Elias
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Joined: 06 24 04
Posts: 1237
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 Post subject: Re: essay three ~ The Return of the King... Posted: 02/08/08, 11:03 pm |
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from an email:
| Quote: | | Aren't you talking about the old-fashioned world vs spirit dichotomy? |
No. The real world arises in the Spirit of God. That's the reality of our existence.
Caught up as we are in the dishonesty (and death-denial) of the pseudo-world, we don't know about that, of course. We might hear of it from time to time. But we don't really know it. We don't really know reality.
We live removed from the truth of our existence, and thus at a distance from the Truth of our real selves: our all-pervadingness and our eternal union with God.
That's the "problem", and it is this "problem" that defines our daily lives. It is this "problem" that defines the imaginary opposition between "the world" and "the spirit".
A lie is always going to imagine a non-existent "dichotomy" between itself and the truth, is it not? That doesn't mean we should enshrine the lie as an authentic reality, equal to the truth.
Rather, we should just deep-six the lie and get to the truth.
You have to decide which you want -- the lie or the truth. And if you decide to go for the truth, you have to inspect the lie, see what it is made of, and learn why you have lived under its commands.
Like a spell placed on the mind by an evil Wizard (society), the world system has a hidden motive. Its unspoken intention is to block communion with God, to push Reality right out of the "description of the world". It also, like the Wizard of Oz, attempts to block all awareness of its game (except perhaps by those who are destined to become the "game-masters" of the next generation.)
What is the Wizard's game? Over many centuries he has perfected his ability to enthrall you, to enclose you in limitation, to secure your agreement to a state of ignorance. He has even made you indifferent to your own dying and the eventual accounting of your karma.
This pseudo-world profits by the theft of your spiritual (and mental as well as physical) freedom, exactly as slave-holders have always profited from their possession of human chattel. The modern difference (as compared to the slave societies of the past) is that to a great extent you are complicit in your own slavery. Your loss of freedom is not only based on indoctrination -- it is based on choice.
Fear and desire, compounded by ignorance, lead you to make a choice (sometimes a very subtle choice) to live within the "Emerald City", and to learn how to survive according to its rules. You even imagine that you profit thereby -- you are awarded both financial support and "identity". Despite the fact that you have chosen separation for God, within this self-limiting system you are a "somebody".
The Catholic Church (another self-limiting system) even goes so far as to teach that this "somebody" is eternal, caught up at death in a kind of "beatific" separation from God. What they are saying is that the ego-personality is so rock-solid that it cannot be undone at death. There is simply no bridge to transcendence and liberation in Catholicism. There is (at best) "the beatific vision", a kind of exalted eternity of worshiping an Absolute Other.
(Note: that same myth unconsciously informs a lot of the Western approaches to the Eastern teachings, as well. More about that some other day.)
Even the real mystics, who can be found in the Western tradition, are misunderstood as privileged seers of the "beatific vision." They are held up as examples, not of the real life in the Spirit, but as better versions of the dissociated life, the life of a satellite consciousness orbiting the Great Other. In other words, according to the Churches, Western mystics are no better than glorified cultists. And they are exploited as paradigms to reinforce the cultism of the Churches.
From the personal experience of spending a few years in a Catholic monastery, taking daily "theology" classes, I learned that there is no trace of real spiritual education to be found in the official Church. There is no understanding of the nature of the mind as an instrument of spiritual awakening. There is no effective criticism of the mind as an obstruction to awakening. There is no self-inspection, no self-inquiry, no "who am I?"... Indeed, self-knowledge is pretty much relegated to Freudian-style analysis of the occasional psychological "case". I never saw self-awareness considered as the necessary instrument and immediate precursor to divine illumination. Instead, a massive taboo stood in the path of anyone who yearned in that direction.
(You can feel that yearning in writers like Thomas Merton. But as you read his books you see him constantly looking over his shoulder at the authorities who governed his religious vocation. He is always adjusting what he intuits and thinks to fit their controlling game of approval-disapproval. If Spirit had broken through in him, wakened the voice of the Self in him, it would have met with incomprehension, anger, and shocked finger-wagging. After all, there is nothing more threatening to those whose identity is composed of "spiritual authority", then the voice of the Self.)
Anyway, to come full circle, the first task of self-knowledge is to free yourself from the false mind and its hallucinatory world. (An hallucination which includes the official Churches.)
The Spirit of God is right here to help, every step of the way. Your true "I" wants to be restored to its rightful position in the life of the body, like a King returning from exile who finds his Castle overrun with idiots and posturing fools.
Just seeing what is going on is the first step. Everything follows from that.
Elias |
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