Bede Griffiths

Introductory note: This is a slightly revised version of a piece I have previously posted. It seems pertinent in the light of the previous post serving as an example of what I consider to be a well-meaning but misguided and ultimately failed experiment.

 Most of the time during our years in Yercaud not much happened. The idea was to lead a quiet life of meditation and spiritual focus in a suitable environment without disturbance or distraction. I have nothing to write about these times, the bulk of my life there, but they were the most important part. 

 Sometimes, though, we went travelling, and I might mention here a visit we made to the ashram of Bede Griffiths, the Christian monk who had adopted the lifestyle of a Hindu sannyasi. Michael and Bede Griffiths had a mutual acquaintance who had given us a letter of introduction and so one time when we were travelling in the vicinity of his ashram, we decided to pay him a visit. By one of those little quirks of fate which you might take to mean that someone on the other side has a sense of humour, it transpired that Bede Griffiths had that very day gone to Yercaud for the funeral of a fellow Catholic priest. However, he was expected back the next day and the people at the ashram kindly said we could stay there. I recall that the ‘bed’ we were offered was basically a slab of concrete jutting out from the wall, resembling a shelf you might put pots and pans on more than something you would want to sleep on. Still, you don’t go to ashrams for the creature comforts. The site itself was idyllically situated on the banks of the sacred river Kaveri, the Tamil equivalent of the Ganges, and though the life led by the devotees there was simple to the point of austerity, the natural beauty of the place more than compensated.

 

Father Bede came back the next day. With his long white hair and beard, barefoot and simply dressed in an ochre robe, he looked every inch the holy man. We talked to him for an hour or so and it was clear that his appearance was a true representation of what he was which is by no means always the case. He had been a pupil and friend of C.S. Lewis and we spoke a bit about that. He was very friendly and happy to talk. When we told him we had lived for a while at Whitefield he asked us what we thought of Sai Baba. “At best, a false prophet” was my diplomatic response. Father Bede was less condemnatory but thought confusion arose when Indians did not sufficiently distinguish between their mythologies and their philosophy. Perhaps he was being diplomatic too.

 

 

I liked Father Bede, but I did have some reservations about his ashram and the form it took. The church was built along the lines of a southern Indian temple with statues of Jesus and Mary in the form of Hindu deities which made it look like something out of an Indian Disneyland. We went to a service which was half Mass and half Puja and, although conducted with obvious sincerity, seemed to me to be fundamentally misconceived. When you mix the outer elements of religious traditions you end up with a hybrid that may preserve something of the externals of both but has nothing of the inner nature of either. Truth may be beyond form but form can express or misrepresent truth, and if you try to blend traditions that have grown completely separately, you lose most of what matters and are just left with a caricature of both. It is true that religions have borrowed from each other and that, for example, the now unmistakably Eastern form of the Buddha owes much to Greek influence but when a religious iconography and ritual has taken on a settled and defined form, to mix it up with that from another tradition negates its whole purpose which is to act as a channel from the inner to the outer.

 

 I am not saying that religions cannot learn from one another, but to seek to combine their outer trappings and forms of worship robs them of their operative value and results in a maybe well-intentioned but effectively confused mishmash, all style no substance. The mystical elements of the various religions may be reaching for the same inner truths (though they may not, see this post), but you cannot mix and match the externals, and to see a picture of Christ sitting like Siva seems blasphemous to me. I understand that Father Bede himself was aware of the dangers of syncretism, and I mean no disrespect to his person in writing of my impression of his ashram like this. He was born in a time when religions were very exclusive and it is understandable that, as a mystic, he sought to move beyond that, but I think the approach tried at his ashram was a mistaken one even if it was well meaning and sincere. 

 

My visit to Father Bede's ashram was nearly forty years ago and it may be completely different today, but that's not the issue. My point here is that the 'all religions are one' attitude, popular during the 20th century, doesn't really work. Because there is nothing hidden anymore and we appear to have easy access to everything that has ever existed, it is tempting to blend traditions and think we are getting the best of all worlds. But greater breadth often means less depth. I do think we can learn from other traditions, and one of the advantages of living at the present time is that we have that possibility. But if you blend the outer forms of traditions that have sprung from totally different revelations you will lose the connection they both might have had to the source of all.

When I visited Father Bede I was more persuaded of the idea that all religions express the same truth than I am now. Today, we can see that God is conceived very differently in some religions compared to others, and the desired heavenly destination is not the same in all cases either. Obviously, there are strong similarities, the mystics of every religion do have much in common and the moral codes are largely identical, but we live in a world which is increasingly dominated by spiritual evil, and it seems clear to me that only Christ has the power to stand up to that evil. I wonder that if Father Bede were still alive whether he might reassess the wisdom of blending Hindu and Christian iconography at his ashram. His friend and mentor C.S. Lewis certainly regarded the two religions as very different. That doesn’t mean there are not many points of contact but there is something unique about Christ that does not exist in Hinduism even in the figure of Krishna who may be similar in some respects but is utterly different in many that count.

Jesus Wept - The Difference between Non-Duality and Christianity

 This is a follow up to the previous post which stated that Christ can operate through avenues other than mainstream Christianity. This is because Christ is not only the historical Jesus. He is also the eternal or archetypal pattern of divine truth which can appear wherever a form is open to it. In fact, this inner Christ is more spiritually important than the historical Jesus though it was fully present in him and best revealed in him.

What this also means is that to be a Christian in the proper sense and not just a believer requires that you allow Christ to be born in the heart and so live in the same divine truth he does though note that Christ does not just live in this divine truth as anyone might. It is grounded in his being so while we can share in it, he is it and it is him. 

The spirit of Christ can overshadow any religious approach that is open to it. That is not to say it operates equally well in any religion, but if there is something in the soul of an individual that accords with the reality of Christ then that individual can find something in most religions that will develop that connection to some degree. We must accept this if we make an unbiased study of non-Christian religions and realise that all of them have their share of genuine holy people.

However, this fact has led some people to draw the conclusion that all religions are essentially the same with the same ultimate goal. When we encounter other religious traditions and see that they are authentic guides to spiritual transcendence and do contain significant numbers of saints and sages, it is logical to assume they must simply be different ways of describing the same thing. This was the conclusion drawn by the group known as perennialists.

It can be hard to argue against this conclusion, and yet I was never comfortable with it because of the obvious uniqueness of Jesus Christ who cannot be reduced to just another enlightened soul or even avatar. You cannot escape what Christ said about himself or that he was the one human being genuinely without sin or stain and the absolute incarnation of goodness and truth in a way that no other person, alive or dead, comes near.  This is clear from the Gospels and brought out by meditation on his holy image.

The perennialists thought that all religions in their higher aspects led to the same goal, but to reach this conclusion they had to set aside much of what Jesus taught. Specifically, he did not teach the extinction of the self as in Nirvana which is the Indian way. I am aware it is not the only Indian way but it is the way usually regarded as the summation of the spiritual path by all those who teach the universality of religion. Everything is subsumed into the One in which the human does not survive. As far as this path is concerned, the individual self is the barrier to truth and must be killed, conquered or transcended. It makes no odds how you express it. The self must go.

Now, this is a real path and does lead to a form of God when the end is attained though that is extremely rare, especially in our day even though there are many claimants to the title, people who may have had a taste of the non-dualistic state but who are not fully established in it. However, the God it reaches is not the personal God of Christianity. Absorption into impersonal pure being is seen as a step beyond the personal God but what if the reverse were the case? What if everything comes from the personal I AM and the impersonal is part of the stuff from which God creates consciousness, his spirit but not his self? This would be the Christian position even if Christians unaware of esoteric teachings might not understand it in this way as they do not have the linguistic and philosophical tools to do so. To support this idea consider the fact that pure impersonal being as ultimate reality could not give rise to an 'I' unless that 'I' was already there in some form. It is the 'I' that comes first as, indeed, it does in language when we say I am. The person comes before impersonal being which shows there is a profound difference between union with the transcendent God and oneness with immanent being.

The non-dualistic Eastern religions and the Christian religion both lead to a form of God but it is not the same divine form. The Eastern way concludes in Nirvana in which the individual is dissolved while the Christian way leads in salvation where the individual is sanctified rather than expunged from existence. The Christian disciple still has to transcend the ego aspect of the soul, the separative sense, but individuality is a gift from God. The Christian way is to return it to God who then gives it back filled with his grace and his spirit.

Thus, we can see that the Traditionalist idea of the transcendent unity of religions is based on a metaphysical error, the assumption that all religions are subsumed in a type of Buddhism in which the I is transcended and left behind as nothing. But non-dualistic religions and Christianity aim at two very different destinations, and while non-dualists would claim that salvation belongs to the relative world because it is still part of Maya or creation, and their goal is the absolute, the truth is that salvation, properly understood, is greater because it includes both the absolute and the relative. It has everything of the peace and bliss and oneness of the non-dualistic state but it also incorporates love, beauty and goodness which belong to the world of created beings.  God did not create man simply to re-absorb him into himself. He did so to watch his children grow up to become god-like themselves.

Non-dualistic religion has no understanding of creation or growth or judgment or purpose or even, really, love. For it, time is an illusion rather than a means to grow and a path to an end which is better than the beginning. But if creation has no purpose, what is it there for? Why go through all that stress and strain just to go back to the beginning with nothing added?

If you talk to a non-dualist about sin or the Fall he will not understand or else he will reframe those things in terms he does understand but that robs them of their meaning. They are more than just ignorance. They relate to a malfunctioning of the will which is where the self is situated, and they mean that good and evil are real things between which there is a battle from which you cannot just turn away by denying its reality. The non-dualist would say only God is real but precisely because God is absolute reality what he creates is also real. Not as real as him because it has dependent being but it is still fully real, and that means that good and evil are not just illusions. They are part of reality as it exists for the individual.

Since the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ a new goal has opened for humanity, one that leads to the divinisation of the self rather than its destruction. This new goal does not make merging into the One obsolete but that does now become the lesser option, a truth which the non-dualist would reject, failing to understand that times have changed since the Vedas were revealed and the Buddha preached. More is on offer. It seems God has left the door to Nirvana open, but I wonder if that is really so or whether those who follow this path might have to return and be required to work out their salvation once more. Or else they might wish to once they realise what is on offer in the greater spiritual universe.

Jesus wept because he shared in the suffering of Mary and Martha. For the non-dualist that suffering is ultimately an illusion and to weep would be to partake in that illusion. But for Jesus, Mary and Martha were real beings in themselves and not merely manifestations of the divine. The new spirituality brought by Christ did not aim to kill the self but to raise it up to eternal life. Yes, it must die to itself but after that death it is resurrected in glory.

A Christian Universalist

 I am sometimes asked "What are you?", meaning am I a Christian, a Buddhist, Theosophist, esotericist or pagan of some kind, whatever it might be. I always find it difficult to give a proper answer to this question since in a way I am all of these and yet none. That is to say, I have learned from many spiritual traditions but cannot fully align myself with any of them because if I did I would then have to take spiritual truth at second hand and be bound by the particular form I had chosen. I am well aware there are some who would consider this spiritual arrogance, but it is not. It simply means that truth is beyond form, any form, and to commit yourself to a religious form means you are stepping down from direct interaction with truth. You then have to accept the restrictions of that form and be limited by its concepts and definitions. You may say you are aware of these and so escape their dominion, but that cannot be the case if you really do believe in the religion as it presents itself. And if you don't wholly believe why bother with it at all other than as a guide? I take several things as guides but do not see any as a destination.

I am always careful to stress that this may not have been the case in the past but it very much is so in our time when all religions have lost spiritual authority and power, and all have become exteriorised versions of themselves with their inner energies increasingly draining away.

So now, if forced to describe myself as something, I might say I am a Christian universalist while all the time realising that is just a phrase which doesn't mean anything much. But if someone wants a label, that's as good as any. I absolutely believe in Christ as the central figure in the human spiritual drama, and that the Christian religion expresses something real and profound about him even though we still do not understand the fullness of it. However, I also believe that Christ as the spiritual commander-in-chief of humanity can operate through different outlets. In this sense, he is like the central hub of a wheel and there are various spokes that go out from him to humanity positioned at different points around the edge of the wheel. That's a clumsy analogy because some of these spokes go directly to him while others only go part of the way and would then have to join another spoke to progress to Christ, complete alignment with whom is the fulfilment of the spiritual path. Still, I hope you get the idea. 

Not all the spiritual spokes lead to Christ but he can use some that don't to get an individual some of the way. I see Christ as the goal for all humanity but there are different paths to him, some direct and some circuitous but still leading to him at the end if followed right. I certainly would not say all paths lead to Christ because that isn't true and most don't, but there are more than just one. At the same time, I would also say that to reach the inner reality of Christ means going beyond all outer paths and treading the inner way, and that is the same path for everyone.

Christian universalist it has to be then, but don't take that as saying everyone is saved regardless of their path. Outer paths may vary in their form but the inner quality of each one must have the same core for the path to be effective. The core is the love of God which means true God not some particular image that has been constructed by man, of which there are numerous. The best image of God is Christ as he is the image in which God is most truly revealed

Psychology and the Soul

 For many people in the modern materialistic world psychology has replaced religion, but how can you heal the mind if you don't acknowledge the soul? And most forms of psychology, despite the name, do not acknowledge the soul except sometimes when it is envisaged as an aspect or extension of the mind.

Human beings consist of a body, a mind and a soul, all three of which must be aligned and interacting harmoniously for an individual to be in a healthy state. All three are important to the whole but there is a hierarchical relationship between them which is to say the soul has a mind and a body rather than the other way around. So, I do not have a soul. I am the soul.

If the spiritual is not taken into account a person will be not be in a healthy psychological condition, and while not everyone will feel the impact of this there will still be damage. To attempt to heal the mind without acknowledging spiritual factors is superficial at best.

Some forms of psychology do attempt to integrate a spiritual element into their thinking but they do this by making the spiritual a subset of the psychological so giving a false idea of the spiritual by reducing it to the psychological.

But the spiritual exists at a level of being beyond the psychological and the psychological cannot touch it. All it can do is create a conceptual framework for it but if that is mistaken for the real thing any true connection to the soul is lost.

The soul is sometimes described as beyond form but this is not strictly true. It does not have material form but it has a spiritual form which is its quality. It takes on form in order to express itself in the material world but then it mistakenly identifies itself with the form assumed. It forgets its true nature. Psychology addresses itself to the mind but the mind is part of the form the soul takes in order to interact with the world. If there is not a clear understanding of the difference between mind and soul psychology cannot address deeper problems when they arise and they will even if one is not aware of it with the outer self.

We can go further than this and apply the same line of reasoning to religion. Does religion bring us into relationship with the soul or does it supplant that relationship with itself? It depends on how an individual views his religion. Does he see it as a path to God and the soul or a replacement for God and the soul?  Often it is a bit of both but we must, especially now when all religions are spiritual shadows of their former selves, recognise that religion belongs to the world of form and that true spiritual understanding must lie beyond that. 

In the End Times religions lose their power for two reasons, one bad, one good. The bad reason is the prevailing atheism and egotism of a large section of humanity. The good reason is that an increasing number of people see that the form of religion is an inevitable limitation on the higher understanding. That is not to reject religion because if that limitation is recognised one can go beyond it while still using the good in religion as a guide and support. But a religion is rather like one of those rockets that enable a spaceship to escape the earth's gravity but must then be jettisoned if the ship is to advance deeper into space. This may not always have been so but has become so in our day when End Times energy affects everything in the world.

The Reality of Evil

 It is remarkable how few people nowadays can bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of supernatural evil. Could the reason be that if they did, they would have to admit the possibility of supernatural good and therefore of God? Do people not admit the reality of evil because then they would have to confess their sins, putting it in good old-fashioned terms? 

If you don't see the activity of evil in the world, since forever but especially over the last couple of centuries, it can only be because you have closed your mind to its possibility, and that may be because your worldview would then have to change so radically and you would have to accept spiritual responsibility. If you want to carry on without having your pleasant existence disturbed, indulging your favourite sins even if they are mild compared to some and not seen as sins by modern liberal standards, then you cannot acknowledge evil and that not only does it exist but it has an agenda.

It may be hard to see the activity of evil if you only look in terms of a limited timeframe as we are increasingly trained to do, divorced as we are from tradition and history, but if you stand back a little and take the longer view then it is blazingly obvious. Consider how our minds and attitudes have shifted over the last century or so. Bit by bit we have been moved further away from God and even nature towards an artificial this-world-only mindset that sees human beings exclusively in terms of their outer forms by which I don't just mean bodies but material selves including the mental and emotional aspects which are as material as the physical seen from the spiritual standpoint.

Go back 100 years, though it might just as easily be 200 or even 300 - this is an ongoing phenomenon, long in the preparation. You are a member of the devil's high command. You have to propose an agenda for the corruption of humanity, a fast track to damnation. I say fast track because it is that, given how historical movements normally proceed, but it may not seem that rapid to us in the context of our 70 or 80 years on this planet but that's nothing in terms of humanity as a whole. Your task is to introduce ideas that will gradually but increasingly separate Man from God, and you have to do so in a manner that to the naive and ignorant might actually seem good and as though they will improve society. What would you suggest?

• Firstly, you might try to undermine the reality both of God and religion by attacking those elements of religion that have accrued over the centuries but which are peripheral to the core message. You might get some clever people in the world whom you can influence because of their lack of faith or intellectual vanity or desire for prestige to formulate theories that purport to show there is no rational need for a divine Creator to explain the universe. They will not need to be wicked people but their flaws can be exploited. The attack on religion is made simpler because all religions really are now outdated so their flaws can be pointed out and used to undermine the whole.

• Next, you might suggest measures to dismantle the centrality of the family because the family is the reflection on Earth of a great spiritual fact. Undo it and you separate men and women from truth leaving them open to the lie. These measures will ostensibly be to protect or acknowledge people who fall outside the family for whatever reason, and to say they are just as good as those inside which may be true but is used as a means to destroy what is inside and an essential good. You might propose presenting ideas which see children as distractions or impediments to personal fulfilment instead of being the means to fulfilment which is the case. You might also push to extend the definition of the family, thereby destroying what it really is which is a father, mother and children that come from them by replacing it with what it isn't, all in the name of tolerance and inclusivity. It's a clever ploy to keep the outer trappings of something while replacing what is within as though it were still the same thing.

• Then you might deconstruct the past and seek to separate people from their roots. People without roots have no depth and are easily herded wherever you might want them to go. This could be through education on the one hand, and immigration, on the other, a two-pronged attack that obliges people to think of themselves in terms of a new definition of what a modern member of a particular society is because that is the only definition that will accommodate both the native and the stranger under just one umbrella. Attack the past to reframe the present in the style you want.

• You might suggest stimulating consumerism, that being the constant and insatiable desire to fill up a perceived emptiness as this fixes consciousness on the material plane better than almost anything else.

• Except sex. And so you would over-stimulate this to an absurd degree, separating it from love and making it absolutely central to all culture and much sense of self-worth.

• At the same time as stimulating the sexual instinct, you would propose dismantling the difference between men and women because then neither will be happy and society as a whole will start to break down as a result of it bending to accommodate something that is only possible when there is a lot of meat already on the bone. Feminism aka equality can only exist in a culture that has built up wealth and power so there is a lot to spare. Or else in a primitive culture which has nothing anyway. Otherwise it tends to be parasitical because it feeds off its host, the society in question.

• Then, in line with the consumerism, make it all about the economy. Make that the justification for everything and everything subsidiary to that. Money replaces God.

• And in case none of that is enough, why not attack, dismantle and break down beauty? Call the ugly beautiful and relativise everything in line with a general destruction of hierarchical values. All this, of course, in the name of unity, fairness and equality, the new anti-value values.

This is only a start and there is a good deal more that the devil can do, has been doing, to degrade human souls. For example, life over-stimulates us now to the point at which inner stillness is totally impossible for most people. We are always after the next hit and then the next and so on.  Our institutions, built to sustain and protect us, have been hollowed out and exist now as bureaucratic leviathans whose only real purpose is self-perpetuation. Even the spiritual, where it exists, tends to be a playground for the ego in many cases, captured and misrepresented as a means of human, i.e. personal, development.

All this is at the same time subtle but blindingly obvious when you know how to look. Surely we can see that everything is in one direction now? And it only ever goes further in that direction, despite occasional attempts at course correction. This should be enough to show us the source of the trends and where that source wants to take us. But then we would have to acknowledge the reality of supernatural evil and that would require us to confess our sins and turn to God.

The scale of the attack might seem overwhelming, given that it is everywhere and on every front. But the remedy is simple. Just see it for what it is. The devil likes to hide. Drag him out in the open by revealing his works and he loses power. Once his tricks are exposed he becomes impotent.

The Edge of the Circle

 The UK is currently going through one of its periodic political crises when the powers that be decide to swap one of their indentured servants for another in the hope that the public's dissatisfaction with its controllers will be ameliorated and everyone can start looking forward to a bright new future when everything will be different. It's one of those occasions when tragedy and comedy are hard to prise apart.

When will we learn that nothing can be changed for the better by politics or social action or anything that people actually do? Perhaps at one time that was not the case but it certainly is now. The state of our Western civilisation has reached the point at which everything external has been corrupted and anyone who climbs to the top of the greasy pole will have had to compromise their soul in some way or another. No exceptions. As I always say, this is not a counsel of despair or a reason to do nothing. It simply means that the source of the rot is spiritual and the remedy must also be spiritual first and foremost before anything else can change. If the root of the problem is not addressed than nothing will change and things will continue to decay.

Therefore we must ignore what goes on at the edge of the circle. We must return to the centre for only then will external issues start to correct themselves. Changing yourself is the most radical political action you can take. Not your ideas, though those too, but your very self which must be reoriented to God.

The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man redux

 In a couple of months my new book A Survival Guide to the End Times will be published and I am reminded that I should promote and publicise it. For someone like me that's the least pleasant part of bringing a book to life, but obviously I understand the need for it. 

However, for now there's an earlier book I would like to draw attention to because it isn't included in the sidebar on the right. That's because it's a collection of posts from this blog so I published it myself through Amazon rather than submit it to a proper publisher. The title is the title of this post and that describes what the book is about. We are in a crisis. I would say almost everyone recognises this but by no means everyone recognises the cause of the crisis. It is our rejection of transcendence which is a fancy way of saying rejection of the spiritual. So, it is a spiritual crisis and that affects everything else because everything, absolutely everything, is downstream from the spiritual. If the source is poisoned then the water will be too. And we have poisoned the source.

The essays of this book are ranged under various broad headings such as God, Truth, Christ, Love, Morality, Evil, The Spiritual Path & Spiritual Practice and Modern Times. Then there are subjects like Buddhism, Non-Duality, Masculine and Feminine and the Masters which interest me but are narrower in scope. The message behind all of them though is that we are in a crisis of monumental proportions. There's no point in beating about the bush. One has to recognise this if one is to address its properly. That it is not acknowledged is why it is worsening which is the case.

As a matter of fact, this ties in with the new book. The spiritual crisis is an end times scenario. It is a product of the withdrawal of spirit and consequent dominance of matter which is what occurs when a cycle comes to an end and the initial injection of spiritual energy has dissipated to the point at which we are basically running on fumes. At the same time, this represents opportunity because although the end times affects everything we experience we still have the divine spark within us and the outer degradation can force us to rediscover this. When your world is collapsing you turn to eternal truths which can never be affected by phenomenal decay. That is what we must do to surmount the present crisis.

The book is available here and here in paperback and ebook form.