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Christianity, Gnostics and Rosicrucians

Posted July 12th, 2011 by Greg Mayers

Modern people in the first world cultures have a suspicion, it seems to me, that somebody is hiding something really important from them. This is especially true when it comes to religion. The "suspicion" expresses itself in two ways, that I can tell. One is that the established religions, which in the West means Christianity mostly, are trying to pull the wool over their eyes. So this group sets out on a journey to unmask these magicians. The other way the "suspicion" expresses itself is that Christianity is hiding something from them. This group is like a child who sees an adult put something in one hand, then place both hands behind his back, then bring both hands out in front of the child. The child gets one choice, but doesn't know which hand, if either does, holds the hidden treasure.

As far as the first group is concerned, there is nothing to do for them. Doubt is their divine guide; indeed it is their god. They will serve him well and he will continue to bless them with uncertainty. The second group is a different story. Strangely enough their instinct that something about Christianity is hidden from them, is smack on the mark. But, alas, they too often look at the wrong hand for what they suspect is hidden. They think that the institution of Christianity suppressed that hidden something. It was the Gnostics who had the real inside story, and if we could only recover what they taught we'd also have the inside story. Or, it was the Rosicrucians, or some other historically marginalized Christian sect who supposedly possessed the real jewels of Christianity.

One of the most astonishing historical facts about Christianity is that the Christians of the Roman empire and the Christians of the Persian empire (and beyond into Indian) end up with the same texts as their sacred scriptures. One would think that they must have conspiratorially collaborated in settling on these texts. Except that historically they could not have done that. Their was an iron curtain between the Roman and Persian empires, which were at constant war with each other. Christians in the Persian empire never gained the political status they did in the Roman empire. They were always on the margins, subject to suspicions about their loyalties to Persian kings. As a result they were anxious to prove their loyalty for their own safety's sake by staying away from the Roman Christians. Secondly, the Roman Christians, probably due to mistranslations of documents between Greek and Aramaic, anathematized the Persian Christians. The Roman and Persian Christian were as much at odds with each other as were the Roman and Persion empires. The result of these two historical conditions is that the two groups of Christians were separated for 700 years developing in their own ways, during which time both settled on the texts of the Christian scriptures without knowledge of what the other was doing. Yet they come up with the same texts as sacred scripture? How does one explain that historical anomaly?

Both sides start from Jerusalem followers of Jesus, known as "the people of the way". Both had various interpretations of the historical Jesus to contend with (Gnostics, Manicheans, etc. - historians count around 23 separate interpretations in the early centuries of the meaning of Jesus' life and teachings) yet separately they did not endorse these interpretations, which came to be known as heresies, from the Greek word meaning "a faction," something that is not whole. They both separately reject the factions' writings and separately accept the same texts as authentic Christian witness! Something more than chance or coincidence is at work here. The least that we can conclude from this fact illuminated by modern historical scholarship is that we ought to take the texts of the Christian scriptures seriously. They bear the validity not only of time, but of two separate and great cultural settings. (It is a shame how little we know of Persian Christianity and its thousand year great achievements which rivaled that of the West. Muslim fanatics today are killing off the final remnants of that tradition in Iraq.)

What does this have to do with those who feel that institutional Christianity is hiding something from them? Well, for one thing they are looking for a special knowledge to unearth what they think are the secrets in Christianity, just as the factions in Christianity were doing 1500 years ago and all the way up to the present. This is especially true of the Integral community that embraces a new gnosticism for Christianity, which turns out being the old gnosticism in modern garb. No one can doubt Wilber's great talent as a synthezier and interpreter of that impressive Indian tradition known as the Vedas and its philosophical children. What Wilber accomplishes is truly impressive. He takes ancient texts that are mostly inaccessible to modern readers and lets those texts interpret him. Then he writes about his discovers in ways modern readers can grasp, at least intellectually, while insisting that an intellectual understanding falls far short of reaching the riches of this tradition. His methodology is noteworthy for its order, and his insistence on that order. First, he lets the orginal texts interpret him, then he writes about what that interpretation revealed to him about himself at the deepest levels. But he goes further. He warns that using his writings to interpret the tradition cannot yield the tradition's treasure. In other words, the process does not work in reverse. One cannot gain a transformation by analysing and interpreting the tradition. One can only gain a transformation by letting the tradition work on and in you - interpreting you.

But then Wilber makes a mistake, I believe out of a deep compassion. He applies his methodology to the Christian tradition, but only to a part of the Christian tradition; and without doing what he did with the Vedic tradition: let the Christian texts interpret him, which is fatal to his attempt. The part of the Christian tradition that he accepts is what he names as the esoteric or mystical version, which he defines narrowly according to Vedic criteria. The point is not that there isn't a mystical strain in Christianity similar to the Vedic tradition. The point is that taking only that strain as representative of real Christianity is truncating the Christian witness and thus distorting it, the way the 23 or so faction in the early church were seen as distorting the whole of the apostolic witnesses' reporting. In other words, Wilber is offering us a new kind of gnosticism, which is not really a different kind of gnosticism than what was found in the early Christian communities, and, I might add as noted, was rejected as incomplete. The new gnosticism equals the old gnosticism dressed up in modern garb. With the best of intentions and some justification, Wilber unwittingly mixes up the Vedic and Christian traditions. He gives the Vedic tradition its full voice, but mutes the Christian voice to a narrow range that sounds like the Vedic voice with a Christian accent.

Wilber should be taken seriously and his methodology applied rigorously. Something of Christianity is hidden but not in apocryphal writings or heretical views or the new gnosticism. It is hidden in the texts themselves. No, not as some system of code. It is hidden in the witness that the texts of Christian sacred scripture illuminate. The texts tell a story of events that were witnessed and those who want to discover the hidden meaning of Christianity must let the texts work on and in them; let the texts, the story interpret them. The problem is that the process is not as straight forward as it sounds. It never is in any tradition. The problem is twofold. One, the texts are ancient and not readily available to our modern minds' outlook. This is a job for scholarship; exegetes, archeologists, anthropologists, authoritive interpreters of the texts, etc. The second problem, as with all great religious traditions, is us: we don't want to be interpreted. We don't want to be vulnerable to the texts. We don't want to be caught out. What the great traditions have in common is the recognition that what we consider normal life is a lie that makes us miserable. Furthermore we lie about the lie we tell ourselves. We prefer that everyone else change to accommodate us. The problem is always out there. We may not be able to do much about the scholarship part of the problem, except honestly study. But the personal part of the problem is entirely up to us. Even when scholarship makes the whole of the texts crystal clear, still the scales must fall from our eyes for us to see that the story is about us, in us, for us, interprets us, tells us who we are. Then it will resonate in us, and what seems obscure and ho-hum now will be obvious then. Encrusted eyes and encrusted textual cultures must be cleansed first.

Can anyone say clearly what the "hidden" meaning of Christianity is? Not only can it be said, it must be said anew for every generation. What Wilber has done for the intelligent contemporary mind for the Vedic tradition, Rene Girard has done for the Christian tradition; taken the texts seriously, let them interpret him, and given us the benefits of his insights, and they don't look like the Vedic tradition. They look like the Christian tradition. There use to be a group called "The Reduced Shakespeare Company" that performed the bard's plays in 5 minute or less. Here is the "reduced Gospel", the hidden meaning of Christianity. All the Christian texts are witnessed, told, written and transmitted from the perpsective of the Resurrection of Jesus. No Resurrection, no Christianity, no texts, that simple. What is the Resurrection? Surprise, everybody, God is not about death. God does not demand death as a tax for peace or for living. God has never been about death. This is just the reverse of how you have seen it and do see it. In fact, you've never had to win God over by death, for God is and always has been for you. Not for you and against your enemies, but for you without any against anything. You live in a world of opposites, God has no opposites. Jesus is Yahweh enfleshed overcoming our otherness without dissolving it. Now stop the rivalry between yourself and everyone else. Stop imitating one another and imitate Yahweh, Jesus, who is non-intrusive love for you. Then you will know eternal life. Oh, and by the way, this will likely inflame hatred in others toward you because it will expose the lie, as Jesus exposed the lie, that we live. But don't worry about it. Jesus has overcome the world (the lie) and even the most horrible death (crucifixion) cannot dent or defeat God-being-for-you. The End.

However, reduced Shakespeare is not Shakespeare, and the reduced Gospel is not sufficient to "get" the message of Christianity. There are no short cuts. There is no easy method. One must do the work of letting these ancient text, this unprecedented story, the apostolic witness, work on you and in you. And as St. Gregory of Nyssa said, the work goes on and on and on....

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Thanks Greg

Posted July 20th, 2011 by Stanley

I enjoyed reading your post. If I understood it right and Ken’s way right there might be a few things to consider;

You stated that; First, he lets the orginal texts interpret him. I don’t think this is the case. I think that at least in terms of emphasis that the first thing Ken does is to do the practices to awaken within him the realization of That which cannot be completely explained in words. This is why he keeps insisting that an intellectual understanding falls far short of reaching the riches of this tradition. In a way That will always be what you might be referring to as hidden, in a kind of way. It can never be captured by words, Scriptures, or theologies. But it can always be expressed as love.

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Re: Thanks, Greg

Posted July 20th, 2011 by Greg Mayers in response to Thanks Greg

Stanley:

I think you understand what I meant, but you misunderstand that I meant it. Doing the meditation first = being interpreted by the texts. It doesn’t matter if you read the texts or not. When you do read the texts, you understand that it is referring to your meditative practice. Analyzing the texts for meaning = you interpreting the texts, and that gets you nowhere real; it is just a mental exercise leading to more mental exercising. You got the right understanding, you are just attributing the wrong understanding to my writing.

Greg Mayers

Zen taught me everything I can do.

Christianity taught me everything I can't do.

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More Irony

Posted July 20th, 2011 by Jennifer Grove in response to Thanks Greg

Letting texts interpret us is not necessarily engaging in State practices. At least, not in the sense of Buddhist Contemplation or Meditation. It may or may not involve that at all. It really depends on what the texts claim to be about.

Also, in the case of Christian texts, there is a State experience that happens when they interpret you, but it is not called that.

The main difference between interpreting the text and letting the text interpret you is, as Greg has basically described it, either you are standing in Authority over what the text says and you determine what it means OR the Entity who is speaking in the text is standing in Authority over you and they are determining what your response means. Nearly every time I've heard KW speak about the Bible or the writers of the Bible, it has varied between a position of emotional unavailability to downright defiance. When he did his little "Shadow Work" exercise (00:29:05) for us several months back, he couldn't even correctly interpret the Voice of the texts at all which tells me that he will prolly not be able to allow them to interpret him. I understand very clearly what it is like to be inside of this experience and I totally have pity on the man. I tried reading Ayn Rand once and it was a total joke.

BUT! AND! Even more ironically, his own Moral Intelligence has lead him to authentically Voice nearly the same ideals that the Christian texts teach! This too has happened to me, so I recognize it. Even tho he claims that the Bible is Ethnocentric and antagonistic to the ideal that Expanding Care is what is truly Good, the texts actually aren't hostile to that and he is Voicing the same ideal that Jesus and most of the Apostles did. Esp. Paul. He just doesn't seem to see that. Shadow is a tricky bastard!

What the Christian texts claim to be about is calling the human character to account: EXACTLY LIKE WHAT YOU'VE BEEN DOING LATELY!

"Oh. You want to know what you must do to be a ___(Good Integralist)___? How deeply have you given yourself away to the world? (Go sell all you have and give all the money to the poor.) Wanna know how to do that? Watch me and do as I do."

And the reason you're not getting alot of good response is the same reason Jesus didn't.

So, when you let that text (the Voice of Jesus and His followers) interpret you, you follow the injunction and you have an experience. This is both the result and cause of a State, and can be considered a discipline. In the Christian Tradition it has been called "Obedience". The Muslims call it "Submission". In the Vedic Traditions it is called "Bhakti".

If there is a difference, it would be so subtle that it is too subtle to make a difference.

This practice is currently getting a real work-over in Integral circles. There is a strong resistance to it no matter who the Object of devotion is. This is not sitting and staring. This is not an "achievement" brought about by a strong and persistent act of your will. You are not in charge. Read Greg's "signature". It's very telling.

This is what it is to be interpreted by the Christian texts. And luckily, Jesus is pretty dependable as a Model. And now that I have looked at Rene Girard's thot, that term is even more meaningful.

"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."

~SES pg. 148

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Yea

Posted July 20th, 2011 by Stanley in response to More Irony

Ken does not seem to resonate so well with the Christian religion. It might be due to some bad early personal experiences he had. But I think that what he wants is to have his students outgrow even him.

I think that the heart of what Jesus was about is love/Love/LOVE. Ken gives lip service to this but up to now has not really emphasized this to the extent that I would like to see. It might be up to people exactly like us to do better than him. How does this make you feel?

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The Death of God??

Posted July 12th, 2011 by camfree

Hi Greg

It’s always good to read your posts and I do share this sense that Integral doesn't always do justice to the depth and richness of Christianity. There is, however, just one pointhere I want to follow up with you for now. You write:

“God is not about death. God does not demand death as a tax for peace or for living. God has never been about death… In fact, you've never had to win God over by death.”

Yes, this is true, but also just the reverse of how I have tended to see it … and I secretly hope I’m wrong… But what about the Incarnation? There is a subtle shift going on in Christian theology (since Hegel), in which God is nothing but God’s self revelation, i.e. the Absolute is constitutionally, inherently intrinsically temporal, caught up in the pain and contradiction of finitude and mortality.

In this view emerging in radical theology, the Absolute is not a timeless Non-dual presence untouched and unmoved by the suffering and death of finite creatures. God does not fall into time from Eternity, God becomes who/what God is by temporalizing, i.e. the Absolute is time temporalizing itself (which is precisely why Hegel was considered as atheist by Lutheran theologians).

So I would argue that in the Incarnation it is the Absolute (God’s own self) that passes through life and death, i.e. God actualizes or realizes God’s self by being made vulnerable to suffering and exposed to death… Otherwise we have an impassible Absolute unaffected by the sensless nightmare of the world, the kind of loveless perfection of sovereignty and transcendence that has been the object of critique in post-modern theologies since the horrors of the 20th century.

So perhaps the Absolute is nothing but the risky venture of God’s en-fleshment in Christ, and the community of love unplugged from the Big Other (the symbolic order) that emerges from fidelity to this event? As you are well aware, the very site of Spirit becoming itself in Christ is a monstrosity of prodigious proportions…. But if Sprit is ‘always already’ incarnational, emfleshed as time temporalizing itself, how can we say that God is not about death? What if there is the unmitigated disaster of suffering and death at the very center of the life of God? Is death a meaningless accident wiped out by the Resurrecion or an unavoidable moment in the very life of God - who becomes God by being fully present in the heart of flesh and passing through death?

Cam

"Become passers-by" (Jesus of Nazareth)

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Thank you

Posted July 17th, 2011 by Jon Sanders in response to The Death of God??

Hi Cam & Greg

Thank you, and also to everyone else, who has participated in this refreshing thread; it is encouraging to read on this site Christianity being discussed in depth.

It will take me some time to digest and reflect on these deep issues;

My summer vacation will be spent reading your text: Post-Metaphysics and the Paradoxical Teachings of Jesus

Thank you

John Sanders

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Death and God

Posted July 13th, 2011 by Greg Mayers in response to The Death of God??

Cam:

Thanks for your thoughtful response. It is refreshing to have an intelligent conversation around Christianity on this site. As I’ve mentioned to you more than once in person there are two things I admire about you: your deep Christian faith and your brilliant mind. Both are a welcomed challenge to me.

I will try to further the conversation along. I hope I can be worthy of your insights and skills. Please correct me when I misunderstand your meaning, or miss your points. You wrote:

But if Spirit is ‘always already’ incarnational, enfleshed as time temporalizing itself, how can we say that God is not about death? What if there is the unmitigated disaster of suffering and death at the very center of the life of God? Is death a meaningless accident wiped out by the Resurrection or an unavoidable moment in the very life of God - who becomes God by being fully present in the heart of flesh and passing through death?

I don’t buy into KW’s Vedic premise that the spirit is “always already… enfleshed.” That is a cyclic philosophy. The Judaic/Christian view is linear. The Incarnation is an historical event. From the divine point of view there is no history and there are no cycles. But in human terms the cyclic view of life is predominant among the pagan philosophies; the linear view is the Abrahamic point of view.

Are you saying that being human involves death and therefore the Incarnation involves death and therefore God involves death?

Being human involves death, but it didn’t start out that way. Death was the result of human choice, not a divine plan. And to everyone who screams that it is unfair, I say a hearty “yes” it is unfair. And being born in Darfur is unfair. And having my property value decline 60% because of greedy bankers who mucked up the international financial markets is unfair; etc., etc., etc. That is what we have to live with now, but it is not, in biblical terms, God’s justice.

It is a horrible arrogance to attempt this, but to summarize Rene Girard’s life’s work, being human now is founded on a cover up which is then lied about, creating a double disguise difficult to discover. The cover up is the murder of an innocent victim in order to establish “peace among men,” that is civilization, culture, society, what he calls “hominization.” The lie is that the covered up murder was necessary because God wanted it that way. Thus the murder is called a sacrifice (sacra + facere = to make holy). In other words, the defense is that “God made me do it.” (Girard comes to this insight after extensive analysis of secular literature, cultural myths and the stories in Sacred Scripture).

The anthropology Girard finds in the Judaic scriptures exposes both the lie and the cover up. Jesus is the living exemplar of the expose, and thus the fulfillment of the law. And he has to die. Not because God demands it, or because it is inherent to being human, but because He exposes the faulty foundations of our own cherished identities, foundations which we dare not see. And we kill those who show it to us in order to restore peace to our troubled minds and cultures. “Do you not know that it is better that one man should die, than that the whole people perish?” There were only two choices facing Jesus: kill or be killed! Kill here means agreeing with the faulty foundations and participating in the founding murder. It means hating one’s enemies. It means throwing divine love out in favor of temporary (or is it “temporal”) self preservation, but at the cost of murder: “He who hates his brother is a murder.” Being killed means remaining faithful to the divine message: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” “Love God with all your heart… love your neighbor as yourself.” This dilemma is imposed by faulty humans, not divine decree. Thus Jesus died because of our “sins” to save us from the horrible fate of our murderously false identities, a redemption that is offered, not imposed.

But of course the crucifixion is not the end. If it were the end, then nothing was gained for us by Jesus’ fidelity to God, and God just played a cruel hoax on Jesus. The unexpected happens. The foundational murder, cover up and lie, with all its consequences, are completely forgiven in the act of self surrender of Jesus. The evidence for that is called: the Resurrection. “I have come that you may have Life and have it to the full.”

In 1 Cor. 15 Paul has an interest few passages, which as best as I can tell, have been dismissed by exegetes as Paul being mistaken about the return of Jesus. Paul says he has a secret, that we are not all going to die, but some of us will be changed in a moment. I think that we should take that seriously as an indictment against the necessity of death as defining what it means to be human. Whatever it means to be human, death is not essential to it. An interesting quote here from Wisdom: Death was never of God's fashioning; not for his pleasure does life cease to be; what meant his creation, but that all created things should have being? No breed has he created on earth but for its thriving; none carries in itself the seeds of its own destruction. Think not that mortality bears sway on earth; no end nor term is fixed to a life well lived. Wis 1:13-15. We could add here St Paul’s “all creation is yearning for liberation…”

Yes, God has seen, knows intimately, the human side of reality, the unmitigated horror of suffering and the emptiness of death. And he wants us to see, know intimately the completely divine side of life. To that point, the early Christians fought very hard for the recognition that Jesus was 100% human and 100% divine. It seems to me that you want to put death into being Divine, and God wants to take death out of being human. Or are we both looking at the same thing from different angles?

Does this reflection help, or am I off base here? Your response is most welcomed as I know you have considerable integrity and scholarship to illuminate these questions…

Greg Mayers

Zen taught me everything I can do.

Christianity taught me everything I can't do.

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like a god self-slain on his own strange alter...

Posted July 14th, 2011 by camfree in response to Death and God

Hi Greg

Thanks for your thoughtful response, I do enjoy being challenged by you of these questions, and I love the brief intro to Girard too. I just have a few quick thoughts for now.

I think you got to the crux of the matter when you said

“It seems to me that you want to put death into being Divine, and God wants to take death out of being human.”

Yes that nails the difference between us here, and I would agree that we both looking at the same thing from different angles - the reverse side has a reverse side. Perhaps you are coming from a more Catholic theology of glory (Resurrection), and I am coming from a more Protestant theology of the Cross? In this sense, I would just say that there is an irreducible gap or tension between the two that refuses any proper resolution…

Also, I am not advocating Wilber’s Vedic view but rather the post-Hegelian view that there is no pre-existing Trintitarian Logos – a “world behind the scenes” - making sure everything turns out for the best… Basically, I am questioning the distinction between Absolute and relative that founds so much of KW’s work, and which he grapples with in Appendix II of Integral Spirituality… and which (I believe) needs to be abandoned if we are to take the evolutionary context of spirituality in the 21st century seriously…

I guess I am taking a more radical move of saying that it is this Jesus – the one who suffers and dies – who reveals the heart of God. This is pretty orthodox as far as I can tell, but it does raise some interesting questions. Given this point of departure, perhaps the crucifixion/resurrection is an event that which would have taken God by surprise, which God would not have seen coming? Perhaps the Absolute must undergo its own Golgotha to become actual?

This also relates to the moral conundrum of theodicy… what if a divine sovereignty unaffected by death and mortality is an obscene evil… whereas the obscene scandal of a crucified victim of human evil is divine… All of this is being worked out at the moment, and I will just leave you with a quite from Derrida and respond more in due course

“For wherever the name of God would allow us to think something else, for example a vulnerable non-sovereignty, one that suffers and is divisible, one that is mortal even, capable of contradicting itself or repenting (a thought that is neither impossible or without example), it would be a completely different story, perhaps even the story of a God who deconstructs himself in his ipseity.”

Cameron

"Become passers-by" (Jesus of Nazareth)

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St Cyril of Alexandria

Posted July 15th, 2011 by Greg Mayers in response to like a god self-slain on his own strange alter...

Cam:

To your point about death being essential to the Divine, I remembered some early Church Fathers preaching that Jesus’ Crucifixion is God dying on the Cross. I can’t find the reference at the moment, or even remember who it is attributed to. But I did run across the following from St Cyril of Alexandria, from his 12 anathemas which were adopted by the Council of Ephesus in 481 AD.

If anyone does not confess that the Word of God suffered in the flesh and was crucified in the flesh and tasted death in the flesh and became the first born of the dead, although as God he is life and life-giving, let him be anathema.

But I think you are bringing St Cyril’s proposition forward to the effect that death and God have something that is more than just being in common. It sounds to me like some kind of causal connection, though I doubt you would say it that way. Maybe, being God and being human are simultaneous realities, is what you are driving at.

Am I understanding you correctly here?

Greg Mayers

Zen taught me everything I can do.

Christianity taught me everything I can't do.

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Eckhart: does God need the soul?

Posted July 15th, 2011 by camfree in response to St Cyril of Alexandria

Hi Greg

That’s a great quote, and sums up my position exactly – and just when I thought I had a novel insight you show me how deeply entrenched it is in the Tradition…

For me a lot of this stuff goes back to Eckhart. What made Eckhart’s mystical writings so shocking and offensive to the medieval Church was his claim that God needs man in order to actualize God’s self. Since it is of the very essence of the Son (Logos) to enable God to manifest himself, it is humanity itself that gives birth to God, and thus death and meaninglessness are something that God undergoes. It is precisely this ex-centricity of God’s own self, on account of which God needs man in order to actualize God’s self that raised the attention of the Inquisition...

This insight has been taken up in different ways by a range of more radical theologians (Zizek, Caputo/Derrida, Rollins, Moltmann). For these guys, the crucified body of Christ is the incarnation of the Death of God. The Christ-event is the diabolical scandal, an explicit expression of the Death of God and the ‘good news’ that there is no Big Other behind the scenes keeping things safe and guaranteeing the outcome of events before they happen.

As an unpredictable irruption of the Real, in the central Christian experience we encounter/undergo the genuine negativity of the Absolute itself (Schelling’s UnGrund), as an irresolvable tension or gap in the heart of God’s own self that reveals the deep ambiguity in things and the non-existence of the firm, impenetrable ground of the Big Other (i.e. the death of God). This scandalous interruption of the business as usual world is simultaneously the site of a truth-event (Badiou), the condition of possibility for the emergence a universal, revolutionary collective of love, where the Death of God is also the birth of the Holy Spirit: i.e. a community of believers exposed to the creaturly vulnerabilities of actual human existence (unplugged from the Big Other) and engaged in a public struggle for freedom and justice against the “powers and principalities”...

I hope this relates to Girard and the qiestion of whether or not God has anything to do with suffering and death... this continues to be an excellent thread, I have enjoyed all the contributions very much.... Cheers,

Cameron

"Become passers-by" (Jesus of Nazareth)

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St Bonaventure

Posted July 15th, 2011 by Greg Mayers in response to Eckhart: does God need the soul?

Cam:

Here is another quote for you from St Bonaventure's On the Mind's Journey to God

"If you ask how such things can occur, seek the answer in God’s grace, not in doctrine; in the longing of the will, not in the understanding; in the sighs of prayer, not in research; seek the bridegroom not the teacher; God and not man; darkness not daylight; and look not to the light but rather to the raging fire that carries the soul to God with intense fervour and glowing love. The fire is God, and the furnace is in Jerusalem, fired by Christ in the ardour of his loving passion. Only he understood this who said: My soul chose hanging and my bones death. Anyone who cherishes this kind of death can see God, for it is certainly true that: No man can look upon me and live.

"Let us die, then, and enter into the darkness, silencing our anxieties, our passions and all the fantasies of our imagination. Let us pass over with the crucified Christ from this world to the Father so that, when the Father has shown himself to us, we can say with Philip: It is enough. We may hear with Paul: My grace is sufficient for you; and we can rejoice with David, saying: My flesh and my heart fail me, but God is the strength of my heart and my heritage for ever. Blessed be the Lord for ever, and let all the people say: Amen. Amen!"

Be careful you old Protestant, you might become Catholic :-).

By the way, Eckhart wasn't condemned by the Inquisition, which only operated in Spain. In fact, Eckhart wasn't even technically condemned by the Pope at all. The rivalry between the Franciscans and the Dominicans spilt over onto Eckhart when the bishop of Cologne (a Franciscan) contrived to have certain phrases of Eckhart taken out of context sent to Roman and reviewed as suspicious. Some of those phrases were written up and reputeated in a document (a Papal Bull), but it never reached Eckhart. He had the good fortune to die before it could be delivered. Since such a legal document could only come into force when recieved (delivered in person), Eckhart technically escaped condemnation. However, that doesn't change the assumption almost everyone has that he was condemned. In place of condemnation, what we end up with is suspicion hanging over about 20 or so out of context phrases of Eckhart.

Greg Mayers

Zen taught me everything I can do.

Christianity taught me everything I can't do.

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Follow up (Bonaventure, Eckhart, etc...)

Posted July 16th, 2011 by camfree in response to St Bonaventure

Hi Greg

Thanks for the quotes, I love this line "look not to the light but rather to the raging fire that carries the soul to God with intense fervour and glowing love." It reminds me of some of Schelling's work on the UnGrund, this wild fury or inner turmoil in the heart of the Absolute...

In a sense, I'm looking at the Incarnation as an event that disorganizes all of our thought and our language… So when we try to appropriate the Secret, we close off the riskiness of the ‘to come’, the unpredictable earthquake that goes by the name of Jesus of Nazareth...

The senseless nightmare of Christ’s suffering and death is precisely where we cannot make things make sense. There is an inner turmoil in the very heart of God that de-stablizes and disrupts every ‘given’ order of things, even second-tier/integral orders... In Christ we encounter - like Job before him - a God who reveals himself as an incomprehensible mystery… where God, maybe, just perhaps, does not make things make sense...

Also, yes the Echkart/Inquisition reference was a little lazy, I knew you would call me out on that, thanks for the deeper context for these events.... Would you still agree that Eckhart was a genuine heterical with his writings on the "birth of the Son in the human soul"?

Cam

"Become passers-by" (Jesus of Nazareth)

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Eckhart and Girard

Posted July 16th, 2011 by Greg Mayers in response to Follow up (Bonaventure, Eckhart, etc...)

Cam:

This thread has become so rich that I find myself picking a choosing what to respond to, while being conscious of leaving out so many treasures and tangents that could yield enormous insights.

You wrote: In a sense, I'm looking at the Incarnation as an event that disorganizes all of our thought and our language… So when we try to appropriate the Secret, we close off the riskiness of the ‘to come’, the unpredictable earthquake that goes by the name of Jesus of Nazareth...

I just can’t agree with you more. Your writing almost transports me beyond myself into the very mystery that we mis-name God.

Would you still agree that Eckhart was a genuine heretic with his writings on the "birth of the Son in the human soul"?

Heresy is such an ambivalent word. OED’s second definition of the word is: opinion profoundly at odds with what is generally accepted. In this sense Judaism was originally a heresy of the pagan cults out of which it arose. Christianity was a heresy of Judaism. The first definition of heresy in QED is: belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious (especially Christian) doctrine.

I personally don’t see Eckhart as a heretic in either senses given in QED. He was deeply influence by the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, as were most theologians and scholars of the Middle Ages including Aquinas, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing and St John of the Cross. I can’t put my finger on the list of questionable sayings of Eckhart at the moment, but I don’t think his teaching about the birth of the Son in the soul was on the list. (I could be wrong about this, and when I find the list, I will confirm it for you.) I think current scholarship sees Eckhart as being the victim of political infighting and the Magisterium today doesn’t consider him a heretic. I found the following paragraph encouraging…

Eckhart's status in the contemporary Catholic Church has been uncertain. The Dominican Order pressed in the last decade of the 20th century for his full rehabilitation and confirmation of his theological orthodoxy; the late Pope John II voiced favorable opinion on this initiative, even going as far as quoting from Eckhart's writings, but the affair is still confined to the corridors of the Vatican. In the spring of 2010, it was revealed that there was finally a response from the Vatican in a letter dated 1992. Timothy Ratcliffe, then Master of the Dominicans and recipient of the letter, summarized the contents as follows: “We tried to have the censure lifted on Eckhart”, writes Timothy Ratcliffe, “and were told that there was really no need since he had never been condemned by name, just some propositions which he was supposed to have held, and so we are perfectly free to say that he is a good and orthodox theologian.”

I find Eckhart to be right in line with St. Simeon the New Theologian (949-1022) who was exiled and died as an abbot of an Orthodox monastery on Mt Athos. (Pope Benedict XVI within the past year delivered a beautiful reflection on Simeon’s theology). The following piece by St. Simeon is translated by Stephen Mitchell.

We awaken in Christ’s body as Christ awakens our bodies, and my poor hand is Christ, He enters my foot and is infinitely me. I move my hand, and wonderfully my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him; for God is indivisibly whole, seamless in His Godhood. I move my foot, and at once He appears like a flash of lightning. Do my words seem blasphemous? Then open your heart to Him and let yourself receive the one who is opening to you so deeply. For if we genuinely love Him, we wake up inside Christ’s body where all our body, all over, every most hidden part of it, is realized in joy as Him, and He makes us, utterly, real…

This short excerpt is right in line with your own thinking, the utter humanity of divinity, the reality shaking revolution that is Jesus.

On this same topic, you wrote previously: I hope this relates to Girard and the question of whether or not God has anything to do with suffering and death...

As a matter of fact it does in my opinion. Girard makes no theological claims. He analyses the Sacred Scriptures from an anthropological perspective. But his discoveries bear exactly on your points. If his insights are correct, we humans are infected with violence which no of us can expel. We end up expelling others onto whom we project our own violence. This violence is like malaria, once you get you can’t get rid of it. Or it is like a really malicious computer virus that keeps replicating itself throughout humanity. It does this by a process which Girard calls mimesis, copying the desires of the other. Furthermore we hide this condition from ourselves. And the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves make sure that it is kept secret. The only way to expose our dirty little secret is for one who is truly innocent to suffer the consequences of our true condition. The way Girard says it is that it is only in the few moments of the death of the truly innocent victim that we can glimpse our hidden condition by witnessing the innocence of our chosen victim, in this case Jesus. Jesus is innocent because he never enters into the conspiracy of making victims as we do, not even making himself a victim. He is the only truly non-violent human ever, and because of that the early Christian recognized in him divinity, for no one who is that innocent can be said to be only human.

The important point which relates to your insights, I believe, is that it is in the atrocious death of Jesus that we glimpse his divinity. All of our stories would tell us just the opposite: divinity is revealed in side stepping death. If he really is the Son of God, let him come down off that cross, one of his tormentors says. Divine revelation says that divinity is revealed in the most awful and most common of all human acts, in the very act of sacrificing the innocent victim in the hope of restoring our cherished sense of peace. But it is a peace only because we want the real human story kept in the cellar, out of sight, and certainly out of our minds and hearts.

I am reminded of Tennessee Williams’ play Suddenly Last Summer where the mother of deceased Sebastian asks the doctor to do something about her daughter who in her neurosis reveals the awful family secret of Sebastian’s homosexuality. Mother says: “Can’t you cut it out of her doctor?” suggesting that a lobotomy will solve her problem. (Note: the neurotic tells the truth, the normal people conspire in a lie; the outsider is innocent, the insiders are guilty; the perfect mirror to our inner depths. The plot reflects the Gospels that pull this kind of reversal all the time).

Seeking peace in eastern meditative techniques is deadly for Christians. It is lobotomizing our souls. It is truth that makes us free, not peace. That is what the Christian Sacred Scriptures point out to us. From the very beginning all the way to today the Christian message has caused an uproar in humanity for its unsettling reversal of what we think is real. Maybe that is why so few bother to imitate Jesus. Who wants to be a neurotic, an outsider, the victim of our own viral violence… unless, of course, one really does want freedom in the truth.

Greg Mayers

Zen taught me everything I can do.

Christianity taught me everything I can't do.

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needs

Posted July 16th, 2011 by Shikha Sabharwal in response to Eckhart: does God need the soul?

are ridiculous in considering God. The Absolute is One, and cannot possibly 'need' any ... whatever...God is God, and comes as the Whole package + infinity &c. Choice is inherent to God, Creating. As Divine Reflections 'made in the Image' &c., we reflect the Creative qualities implied in 'made' and 'image'.

"He enjoys all and is all He sees" (Upanishads-I don't remember which one where)

So we have choice. Choice is the origin of power. A human crucified via human evil does not embody this creative power, which is the capacity to create change. 'I Am That I Am'- sure, yes; and evil is not a quality of God's feeling, which is human intention. Does that mean God does not see evil? Well, yes. Does that mean evil does not exist? Well, yes and no. 'Evil' is subjective human identification of the direction of attention as 'intention'. Can there be sacrificial vehicle appearances? Sure.

The unfoldment of God's seeing in time (space-time, maybe), transforms evil as it turns toward the end of humanity onto itself. A quality of conflict, it fights and eliminates itself, turned into its self-destruction as God's seeing unfolds humanity's mark.

Pilate, by way of his wife, was uncertain about whether he would take responsibility for participating in Jesus' elimination. There was conflict.

Seeing (rather, 'perceiving') is also inherent to Creating. So humanity, also, is unfolding a process of self perception. (What is it, to be 'made in the image of Who Is'?) As humans, our power is in surrender. Our choice is our master.

The problem, really, is choice.

But we are past that problem, since God, inherent in, and also Moving (Changing) All+ &c. has infinitely greater power (capacity) than the reflection of His reflected image.

"I am this Creation/For I was its Creator" (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Part 4, Verse 5.2-3)

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Irony

Posted July 15th, 2011 by Jennifer Grove in response to like a god self-slain on his own strange alter...

Hi, Cam.

I was trained to blame the Catholics for the obsession with death and the Cross and arrogantly assert that it was "We Evangelicals" (Protestants) who were more interested in the Resurrection. LOL

But you're right, there is alot of emphasis placed on God "demanding death as a payment for sin" in the Evangelical Tradition. It is the Death of Christ which purchased our Salvation, and without it we would still be in our sins... blah, blah, blah. I think the reason why High and Low Church play Hot Potato with the Cross is because we both instinctively know that Death is a problem and that the Bible supports the emphasis on both Death and Resurrection, so we both confess the Death with half our Brain and trumpet the Resurrection with a knee-jerk reaction from the other half. [sigh] Just one of the many joys and heartaches of metaphysics.

But as I mentioned before, we wouldn't have even figured out that Death was a problem if it weren't for Christ. Both Jews and Romans and Pagans alike (yes, there were exceptions) in the time of Christ only had a problem with Death when it was visited upon their own family or self by means of an enemy - otherwise, it was a necessary and useful means of solving problems. Death provided food, freedom, forgiveness and fun. What's not to like? But Jesus undermined this whole world-view and so few understood what He was doing. It's easy to look at Judas as an example, but Peter (The Father of Catholicism) famously didn't get it either.

It will be important to be able to Speak any and all the levels of dogma of whomever is listening and do so with correct precision. To do that, we will have to let go of being correct ourselves in service of fulfilling the lower value claims. And because of that, we too will have to learn to speak "Deathese". We will have to befriend our own Death Monger in order to win the Death Monger - as Paul might say. If we're human, we too will have real estate in that territory.

And so from within that territory, we "let the text interpret us". And then we leave our Homeland of Death and be called into into a New Land of Life - not just for me, mine and ours, but a "Totalizing Kingdom" which offers an alternative to Death and Tyranny. After being interpreted by the text, KW's persistent rant about Mythic Christianity being Ethnocentric can clearly be seen as incorrect. It is World-centric and beyond. God is offering a Kingdom (the only kind of secure Real-World Civic Body that all people understood at the time) a chance to live free from fear and cruelty and Death. For a while it seems like Suffering and Death are punishments for wrong living. When one is simplistically and childishly having trouble suppressing the impulse to hurt others, this is what it seems like. But that is not the Final Word. Suffering and Death are the wrong living itself. Life and Love are not rewards for right living. Likewise, they ARE the right living itself. Hell is for people who prefer Suffering and Death. Hell is not the punishment for hating your enemy. Hell IS hating your enemy. I need The Kingdom of Heaven to be within me because the Kingdom of Hell is already there.

Basically, I believe that the two views which you are contrasting are not really two. It is not useful nor Biblical to pull them apart except to gain perspective on them both, and then they need to be put back together. Derrida's quote is great. It reminds me of something I say often: I don't believe in the Monolithic Self.

It's late and I'm mumbling now. This is a fantastic thread so far. I enjoy thinking together instead of competitively.

"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."

~SES pg. 148

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Or You Could Say It That Way

Posted July 14th, 2011 by Jennifer Grove in response to Death and God

"It seems to me that you want to put death into being Divine, and God wants to take death out of being human. Or are we both looking at the same thing from different angles?"

Yes. That's what I heard him saying too. Maybe we heard wrong. But I pretty much said the same thing.

"I don’t buy into KW’s Vedic premise that the spirit is “always already… enfleshed.” That is a cyclic philosophy. The Judaic/Christian view is linear. The Incarnation is an historical event. From the divine point of view there is no history and there are no cycles. But in human terms the cyclic view of life is predominant among the pagan philosophies; the linear view is the Abrahamic point of view."

I totally understand what you're saying here and at a certain level, you are right. But in another way, you're only partially right. Not wrong, because that really loses meaning at a certain point. Here's what I see:

I see the Abrahamic Tradition being linear primarily for the reason that it was one of the only - maybe THE only - Traditions that was able to get perspective on the cyclical Traditions. The Abrahamic perspective is surrounded on all sides and from above and below by cyclical Traditions. There were problems with those Systems that could not be "seen" or dealt with until and unless you could get perspective on them from outside the box (Ur?)! Early Jewish practice included some cyclical rites, but they were practiced in order to remember events in History that would not happen again. And the reason those events would not happen again is because they were remembering and learning from them! This was not the reason cyclical rites were practiced on other religions. In other religions, they were practiced in order to demonstrate the repetitive nature of events and to teach people to accept them. The First Passover is in direct contrast to most of the religious rites that were being practiced all around them, and this was intended to be an innovation and improvement.

It seems, then, that it is Traditional in the Jewish/Christian scheme to gain perspective on what is going on all around us and even within us. Keep getting perspective. Keep going. Gaining perspective on the medium which we swim/breathe/live in or which "comes out of the mouth" is profoundly transformative and a nearly infinite endeavor. Ultimately, it will lead to the "always already" (In Him we live and move and have our Being), but in this world, it must lead us out and away from destructive ways of being. Regardless of what world-view we are gaining perspective on; be it a cyclical one or an exploitative one or a dualistic one, it seems to be part of the Tradition to reach for it in service of living better. It is not Traditional for everyone to reach for it in service of leaving this realm of bodily living entirely, tho there are some beloved exceptions (Enoch & Jesus) and it does seem to be allowed. Paul seemed to indicate that he had a choice and it was totally up to his preference.

In this sense, it seems like Christianity is totally about Morality: how to act and behave in this world. To an obsessive degree. And in hindsight, this is true. But at that time, they were surrounded by Traditions and convenient fads that taught that there is no future progress for humanity as a whole. There were just more or less effective Tyrants and their Subjects. Tyranny and warfare seemed to be the only arts or sciences believed capable of progress or improvement. And while the smell of change was in the wind around the Mediterranean, it wouldn't have had a snowball's chance in Hell if Jesus hadn't evoked the Erotic (Eros) potential for linear transformation and evolution for the Human Soul, both individually and collectively, precisely when He did.

So it seems to me that it's okay to get perspective on The Abrahamic Tradition of Linearity, without having to say it is "The Right One" or "The Wrong One". It simply is. And this is one of my BIGGEST complaints about KW's treatment of Christianity so far. He wants the "Baby" to be the "always already" bits while the metaphysics designed to build and direct temporal character is the "Bathwater". But the temporal character bits are also a Baby. And, as Stanley has recently brought to our attention, KW seems to be somewhat puzzled about how and where that Baby got thrown out.

I LOVED what you've brought from Rene Girard.

"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."

~SES pg. 148

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Rene Girard

Posted July 18th, 2011 by stefano

I hadn't heard of Rene Girard and I'd guess most people here haven't either.

I'd be interested in an introductory essay to Girard written from an AQAL approach. Does Girard make AQAL errors of quadrant absolutism? Confuse lines with stages? Does Girard understand how to rank holons? Give due deference to the individual as well as the collective? See the value of other zone methods? You know, all the usual AQAL orientations we rely on to find the valuable partial truths in anyone's work.

If we had that then I think we could better understand where your essay is coming from. To me it seems that Wilber pays his readers a tremendous compliment by writing in an accessible way, so that the reader has the best chance of understanding the material, and isn't just left feeling a bit stupid for not getting it. From quick Googling I see there's split opinions on Girard, and depending on which page one lands on, one could just read the "dismissive" view, and I also get the impression some comments here just miss the point of your essay because they are not familiar with Girard. Although you might feel it is unfair to try to summarise his work, I think it would help to talk about the key aspects on which your essay is relying, within an AQAL orientation.

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Response

Posted July 18th, 2011 by Greg Mayers in response to Rene Girard

Stephano:

Thank you for your comments and your helpful hints toward clarity. You concluded with a fine summary of your inquiry in the last sentence:

Although you might feel it is unfair to try to summarize his [Rene Girard] work, I think it would help to talk about the key aspects on which your essay is relying, within an AQAL orientation.

The point I am trying to make is that KW doesn’t do what he set out to do, namely give a framework for everything, as in A Brief History of Everything, which book title may be taken as the phrase that summarizes his life’s work. Mine is an unpopular opinion on this site, seen by hardcore Wilberians as a heresy in the general sense of that word found in OED: opinion profoundly at odds with what is generally accepted.

I don’t mean to say that KW doesn’t offer some compelling insights and analysis that deserve serious consideration. To the contrary, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort learning and applying some of his more illuminating analysis to the Zen tradition. He has helped me explain kensho in a modern manner, which I posted some time ago on this site. He is great for updating the Vedic worldview and making it accessible for the modern searcher.

When it comes to Christianity, however, KW’s AQAL simply misses every marker. There is no place in AQAL for the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit and the Trinity. I tried fitting the Resurrection into an AQAL framework in a comment on What are some possible interpretations of the Resurrection, but I judge my efforts a dismal failure. Those who tried to place Christianity into AQAL ended up degrading it to some form of eastern philosophy or western Platonism, neither of which it is. AQAL simply can’t catch or illuminate the heart of Christianity. It is too small a box, or to use a different metaphor, too coarse a net for that use. Christianity passes right through it.

Everyone has a god, acknowledged or not. The Enlightenment’s god is Reason, and KW’s work is an homage to the god of reason, even with his modernism, post-modernism and post-post-modernism critiques. He can’t disentangle himself from reason. I tried to summarize this by writing that KW offers up a new Gnosticism, which is the old Gnosticism in modern garb. In so many ways KW makes sense. But there is something else going on that reason just doesn’t spot. It is easily, and often on this site, dismissed as irrational, some lower form of life on the scale of evolution. I think that effort is a wonderful exercise of bearing one’s head in the sand.

If AQAL is too small a box, there is lots of room outside the box. This is where I find Rene Girard compelling. He does for Christianity what KW does for the Vedic tradition, but on Christianity’s terms, not on Vedic terms. For those interested in a fresh understanding of the heart of Christianity I suggest that they spend time with The Girard Reader edited by James G. Williams. It will give a fair overview of Girard’s groundbreaking studies which are now being applied to anthropology, sociology, economics, politics, international relations, psychology and, of course, theology. If KW hasn’t read Girard, then he should begin to. At the minimum it will show him Christianity in a new light.

Greg Mayers

Zen taught me everything I can do.

Christianity taught me everything I can't do.

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Follow-on

Posted July 21st, 2011 by stefano in response to Response

I'm reading Discovering Girard by Kirwan (cheap and quick Kindle download).

In your view:

Does anyone ever deserve punishment?

Also, the method of literary criticism and interpretation, is in AQAL a LL domain method, so I'm wondering about this idea that the individual isn't real -- at first glance that would obliterate the UL quadrant, but is that just because when reading culture, one sees culture, and one ascribes reasons for violence to LL culture alone? Is there an error of quadrant absolutism going on for Girard? And yet, Girard's reading of the Bible seems to suggest to me that he knows people can make a choice and can change their perspective (a choice to drop the "romantic lie") so there is still individual will implied? So I'm not sure where the UL quadrant fits with Girard's story.

Plus, in terms of altitudes, outright revenge seems a red level theme. I mean, we all feel some impulse to want revenge, but at red it is thought to be entirely "justified". So I wonder if the story Girard is reading has a lot to do with the problem of rising out of red and tribal structures. But I'm not clear on this from the first book I'm reading on this subject.

I'm also unclear about the apparent circularity of claiming that all human desire is imitative and not innate. Either the word "desire" has a very specific context and application, and Girard means only certain specific types of desire, or he's made it an over-generalising notion taken to an extreme, trying to apply it to everything?

I am surrounded in culture by an abundance of objects of "desire" and yet most of those objects don't interest me. Why do I desire some and not others? Doesn't my individual psychology have something to do with which things out there I key into? And to simply say that any desire I have, I have because I'm imitating a model out there, well, that's neither provable nor disprovable. There are many models and we can't all imitate all of them. Do we simply explain away the ones I don't imitate with the excuse that I would if only I had more time?

I wonder that Girard has perhaps basically noticed that desire appears as a structure in the text of stories, in the relationship between characters, and that he's noticed this because his profession was to read texts. Meanwhile a neuroscientist can notice "desire" appearing as the firing of brain synapses, because that's what he is looking at. These are all different aspects of the phenomena. Is it a step too far to claim that desire has no innate basis in individuals? I'll keep reading but if I can't find an answer to this it leaves it a fairly weak theory.

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Questions...

Posted July 22nd, 2011 by Greg Mayers in response to Follow-on

Stephano:

You asked: In your view: Does anyone ever deserve punishment?

I've seriously thought about your question and have to admit that I don't have an answer for you. I do see that Christian revelation addresses what anyone (and one could say that means everyone) deserves: forgiveness and unconditional love, which is up to us to claim...

As to the rest of your many questions, it seems to me that dipping into Girard's thoughts is having an effect on you. Maybe it is not a good idea that you read Girard's original works. He's analysis can be upsetting. I've had friends who started reading him and had to put his works down because they bothered them too much. One friend refuses even to read him because she doesn't want to be affected they way she sees he affected her husband.

Greg Mayers

Zen taught me everything I can do.

Christianity taught me everything I can't do.

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...

Posted July 22nd, 2011 by stefano in response to Questions...

Well, you know, interpretation is tricky.

Wilber mentioned this in one of his essays on Art. He quoted an interpretation that had been made on the significance of Vincent van Gogh's painting of a pair of old clogs. People wondered why Vincent painted such a mundane subject. An art historian wrote that it showed a deep affinity for the plight of the honest worker in the fields; you could still see the earth from the fields covering the clogs, of the kind poor farmworkers wore, and the meaning of the painting was clear, it was about the toil of the farm workers. The description and interpretation that was made was beautiful, deep, sincere, and convincing. There was one problem: some years later a letter was discovered, penned by van Gogh wherein he described the painting and his reasons for painting a simple pair of clogs. It turns out, it had nothing to do with farm workers and the historian's interpretation was entirely wrong. Van Gogh painted the clogs because he happened to be wearing them at the time when he had an extraordinary experience, so they retained some sentimental value for him.

I'm often bothered by whether I'm making the right interpretation, or one that is even close!

So anyway, I had a lot of questions because Girard's idea seems weak and would need backing up with more. And my questions were pretty simple: why would I copy some models and not all the others? As for my reaction, well, again, interpretation. If I bought my girlfriend a really ugly dress, she would be upset with me, not because the dress was in truth beautiful and she refused it for some weird psychological reason, but simply because it was ugly and why would I be so misunderstanding of her to imagine that she should wear it. So I wouldn't jump too quickly on the "gee people reject it because it is so [true] upsetting". It is a tricky interpretation to make. It presupposes that people are ignorant.

Thank you for your answer re. punishment. A few months ago I was looking at some stuff to do with a religion (that shall not be named), and I just got to wondering, why do they seem to advocate punishment with such gusto? And it seemed that in certain beliefs, the punishment is totally warranted, absolutely deserved. And that made me wonder, why do I find that such a strange idea? Why doesn't that sit well with me? Why do I feel uncomfortable and uneasy about the notion that one should aim immediately for inflicting punishment, instead of at least trying to find a sense of, well, forgiveness? And I realised, "turn the other cheek" -- they don't have that gem of wisdom. Instead of try to forgive, it is automatically, revenge! I found that weird and strange, and I felt for a bit what it must be like to be in that worldview. So I began to reflect on why my worldview wasn't like that, and I began to think about the influence of Christianity in Western culture, in our deeper and earlier value structures, in teaching the message of forgiveness.

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...Reading the Wikipedia Article on Girard...

Posted July 19th, 2011 by Jennifer Grove in response to Response

Hi.

So, I'm reading the article and I could swear that I've read this before. I don't know what situation it was, maybe it was you, Greg, who mentioned it already. In any case, this prompts me to remember something else kinda weird. You are familiar with Oxytocin, right? The "bonding" hormone that is released by the body during sexual stimulation, orgasm, childbirth and breastfeeding? Okay. Well, it's also connected to Schadenfreude. Sick but true.

We have an interior bonding experience when a winner is brought down which is also correlated in the exterior with the increase of oxytocin. The study doesn't prove that Oxytocin is released during Scapegoating, but that the presence of Oxytocin intensifies the experience - and since it is a bonding event, that would imply that it bonds the group together.

Oh. One more thing: It is primarily a man thing. Oh, dear.

That's all 4 Quads.

His theory makes alot of sense. I don't know if I would be willing to place the entire weight of religious practice on this deep structure, but that it plays a big part.

And speaking of the Quads, I don't really know if "Real Christianity" can be placed inside the map yet because, frankly, I don't think it's even been tried. I don't think KW can inhabit it authentically enuf to even begin. One of us is going to have to do it. Better yet: many of us. Popular or not.

I truly do suspect that the Gnostic escape hatch will be the best option for those who have Post Traumatic Church Disorder. There are so many. But there are also some who don't have that Disorder and who have managed to ride the Earthquakes and Tsunamis of Church Crimes and come out stronger. Our Voices should be heard as well. And in the end, it will not be a particular Theological Story which will stand strong, but the Story about the Stories. Integral Gnosticism is not that Story, but it can be contained inside it.

"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."

~SES pg. 148

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If I may add a perspective

Posted July 15th, 2011 by Isabella Valentine

Greg ~

The first line of your post: "Modern people in the first world cultures have a suspicion, it seems to me, that somebody is hiding something really important from them," brings to mind a perspective I feel compelled to share.

In regards to suspicion, a perspective is, there is an implication of carrying a secret.

In the book Rumi's Sun, The Teachings of Shams of Tabriz (basically a translated book of rare verbal notes transcribed in bits and pieces in a conversational setting of 8-10 scholarly Sufis nearly 800 years ago), there is a passage that I hold dear.

That passage is this:

"The person taken to the universe of the heart is one who has a secret. People get him drunk, so that he might reveal that secret, so that he might tell him everything in that drunkenness. But the one who listens to him has to understand which among those drunkard's words is the secret. There are little things that never have been spoken but some of which escaped from his mouth, and then were covered over again."

A perspective I bring to the table is that if a curious suspicion becomes a secret, there becomes not only one secret (of the Other who is suspicious) but two (the Self, who is now secretly searching for the source of the suspicion in the Other). So two secrets arose from one, a direct link to the heart.

Love
Isabella
xoxoxo

The deeper the depth, the longer the melt. Dreamless sleep dissolves into a cosmic pond... sometimes the ripple, sometimes the wave.

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Some Thoughts....

Posted July 14th, 2011 by Mary Linda Landauer

Reading your post Greg, which I enjoyed very much, then reading all the comments, which I also enjoyed, I found myself contemplating each. I was then led to read some of Rene' Guenon's collected works again and several passage's of Sri Aurobindo's writing that came to bear on this......I would like to share one of those passages from Aurobindo that serves to bring understanding to me, and how we never need to negate the opposing truths.....they are all important and contain within them meaning and purpose to keep each of us moving forward to approach our spiritual realization.

"The harmony of the two tendencies is the condition of all life that aims at being really divine. Liberty pursued by exclusion of the thing exceeded leads along the path of negation to the refusal of that which God has accepted. Activity pursued by absorption in the act and energy leads to an inferor affirmation and the denial of the Highest. But what God combines and synthetises, wherefore should man insist on divorcing? To be perfect as He is perfect is the condition of His integral attainment. Through Adivya, the Multiplicity, lies our path out of the transitional egoistic self-expression in which death and suffering predominate; through Vidya consenting with Avidya by the perfect sense of oneness even in that multiplicity, we enjoy integrally the immortality and the beatitude. By attaining to the Unborn beyond all becoming we ar liberated from this lower birth and death; by accepting the Becoming freely as the Divine, we invade mortality with the immortal beatitude and become luminous centres of its conscious self-expression in harmony." Sri Aurobindo

In the great works of Rene' Guenon; especially, I like his "Man & His Becoming According to the Vedanta, he seems to me to say what Aurobindo above says: In our stage of becoming, those lower levels where we are driven by our minds,(personality/ego), it becomes important to adopt or become part of a system of belief, whether Christian, Islamic, nature or simply to not believe, it is this revealed system that takes us forward to where at some higher climb to know directly we, "fall off the ladder of the climb" as many talk about who have traveled this path of self-realization. This falling off brings us to that direct knowing, via some greater liberation from the lower nature into our embrace with the flame of God.....no longer then do we divorce ourselves from each other with all our different paths of tradition but, instead, see that all these paths lead us to this great, stunning and luminous realization that there is only one Divine movement and it takes many amazing expressions through all of us to reach the same deep understanding......Unity and Harmony.....and if I may.....only the deepest, most profound Love ...being Divine creativity.... with its Light..... being Divine knowledge and wisdom.....but as Rene Guenon and Aurobindo both elude too; when we reach this higher revelation of our spiritual realization, one thing seems to be of great clarity;and that is the final identity of acknowleging all spiritual paths as God's many expressions of final reconization.

With love and light,

Mary Linda

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!!!It Would Have Taken Me Weeks!!!

Posted July 13th, 2011 by Jennifer Grove

...of explaining to say this:

"The second problem, as with all great religious traditions, is us: we don't want to be interpreted. We don't want to be vulnerable to the texts."

There are no words to express my relief and gratitude to you right now. ... !!!

"We may not be able to do much about the scholarship part of the problem, except honestly study. But the personal part of the problem is entirely up to us. Even when scholarship makes the whole of the texts crystal clear, still the scales must fall from our eyes for us to see that the story is about us, in us, for us, interprets us, tells us who we are."

This is exactly what most people won't do. I understand why, but they are unable to see that this desperate, emotional and pre-conscious act of survival on their part, is actually going to cut them off from the lifeboats. And, yes. KW is modeling the problem for them all. It's okay to have personal hang-ups. I've got mine about Atheism. But I turned that hang-up into an object years ago and have learned to appreciate it as an alternative path which has its glorious potentials. And I'm not alone in that as a Christian. I may never be able to make my peace with Ayn Rand, however. Even if she has a redeeming quality (doubtful she has more than one) I may never be able to see it because of how deeply hurt my bodymind has been by her. She was somebody's child, but no one was her child! She is some kind of chimera that is unable to reproduce! Anyhoo! - Many people have been hurt by the Church the way I have been hurt by Objectivism and so their emotions will blind them from seeing anything but judgment/condemnation/death/etc.

But the intellectual misstep is another thing. Methinks that we will just have to allow KW to not be an expert in this particular area of Spiritual Tradition and take up the reins ourselves. He can't cover everything in precise and correct detail.

I have one question. Did you intend a double neg here?

"Oh, and by the way, this will likely inflame hatred in others toward you because it will expose the lie, as Jesus exposed the lie, that we live."

Or is there more to that that needs to be said? Do we or do we not live?

Cam,

"What is the Resurrection? Surprise, everybody, God is not about death. God does not demand death as a tax for peace or for living. God has never been about death. This is just the reverse of how you have seen it and do see it. In fact, you've never had to win God over by death, for God is and always has been for you. Not for you and against your enemies, but for you without any against anything. You live in a world of opposites, God has no opposites."

The bridge was built so that we could cross over and live like God, not because God wanted to cross over and die like us. He was "willing". He "submitted". It's not what He was "about". Death is what we were about. You could say Jesus did a 3-2-1 on His own Shadow.

The irony is that no one would even feel incredulity about sacrificial death if it weren't for Jesus. He's the one who said it needed to stop, not us. We were - and still are - buying and selling it as tho it were the #1 most coveted commodity.

"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."

~SES pg. 148

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Posted July 16th, 2011 by Shikha Sabharwal in response to !!!It Would Have Taken Me Weeks!!!

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Bad Grammar

Posted July 13th, 2011 by Greg Mayers in response to !!!It Would Have Taken Me Weeks!!!

Jen, you asked...

I have one question. Did you intend a double neg here?

"Oh, and by the way, this will likely inflame hatred in others toward you because it will expose the lie, as Jesus exposed the lie, that we live."

Or is there more to that that needs to be said? Do we or do we not live?

I think the confusion is due to my poor grammar... I mean that Jesus' life and teaching exposes the lie we all live, and if we live out his teaching, we will also expose the lie that all human beings live. To add a bit of humor to this: this is not the way to win friends and influence people. Or to say it another way: a recovering alcoholic is not a welcomed guest at a bar party. If everyone agrees by the way they live out their lives that hating one's enemies is the best policy even if their words contradict their actions, and you love your enemies, the enemy haters aren't going to much like you - in fact they will put you in the enemy category.

Does this clarify for you what I was trying to get at?

Greg Mayers

Zen taught me everything I can do.

Christianity taught me everything I can't do.

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Parables......

Posted July 17th, 2011 by Mary Linda Landauer

Through the years of my own spiritual growth, the reading of parables always take me along an inner path of self reflection and discover; like a Zen koan, or story where I'm drawn into the indirect conversation to make sense of something that has been left out and its my job to figure out what that is......I would like to share two of my favorites:

Jesus says, "The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. And he thought within himself, saying, "What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops? So he said, I will do this: I will put down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods. And I will say to my soul, soul you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease: eat, drink, and be merry. But God said to him, "You fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?

Kierkegaard's parable, 'The Cellar Tenant'......In case one were to think of a house, consisting of cellar, ground-floor and premier 'etage, so tenanted, or rather so arranged, that it was planned for a distinction of rank between the dwellers on the several floors; and in case one were to make a comparison between such a house and what it is to be a man__then unfortunately this is the sorry and ludicrous condition of the majority of men, that in their own house they prefer to live in the cellar. The soulish-bodily synthesis in every man is planned with a view to being spirit, such is the building; but the man prefers to dwell in the cellar, that is, in the determinants of sensuousness. And not only does he prefer to dwell in the cellar; no, he loves that to such a degree that he becomes furious if anyone would propose to him to occupy the bel 'etage which stands empty at his disposition___for in fact he is dwelling in his own house.

I'm enjoying the richness of everyone on this thread; so many beautiful perspectives, stories and aha moments.

With love,

Mary Linda

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