayed by Judas, a Jewish zealot (the meaning of his second name, Iscariot) who was disappointed that this messiah did not dispatch the Romans with a sword. Once he betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, he promptly (and rightly) hung himself out of anguish and disgrace.
But a careful reading of the New Testament gospel accounts indicate that Jesus knew the whole scenario was going to unfold and obviously could have prevented it in any way. The implication is that he realized that it had to happen, that it was God’s will, in the sense that it would be the basis for this central imagery of crucifixion and resurrection through which his followers in succeeding ages would reach salvation. In this sense, Jesus used, even exploited Judas to accomplish the destiny that forms the basis of this central Christian vehicle of salvation. Who betrayed whom here? I remember having this insight as a child, but feeling if I wanted to be a good Christian I had better not go there or even allow such perceptions to come into my thoughts.
The fact is that the taking of Jesus and his crucifixion was such a traumatic and appalling event that early Christians were hard pressed to explain it in such a way as to preserve their faith. Each Gospel deals with it in a slightly different way, showing that each splinter group of Christians had a characteristic way of explaining and justifying this calamity. With the careful eye of a detective, Elaine Pagels examines this explanation in each gospel in the New Testament and in the gnostic gospels, throwing great light upon the consternation that existed about the crucifixion and how early Christians dealt with it. She also shows how the interpretations that served the political and spiritual needs of a community horrendously persecuted and often facing terrible death led to the interpretations of the crucifixion that are found in the four Gospels of the New Testament. This explanation is subtle, informed and brilliant, and I recommend that the reader who has any doubt about this interaction of history and scripture read her book. What matters here is that in the context of these variations the story related in The Gospel of Judas is not so deviant.
The Gospel of Judas goes way beyond my youthful perceptions of the contradictions in the story, challenging every aspect of this narrative. In order to understand it spiritually, we must look at some more history and consider the gnostic form of Christianity that focused on the realization of the living Christ in the individual. This Gnosticism lost out to the patriarchal Christianity that took on the structures of the Roman Empire, which looks to the ordering of society and civilization and forms the basis of the Christianity we know today as we recite the Nicene Creed.
2. The True Betrayal of Christ
So long as Christians were a persecuted underground minority in the first centuries after Jesus, the religion thrived spiritually and grew in many ways. Among these variations was the spirituality based upon achieving a certain level of self-realization and awareness, the state of monism in contrast to the doctrine of monotheism. Gnosticism was not hierarchical imposition of belief that might be codified by a creed so much as a teaching of individual responsibility for ones own salvation with the help of proficients who understood the mysteries of the truth of Christ.
One of the main interpreters of The Gospel of Judas is Bart Erdman, who has explained the historical background and theological understanding of the Gnosticism that gave birth to the Gospel. Through the examination of gospels and documents contemporary to The Gospel of Judas, he traces its belief system to Sethian Gnosticism, a type of monism that fell into disrepute as the orthodoxy of Christianity came into power. Here are the outlines of this form of Gnosticism.
The world, and the humans that populate it are the product of a hierarchy of deities, headed by the Hebrew God, that were the creators of this world. This anthropomorphic God and the other forces that surround it are the cause of this chimerical world of suffering and strife. This world is represented by the two sons of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, who symbolize good and evil. By contrast, the one-monist reality is a transcendent consciousness that is the true home of the soul, prior to and beyond good and evil. Seth, third son of Adam and Eve, born after Cain and Abel, was the child who was a divine spark of the transcendental Absolute and who could come to know this truth. Christ was the manifestation of Seth, available to all spiritual descendants of Seth, that is, those who have the divine spark and therefore the potential to become one with the fire of transcendent consciousness.
The state of transcendental consciousness is the true Kingdom of God. Access to this monistic Kingdom is through realization, which is gnosis. Gnosis, the highest transcendent state and the true God are one and the same. But the world as we know it a
nd live it is the product of ignosis, the foundational ignorance. The Sethians see the entire belief system of the Hebrew God as the basis and structure of this ignosis, and were therefore entirely anti-authoritarian.
Gnosis, capitalized, refers to the early Christian groups. But gnosticism itself is universal. This monistic view of reality appeared in most religions throughout the world many centuries before Christ. The entire structure of gnostic reality including the monotheistic God just described is expressed with utter economy in the following words of Lao Tzu from the Tao Te Ching as he describes the Tao.
It is hidden but always present.
I don’t know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.
The same gnostic themes are fundamental to Brahmanism and Buddhism. This world, presided over by one or many deities, is understood to be the product of ignosis (ajnana), non-awareness of this fundamental state of existence, “hidden but always present.” Thus the “real” world, the created world, is described as maya, or magical delusion. In each tradition hierarchies of gods and demons, generators of good and evil, bring about this world and manipulate it to their own ends. For the early gnostics, these, in the end, are the real betrayers of Christ, who is the manifestation and revelation of the one monistic reality.
The Challenge of Gnosticism
The challenges to gnosticism are overwhelming in a world based upon hierarchical order, and certainly overwhelmed Jesus himself. The primary challenge of gnosis is that monistic realization, obeying its own deep law, is radically individual and not conducive to collectivistic organization. In the end the state of gnosis is achieved through individual practice and it is foundationally freeing. The state itself is the authority. This ultimate freedom, based as it is in individual as opposed to collective experience, in no way lends itself to authoritative legislation and cultural organization, in many ways the bulwarks of an ordered society. The revelations of gnosis intrinsically generate kindness and compassion, and while it is true that, as Jesus taught, kindness and compassion realized in the Kingdom are the spiritual basis of morality, ethics and civil order, there is no way of controlling who has this insight and who does not. On the level of order and governance, the true values of Rome, this was a formula for anarchy. The function of the State is to maintain order. It is for this reason that when Christianity finally became the official religion of the Roman Empire, elements that could lead to such anarchy (and individual freedom) had to be eliminated. The irony is that these anarchic elements are the very nature of Christ and were the reason that he was brought to trial and crucified in the first place. Order betrays freedom.
In a way, the gnostic gospels functioned to counter the void created by this aspect of freedom. They were in a sense guides to attaining the state of the Kingdom and revelations of the intrinsic moral order of Being that is revealed once this state of freedom is achieved. Thus the core of The Gospel of Judas is the teaching of the vision of this ultimate order to the one disciple who Jesus sees as capable of receiving it, Judas. This it does in eschatological terms. At stake is not only the survival of people beyond the grave, but the question of whether justice will prevail in spite of the play of power, violence, unjust suffering and evil that people suffer. In spite of the horrors of Christian persecution and its own internecine absurdities, justice does exist and the glorious life of true spirit will triumph over every evil. What will happen in the end times reveals the eternal order intrinsic to the present.
Patriarchal Christianity
Once the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, everything shifted. There is considerable conjecture as to whether this was a spiritual realization or political expediency based on the pragmatic realization that Christians were becoming a critical mass. Gone were the days of persecution of the Christians, a situation which made life dangerous, but religion authentic. Instead, Constantine made Christianity the primary political force of the Empire, volatile excess that was not tempered or clarified until the conception of the separation of church and state 1300 years later. Under the emperor, the central figure of the empire, the way of Christ shifted from a spiritual path based on personal conviction in the face of public persecution to a doctrine which had to take on the imperial role of establishing and maintaining a patriarchal order on the model of the Roman Empire and its legal structure. As the Emperor was to Jove, so Christ was to God. And so the imperial hierarchy was transliterated into God, Christ, Pope, Cardinals, clergy and laity.
As Patriarchal Christianity conquered Christendom and became the prevailing view, all of the outer traces of Gnostic Christianity were hunted down and eliminated. In the purge, all Gnostic gospels throughout the empire and their communities were destroyed. In great haste Gnostics hid or buried their gospels before the “armies of Christ” descended upon them to destroy all trace. It is the discovery of some of these buried gospels during the last century that gives us a clue to the richness of the Gnostic practice and tradition in pre-Constantinian Christianity.
One of the reasons that there was so much antagonism towards Gnosticism is that it proceeded from a very different philosophical base than patriarchal Christianity, that which we have described by contrasting monism and monotheism.
But in fact, Gnosticism is a way of being spiritual that exists in the whole of humanity. It is a fundamental spiritual tendency and not a doctrine. The written traces of it in the Christian tradition were wiped out by the armies of Constantine, but the tendency simply cannot be wiped out. It will be there as long as the human spirit is there, because it represents the highest possibility of human freedom. Furthermore it is there as the base of all the great religions, in the higher forms of Hinduism represented by the Upanishads and Vedanta, but most of all, in Buddhism. Without any question Buddha was a scientific gnostic, perhaps the greatest that ever lived. In these religions, which are not constituted by overriding hierarchical structures, the gnostic realization is regarded as the highest spiritual achievement. The tendency also exists in the Semitic religions but is always subsumed under the dominating monotheistic and patriarchal forms, which are accepted as the norms. In Judaism, it exists in the Kabala. In Islam it exists in the Sufi tradition. These forms of gnosticism have also been persecuted by the patriarchal elements of Judaism and Islam. In Christianity gnosticism is the underlying impulse of Christian mysticism that has surfaced throughout Christian history but has for the most part been suppressed by those who value order above all else.
Why is Gnosticism and gnosis suppressed? Because it is not subject to hierarchical control it places the responsibility on the part of the individual to gain insight into the ultimate truth. This truth has to be realized. It cannot be imposed. It cannot be transferred from an authority or conferred through a hierarch
ical structure. Gnostic realization eliminates the need for authority. It cannot be legislated or controlled by external authority. It is intrinsically anarchical, therefore dangerous to the civil order. This, as we have seen, is why Jesus was crucified. He had to be: he threatened the civil order.
However, where gnostic realization is authentic, it is the quintessence of goodness and godliness and even as a shadow tendency in the West, always acts as a corrective to the militant excesses of patriarchal Christianity. Some of its greatest exponents greatly influenced the history of Christianity: among them, St Francis and Martin Luther and the many authentic Christian mystics and reformers since Rome became the Roman Catholic Church.
The Point of view of Hierarchical Christianity
Let us consider the basic existential situation of the patriarchal Christian story. The protagonist is you, the sinner. Jesus is a paragon of goodness that you can never measure up to but must always strive towards. He was betrayed by Judas, who represents the nadir of sin, rightly punished by the inner horror that results from the betrayal of love, which must on some level always lead to suicide.
According to patriarchal Christianity, in order to be saved one must engage with the hierarchy in order to be absolved through the mystery of the crucifixion and resurrection. This deep dependence upon the authority of the church and its hierarchy had the necessary organizational advantage, like the Roman Empire, of controlling and maintaining order. But in this way, the patriarchal Church stole the keys to the Kingdom. With these keys firmly in hand, the authority of the Church and its entitlement became a license for conquest and domination, as we have seen throughout the history of religious wars in the West and the colonization of the lesser peoples of the world by superior Christian based empires and rulers.
With the grievous degeneration and excesses of medieval Catholicism, this entitlement was discredited. The protest against this usurpation and abuse of power, fuelled by a sense of injustice and inspired by the gnosis or its great visionaries, became the Protestant movement and resulted in the manifold forms of Christianity we know today. Here, in a reaction back towards gnosticism, individual faith and engagement in the mystery of the resurrection became the basis of salvation. The Bible and the codex of faith and morality therefore became the authority of the Church rather than the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
Such a base of hierarchical domination does not exist in Gnosticism.
The Point of View of Gnosticism
The Gnostics (and their Asian counterparts) have a completely different point of view with a very different approach. The basic reality is the transcendental ground of existence, which can be known through contemplation. But attaining gnosis is so difficult that the Sethians accorded the possibility only to those who were gifted with “the divine spark” whom they saw as “the descendents of Seth”. Brahmanism sees the possibility as a function of one’s karmic past, and Buddhists see it as one’s accumulated merit over lifetimes.
What is called into question is the nature of the individual and the world. It is your individual ego, identified as it is with the individuality of your body and predisposed to see itself separated from the transcendental ground, that betrays true being. Your ego separation and the world it projects is the betrayer of your true consciousness.
In Gnosticism Christ is this consciousness. It is the fundamental base of what you are and what the world is. This truth has no history or future, it can only be known as the present. Once “apprehended” this present is always here/now, and thus eternal. Most of all, it is knowable, but not through knowledge that resembles factual or scientific knowledge or belief in past events, but only through gnosis, which is basically the understanding arising from consciousness knowing itself. This occurs through the skillful means of contemplation, a great feature of the pre-Christian mystery schools and of Gnosticism itself, but completely lost to mainstream Western thought.
Jesus Christ is the symbol of the state of pristine gnosis by which one experiences the blissful divinity of the universe, an existential state of being in the Kingdom. It is real as opposed to illusory being. It is a real state that has been experienced at the peak of all religions and described in a fundamentally identical way by all the mystics of the world who have realized it. From the gnostic point of view this is the absolute and true meaning of Christ, of which Jesus is the perfect exemplar, the one who shows his followers how the state of the Kingdom is lived out in this real world.
The consciousness of every human being is basically structured in the same way. With the perspective of all the great world religions now available to us, this has become abundantly clear. The pattern of existential transcendence is what is universal and true, not the belief system of any particular religion. Imposing belief systems always ultimately fails, because it betrays the universal truth.
True religions reveal this structure in manifold ways. Theoretically, anyone can experience the state of the Kingdom, because it is the essential nature of human consciousness. This is hateful to patriarchal Christianity, because salvation is a realization, having nothing to do with legislation that supports a worldly hierarchy and order, the ancient dream of the Roman Empire.
3. The Betrayal of the True Christ
The living Christ IS power. When the gnosis has been realized there is no more need to exert power in the world. One is certainly powerful, because one is standing in the very nature of power, but one does not need to HAVE power. When gnosis has not been realized, in the condition we have called ignosis, existence is a vacuum of nothingness that has to be filled at all costs with some form or other of self-importance. This ignosis makes men desperate to have power. What stops up this vacuum is the ego. Out of this negative void of ignosis, the ego arises to control and dominate its world with all its tentacles. Power corrupts: absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is the betrayal of the true Christ.
The ego is the center of the world. It is the point of false identification, which “exists” in its past history and in its possible future. This ego is who I was yesterday, am today and will be in the future. All wants and needs are directed towards itself. As such, ego goes on fortifying the separation from the whole, or God. Its physical locus is ones body, and the body is always the point of reference for this ego-centered reality. The body is the vehicle of the ego, for Jesus, as for all of us.
The body is deeply contradictory. On the one hand, life is about protecting and strengthening the body. In the yoga tradition bringing the body to its highest perfection is the precondition for gnosis. At the same time, death, often accompanied by great suffering and illness is the inevitable fate of the body. The body is intrinsically a betrayer. Body “betrays” us in the sense that it is sure to fail us at some point, and at almost any time observable in the illness and death of those around us, will bring us down in terrible suffering. Its crucifixion is inevitable. The ego, identified with the body, is the reference point for our separation from God. The ego is inevitably the source of suffering.
This is represented in the central imagery of patriarchal Christianity. The crucifixion is the crucible of transformation
in which the body suffers the crucifixion of old age, sickness and death, and the Resurrection is the ultimate realization of the human spirit by which one comes to experience the immortal nature of essential being. At this point, all the promises of salvation are realized.
In Gnosticism, it is the ego’s identification with the body that is the great betrayer of the true nature of the divine or transcendent self. The Gnostic project is therefore to free the transcendent being into the Kingdom by overcoming the betrayal of the ego identification with the body. It is this fundamental freeing of Christ from the body of Jesus that is accomplished by Judas.
St Judas
The Clarification of the Contradictions
Now let us use this expanded understanding of the Betrayal to reconsider the ways in which The Gospel of Judas contradicts the orthodox Christian view:
1. Judas is presented as Jesus’ special disciple and as the hero of Christianity.
All of the gospels are the accounts of disciples who are attracted to the truth and gather around the Master who has achieved it. Each disciple represents some way of being with regard to this true state. In this gospel, Judas, the betrayer of Jesus, the justification for all anti-Semitism, the arch-villain of Christianity, is presented as Jesus’ special disciple and as the ultimate Christian hero.
Judas here represents the intelligence of one who can truly follow the Master and achieve the state. He is presented as the only one of the disciples who is gifted with the capacity for true gnosis and is therefore the dearest disciple, the one entrusted with the sacred betrayal of the ego, by which the ultimate truth can be known. His “betrayal” is the symbolic act by which the truth of Christ is freed from the body of Jesus. The deep fundamental truth of this is that the function of the ego is ultimately to eliminate itself and its identification with the body so that it can enter into the Kingdom.
While this cannot be reconciled with the orthodox history of Jesus, existentially it is the equivalent of the symbology of the crucifixion, death and resurrection.
2. Jesus appears in the Gospel as a child
The image of a child points to the hidden or unexpected presence of the divine.
A characteristic of the enlightened state of gnosis is simplicity and innocence, the attainment of the natural mind. But this does not mean lack of experience, or lack of sophistication. It is experience transformed into radically pure intelligence. It is simplicity itself. It is the pure innocence of gnosis. When one enters the Kingdom, one is blessed as a child is blessed. One is almost giddy. The things of the world that others cling to are merely ornaments of bliss about which wisdom is neither serious nor grave, but playful. Buddhists call this “crazy wisdom,” and there are many legends and tales about this in the Buddhist literature.
As Jesus has entered his true Christ nature, and lives out of the natural mind, he is childlike. In The Gospel of Judas he is portrayed as a child, thus emphasizing the radical quality of his innocence and the incomprehension of his disciples before it.
3. Jesus is often laughing and even derisively mocking the disciples and their observations of ritual.
In this Gospel, Jesus shows how the ego has overtaken all the disciples, indeed many in the church. It all makes him laugh. Whenever he laughs, a new teaching is forthcoming.
In The Gospel of Judas, Jesus laughs at piety around the sacred rituals of the tradition, ridicules them and makes fun of them. The other disciples are dismayed and angry with him for ridiculing their monotheistic observances. Only Judas understands, which demonstrates how spiritually gifted he is.
In part this is another way of expressing the giddiness of the innocent bliss, which turns the gravity of what most humans experience as reality into a kind of joke. But beyond this, Jesus has no respect for that which does not lead directly into gnosis, and this includes all religious observance and ritual that becomes a meaningless end in itself and a fortification of authoritarian hierarchy. In the Gospel Jesus is making sport of the rituals surrounding Judaism and its worship of the anthropomorphic God. One can be sure that, in this spirit, were he to appear today, he would also laugh at all the ritual surrounding orthodox Christianity.
There is another dimension to the derisive tone of the Gospel that is direct evidence of the intensity of anger towards other groups of Christians, among the Gnostics themselves, but particularly between the group which produced this gospel and the patriarchal elements who were clearly threatened by the gnostic tendency itself, the faction that eventually obliterated this sect and its gospel. Pagels in particular discloses that this vituperation is clear evidence of the intense hatred between these strains of early Christianity, a conclusion further confirmed by the fact that all trace of Gnosticism was wiped out.
When Jesus laughs, a “reformation” is forthcoming. In a general sense, every Christian reformer has gone through this rejection of traditional ritual. It is a kind of purification consequent upon the renewal of gnosis throughout history. The Reformation ridiculed and destroyed the richness and rituals of Catholicism. Quakers threw out the rituals of Protestantism. When such ritual becomes an end in itself, like philosophizing, it simply no longer fits the essential goal of realizing the true Kingdom.
For gnostics, the goal of existence is the arrival into the state of understanding emitted from the ongoing experience of the luminous ground of Being and its many revelations. One is led to a monistic understanding that there is one ground of Being and that the rest is fundamentally illusory. From this perspective, rituals propitiating some exterior God are primitive, pathetic, and rather ridiculous. Jesus laughs at them.
In reflecting these values, Jesus says to his disciples, “Let the person of perfect knowledge stand before me.” Only Judas is able to step forward, but he stands very humbly, not meeting the eyes of the Lord. But then Jesus takes him aside and reveals the wonders that constitute gnosis, all in figures familiar to the Sethian Gnostics. Then he points to a star in the firmament and indicates that this is Judas’ star. Only Judas has the divine spark, which, followed, can lead back into the Kingdom. Christ is that divine spark that needs to be set free from its ego identification with the body. This is the true spiritual work, not mindless repetition of ritual and delusional belief. Thus, as Judas is the only one capable of receiving the living Christ, Jesus reveals to him the eternal truths of gnosis. With this, He raises Judas into the living Christ so that Judas is able to betray the ego and finally release Jesus into the fullness of Christ.
4. The Gospel entirely omits the crucifixion or resurrection.
The crucifixion and resurrection are the Pauline experience of Christianity that forms the basis of patriarchal Christian symbology. While Paul certainly had an experience of gnosis that overwhelmed him entirely, he experienced this through the imagery of the risen Christ. Many Christians have experienced this throughout the centuries, but for the gnostics, this imagery was simply not necessary.
The scholars of early Christianity also show with great sophistication, empathy and skill how this doctrine of physical suffering and transcendence was used to comfort and encourage early Christians who were under constant threat of having to die horribly for defending
their faith. It provided a point of identification, which made torture and death a way of identifying with Jesus Christ.
The identification of the ego with the body is what has to die so that true gnosis can occur. This is expressed in the central imagery of crucifixion and resurrection, but this imagery is not necessary to gnosis.
These points contradict traditional Christianity, but they validate the truth of the living Christ.
Conclusion
Let us consider The Gospel of Judas in terms of its value to us.
What do we lose by taking the Gospel seriously?
• A clear sense of the story of the passion of Christ
• Jesus as a victim of the betrayal of Judas
• Everyone’s favorite villain
• An excuse for blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus
• Assurance that we know the story of Jesus
• The historical veracity of the Bible
What do we gain?
• A deeper understanding of the situation of early Christianity
• Clarification as to the suppressive nature of the Roman assimilation of Christianity in which it expunged all that did not contribute to the order imposed by the new imperial hierarchy.
• An appreciation for the aspect of the Christian revelation that established gnosis as the highest Christian possibility
• A deeper understanding of the role of the ego and its betrayal of Christ
• The link of gnostic understanding that connects Christianity into the universal human reality and spirit
Radical Christianity
The Grand Inquisitor, written by Dostoevsky in the late Nineteenth Century, expresses the fundamental theme of this essay. The Inquisitor, grand authority of the church, visits the living Christ who has returned to earth but has been imprisoned and condemned to die. He recognizes Christ, but gives Him to understand that he must be eliminated in order to preserve the order established by the church. This story represents a significant point of self-awareness in Western culture.
Order is necessary, but the love of power is the betrayer of Christ.
The central question we are dealing with here is freedom and domination. They are an important theme of the history of the church as well as the existential nature of the human spirit. They have both a political/ historical dimension as well as a psychological/ spiritual one. Domination is the exercise of manipulation that is not the power of true spirit. We have seen how the Roman Catholic Church thrived on its power over the mind of the West, but science and technology are also forms of domination. So are the many manipulations of ones own ego in the state of ignosis.
Just as achieving the state of gnosis, the living Christ, and the experience of the one monistic reality is the freedom of ultimate oneness with God, so does true gnosis free one from the necessity of all manipulation and governance. Gnosis frees up a love that is its own divine order and needs no ordering. As the Gospel shows, few achieve true gnosis. Without gnosis, in the state of ignosis, one needs to attain a high level of moral and ethical development through reason, a relatively rare accomplishment, or else one requires the guidance, discipline and domination of authority. Therefore the authority and discipline of external governance is necessary to maintain order.
From a historical perspective, the monism revealed in the Gnostic Gospels brings into relief the truth that the triumph of Patriarchal Christianity over Gnosticism was in the end a pyrrhic victory. Over 1500 years the “dictatorship of the spirit” has proven itself a failed experiment. The proof has been the excesses of the Catholic Church during the thousand years of its absolute rule. This produced the Reformation that attempted to restore true spirit to organized religion. But this fragmentation of authoritative domination and its own internecine absurdities created the political excesses of monarchies which attempted to rule on the authority of the spirit as “the divine right of Kings”, epitomized by the violent abominations in the reign of Henry the Eighth. The dictatorship of the spirit was such a catastrophic failure that it was not clarified until the Eighteenth Century conception of the separation of church and state, that is, the separation of civil order from spiritual freedom. This rise and fall of the dictatorship of the spirit is a cycle not yet complete, for the spiritual responsibility attendant upon democracy is still in the process of clarifying itself. It is however on the horizon and is described by scholar thinkers such as Jeffrey Kripal in his analysis of the way the truth of religion is working itself out at the vibrant fringes of American culture in what he describes as “the religion of no religion”. (See Jeffrey R Kripal, Esalen, the Religion of no Religion, Chicago University Press.) In this context of democratic freedom and the self responsibility of the spirit unmediated by religious authority external or internal, the living Christ might once again establish its truth in the human heart.
But where are Christians to go?
The state of gnosis is the living Christ. Direct access to it as supported by Gnosticism was too anarchistic for Roman Catholicism, so it had to be eliminated. However, it is still to be found in the Christian canon as it exists. It is the hidden “mystery of Christ” which gleams like gold in the dirt if one has the eyes to see it. The purpose of radical Christianity is to gather the gold by clarifying that state as the supreme achievement of Christ, to show how faith leads to this state, and to purge the religion of the power base that has led to its “religulous” excesses.
The discoveries of the Gnostic Gospels over the last century have been unsettling to some, but in the end they may vindicate Christianity of the excesses that suppressed them in the first place.
Christians, like the adherents of the other Semitic religions, like to think that they are not just the best, but the only religion. While this may have strengthened the faith of some over the centuries, it has been for the most part a justification for grievous excesses of power leading to horrible consequences all over the world with regard to factions within the religion and almost all indigenous peoples of the world. The entitlement of specialness of a religion whose fundamental premise is compassionate love for all justified centuries of war within Christendom, constant war with Islam and persecution of Judaism, and then the carnage of colonialism, in particular enslavement of Africans and the obliteration of five hundred indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere with no compunction. Would anyone who “knows Christ” possibly be able to countenance any of this? The contradictory nature of this history has significantly contributed to the demise of Christianity. It is not Judas that was the great betrayer, but the entitlement of Christian authority. This IS a historical fact.
When the excesses of an institution militate against it, the only way to save that institution is to go back to its roots. The gnostic gospels bring Christianity back into the human family. They indicate and clarify the roots of spiritual truth not only in Christianity, but also in the fundamental unity of all humanity.
The root of Christianity is not any historical event, but the experience of “the living Christ”, which is the arrival of gnosis. All the great religions agree that this attainment of gnosis is the achievement of eternal
life, which transcends the permutations and suffering of physical existence. This attainment is the Kingdom of Heaven. It is an existential state of being which reveals the luminous truth. Because it is a natural human tendency towards true maturity it can happen in any context and within the structure of any religion.
This understanding of Christ as the primordial realization of the true nature of consciousness meets patriarchal Christianity at its peak. That is to say, the central Christian imagery of suffering, crucifixion and resurrection is another set of images that refer to the same gnostic reality. To commune with the Christ means that the body of every human is in the end crucified by the physical suffering of old age, sickness and death. The body, the vehicle of life is also its betrayer. The ego that identifies with the body is the betrayer of the Christ nature. But the ground of human consciousness, which is what we truly are, is transcendent and eternal and can be experienced, known and dwelt within as the most fundamental condition of being. This is gnosis.
The Christian way of faith surrounding the central symbology of the death and resurrection, wisely followed, is also a path to gnosis. Authentic revision of patriarchal Christianity always strengthens the true possibility within the tradition. One takes on the imagery of Christ and Jesus, one studies the word of the patriarchal Bible, enters it deeply, essentially comes to live within it, and gradually gnosis happens. The psychological position of faith provides a crucible in which gnosis may arrive. Then the existence of God and the historical validity of the biblical events cease to be an issue. True transcendental love happens upon understanding.
If one is truly interested in achieving the Kingdom therefore, one will come to see that the highest truth of Patriarchal Christianity is one and the same as Gnosticism. They deeply inform each other, and each corrects the weakness and excesses of the other. All the conflicts around the truths of Christianity are of an entirely different and lower order of fearful mentality in which historicism, literalism, the confusion of beliefs with factuality create a morass of confusion.
The truth of transcendence, transformation, and realization as a viable state is simple. Wise men call it by many names. Fools fight over those names, defending their own against others under the banner of piety. If one reaches true silence, one can hear Jesus laughing.
OUR TIME - THE STATE OF METAPHYSICS, RADICAL CHRISTIANITY, THE SPIRIT OF RELIGION
THE BIG LIE AND THE GREAT TRUTH
SEPTEMBER 24, 2009 ADMIN
The split between the spirit and the flesh is a subtle fallacy which has had fundamental and dire consequences in the development of Western Culture from the beginnings of Semitic culture. Bodily consciousness and spiritual awareness are essentially one, and this is the ontological base for realizing the oneness of God.
The Big Lie and the Great Truth
Contents
The Big Lie
1. Identity Unrooted
The Semitic Tradition
2. Man vs Nature
Western History
3. Sex vs Spirit
Eroticism and Spiritual Potential
The Great Truth: All is One
The Body as the Temple
1. The Innate Wisdom of Body Awareness as the Source of Gnosis
The Garden into the Kingdom
Chi: The Innate Wisdom of Body Awareness as the Source of Gnosis in East Asian Religious Practice
2. The Method of Tantric Yoga
Working with the Chakras
3. A Scenario of the Tantric Integration Process
The Importance of the Root Chakra
The Pattern of Breathing and Visualization
The Systematic Transformation of the Chakras into Gnosis
The Peace of the Great Truth
The Big Lie and The Great Truth
The Big Lie: Flesh vs Spirit (body vs mind)
The flesh lusts after the spirit and the spirit lusts after the flesh.
St Paul
What St Paul says in this famous quotation is at once the problem and the suggestion of a solution. The problem is that in the Semitic tradition the spirit and the flesh have been so construed, seen as fundamentally separated, that each is incomplete without the other. Falsely separated, they “lust” after each other. This lie produces the fundamental angst of Western consciousness.
1. Identity Unrooted
We understand that birth is an original trauma of separation from the Mother. Healing this trauma at our source is the stuff of religion and makes pilgrims out of all humans. Yet we come into a consciousness, which, though undifferentiated, is one. Subsequent experience of the freedom of the mind and the limitations of the body, however, leads to a fundamental human tendency to differentiate them.
This universal tendency takes on a special character in the West. The original separation comes out of Semitic culture. As the New Testament is based in the Old Testament, so Christian culture is based in Semitic culture.
We have learned from the feminists that the cultures descended from Semitic culture have been male dominated. Much is to be seen by starting with the earliest experience of the male infant in that culture.
Consciousness enters with conception, it grows as one in the mother. At birth that consciousness is full unitary potential, one, body and mind undifferentiated. Then in a moment of primal, original, and unimaginable pain something at the most essential core, something bodily, secret, intimate and close to the center of ones unitary being is severed. A chorus of adult voices chant their approbation. This event, possibly the first memory, at once severs the (internal and intrinsic) primordial connection to nature, true power, and simultaneously seals the connection to the (external and extrinsic) authoritative God. It sets the ground for an identity traumatically alienated from its roots and stressed in a lifetime of trying to regain union.
Circumcision of Jesus
This is circumcision, a fundamental Semitic event happening at the beginning of life to each male child from the time of Abraham as a sign of his covenant with God, and followed ever since by all males in the traditions descended from the patriarch.
I am not saying that circumcision causes Western Culture, but that it reflects a certain archetypal quality of the Western psyche, which has always been male dominated. This ritual act and the thinking behind it sets up Western culture in a characteristic way. There are of course many “gentile” Christians who are not circumcised, yet they still live in a culture grounded in the original Abrahamic identity uprooted in this way from its primordial nature. These are the men who have shaped Western Culture.
This ritual act grossly establishes something very fundamental: you were made wrong! This raises all sorts of weird ambiguities that remain largely in the shadows. For instance, if God is perfect and good, why did He make me this way? Why does His perfect work have to be mutilated in order that I might be put right? His perfection thus made terribly wrong, must I then spend the rest of my life trying to attain union with Him? Is it not this wound, passed from generation to generation, that establishes and continually confirms Original Sin in the first place? How can the child in his innocence deal with these questions, particularly in a culture of adults that never address them? Does this not imprint upon him forever what he will experience for the rest of his life as guilt and anxiety?
With this miasma of primal questions relegated to the shadows and never addressed, the covenant with the Semitic God is sealed. But before the fundamental agreement is secured, the man-child is violently and irrevocably separated from what is given.
Let us be clear, this covenant between man and God is based on a primordial, traumatic separation which is self-inflicted.
Christian flagellants
2. Man vs Nature
The human is a psycho-physical being. Dividing the physical off from the psyche sets up a contradiction in reality.
What is actually happening here is that the mind has rejected the primal body with all of its awareness and connection to primordial being. In the last hundred years this has been clarified as the nature of psychological pathology; first by Freud as the repression of the id, or the itness of the body/psyche, and then by Jung as the formation of the “shadow”. What is rejected forms itself into sabotage. The rejected being turns negative and becomes the antagonist. The body and its energies, and by extension, nature itself, become the enemy of the spirit/mind. The control of this enemy and its persecution becomes the main challenge of life and the function of Western religion.
Separating mind off from body violates the primordial unity and creates a state of chronic internal division and anxiety. This is the Fall.
Western History
Judaism created this split, cemented in the consciousness of each new generation by circumcision, thus producing a fundamental angst and guilt. Then Jesus Christ appeared to show that only foundational love could heal this angst. Some early Christians followed his inspiration and found a way to renew the primordial unity through gnosis.
A description and a full discussion of gnosis is to be found in the long essay, The Heart of the Matter. In the present essay, we will consider gnosis as the understanding which is a return to the primordial unity of spirit and body.
Gnosis is returning understanding to the original given state of awareness, the Garden. When the primordial unity is rendered conscious through gnosis, it becomes the true Kingdom. This is the nature of true power. However, gnosis does not wield power, nor does it control. It unifies and empowers: it does not divide and conquer.
When Christianity was brought under the hierarchical structure of Rome and became the Catholic Church, the deeper unifying truths realized through gnosis were co-opted into external authoritarian fact, which furthers the Semitic tradition of setting the spirit against the body, thus creating a fundamentally anxious existence riddled with guilt. The Kingdom became exiled to the afterlife, and the anxiety fed into the resolve in this life to exert control over one’s body and behave oneself. When Christianity became the State Religion, it got relegated to the Roman power structure which attempts to legislate and regulate behavior in a fundamentally anxious existence based on a self-generated and perpetuating split. It is like the man who sets fire to houses and then provides a service for putting house fires out, which becomes a very lucrative business.
Thus in the Hebraic and Christian traditions, the split of flesh and spirit became foundational to the development of the Western concept of human nature in which mind and spirit are at war with nature, derisively labeled “flesh”. This is a usurpation of Christ by the anti-Christ of power lust.
In this war of spirit and flesh, domination becomes the central theme. The spirit MUST dominate the flesh or else all is lost. Among the myriad reasons that Western Culture has come to dominate the world, this is perhaps the metareason. Since men identify women with fleshly lust, they must be dominated and held in place. When this was added to Greed, the formula became deadly. Since the indigenous cultures of the world have not been indoctrinated with the Christian truth of spirit over flesh, they must be destroyed, enslaved or at the very least clothed in modesty. By the way, while we are imposing upon them our Christian truth, the resources of their lands can make us very rich. Since Nature is the source of flesh, it too must be controlled and enslaved. Science can dominate nature, and technology can exploit all this planetary resource.
Where has all of this led us?
The most powerful impulse in Western religious history to reconstrue this narrative of spirit vs flesh and to reground the Kingdom in the Garden, was led by St Francis, who sought to heal the breach by reestablishing a simple, holy relationship to nature, which he believed to be the truth of God. Though he came to be revered with great sentimentality, he did not succeed in his dream of “rebuilding the church”. In fact the church dealt with his simple tendency to reform the relationship to nature with characteristic cunning: it assimilated the Franciscan Order into itself and built grand temples adorned in gold to honor Francis.
With this holy project thus incorporated into the power of the Church, the way was clear for the domination of the world, starting with the invasion of the Southern Hemisphere by sword and cross.
The Enlightenment furthered the project to lift Western man out of the experience of nature, by promoting the practice of observing nature and manipulating it, creating science and technology which dreamed of creating the Kingdom on Earth.
Yet it did not satisfy the human heart. In the Romantic period great sentiment to return to nature took hold. Romantics longed to reunite with heart and soul and the givens of nature. One star of British Romanticism, poet and theologian William Blake, succinctly diagnosed the Big Lie and identified the basis of the Great Truth. In 1793 in the opening declaration of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Blake stated this thesis in concise terms.
“All Bibles or sacred codes have been the cause of the following Errors:
1. That Man has two real existing principles viz: a body and a soul.
2. That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, and that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:
1. Man has no body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in these days.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight”
In the late nineteenth century the forces of nature came to be seen as a kind of godless force, the Will of nature and instinct. Darwin demonstrated this in external nature, and Freud demonstrated it in internal nature. This Will, raised to a kind of religion by Nietzsche, was glorified in two traumatic world wars that profoundly exhausted all efforts to realize the enlightenment dream of applied science as the savior of civilization and resulted in the annihilation of all essential value. The victors led the world into unparalleled development, which began to overwhelm nature on a planetary scale.
The longing for an authentic relationship to nature exploded into the sixties, which ushered in a dream of realignment with nature, through sexuality, through the equality of all humans before nature, in the growing ecological movements, and through a diaspora of Western youth into the spirituality of Asia and indigenous cultures still integrated by their sacred relationship to nature.
As for the Enlightenment dream of dominating nature through science and technology, it has turned into a nightmare. Western man, fueled by his antagonism against nature, and in marked contrast to most other traditions which honored nature, set out upon a conquest and exploitation of the earth that has resulted in a destruction of the environment that now threatens the very existence of the human species.
3. Sex vs Spirit
One of many consequences of this complex, producing anxiety on the most intimate level, is the mishandling of vital or sexual energy in the Christian tradition. The stance of the church towards sexual expression outside of marriage is “Just say no”. Like its modern cousin in drug policy, this strategy exerts control but doesn’t work. It never has. The priest and the prostitute are in business together. The priest creates the guilt, which foments temptation and hunger, which the prostitute satisfies, which creates more guilt, which the priest then forgives with the admonition to not sin again….
The one situation in which the breach of body and spirit may be authentically healed is the marriage bed, in the case where the chemistry is right. Here the ecstasy of sexuality may ascend through the heart of love into the bliss of sacred union. This experience of the primordial union is regarded as a great blessing in the Semitic tradition and has caused romantic love to be raised in the West to the status of true fulfillment, up there with salvation. As the culture has become more and more secularized, romantic love has been raised to a universal cult, now the obsession of pop culture the world over. While the split of body and spirit remains deep in western culture, every loud speaker in the world proclaims its only antidote in rhythmic and lyrical paeans to romantic love, celebrated obsessively as the only true value in life. However, this is a blessing vouchsafed to a few. Fewer still are those married who find their way to sustain this kind of union for a lifetime of sexual/spiritual satisfaction on the part of both partners. Very few indeed. And the others? The other 95%? Well, just say no.
As the sexual scandals of the church become more and more appalling, it becomes increasingly clear that the “just say no” policy of the church towards sexual energy, is demonically dysfunctional, indeed malignant. In words the Pope used to describe homosexuality, this handling of vital energy is “intrinsically disordered”.
The Western attitude towards sex culminated in the repressiveness of the Victorian period, which, as Freud and Jung showed, sets man against himself, thus creating a deep pathology. Sexual repression continued however up until the early Sixties, when the suppression exploded into the sexual revolution with its own attendant obsessions and painful excesses.
Eroticism and Spiritual Potential
In fact, hidden in the Christian story has been an underlying theme that the height and genuineness of spiritual experience was inversely related to the capacity for depth of erotic experience. Original Christians, those true to themselves rather than to the traditions, often understand this. Some of the greatest Christians were very experienced in sex, reputedly Mary Magdalene, who was the first to realize the risen Christ, and Saint Augustine, who was the first to frame Christianity in the context of the great Platonic tradition. Christians like to believe that when these spiritual giants became Christians they gave it all up. However they may have reformed and repudiated it subsequently, their prior sexual experience and understanding was still part of their total experience and make up. Another perspective would be that the depth of their sexuality was the basis for the originality and heights of their spiritual insight. This alternative possibility is now corroborated by an entirely different form of information, which comes from a growing comprehension of the great spiritual and religious traditions outside of the West.
Gnosis does not support a stand against the body, but reaches back into the intelligence of consciousness that is prior to a split between body and spirit. This it does by realigning primal bodily awareness with mind. This union is the basis of true spirit, which alone is capable of receiving the fullness of gnosis.
Crucifixion sketch, Michelangelo
The Great Truth: All is One
Flesh lusts after spirit and spirit lusts after flesh because they have been traumatically separated and falsely identified and, as such, underneath, they yearn for each other. This produces a fundamental anxiety in which lust is a form of desperation. On a deeper level, they desire each other because they belong together. Most primordially, however, they are not separate, but one. That is to say bodily consciousness and spiritual awareness are essentially of the same origin and are the ontological base for the oneness of God. This is the Garden the realization of which is the Kingdom.
Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci
The Body as the Temple
The fundamental human tendency to separate mind and body has been dealt with in different ways by the great religions of Asia.
The body is the primal fact of existence. It is the given. Everything else that the mind construes — stories, myths, images — are constructs in a world which very possibly is just collectively imagined. The body however is different. It is the concrete given of God. Therefore the body, not the stories fabricated for human belief, is the primordial access to God. It is that within which consciousness may authentically become aware of its own divine nature. This is the basic insight of Yoga. It sharply divides West from East.
Yoga comes from the Sanskrit root, yuk, which means “yoking or uniting.” The most sophisticated of these unifying traditions are the yoga practices from the Sanskrit tradition, Taoism, the contemplative tradition growing out of Chen Buddhism, and the Tantric schools of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, which cultivate the root awareness of the body and use it to inform and cultivate the intelligence, thus “uniting mind and body” creating true spirit, the source of gnosis.
Asia has had its great dominators, but they did not have the same fierce complex of Spirit vs Flesh underlying and fueling their need to dominate. That is perhaps why they have not, up to this time, overtaken the world as did Western culture.
The practices of these great Asian traditions are methods for returning the mind to its primordial or natural ground, the Garden. These conceptions are absolutely alien to the Semitic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For these religions, the Garden was lost with the Fall.
1.The Innate Wisdom of Body Awareness as the Source of Gnosis
The great truth of the Garden as the base for the Kingdom, the primordial oneness of being, is alien to the Western mind. Therefore this discussion has two purposes:
– To show that the alienation of mind and body is not intrinsic to the human situation nor absolute as it is regarded in the West, but belongs to the Semitic/Christian tradition.
– To show how the practices of the great Eastern traditions systematically generate gnosis by bringing the body and the mind together, as it were, uniting the branches of mind with its roots in body awareness to realize the trunk of authentic human being. This is the tree of true knowledge.
To truly reveal how this split is overcome in the Asian contemplative tradition is to take a Western reader further and further afield from recognizable territory. For those unfamiliar with Asian religions and practice, this discussion will become more and more alien.
In the end the unification of mind and body is not an intellectual proposition. It is, like gnosis, a state of being. Therefore the following goes over the same process of unification in a progressively detailed manner, each time going into a deeper analysis.
– First we will go over the general principle of generating gnosis through chi or bodily awareness.
– Second, there is a more articulated description of how this union is brought about in different contemplative practices.
– Third, there is a completely articulated description of how the Kingdom is achieved through the Tantric method of contemplating the chakras.
In order to get a real understanding of the Great Truth, stay with the first description, understand it better, go through the second, get as full an understanding as possible on an intellectual level, use the third, articulated discussion, to understand how gnosis is generated and what it is.
The Garden into the Kingdom
At a very fundamental level our consciousness has never left the Garden. It is this that gives us such longing, such pleasure, and the peace that we experience in nature. We all come into the Garden, get separated by the world, spend our lives as pilgrims on a path, which as gnosis grows, becomes clearly oriented toward reunion that ends in the Kingdom.
Taoism may be the most ancient of the great Asian religions, but it is certainly most fundamental in the sense that nature, the external Garden, and the body, the internal Garden, are both the central objects and metaphors of contemplation by which intelligence is shaped into gnosis, understood in Taoism as knowledge of the basic “way” of being, the Tao. This characterizes the archetypal approach to religion in Asia.
Taoist landscape
Chi: The Innate Wisdom of Body Awareness as the Source of Gnosis
These great Asian traditions are generally based in the experience and contemplation of the fundamental body-based energy of life or being, known as CHI. Chi is the basic awareness that is both body and mind, fundamental life consciousness. This source is symbolized, figured, and contemplated as the body center, four finger widths below the level of the navel, known in the Zen tradition as hara, in the Chinese tradition as d’an tien, and in the Hindu tradition as the nabi chakra.
From the outset it is essential to clarify the distinction between conceptual/ linguistic knowing based on empirical information and chi awareness. Whatever constructs the mind invents to explain its existence is derivative. Derivative means names and forms, or concepts and language formed out of experience. The body is the given of human existence. It is also its source. Its form is the primordial metaphor of consciousness, providing an imagery that is more original to the natural mind than any conceptions, histories, or mythologies can ever be. Furthermore, however, the body is itself conscious. This consciousness is chi. Chi is not concepts, ideas or empirical information about the objective body, such as we find in Western science, but the body’s awareness of itself. Its “cultivation” in East Asian religions is in fact uncovering a primal awareness that is chronically covered over by our lives construed in names and forms, or concepts and language. This dislocation of concept/form from actual bodily consciousness is a separation of body and spirit that is universal. But it is compounded in the particular way that we have discussed in Semitic monotheism. This primordially unitary bodily awareness is the root of the natural mind. These roots are the direct source of gnosis.
Cultivating chi and learning how to contemplate it means that one is engaging a knowing that is directly related to the root of being. This engagement opens up the awareness and ultimately the gnosis that is prior to the split of “body and spirit” It is more primordial than this split, more whole, more holy. As the mind becomes receptive to this awareness it opens itself up to direct access to chi, which access, through careful contemplation, becomes gnosis.
In Ch’an and Zen Buddhism, the fundamental spiritual technique is to return the mind to awareness in body center chi. What incomprehending Westerners have described as “contemplating your navel,” is concentration into this center which relocates consciousness in body generated awareness as the source of mental awareness. It realigns the mind with the body. The experience of hara is to enter into the silent emanation of life consciousness from its source. This emanation radiates into awareness as gnosis.
All of the active meditations, such as those Westerners refer to as “the martial arts,” are also disciplines which center consciousness and activity in the body center. Whereas in Zen sitting, centered stillness emanates the utter silence, “the emptiness” of gnosis, motion meditation provides experience of primordial body energy emanating into the kinesthesis of movement, which is an archetype of all physical experience. Perhaps the greatest of these, Tai Chi and its many variations, involve balanced movements that originate from the body center, but are slowed down to the point where they become the emanation of life, the actual experienced flow of chi into movement. The movements are archetypal positions which cultivate realignment, body consciousness as the source of all mental experience. Devotion to these practices allows the bodily source of awareness to instruct the mind with the primordial knowing of gnosis.
The purpose of the entire endeavor is to bring the chi (the Garden) up into the mind, where it reforms intelligence, and returns to the heart, the center of being as blissful union. (The Kingdom)
Integrating the polarity of sexuality and the highest spirit means returning to the Garden of their primordial unity. This polarity is understood and integrated, but grounded in the conscious experience of their primordial oneness. This is the experience of monism. This is the Kingdom. It obviates the need for domination at its core.
2. The Method of Tantric Yoga
The process of awakening chi, or bodily awareness and allowing it to reconstitute intelligence is handled in a different way, with another kind of technology, developed in the contemplative traditions of India. These techniques are called Tantra. There are two forms of Tantra, left- and right-handed.
Left-handed Tantra proceeds by sexual practice which is actually a deep penetration into the nature of sexual energy and bodily reality. In this form of Tantra, sensuality and sexuality are cultivated into deep bodily awareness, and the achievement of high blissful states becomes a spiritual path. Orgasm is separated out from ejaculation and contemplated as the clear light of consciousness, which with practice and detachment, in time begins to radiate gnosis. Ritual intercourse focuses on the blissful union of active and receptive (yang and yin) capacities and their divine union, which is a whole other way of achieving mind/body unification.
The Christian advocacy of the union of man and wife into one flesh in the West permits this form of access to the primordial undifferentiated consciousness. In fact it is the only means in the Christian tradition, but because of the negation of the flesh it is virtually unspeakable. There are no Christian scriptures prescribing how this is to proceed or be cultivated. You say your marriage vows and then you’re on your own. By contrast the left-handed Tantra in India and China has been a refined field of spiritual endeavor in which detailed instruction abounds.
There is much in the Tantric tradition which promises success through this methodology, but at the same time this left-handed path has always been considered very dangerous because, as anyone who has practiced it understands, it’s intrinsic pleasure tends inevitably to becomes an end in itself. The practice originated in a culture that was not dedicated to the split of body and mind. That split, as we have seen, creates the mutual lust of body and mind for each other, the root of our Western compulsions around sexuality. Many Westerners are attracted into this path as a function of our sexual revolution, itself related to the attempt on the part of Westerners to heal the breach of body and mind. Except in the case of those who are unwaveringly dedicated to spiritual development, this path almost inevitably degenerates into mere cultivation of sexual pleasure and feeds into sexual addiction, a distraction which becomes increasingly destructive. Breaking with this diversion is a difficult process in its own right, requiring a drastic process such as the Twelve Steps.
The other form of Tantra, called “right-handed” is a systematic contemplative method for discovering body awareness, working to transform it into the intelligence of wisdom. This is often called “seated Tantra,” because it is traditionally done cross-legged in a “lotus” position, which itself may be contemplated as the image of a unified mind and body, as the upper body sits rectified on a balanced and grounded base.
As in the case of Zen and Chen contemplation, seated Tantra begins with a deep cultivation of chi awareness. This means that the awareness can drop out of its mental preoccupations into pure body-based awareness.
This is a summary of the way chakra practice proceeds.
As a Tantric, one cultivates the experience of this level of consciousness, or chi, to the point where one learns to identify and inhabit this ground directly. This is already a spiritual accomplishment as it provides a cradle or base of peace to which one can always retreat. Moreover, contemplation of chi begins to yield base knowledge of consciousness itself, which yields conscious apprehension of the nature of existence. This is an extatic experience. Outer nature is the perfect image of chi awareness. It constantly radiates the chi awareness which has been overlooked internally. Once this relationship is corrected through the internal accession to chi, nature becomes the blissful objective correlative of a subjective experience that reflects the primordial union before the Fall.
Tantra proceeds as this chi awareness grows very intense and enters the heart, where, recognizing itself, it becomes joy of universal love for all that is sensate. Further on, the chi awareness approaches the intelligence, which recognizes the apprehension as the base truth, gets informed by it, reshaped as it were in the understanding of primordial existence. This corrects the mind’s wiring to the separated state to which Western consciousness is so committed, and regrounds it in primordial unity with the body.
This is the healing of the mind. It can be called the new mind, but it is “new” only in respect to the separated state, the norm which is falsely understood to be basic. In fact it is the natural mind, the intelligence that is one with being. The mind has been healed of The Fall, and The Garden has been regained. The mind that has lived in the intelligence and intellect of the Fall, but is regenerated by the Garden, enters the Kingdom.
The illumination of the new mind is experienced as bliss, which becomes the presence of the divine. This is the enlightenment of the spirit, of consciousness itself. This bliss of enlightenment is then directed to the heart where it becomes true compassion, that is overwhelming love, experienced as an absolute dedication to the well-being of all that is sensate. Again it is important to understand that this is not a mere intellectual or sentimental proposition, but a state of being. This experienced conviction is directed primarily at other human beings, as it sees each individual as the one human being whose real condition is also this state. But it is further the dedication to all that is sensate through the understanding that the physical and the sensate are actually one.
This creates the Kingdom: intrinsically one with all being and dedicated to the well-being of all that emanates from it. This is the one God, the existential experience and grounding in the one, the state of monism.
This existence out of the heart, the presence of God, is innately good, which means it is spontaneously moral. This is the radiant nature of the Good. It is true morality, but until the Kingdom is realized and morality (the Good) is intrinsic to thought, morality has to be legislated and enforced from above. The necessity for this legislation returns the situation to the role of authoritative Religion, and there it becomes subject to the vicissitudes of power, best summarized in the proposition that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This perversion, which comedic commentator Bill Maher describes as “religulous” provokes the kind of anti-religious vituperation that dominates current Western Culture.
Perhaps you have understood the basic point that the Big Lie of the split of spirit and flesh can be supplanted by an actual experience and knowledge of the Great Truth, the primordial oneness of being. In many ways this lies at the base of the difference between East Asian culture and Western culture derived from Semitic religion. However, if you want to understand this further, proceed carefully. Now we will go over this same material as it presents itself in seated Tantric practice, showing the actual steps, involving breath and visualization by which the Kingdom may be accomplished.
Working with the Chakras:
Visualization and the Transformation of Chi into Gnosis
In the very ancient tradition of Tantra the process of unifying with the roots of being became formulated into the notion of chakras, points of awareness located along the spine. The spine is thus the image of primordial bodily consciousness. The chakras differentiate this consciousness into levels or spheres of body-based awareness.
Chakras in the spine
Chakras are ways of symbolizing and articulating levels of chi awareness. They are a tool for contemplating primordial bodily awareness, articulating the root of gnosis, and integrating it into intelligence, the fruit of wisdom, thus returning consciousness to its praeternatural state, the experience of which is bliss and compassion. It brings the Garden into full awareness, therefore producing the Kingdom.
The validity of the chakras is not that they physically or materially exist, but that they are an effective meditative device. Various Tantric traditions differentiate the chi awareness into various forms. There are systems of three, five, seven, nine, twelve, even up to 108 chakras. This does not mean that these systems contradict each other. Each represents a different way of articulating subtle levels of bodily originating consciousness, of, as it were, cutting up the pie of given human awareness.
The base, source and union of these chakras are figured either as the spine, or in some traditions as a central channel rising through the center of the body from the perineum to the crown. We will stay with the more primordial image of the spine. The points of awareness envisioned along the spine are actually aspects of chi or bodily awareness. Be clear however, this is not anatomy, and we are not competing with anatomy. The chakras located along the spine do not “objectively exist,” but constitute a tool for focusing awareness or contemplating levels of primordial awareness. They are a mental tool for accessing pre-mental, non-derivative, or given awareness.
The discipline is learning how to focus contemplation in each of these points so that the level of awareness associated with it becomes completely accessible. The visualization is enhanced by various image based aids. Some traditions imagine that the chakras are pearls. Some image the chakras as flowers which bloom with growing awareness of that particular aspect.
3. A Scenario of the Integration Process
In the following I will examine generically this form of Tantra in order to illustrate in some detail the process by which body and mind may be returned to their original unseparated state. There follows the generic steps by which this process proceeds.
In this scenario we arbitrarily choose a system of seven chakras located along the spine. We will see each chakra in the image of a sun radiating this aspect of chi or bodily awareness. Each of these is a quality of chi which can be unified with intelligence.
1. The base chakra, a pink sun located at the perineum or tip of the spine, which radiates the conscious energy of sex and vitality.
2. The red/gold sun located at the level of the body center, which radiates fundamental bodily structure and survival.
3. The yellow sun located at the level of the solar plexus,which radiates the structure of physical reality and well being.
4. The green sun at the level of the heart, which radiates care, feeling, emotion and morality.
5. A light blue sun at the nape of the neck, which radiates intuitive knowing.
6. A dark blue sun in the center of the head, which radiates intellectual understanding.
7. A violet sun at the crown, which unifies all the chakras radiating all consciousness itself. When this sun is brought down and reunified with the heart chakra, it becomes the innate compassion at the core of unified consciousness.
In this scheme you can see that the unification happens by constantly reunifying the top to the bottom, in effect, heaven and earth. Just as the spine is originally one, so consciousness is one. Therefore a special relationship exists between the polarity of chakra 1 (vitality) and 7, (highest consciousness). This is the fundamental reunification that has to take place, because it brings the spine into its primordial unity. This is echoed in a special relationship between chakra two and six, union of intellect with the fundamental structure of body and life. Similarly, chakra three (physical reality and well-being) informs five (intuitive knowing). Everything revolves around the heart that draws the entire unity to itself which is the true center.
Chakra spiral
This unification is “new,” not in the sense that it never existed, but only in the sense that a false separation of mind and body has been rectified by the practice. I think the kind of wisdom that we find in indigenous cultures differs greatly because the separation has not taken place in the first place. However, wisdom regained from the separation, having been the condition of the mind inherited by the culture as in the West, has a special quality of transcendence.
So how does the practice accomplish this reunion?
The practitioner imagines that, as he concentrates into one of these suns, it becomes warmer, heating up, becoming brighter and brighter. This image functions to intensify and amplify consciousness of that particular level of bodily awareness. This facilitates bringing bodily awareness into mental awareness, thus integrating the bodily knowing with intelligence.
This is almost impossible to describe because our language uses name and form to serve a knowing that is more primordial than name and form. This is why the name and form of chakras is fabricated as a means for focusing on the chakras as a way of bringing name and form back into the primordial awareness that is its source. In a way the mental imagery is a means for directing awareness into the body as its source. Once the realization is accomplished, this tool is no longer necessary.
The Importance of the Root Chakra
The root or sexual chakra has a special importance to the Big Lie and the Great Truth. Its sexual consciousness is the actual (hormonal) source of the mental projections of sexuality onto the world. This separates the world into what turns you on and what doesn’t. This is the fundamental dynamic by which consciousness is thrown onto the world and attachment is formed. This mechanism of attachment is the ongoing cause of the Fall whereby source and world are kept separated.
This is why the sexual chakra is specially important, because it is here that we find the root of the fundamental process by which our divine vitality is thrown upon the world away from the source. Knowing this, and being able to return the primordial energy to its primal bodily source becomes the possibility of true spiritual life.
To return the spirit from its fallenness into the world, this fundamental projection has to be reversed. The names and forms that stimulate or evoke sexual feeling has to be shut down and the awareness returned to the genitals with such intensity of focus that one reowns the root chakra as the source of sexual energy, thus reversing the natural tendency to experience the names and forms as the stimulating source. This goes against all conditioning that has essentially thrown the fundamental vitality of sexuality onto external forms.
In a way the denial and persecution of the flesh so important to many waves of puritanical reform in the history of the church was a very crude and misguided way of attempting to achieve this fundamental return of projection to source. The “denial of the flesh” should be a process for taking divine or given vitality back from its projections, experienced as lust for sex objects, into its source so that it can then be experienced as the root of the spirit. Instead the “mortification of the flesh” starts with a form of hatred of the bodily self and proceeds by trying to eliminate the vitality altogether. To clean the bathwater it eliminates the baby. This is one more result of the Big Lie in Semitically derived culture.
The Pattern of breathing and Visualization
The following generic description of chakra meditation is intended to show how Tantric traditions draw out body energy consciousness and unify it with the mind to generate gnosis.
In the meditation process the contemplator brings awareness back into the chakra by very controlled breath and visualization into the transformative modification of intelligence and the realization of blissful totality and compassion. With breath slowed to a constant long inhale and exhale, it may proceed something like the following:
Long slow inhale
You direct awareness, envisioned as intense heat bursting into flame concentrated into the spine.
Slow exhale
You concentrate awareness into the chakra or sun, which you envision as becoming very hot and luminous.
Slow inhale
You see the heat specific to the chakra as fire in the spine experienced as concentrated awareness, and you envisioned it traveling up the spine where it becomes very brilliant, illuminating the blue sun, reforming your intellect. This is the union of body awareness and intelligence.
Slow exhale
This union creates its own joy of reunion which you envision as the heat of the chakra being shot up into the violet sun, the crown chakra, the totality of consciousness. The experience of the totality is no longer ideational or conceptual, but is pure experience of the blissful nature of consciousness itself.
Slow inhale
You then visualize this heated, brilliant bliss, the realized crown chakra, descending into the heart which it inflames with compassion.
Slow exhale
You then breathe this compassion out through the body, charging it with awareness (chi), out into the consciousness of all beings in the universe.
This elaborate routine with each chakra is neither magical nor a one time thing. It is a tool so alien to the Western mind that it takes years to really understand what one is doing. I have been working with it for forty years. One has to become very adept, first at doing the visualizations and the breathing, then learning how to use this experience as a “lens” for observing the corresponding subtlety of bodily awareness, then as a tool for branding the intelligence with primordial bodily awareness, which produces a unification by which the totality of consciousness can be realized. This is true contemplation.
Therefore to become “an adept” the routine has to be practiced under the guidance of an accomplished proficient, through subtle trial and error, often over many repetitions, even many years. With increasing proficiency in the use of the technique, it becomes a genuine pattern of contemplation. It is this genuine contemplation which clarifies consciousness and gradually brings about gnosis.
The Systematic Transformation of the Chakras into Gnosis
Now on the model of breath and visioning just described let us go through the seven chakras, imagining each as a sun that radiates its own aspect of consciousness.
The first three chakras bring the bodily consciousness up into the mind. The last three bring the mental consciousness down into the bodily consciousness. They meet in the heart which is the center of being. In this way the mind and body consciousness rediscovers its preseparated unity.
The routine of the first three chakras brings illuminated body consciousness up into integration with the mind.
The first chakra, imagined as a pink sun located in the perineum, radiates enthusiasm and connection and furtherance of life. When expressed through imagination, it becomes our sexual fascination and obsession with objects in the world.
Experienced as chi on the inhale, it is withdrawn into its source in the perineum and, as a form of chi, experienced as pure vitality heated into concentrated life-positive force. With the outbreath it is brought up through the spine to the body center where it is experienced as the sense and instinct of moderation and balance, then up to the heart where it recognizes its own innate knowledge of the given or unconditional way of life as the instinct of what becomes known in Buddhism as “the middle way.” Then into the mind infusing it with the value of pure vital energy, life as ground wisdom, or dharma. On the inhale this fundamental enthusiasm rises to the violet crown sun exploding into the fundamental blissful nature of consciousness itself. When this fundamental life enthusiasm and wisdom descends into the heart it recognizes its ground as the way of life itself, which breathed out into the consciousness shared with all sensate beings becomes pure life empathy and oneness, that is indubitable compassion for all things alive. This results in the experience of oneness.
2. The second chakra is the red gold sun in the body center. It radiates chi consciousness of the physical structure of the body, balance and the will of survival. When expressed through imagination, it becomes physical awareness and the drive of all commitment.
Inhaling fire into the spine and focusing into the body center, the red-gold sun becomes hot and luminous with the fundamental sense of body structure and survival (hara). Passing through the heart chakra on the exhale, it becomes a sense of fortitude, of intrinsic justice, the path to the fruition of harmony. As it rises and heats the mind chakra it is experienced as will, commitment, definitive priority of life for self, loved ones, and species, and the intelligence of accommodation and organization. Inhaling, it shoots out into the crown chakra experienced as the gnosis of the good as the center of existence. Exhaling, it is brought down again into the heart, radiating as the wisdom of being producing foundational love, which is compassion.
3 The third chakra, the yellow sun at the solar plexus is the sense of physical reality. When projected into the imagination it becomes “isness” or factuality, the common structure of the physical body and world reality to which all intelligence of the outer world refers.
Inhaling fire into the spinal channel the yellow sun heats up and in the body center radiates chi as a sense of the common structure of physical and world reality. Reaching the heart it becomes a sense for conducting the self in this reality common to others, an empathetic sense of ones own needs among the needs or others, which produces temperance. Rising to the mind it brands intelligence with clarity about shared reality, brotherhood, truthfulness. Shooting out the top of the head the chi heat becomes the gnosis of the peace of the union of spiritual and physical reality. Brought back down into the heart it radiates into the common human world emptiness experienced as clarity in the common world.
4. The fourth chakra is the green sun at the heart level shining forth care, emotion and morality. When projected into mind it becomes the cares of our subjective world and the integrity of morality. This is the center of the chakras and the sun in which mind and body reunite in the realization of original unity.
Inhaling fire into the spinal channel, the green sun heats up, filling the spinal channel with green fire. On the exhale, the green body center radiates the awareness of all humans as one and the same consciousness, the knowing of which is omniscience. As the fire reaches the heart it is experienced as limitless tolerance and the capacity for forgiveness. Rising to the mind it becomes the commonality of all human hearts, sociable empathy, in its pure form, the omniscience which is the intelligence of “understanding”. Shooting out the top of the head the chi heat becomes the gnosis of the transcendental, the one consciousness that we all are. Brought back down into the heart this is the truth of compassion, the ground of all morality.
As the lower three chakras bring the wisdom of chi up into the mind, so the higher three bring the mind down into the body. This is the second phase of the integration process.
5. The fifth chakra at the nape of the neck is the intuition that refers back to the common structure of world reality, the isness of actuality, and construes its truth in terms of the common human heart.
Inhaling fire into the spinal channel, the light blue sun heats up and shines forth in the body center as chi in the sense of the strength of the wisdom of compassion. Rising to the heart with the exhale, this chi becomes realization of self which produces the essential prudence that is appropriate in the community of humankind. Rising to the intelligence it modifies the understanding of balance and responsibility, confidence in ones own practical wisdom and respect for all, the intuitive clarity of the archetypal pilgrim path, or dharma. Shooting out into the crown the chi becomes the gnosis of the nature of self and its path. Brought back down into the heart it radiates the non-conceptual richness which is true knowing.
6. The sixth chakra at the center of the brain is the intellectual center which refers back to the body center, the source of chi, the structure of life and the adaptation necessary for survival and well being.
Inhaling fire into the spine and focusing into the mind center, it becomes hot and luminous and shines forth in the body center as truth. Rising to the heart, this chi generates serenity and loyalty to truth. Returning to the mind, reinforced with the chi, the intellect corresponds now to dharma, the beauty of all being, and wisdom as truth without position. Shooting out into the crown the chi becomes the gnosis of liberation, which is freedom from all false attachment and posture. Brought back down into the heart it radiates goodness and the sense of perfection.
7. The seventh chakra at the crown of the head represents the entire spine as the whole of consciousness, the experience of which becomes the gnosis of wholeness, all consciousness.
Inhaling fire into the spine and focusing into the violet sun at the crown it becomes hot and luminous, sending violet flames into the spine. As it focuses into the body center the violet sun shines forth as divine love which encompasses all. Moving up into the heart it shines forth as goodness and into the mind it becomes immovable, solid wisdom. At the crown it becomes the gnosis of pure diamond consciousness, the almighty. Brought back down into the heart this bliss is experienced as ground consciousness radiating light and silent compassion into all humanity as its ground consciousness.
Leonardo’s Vetruvian Man with Chakras
The Peace of the Great Truth
At the end of what may be a very laborious process, the adept contemplator realizes that this luminous state of being is in fact the beginning, that which is and always has been present. The primordial given state of consciousness, realized, becomes the enlightened state. The Garden becomes the Kingdom, which is experienced as the true and absolute home of our being. This is ultimate well-being. The addictions of the body lose their hold. There is no longer any conflict between mind and body. There is no question as to the existence of God. Thus all spiritual and mental tension is released, resulting in a profound, inconceivable relaxation which the Upanishads calls, “the peace which passeth all understanding”.
RADICAL CHRISTIANITY
WHAT IF JESUS NEVER EXISTED?
MARCH 9, 2009 ADMIN
The new atheism assaults the excesses of religious zeal, which in our time have become a destructive force. In its convincing proof that Jesus never existed and its gleeful rush towards liberation, however, the new atheism overlooks entirely the existential root of Christianity, which is truer than the facts.
The Contents of This Essay
1. Did Jesus Exist?
The New Information Questioning and Denying His Existence.
How and Why Does It Matter?
Historical Fact as the Criterion of Truth
Does It Really Matter?
2. Does Christ Really Exist?
Comprehending the Knower
Psychology and Ontology
Contemplation
Hidden Factors: Gnosis
1. Mythic Symbolism and Its Use in Faith
2. The Experience of Death and Resurrection
3. The Message in the New Testament
The Truth of Love, the Divine State of Compassion
3. Jesus Christ: A Likely Story
4. The Value of Anti-Religious Thought
What if Jesus Never Existed? In a recent documentary, The God Who Was Not There, former fundamentalist, Brian Flemming, starts out by reminding us that the folks who expect us to believe the truth of Jesus Christ were the same folks that enforced the ‘truth’ that the sun revolves around the earth by putting to death anyone who suggested that the earth revolves around the sun. This disposition towards truth creates deep distrust. In the name of faith, belief co-opts fact. The world is becoming all too aware of this sleight of hand. I have heard the traditional holiday greetings given as “Merry Hoodwink” and Easter as “Happy Hogwash.”
Flemming’s documentary and another which appeared subsequently, called Zeitgeist, as well as books and websites gather evidence that the Biblical story of Jesus Christ was no more than the equivalent of an “urban legend” woven together of mythic themes current in first century Mediterranean culture.
The case against Jesus contributes to a wave of anti-religious thinking, known as “anti-theism” or “the new atheism” that is growing in importance and gaining louder and louder voices. Bill Maher’s film, Religulous, adds to this chorus. They all have an important message. In their zealotry Christians (and other theists) are deluded into forms of behavior that are dysfunctional in the twenty first century, as is all fundamentalism, and are distracted from seeing the manipulation of power in history hidden behind their gentle man of Galilee.
In their attack on the “religulous,” all the films and sites present very convincing evidence that Christian believers have little or nothing upon which to base their faith.
1. Did Jesus Exist?
History is the contemporary, scientifically oriented study of the past. By any of its criteria, the story of Jesus Christ cannot be said to have the same historical verisimilitude as, say, the accounts of Caesar Augustus. There were Roman historians of the time who recorded events after the crucifixion. Josephus, who writes of the early Christian community in Jerusalem in the first century AD, refers to “Jesus who was called Messiah.” (Antiquities of the Jews, XX: 9, para. 200) In about 115 AD Tacitus the Roman Historian identifies the leader of a new cult: “Christ, from whom they derive their name, was condemned to death by the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius.” (Annals. XV: 44) Scholars regard these as more or less historically accurate by modern standards, but these ancients only make reference to such a person. There are no recorded historical facts about his life. All accounts that believers rely upon were generated by faithful followers many years after Jesus’ death, hardly the objective and dispassionate observers modern historians rely upon for our understanding of the past. Indeed, the history of the Bible, now well established through careful scholarship, presents an interesting picture.
Let us look more closely at the evidence. The first factor proceeds from this problematic lack of contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life, even by his followers. Using many ingenious techniques, contemporary scholars have put together a chronology of events, including the creation of the Bible itself, in the first century. Jesus purportedly departed the earth in 33 AD, but the earliest gospels, the only documents that relate the events of Jesus’ life, were not written until at least fifty years later. Paul, who began his letters soon after the demise of Jesus and wrote them before the composition of the gospels, never mentions any of the events of Jesus’ life other than the crucifixion and resurrection. The first account to appear, The Gospel of Mark, was not written until the eighties. Moreover, the author was not writing history, but a spiritual message whose elements were taken liberally from the folklore that gathered around Jesus’ followers.
This “folklore” is the second factor. The miraculous aspects of the story of Jesus Christ include the following: the immaculate conception, the star at the birth, the slaying of the innocents, the brilliant childhood, the many miracles performed, as well as the crucifixion and resurrection. These are the staples of Christian belief, but they are identical to the stories of other heroes of Hellenistic and Roman mythologies of the time. Each theme appears in the stories of deities predating or contemporary with early Christianity: Mithros, Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Tamuz and Dionysos, to name just a few. In a book called The Hero, Lord Raglan took the myth of Oedipus as a standard and divided it into twenty-two elements. Then he scored each story of a divine hero current in the Hellenistic period, including those mentioned above. Of the heroes studied, Jesus ranked third highest, after Theseus and Oedipus, with nineteen out of the twenty-two elements in common with the myth of Oedipus. It takes an act of intellectual violence to say that either these other heroes did not exist or that they are copies of Christian themes, which is absurd because they all predate the gospels. These themes were the conventions of the divine heroes of the time. They were urban legends, which, just as the urban legends of our own time, bear no responsibility to fact or historical truth.
There are numerous other factors, easily proven through history or anthropology that effectively invalidate the historical verisimilitude of the story of Jesus. Therefore from the point of view of objective history it is just as likely that Jesus did not exist as that he did. The story upon which Christian faith is based is nothing but a likely story.
There is something gleeful about these debunking accounts, something of naughty children getting the better of the grownups. On the adult side, they purport to be liberating, in the same way that Galileo was freeing science from belief.
How and Why Does It Matter?
Christian believers base their faith on the historical facticity of Jesus. His miraculous provenance, nature, and resurrection, retold in the events of the New Testament, form the basis of their faith. The truth of his historical existence is the justification upon which the Christian Religion is based. There are dark rumors that actual contravening evidence exists deep in the forbidden vaults of the Vatican, hidden away forever, because such indisputable evidence would eliminate the very foundations of the church. I
f somewhere along the line, someone were able to prove that the fundamentals of Christian faith based in historical truth were in fact false, it would eliminate the authority of the church and throw the community of believers into a turmoil that might be catastrophic to Western Civilization. There are several works of fiction that depict such an eventuality.
Historical Fact as the Criteria of Truth
In fact this campaign to validate the historical existence of Jesus Christ has been active for the last two centuries. Attempts to use historical rather than traditional religious methods to construct a verifiable biography of Jesus began in the 18th century with Hermann Samuel Reimarus, up to William Wrede and Albert Schweitzer in the 19th century. Although Schweitzer was among the greatest contributors to this quest, he also ended by noting very astutely how each scholar’s version of Jesus seemed little more than an idealized autobiography of the scholar himself! A later generation of scholars emphasized the “constraints of history,” so that despite uncertainties, there were historical data that were usable. Yet another generation tended to focus on the early textual layers of the New Testament for data to reconstruct a biography for the historical Jesus. The theme of the existence of Jesus has also been dealt with in fiction. Dostoevsky’s famous story, The Grand Inquisitor, shows that the church has its own agenda for keeping moral and spiritual order, which has nothing to do with Jesus or his historical existence.
The fact is that religion blurs the line between fact and belief. “Sinners go to hell.” is different from “There are white corpuscles in the blood.” But not for believers. This was the issue with Copernicus and the Roman Church. The campaign against Christian beliefs began with the coming of reason as the criterion of truth over faith in the 18th century. It gathered force with the development of science, with its criteria for empirical truth, and its transference of these criteria onto the systematic study of the past, which we understand as history. History is the science of the past. It deals in facts. These criteria came into being over the last two hundred and fifty years and barely existed before that time.
It is also important to understand that this “historical consciousness,” understanding history as past facts, is not a given of human civilization. Nor is it a universal criterion of truth. It did not exist in Asia. Even today, what non-westernized Asians understand to be “history” is what we call mythology. History is the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the great Indian epics. Only Westernized Asians worry about anything else. This is undoubtedly closer to the mentality of Mediterranean civilization at the time the New Testament was written.
In reaction to these challenges over the last two centuries Christian believers, who also live in this time of historical consciousness, fiercely defend the historical veracity of the Bible as the legitimate basis of their social and political views. Many find this oppressive. The relish with which the new atheism refutes these accounts expresses a reaction against societal pressure to believe something that your basic intelligence suspects to be factually false, as was the case during the time when faith was based on the earth as the center of the universe.
It seems to me that it is most likely that an extraordinary person such as Jesus did exist, but that the mythology that grew up around him after his death fits not historical actuality, but the heroic themes predominant at the time in the Middle East. In their efforts to convey a “spiritual truth” the authors of the gospels tended to make the accounts of his life a kind of composite of all the current heroes and gods. This is entirely possible, indeed probable, and with understanding, completely excusable.
Does It Really Matter?
Let us go to a deeper question. Suppose it were possible to prove that the historical Jesus did not exist. For those whose faith is based on the historical truth of the miraculous events of the Bible this would be disastrous. For those who set forward this contravening evidence, it is a great relief, as when the Copernican universe was finally accepted and science was freed from its shackles.
But is there a baby here that is getting thrown out with the baptismal water?
That water may be the belief in the historical truth of Jesus, which has been the kingpin of Christian entitlement in the world — to theocracy, religious dictatorship, ideological crusades, and the colonial right to overwhelm and eradicate other cultures. This same pernicious entitlement supports the tendency of Christian fundamentalism to contradict other fundamentalists, feeding a clash of unilateralist belief systems that is pulling the world apart.
But what is the baby?
2. Does Christ Really Exist?
The real question is; what kind of truth do we find in the New Testament? What is the vaguely acknowledged “spiritual message” that the authors of the gospels and indeed Paul were seeking to convey? Therefore, what is the real basis of Christian truth? Who is Christ?
It is important to understand that if Jesus of Nazareth did exist, he was a man and a teacher. Christ is the Greek term conferred upon him subsequently to designate the divine state of being which he is believed to have embodied. This state is the fundamental human potential, hence “divine”. This was the teaching.
What is experienced as the truth of Christ is so distant from any kind of intellectually generated understanding or factual account that, in our day and age when these things have primary value, it can only be called “the mystery”.
We know nothing of mystery. We have very crude conceptual language to attempt to describe what the truth behind the mystery would be. The strength of our current knowledge centers on scientific and historical fact, but our great weakness as a culture is our lack of understanding of the fundamental nature of consciousness. This is the real paucity of our time and the reason that Christians have displaced their justification for faith onto historical and scientific forms of knowledge. We know the known; we are in fact obsessed with the known: but we are deeply ignorant of the knower. The Christian truth, as is the truth of all great religion, is in the understanding of the knower.
Comprehending the Knower
To understand the knower is the key to the mystery. While the empirical scientific model for the study of objective phenomena has dominated the Western intellect in the last three centuries, there has been a lesser tendency to look into the nature of the knower, primarily in psychology, ontology and to some extent, in anthropology.
Psychology suffers from the fact that it seeks to treat the fundamental and universal consciousness or “psyche” as an object of scientific study. Therefore experimental psychology, with its empirical orthodoxy, is a very clunky endeavor indeed, a blunt instrument for understanding the knower, and useless in comprehending the lived subtleties of existence. In the case of clinical experience and theory, psychotherapy has yielded productive methods for treating pathologies. In the work of C.G. Jung and his followers, there is penetrating insight into the way that myth and dream symbolism originate and function. This has been supported by the very sympathetic approach to universal psychology available through the anthropological study of other cultures and cross-cultural phenomena.
Ontology, which questions the suppositions of our suppositions about what- is, or Being, has been the deepest of all studies in the West, but as it reached closer t
o the subtle truths of the knower, it became so obscure that it is almost incomprehensible, as anyone who has attempted to read the works of Martin Heidegger can attest. The enquiry into the fundamental nature of Being, or Foundational Ontology, started with Edmund Husserl and his development of phenomenology, which initiated a systematic approach to a vital skill utterly lost to the West, rooted as it has become, in empiricism. Taking the cue from phenomenology, Heidegger ultimately attempted to reinstate the place of direct observation of consciousness, or contemplation as the true path towards an authentic understanding of the nature of Being. Empiricism is direct experience and objective evaluation of the known: contemplation is direct experience and objective evaluation of the knower.
The greatest master of contemplation was Gautam Buddha. In the last fifty years, the increasingly sophisticated understanding of the contemplative traditions of Asia and the esoteric traditions in the West has begun to free up westerners from the myopia of empirical thinking, to allow them to understand the nature of contemplation, and finally to actually practice it. As practice proceeds, the nature of the knower begins to reveal itself and the mystery of Christ becomes genuinely available once again.
The understanding of the functioning of the psyche obviates the need to engage in the misguided and losing battle for the historical veracity of Jesus. But contemplation is even more deep and appropriate to resolving the issues surrounding the historical validity of Jesus as a justification of faith. The practice of contemplation is observing consciousness itself. There are different levels: direct observing in a deep state of concentration, such as perfected in the Zen Buddhist tradition; using divine imagery systematically as a lens through which to comprehend consciousness, as in deity yoga; using the focus and study of mythical imagery to realize the nature of consciousness, as in faith; to falling in love with images, as in devotion.
In the West, however, intellectual and academic endeavor encourages only factual understanding of the Bible and Christianity, and also a possible theoretical understanding of the truth of Christ. This intellectual understanding does not necessarily lead to the experience of Christ, the state which alone is the ultimate truth of Christ. In the great poems of spiritual truth, the Upanishads, we find a summary evaluation of such theoretical pursuit: “Those who are in ignorance are in darkness, but those who think they know are in greater darkness still.”
Hidden Factors: Gnosis
But let us back up to the controversy surrounding the existence of Christ. In the debunking books and films, there are hidden factors in the mystery overlooked in the blindness of our time. Here are the clues and the questions they raise:
1. That the New Testament is full of mythic symbolism. What is mythic symbolism?
2. The fact that the death and resurrection were not the facts but the expression of Paul’s experience. What was the nature of this experience?
3. “Mark was writing a spiritual message.” What was the message expressed by the events of Jesus’ life as related in the New Testament?
1. Mythic Symbolism and its Use in Faith
With the anthropological studies of the Middle East, which show that these themes are to be found as leitmotifs among the heroes of the various religions, we are halfway there. Even more convincing is the fact that all great religious heroes of the world are described in similar ways.
Myth has two meanings. The common meaning, and that of the debunkers, is basically, “made up and factually untrue”. In this sense, to call the themes and events of Jesus’ life mythical means to dismiss them out of hand as mere inventions masquerading as facts. The second meaning of myth is more useful: imagery used to express and evoke an otherwise inexpressible psychological or spiritual truth.
The genius of the human psyche is its capacity to express itself in symbols. This is dream imagery. As anyone who has undergone serious dream analysis in psychotherapy knows, at any one moment the psyche has the capacity to express its gestalt or fundamental circumstance in symbolic form. This is not an intellectual act, as is the creation of a metaphor: rather, it is the generation of a truth that is not factual, but constitutive of present psychological truth. Modern psychotherapists generally understand that psychological well-being has to do with the capacity to bring one’s dream into self-understanding. Myth is collective dream and functions in the same way on a cultural level as dream on an individual level. Jung and Campbell and their many followers have shown this. To dismiss myth as non-factual is deeply wounding to our well-being. Tending with awareness to our dream and the mythology of our culture are essential to optimal existence.
The imagery of Christian symbolism refers to a state of self-understanding or integral unity that is called gnosis. Gnosis is basically esoteric in our culture, because it is not the knowledge of the known as is scientific and empirical knowledge, but what comes to be understood through the contemplation of the knower.
To say that the truth of Christ is ‘merely a state’ may seem an enormous comedown, compared to the epochal and miraculous events recounted in the New Testament and celebrated by Christians for centuries. But it is far more radical, intimate, and fundamental. This description as a ‘state’ reflects the words attributed to Jesus, that the kingdom of God is within. Before we live in the world, we live in consciousness. Before we live in a circumstance, a set of facts that we call the reality of the world, we live in states of being, either going upwards towards life affirmation or going downwards towards dissolution. Living from the state of gnosis is optional consciousness. All the promises of the kingdom are figuratively present. With gnosis, in the quiet depths of your being, you know who you are, why you are here, and where you are going.
That which the story of Jesus Christ was shaped to convey DOES exist, is truer than the facts, and is actually the very structure of existence. Gnosis is the truth beyond the facts and far more fundamental, and once experienced and assimilated, entirely eliminates the futile chase after historical verisimilitude.
Myth is the vehicle of gnosis, the truth of consciousness. Only by understanding the nature of myth can one understand the true nature of faith, the most productive form of contemplation in the Christian tradition. Faith is not a hardened conviction that contrary to any evidence, beliefs are facts to be imposed on the world. This is the will to power of the intellect. Faith is rather a devoted and receptive tending to the imagery of the Christ story by entering a deep study of the Bible. This use of Biblical myth was the contemplative method set forth by St Francis.
Let us take the Immaculate Conception, both as an example of “tending myth” and demonstrating the way faith works. The Virgin is chosen by God to conceive Christ through the Holy Spirit. Existentially speaking, the Virgin is the central character in faith. Forget whether she was historically a virgin or actually seeded by the Holy Spirit, and enter into a devoted and receptive awareness of “who” she is. Her purity and innocence elegantly express the simple and open disposition, which alone is capable of bearin
g the child of gnosis. In this sense she is the only one capable of bearing Christ, she is “chosen”. The chosen is the heart of contemplation, the polar opposite of calculation or theorizing. She is an openness of heart on the part of the faithful, as opposed to a willful focus on the believed. She is the opposite of the greed for power and intellectual computation. This disposition of sublime receptivity to how things show themselves is the fundamental attitude of contemplation and phenomenology, absolutely essential to their practice.
The active element in the Conception is the Holy Spirit, the aspect of gnosis, which is an innate guide. In the way of faith you so concentrate on the Virgin, that her disposition begins to overtake your way of being. If with this attitude, you contemplate each event and character of the New Testament, the meaning comes clear. As the meaning reveals itself, gnosis grows within, comes to term and is born. To become the Virgin through your faith, you set up the circumstance by which the Holy Spirit can conceive gnosis within you. Once the virginal aspect of your intellectual will opens to it with the disposition of the Virgin Mary, it guides. Together with the deep receptivity of the Virgin, the Holy Spirit conceives and gives birth to the child of gnosis. This is the authentic process of faith.
2. The Death and Resurrection Were the Expression of Paul’s Experience.
Perhaps the most potent of all Biblical images is the death and resurrection.
No one doubts that Paul existed and that he lived at the time of Jesus, because his letters are full of actual accounting and communication. He personally interacted with many who had known Jesus. If Jesus performed so many miracles, how could it be that Paul’s letters never recount any of the miraculous events of Jesus’ life? But Paul was very aware of the crucifixion and purported resurrection, because up until his illumination on the road to Damascus, Paul (then Saul) was a government official who was dedicated to eliminating the Christian heresy. Ironically, the fact that he was initially against the believers in the Resurrection may be the closest thing there is to valid contemporary evidence that Jesus existed. But more important is the question as to the nature of Paul’s experience.
Under certain circumstances, gnosis overwhelms the psyche in such a way as to alter entirely one’s self-understanding. What happened to Saul is called a reaction formation. He was so fixated on one extreme position, that of denying the resurrection and eliminating its believers, that the opposite extreme completely overtook him and he had the experience of the resurrection by which he became Paul.
What Paul experienced, and spent the rest of his life urging upon the world, is the fact that the sudden arrival of gnosis, which he called the resurrection, creates a unique and distinct perspective that is authentic to the true nature of being. Moreover, it is not just a passive reservoir of correct information, but is dynamic in its own right. In the East one works toward enlightenment to enter the Light, but Paul’s experience demonstrates that the Light can also most forcefully make itself known, coming with blinding intensity and completely transforming ones being. This overwhelming apotheosis of gnosis, often called Grace, is the existential fact of Christianity.
The result of this grace could be described as Love upon understanding, the existential experience of which we are calling gnosis. What we call “love” is generally understood as a feeling or emotion, but Love is a substratum of our being, like the air. In gnosis the self-identity reverts to this substratum and becomes it. The result of gnosis is the state of Divine Compassion, the truth of Love.
What is this Love? What the romantics and the pop songs call love is merely an echo, a clue. Heidegger showed how the fundamental disposition of consciousness is attraction, or care. Because our consciousness is grounded primordially in care, it surfaces in all our experiences of love to which we attribute particular significance, for instance in the way we value romance or friendship. In gnosis care becomes transformed from an underlying disposition to an overt and prevailing force. For this reason Love, the basis of human existence, is a collective force, like a positive virus to which the rebellious human spirit is essentially vulnerable. This Love is the “sword” of Christ, because in its presence, the significance of everything else evaporates.
When Love becomes this basic state, it becomes virtue. When Jesus speaks of fulfilling the Law, what he means is that the Love upon gnosis obviates the laws of civilized behavior, morality and ethics. Gnosis generates virtue — compassion, patience, forgiveness, prudence, and internal balance — not as constraints that must be enforced through the authority of the church or the self-discipline of Christian morality, but as intuitively and existentially imperative. The gnostic becomes intrinsically virtuous and thus has no need of the constraints of moral law.
Fundamental Love, or compassion, makes its universal appearance via religion. Evoked and supported through authentic religion, the truth of Love has the power to gather itself and assert itself into human culture. This is what has happened in the case of each of the great religions. Love through understanding arrives, often via one gifted human being, and spreads until it becomes the base value of a culture. However, it is almost universally the fate of religions that unloving forces, primarily the greed for power, a form of insanity, co-opts the original inspiration and exploits the religion to its own purposes and ends. This is what happened when Rome took over the Christian Church, and the West has been living out the resulting contradictions ever since.
It is always incumbent upon the people of the culture, indeed each individual, to discriminate through the mendacity perpetrated by religious authorities and conditioned into their own reality to find the kernal of the true, the gnosis in the religious mythology. This is why authentic gnostics are always moved to reform the church.
Within each religion, behind its façade of beliefs and symbologies, is a methodology. If we have the discernment to see this methodology and follow it, we are provided with a means to achieve gnosis. If we have an understanding of this truth, the real nature of Christ, the historical facticity of Jesus becomes a non-issue, an irrelevant distraction. It does not really matter.
(For more on gnosis, see the essay The Heart of the Matter)
3. Jesus: A Likely Story
Now that we have established that the historical facticity of biblical events is irrelevant to the true nature of the living Christ, let us revisit the original question: Did Jesus Christ exist?
Here is a likely story. Probably a remarkable person named Jesus existed and became a great teacher. The story of Paul and the situation he was in, of persecuting members of a cult who followed a recently executed prophet, indicates to me that such a teacher did exist. But he was certainly never a Christian, rather one of those authentic mystics who reformed the “church” of his time.
He lived in a period, not unlike our own, of great spiritual diffusion, growing up as he did at a nexus of the Roman and Hellenistic cultures near the Silk Road that led to the East. As a Jew he was surrounded by elders of a reactionary culture that was deeply threatened by this spiritual diffusion and the authority of Rome. In reaction, the
Jewish authorities were very tight-minded, in a word, fundamentalists.
What was a brilliant Jew of his time to do? In the years from the time he was twelve to the time he was thirty, the “missing” years of his life of which there are no accounts, it is most likely that he traveled East, out of the oppressive influence of Semitic legalism and Roman authority into the world influenced by India. At this time the star of Buddhism was reaching its zenith in India. Not far down the silken route he would have taken was one of the greatest and most massive of all Buddhist universities, Nalanda. In the environment illuminated by this star his spiritual genius was attracted to the pragmatic teaching of budhi, the state of divine compassion upon enlightenment as the ultimate human achievement. Becoming enlightened, he assimilated and clarified the truth of gnosis and, journeying home, brought this illumination of divine Love into the Semitic world under the domination of Rome.
The power of the Love he taught was so great that it transcended Judaism, but also, as Jesus realized, “fulfilled” it. This constituted a fundamental threat to all the local structures of power. The teaching of the achievement of divine Love was too revolutionary for the Semitic establishment, who were trying to survive by collaborating with Rome. Its essential freedom stirred things up and attracted the zealots who awaited a “messiah”, a warrior whose sword would deliver the Jews from the captivity of Rome. But Jesus’ serene declaration was that only divine compassion would transcend the power of Rome and eventually undermine it. In time these rebel Jews grew impatient with this teaching of non-violence. A political collusion between the disappointed rebels and the fundamentalists of Jewish tradition took place, and Jesus was sold out to Rome in the person of the local governor, who, apparently against his better judgment, acceded to the demands arising out of this local disruption to allow the man to be sentenced to death. It is also likely that he was crucified. This became a primordial image, for all time, of a fundamental existential truth; how the lust for power overwhelms divine Love.
The horrible end of Jesus was utterly traumatic to his followers and those who believed in him. Some among them that had completely internalized his teaching of Love grew enflamed by it. This was a figurative resurrection, which over the course of almost a century, melded together with the divine resurrection themes current in Hellenistic culture, themes which in their own heyday had mythically expressed the truth of divine Love. Over 200 years this mythology overtook the “facts”. Remember, no one cared about facts anyway.
In my view, the Gnostics, who used the story of Jesus to engender and clarify the state of gnosis, had it right. As their gospels, recently recovered from their hiding places in the earth, clearly demonstrate, they were small communities dedicated to achieving, developing and promulgating this state. But gnosis is the very essence of freedom, which was (and remains) antithetical to any centralized organization such as the Roman Empire or Catholic Church. This is why the separation of church and state in the eighteenth century was such an important step in cultural evolution.
In the fourth century, the wave of Christian Love grew so attractive that the Roman Empire, which for 300 years had been trying to wipe out Christianity, shifted its policy to “conquer” it by assimilating it. Finally, under Constantine, the Empire overtook it and made it over into its own image. In the Apostles Creed those elements of the Christian mythology and writing that reinforced the centralized power of the church became doctrine, and the rest, that which led to the freedom of gnosis, was cruelly and preemptively dispatched along with all traces of classical Hellenistic culture and wisdom. Gnosis and the scriptural gospels that presented and promoted the living Christ were hidden away in the earth, deep in the mystery. Thus was born the catholic (universal) Church, and Europe plunged into the Dark Ages.
But the Dark Ages were also the age of faith. And faith, rightly practiced, can be the flintstone of gnosis. Gnosis constantly reasserted itself in the experiences of the Christian mystics, often suppressed by the church and its preoccupation with power. When periodically the power madness of the church became overwhelming, persons achieving gnosis would seek to reform it, culminating in the protestant revolt and the Reformation. But these too, perhaps inspired by the powerful and refreshing realization of divine Love, nevertheless succumbed in the same way to the greed for power and control.
I believe this to be the real history of Jesus Christ.
4. The Value of Anti-Religious Thought
The confiscation of the truth of Christ into the authoritative structure of the Roman Empire gave this gentle guidance the entitlement of power that has been exploited for centuries as a way of dominating and controlling. The power aspects of Christianity have played a part in all the violence throughout Western history, what we could call the anti-Christ in all religions: ignorance, superstition, bigotry, judgment, force, militancy, violence in the name of God.
The power madness in authoritative religion may finally have reaped its just rewards. The world has witnessed the use of Christianity to fuel the disastrous policies of the Bush Administration and the use of Islam to fuel the militant fundamentalism raging in the rest of the world into a clash resonant of the medieval crusades. The policies have hastened dramatically the process of deterioration of world peace and well-being.
The increasing atheism represents a legitimate rebellion against the inauthenticity of Christian belief and the excesses of power and greed that have thrived in its name. We can surely do without these, and anything that purges them at their roots is of greatest value.
Perhaps the real challenge for Christians is to welcome these critiques, purge themselves of the inauthentic elements and return to the spiritual roots of Love through understanding. This is radical. It will be up to those who experience the gnosis of the living Christ to re-form the religion and cast away its illusions.
Throw out the bathwater, but rediscover, indeed become, the babe.