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July 19 - October 29, 2017
As we now well know, this emphatically lopsided representation of the mystery of God was primarily contrived to support the claim of the superiority of the patriarchal conquerors over their matriarchal victims.
The next point is that that which is no “that” at all because it is transcendent of all categories, is the “essence” of one’s own being.
tat tvam asi, “Thou art that,” or “You yourself are It!”
“Neti! Neti!” “Not this! Not this!” Anything you can name is not it, absolutely. “Iti! Iti!” “It is here! It is here!”
Anyone who says, as Jesus is reported to have said (John 10:30), “I and the Father are One,” is declared in our tradition to have blasphemed. Jesus Christ was crucified for that blasphemy; and nine hundred years later, the great Sufi mystic, al-Hallaj, was crucified for the same thing.
How, in the Western line of thought, is one to achieve a relationship to God? According to Jewish thought, one does so by being born of a Jewish mother.
In the Christian tradition, no less exclusively, the historical character, Jesus, is regarded as the one and only incarnation on earth of the Godhead, the one true-God-and-true-Man. This avatar we are taught to regard as a miracle. In the Orient, on the other hand, everyone is to realize this truth in himself, and such an incarnation as Kṛṣṇa, Rāma, or the Buddha is to be thought of simply as a model through which to realize the mystery of the incarnation in oneself.
To which thought I would now add another, that when you are given a dogma telling precisely what kind of meaning you shall experience in a symbol, explaining what kind of effect it should have upon you, then you are in trouble.
The real function of a church is simply to preserve and present symbols and to perform rites, letting believers experience the message for themselves in whatever way they can.
To respond, for example, to the Virgin Birth within one’s heart by a birth of the spiritual life that we know as “of Christ.” This Virgin Birth within is well expressed in Saint Paul’s statement, “I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20).
There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days. That is the birth—the Virgin Birth—in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life.
Meister Eckhart
“This involves the notion of our being the only Son whom the Father has eternally begotten....The best God ever did for Man was to be man himself.”
The philosopher Alan Watts once said, “The Earth is peopling, as apple trees ‘apple.’ People are produced from the earth as apples from apple trees.”
There is a passage in the Old French Queste del Saint Graal that epitomizes the true spirit of Western man. It tells of a day when the knights of Arthur’s court gathered in the banquet hall waiting for dinner to be served. It was a custom of that court that no meal should be served until an adventure had come to pass. Adventures came to pass in those days frequently so there was no danger of Arthur’s people going hungry. On the present occasion the Grail appeared, covered with a samite cloth, hung in the air a moment, and withdrew. Everyone was exalted, and Gawain, the nephew of King Arthur,
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Stephen Dedalus, who is the hero of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, says, “Aristotle has not defined pity and terror, I have.”[17]
Pity is, therefore, the emotion that arrests the mind before whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the human sufferer.
Joyce and Aristotle define terror in a way that is distinct from fear. It is a static experience of the sublime, of that which transcends pain.
It is the emotion that arrests the mind before whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and un...
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Here is revealed the secret cause: your own life course is the secret cause of your death.
The perspective of “Yes” to life, with its cross, and with its crucifixion, allows the foreground of the event to open up to radiance.
All religions are ethical in their foreground. But there exists a metaphysical ground beyond good and evil, beyond I and Thou, beyond life and death. When the symbol is opened, that background is what shines through and flows forth.
The function of the mythology, we recall, is also to spiritualize the place as well as the conditions in which you live. The function of the artist is to do that for you.
The Promised Land is any environment that has been metaphorically spiritualized.
One of the big problems in the Christian tradition arises from the interpretation of supernatural grace, which says, in effect, that salvation does not come from you, but from outside yourself through some kind of ritual experience. But the function of the sacrament of Baptism, for example, is not to pour anything into you but to pull something out of you. The sacraments are an evocation, not an indoctrination.
“How do you like to speak about God, with form or without?”
Of all the traditions I have studied in detail, the Semitic is the only one in which the game rules require that the deity is to be regarded as absolutely the other.
It has been noticed that, whereas in practically all the other religious traditions of mankind the principal gods are nature powers, cosmic deities, with the various local groups in secondary roles, among the Semites generally, and the Hebrews most emphatically, the principal god is the patron deity of the tribe.
When your principal god is your tribal god, no other tribe can possibly possess the same theology.
Moreover, the laws of a tribal god are mainly social laws. Rather than the general laws of nature, known to all mankind; they are local, historic, and specific.
What I think history has proven is that these local social laws set against the laws of nature no longer hold as a guide to conduct, if, indeed, they ever did hold. Their whole history is of fanatic violence. In the biblical religions’ unrelenting thrust against the laws of the nature religions, a tension was so built up that nature was indeed imaginatively corrupted.
Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
Who ever heard of man giving birth to a woman, as Adam to Eve?
There is in all of this symbol making and storytelling a deliberate campaign of seduction, turning the mind and heart from the female to the male—that is to say, from the laws of nature to the laws and interests of a local tribe.
Mary’s Assumption into Heaven was in 1950 declared a dogma to be believed as an historical occurrence.
Indeed, Mary is even regarded as Co-Savior, co-sufferer with her life-redeeming Son. The line of division here between “veneration” and “worship” is b.c.ming less and less easy to define.
Two mythologies
planting culture,
the old-city mythology of cyclic karma—of the ages of gold, silver, bronze, iron, during which the world’s moral condition deteriorated. The Flood then came an...
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The second mythology is that of a God who created people, some of whom misbehave.
The latter God is one who creates. One thinks of that God as a fact. That we say, is the Creator. We conceptualize that God as an IT.
impersonal dynamism of the cycles of time the gods are simply the agents of the cycle.
This one of the mythologies of God in the Bible was brought in by the nomads who, as herding people, had inherited the mythology of the hunting process in which God is considered out there.
The planting people have a mythology of God in here as the dynamism that informs all of life.
That is a hint, buried in Genesis, that two notions of God are to be found in its pages.
The first was the willful, personal creator who grieved at the wickedness of his creatures and vowed to wipe them out.
The universe as a living being in the image of a great mother, within whose womb all the worlds, both of life and death, had their existence.
(recall the 43,200 beats of the heart every twelve hours)
These old mythologies, then, put the society in accord with nature.
Their festivals were correlated with the cycles of the seasons.
