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

Love vs Compassion

 I've been thinking about the difference between love and compassion. Spiritually speaking, compassion is a Buddhist virtue while love is Christian. Some people would say these are the same thing, just differently viewed. I don't believe they are the same at all. Compassion is supposed to be rooted in a recognition of the unity of all life. You are me and I am you and so on. So, compassion is logical because in feeling for you I am feeling for myself in a certain sense. We are all one and compassion is the appropriate response to that spiritual realisation.

Isn't this rather thin gruel? First of all, the logical nature of the thing is demeaning to true feeling. And secondly, if feeling for you is really a form of feeling for me then it's not really feeling for you at all. It isn't self-interested but nor is it seeing you in your own right as a real individual person

I know this is an over-simplification of what Buddhist compassion is but it does point to something real.  Compassion is calm, measured, dispassionate. It is kind and good. It is the cool light of the moon. But love is the blazing light of the sun. It bursts its bounds. It can dazzle and even burn. It is not kind or good or even loving in the usual sense of that word because it cannot be contained. It overflows. It is radiant, glorious, intolerant of whatever might limit it. There really is no connection between compassion and love. They are not the same or even similar because love comes from the sea of fire which is the hidden cause and substance of all the created worlds while compassion is the reflection of that fire in matter after it has descended from the throne of God to the worlds below. It is love at second hand. Compassion is the good man's response to the human condition but love is the direct spirit of God as it flows through the universe giving it its very life.

Don't take this to mean that compassion is not a good and worthy thing. But it is not love. Compassion lives for others. Love dies for them.

The Recovery and Renewal of Tradition

Christianity can seem soft and feeble to many men today, a sentimental palliative that answers none of the deeper questions of life. It has become something of a nursery religion that looks to make people behave nicely to each other rather than something that addresses absolutes and can overcome death and darkness. The fire has gone out of it, and managers and consultants are raking over the ashes making the Christian religion just another form of liberal humanism.  What we need is a return to Tradition using the capital to make clear that it is the spirit behind Tradition we must rediscover rather than any particular form it might have adopted in the past.

Tradition isn't a theory or ideology and to think of it in those terms is to see it through the eyes of secular modernity. It isn't a system or a codification of some intellectual analysis or argument. Though it may have those elements within it, they are secondary and used to express the ideas behind it. They are not the source of them. The real source of Tradition is insight into the reality behind outer appearance, and this may either come from revelation or mystical experience which is to say it derives from the spiritual world which is primary. For Christianity and the West in general, the revelation was obviously Christ, the descent of the Logos into human form. Therefore, to restore the Christian vision we should go back to him as the source.

 

However, tradition in the Western world was based on Christ but not just Christ. Greek philosophy and thought, Roman law and military strength and the Northern European sense of the individual all determined the form it took. These coalesced into a spiritual ethos that shaped the world until it lost touch with the transcendent and collapsed into modernity which in turn collapsed into whatever we have now when not only the spiritual but more recently the rational too have been rejected.

 The rediscovery of Tradition does not mean going back to the past as it was because we are not the same people we were, and the experiences of the last few centuries have marked us indelibly. What it requires is the recognition of the transcendent and the divine principles rooted in that. At the same time, the forms Tradition took in the past were highly effective means of communicating those principles and until we have anything better we would be well advised to understand and appreciate them because they still have power when understood as receptacles for spiritual truth. We should not limit spiritual truth to the forms it took but nor should we neglect those forms since few of us are able to fully intuit spiritual reality directly. We usually need an outer vessel to convey its essence for us and there is still much to be learnt from the vessels that were built up by wise and inspired men over many centuries.

That having been said, our main goal should be to become aware of God ourselves, and the best way to do this remains through the figure of Jesus Christ. But which Christ? The unfortunate reality is that we have built our own images of Christ which reflect our own prejudices so how can we circumvent these false Christs and discover the true one? Obviously, there are the Gospels, especially that of St John, but there is also Western art and I would suggest that the image on the Turin Shroud is of particular relevance in this respect. It really does seem authentic not just in the sense that scientific analysis has, so I believe, confirmed that the cloth is of the right time and place, but also the image itself, the method of creation of which we still cannot explain. If I were told this was how Jesus looked I would not be disappointed. The face has such nobility and power and inner strength that it exceeds any artist's representation of what the Son of God might look like.

These are outer approaches to Jesus and we cannot do without them. But there is also the inner approach. This is the quest to find Christ within our own heart. I am not referring here to any concept of our own Christ nature or an abstract or Cosmic Christ. There is no inner, no abstract, no Cosmic Christ without the real person of Jesus Christ. That is the reality and the others merely borrow from that reality. But I do believe we can meet Christ within ourselves through prayer and meditation on his holy self, and that by this means we can start to know something of God and eventually unite our being to his. Then we are in touch with the true source of the Christian Tradition.

This is how we rediscover Tradition today. We go back to the source but we also look for it within ourselves. Each is required for the whole approach. Tradition is made up of both body and soul, the body to preserve it and the soul to renew it.

Of Lions and Lambs

 We are living through the end times when spirit is obscured by matter as a result of which even when the spiritual is acknowledged it is often perceived through the distorting lens of modernity.

One of the characteristics of the end times is that the whole era returns as part of a general summing up of the age, but it does so in a form that is misrepresented by the reigning characteristics of the zeitgeist. Thus, we now have access to spiritual traditions of the past in a way undreamt of not long ago, but what we have access to are really only the bones on which we frequently put modern flesh.

An example of this is paganism which appears to be making a comeback in various forms. One particular form has come about in response to the feminisation of modern Christianity and the perception that it is a Jewish religion. The idea is that adopting a foreign religion has weakened the West as a whole and men in particular, and if you look at the Christian religion as it is today you can see there is truth in this. The new Archbishop of Canterbury makes it almost comically obvious. However, if you look more deeply the picture changes somewhat.

To begin with, despite appearances, Christianity is not a Jewish religion. See here and here. Obviously, it was born in a Jewish setting but Christ transcended that which was why the Jews rejected him. And then when the religion took root in the West it was transformed by its host to reflect the sensibility of Western thought and behaviour. The supposed feminine nature of Christianity is only because it shows the way to go beyond the egotistic self. Christianity has become feminised over recent years but that is not its real nature. There is nothing feminine about Christ nor his disciples who all fought and conquered the world but did so through force of spirit rather than force of arms.

Nonetheless, because Christianity has become a bland non-judgmental religion with its idea of love, originally fiery, become wet and soggy, it is not surprising that a more masculine mindset rejects it. Yet those who do reject Christianity for its supposed weakness are not seeing it as it is, only as it has become. Reacting against the soft and sentimental side of modern Christianity, some men adopt hard pagan beliefs in which self-mastery is key. Your mind must master your emotions, they say, if you are to be the master of yourself. They are right. The mind must master the emotions or you remain a slave like most of humanity. 

And yet, is this spirituality or is it self-development? Are you going beyond the self or are you reinforcing it?  It is easy to mistake self-development for spirituality. There is overlap but the former is only a preliminary phase, and problems arise when it is seen as an end in itself.

The resurgence of masculinity often goes with bodybuilding and working out at the gym but then these become ends in themselves, narcissistic ends. Its advocates want success and achievement and to make a mark in the world, and while these are part of human development, especially male development, they are not spiritual things. The self should be strong but it is an error to regard that as a spiritual state. It is only a foundation and it needs refinement and to learn sacrifice or it will degenerate.

Action and reaction are always equal and opposite. We should not allow the absurdities of the left, of feminism, of anti-racism and all the rest of the crazy catalogue of errors Western man has built up over the years, to lead to an excessive response. There are signs this is happening and I suspect the only thing that can keep us on the straight and narrow path, the razor's edge of true spirituality that combines both lion and lamb, is the risen Christ. Happy Easter!

della Francesca's Resurrection of Jesus

Christmas Is Real

 Just as there are holy places, sites of pilgrimage imbued with the presence of an angel or a saint or special in some other way, so there are holy times and Christmas is among the holiest. Whether or not Jesus was actually born on December 25th is largely incidental. This is the time he is deemed to have been born. The proximity to the winter solstice when the sun appears to come back to life in the Northern hemisphere is important but that is not the whole story. The incarnation of the divine light in the world is the main reality and the solar phenomenon is but a reflection of that in the physical dimension. The spiritual always precedes the material, not the other way around as our benighted age generally assumes. The Incarnation was at a special time and it gave a special quality to that time by its very nature.

In the past the church understood the idea of holy times very well with her feasts and festivals, all celebrated liturgically and acting as focal points in the year, stations on a railway line one might almost say. But it is not just the association with an event in Christ's life that is significant here. There is a real quality of time involved, an extra abundance of spiritual presence. Other religions have their festivals too but I have the impression that these do not travel well despite the fact that we are now required to give them almost equal consideration. Maybe it takes time for time to acquire sacredness. That and the energy of human devotion. At any rate, in the Western world the time around Christmas has a special holiness which even the materialism of the present era has not been able to destroy.

Time and space are the vessels in which God creates. They are his pen and paper. I am not Catholic but my wife and children are and over Christmas I had the choice of either going to a service at Westminster Cathedral on Christmas Eve or to the local Catholic church on Christmas Day. I was told that the church you go to doesn't matter. What matters is celebrating mass. Fine-sounding words but in my opinion wrong. They remind me of a time I visited Downside Abbey, a beautiful Benedictine monastery in the Gothic revival style in Somerset. This was in the 1980s and an ugly modern building, a library, I think, had just been tacked onto the side of the abbey. "What a horror"(or words to that effect), I tactlessly said to the monk who was kindly showing us around. "Not at all," he rejoined "if you have spirituality in your heart the outer conditions are unimportant". He had quite misunderstood that beauty within requires outer beauty. That doesn't mean it should depend on outer beauty but nor should it treat the beautiful and the ugly as equal. That is an insult to God and a desecration of creation. I chose to go to Westminster Cathedral rather than the late 20th century concrete pile in my vicinity. In such surroundings the spirit is elevated rather than diminished and crushed.

All this to say that although God is present at all times and in all places, there are certain times and places when he is more present or when more of him is present. Christmas is one of the times he is most present because that is when he really did become present in the world.

Who Was St John?

 Christine Hartley (1897-1985) was a pupil of Dion Fortune and an important figure in the revival of the Western Mystery Tradition. In later life she even wrote a book with that title. There, nestled among stories of Merlin and Arthur and the Tuatha da Danaan and the Druids, there is a short chapter called St John the Kelt. When I first read this many years ago I felt that rush of recognition you experience when something you knew but don't know you knew breaks through into the realm of conscious thought. It made complete sense.

Christine Hartley gives some reasons for this, on the face of it, unlikely assertion, and while they are plausible they certainly don't prove that the beloved apostle really was a Celt. But that is besides the point for this is more an inner plane reality than something that is factually true in the outer world - which is not to say it is not outwardly true as well. She says that the original Celts came from the mountains around Ararat and Persia and migrated westwards, but that there may have been some who remained behind at various stages of the journey. I don't think this is currently accepted by modern scholars but the Celtic people were certainly travellers and there is no reason why some may not have ended up in the Holy Land. More to the point, she says that the Celt is a mystic who thinks symbolically. He is a poet and a dreamer. His spirituality is shot through with magic and mystery, and his view of the created world is that it still shines with God's glory if you look at it right. All of this is in St John. None of it is in the rest of the New Testament nor is it part of the Jewish religious temperament which is based on law and the hard reality of this world. 

St John's Gospel and the Book of Revelation stand apart from everything else in the Bible. Their spiritual approach is mystical in a way that makes other parts of the Bible seem prosaic and earthbound. They glisten with an inner light that is typically Celtic. The imagery of the Apocalypse, its expansive visionary quality and prophetic fire, might have partial roots in the Book of Daniel but, as Christine Hartley says, "Here is the poetry and imagery of the Kelt from the first word to the last - the whole of the great Vision lies before us in a glowing tapestry of Angels and Jewels and Riders upon Horses...so superbly described...that it is almost possible to catch a glimpse of the reality that lies behind them".

Nowhere in traditional Jewish writing is there a sense of the spiritual nature of God one finds in the opening words of St John's Gospel. This is unprecedented and separates him from the other Apostles who, for all their qualities, seem dull and heavy in comparison, unable to transcend the material nature of the world and see spirit in the pure form conveyed by St John. And then, as Christine Hartley points out,  John "invariably writes 'The Jews', as though they were to him foreigners" implying that he is, at the very least, from another background.

Then you have the traditional representation of St John. Obviously, the images we have of him and St Peter and Jesus himself were not drawn from nature, but they might have come from oral tradition and, if we accept that Christianity is a divinely inspired religion, we should have no difficulty in believing that these images could also have been inspirational in origin. Peter is always a burly, bearded, rather fierce man of passion and energy, practical and tough, and somewhat bullish. St John is almost the opposite. He is youthful, sensitive and often fair-haired. A dreamy, almost ethereal quality comes from his pictures as in this one from the 19th century. This is a Celtic poet.

If Christianity was destined to spread beyond the Jewish world, as we must assume it was, then it would make sense to have a non-Jew as one of Jesus's closest disciples, someone who would then write about him from the perspective of an outsider to the very insular Jewish world. This writing would appeal more to the imagination of the intended audience and help bring them on board with the new, what was intended to be, universal religion. Its internal content and unstated but inherent cultural signatures would resonate with them and help make Christianity a European religion not a Jewish one which was its destiny.

None of this can be proved as the world seeks proof but I maintain that on the level of myth and intuition it shines out with the clarity of real truth. St John was the primary medium through whom the Christian message was transmitted to the Indo-European people, and he was one of them. The Christ he revealed was the warrior king of Revelation, the Lord and Ruler of all Creation whose face shines with the glory of the sun, the incarnation of a solar God much more than the Old Testament Jehovah.

Christ is Qualitatively Different to Every Other Spiritual Being

 It cannot be denied that every serious religion has produced its share of saintly men and women, and also that bad things have been done in the name of every religion. In both cases some more than others but still the point stands. Does this mean that every religion is equally valid and that they all come from God and have the same divine stamp of approval? That they simply represent different expressions of divine truth and are intended for different groupings of people?

My answer to this is a definite no. There is a hierarchy in religion as there is in everything else and top of the hierarchy is Christianity. That is because Christ is the one perfect divine revelation because he is indeed the Son of God and Saviour of Mankind.

Most religions probably have some kind of divine input and if they don't at the beginning then they become influenced by truth from on high as they develop and grow. I say most not all because some now passed and more localised are clearly demonic in origin. But of the great religions in the world which have spread significantly beyond their point of origin I would say all contain in part the presence of God. He can be seen, again in part, through the window of the religion.

However, this presence is always veiled except in the case of Christ where it is seen directly. This is because Christ was not a prophet or avatar or incarnated spiritual being of some kind sent from God, all of which are in some degree limited if not contaminated by appearing in the world of matter. Christ was the pure essence of God and there was no limitation or contamination in him. This is what without sin means. He was the naked truth of spirit shining directly, unimpeded by matter. And his teaching was twofold. First, there was the basic teaching which in many ways was not dissimilar to other spiritual teaching even if it was more direct and to the point. But then, and more importantly, there was his person. Christ taught through the medium of his person. He was (and is) the truth, and when he said no man comes to God except through him that is also the truth.

Now, Christ can appear in non-Christian religions through inhabiting with his spirit aspects of those religions, and this is why members of those religions can become saints if they follow the Christ-inhabited aspects of their religion. But, even so, this is not as direct an approach as through the image of Christ that has come down to us through scripture, tradition and art, all divinely inspired. But Christ also lives or can live in our hearts and anyone can meet him there if they open themselves up to his holy person. This then transforms the individual from the worldly material self to a spiritual being. Furthermore, it is the only thing that can do that.

Christ is qualitatively different to every other spiritual being because they partake of him but he only partakes of himself.

The Sun and the Planets

 Nietzsche criticised Christianity as a slave religion which sapped the strength of the masculine virtues as a result of its encouragement of humility and self-abnegation. He said it encouraged weakness and condemned its suppression of natural instincts. For him the Christian runs away from life instead of whole-heartedly embracing it. 

It cannot be denied that there is this element in Christianity (though not in Christ) and it is one of the reasons many people these days turn to some form of paganism as a more robust and less vitality draining spiritual approach. There is also an ethnocentric aspect to this in that many Europeans do not wish to adopt what they see as a foreign, specifically, a Jewish, religion. The pagan traditions are regarded as purer and more in keeping with racial identity.

But is Christianity as we know it in the West a Jewish religion or is it really a European one? Although Christ was born a Jew (or half Jewish if you believe the Gospel account of his paternity), the teaching he brought completely overturned the Jewish religion of the time. That is, after all, why he was crucified by the religious authorities or at their behest. That teaching was then absorbed by Europeans and interpreted in the light of their own identity and within the context of their own traditions, Greek philosophy, Roman law and the Germanic/Nordic sense of individuality and freedom to name the three most important. Christ had to have some particular form and he had a Jewish form because the Jews of the time had been prepared by God as a receptacle for his advent, but in himself he is universal and when the religion founded in his name came to Europe it became completely European.

In fact, it was only much later when the traditional European societal structures were undermined and hierarchies destroyed that the enfeebling qualities of Christianity were brought out. Tell the Desert Fathers they had a slave religion, tell St Benedict, St Columba, St Francis and a host of others. Tell the Crusaders or more or less anyone up to the 18th century. It was only when Europe abandoned its traditions and Christianity descended into humanitarianism that it became feminised and lost its spiritual vigour and vitality. Certainly, it was a monastic religion and a priestly religion and suffered much in the way of corruption (though no more than any other religion and a lot less than most), but it was never life-denying even if it did prize celibacy for some and chastity for all. So did many other religions. If you are trying to transcend the pull of this world and the lure of matter you have to take certain steps. It is not denying nature to realise that the sexual instinct needs controlling. On one level spirit and nature truly are at war even if on another level they can be reconciled.

I mention the attraction of paganism for many people these days and that it is seen as a more natural and affirmative spiritual approach for the European mindset than Semitic (so called, it's not really) Christianity. I love many of the pagan traditions, Egyptian, Greek, Celtic, Norse. Many pagan philosophies are replete with wisdom and insight, the Neoplatonic for instance, or the Indian. In my more fanciful moments I speculate that I may have followed some of these paths in previous lives. But there is a problem. All of them have something essential missing. Before Christ it was not known what that was. After him it became obvious what it was. They were stories without the main character, circles with a missing centre. It's no accident that the principal pagan deities are associated with planets* and that behind them there is often envisaged a hidden One. They are satellites to the central sun who is Christ. Before Christ paganism was a valid spiritual path if it worshipped the One Creator God behind all the gods but with him what was hidden became revealed and the old religions were superseded. Things being what they are there were some aspects of Christianity that were lesser expressions of truth than had existed in paganism even if as a whole it went deeper into the heart of truth and goodness and holiness than paganism ever did or could. And as Christianity lost its force, the further it removed itself from the spirit of Christ, these shortcomings became more apparent. But no pagan god can approach Christ in terms of spiritual power or divine radiance, and the way many contemporary pagans look on their gods today is as bathed in his light. Just like the planets and the Sun. The revived pagan gods have taken on aspects they never had because of Christ, but Christ is the source and to the extent they have any true spiritual substance they are just reflecting him.

Christianity is not a Jewish religion. It was specifically rejected by the Jews. It is not a weak religion for resentful slaves simply because it advocates spiritual power over worldly. Christ may have been a servant in this world in order to teach humility which is the overcoming of the ego, but in heaven he is the great solar hero and a King.

*Note: I realise  that pagans did have deities associated with the sun but they had to have something along those lines, the sun being of such obvious importance. But these were not ruler deities so I see them more as placeholders until the real thing manifested itself in Christ.

Love Your Enemies

 As we know, the devil quotes scripture for his own ends. Nowhere has he been busier in this regard over recent years than with the matter of love which is now used as an excuse to overlook all manner of assaults on goodness and truth. Don't judge, don't condemn, be tolerant, accept everyone and (pretty much) everything because, you know, love.

When Jesus told us to love our enemies he meant we should not hold hatred in our hearts for those who do us an ill turn. This is not to benefit our enemies who may or may not be good or bad people. It is to stop the hatred corroding our soul which is what hatred does do when it is personal. He was saying that hatred darkens the heart while love brings light to it. You cannot affect what is out there in others but you can affect what is in yourself. If you want to go to heaven then you must have heaven within you. We need to remember this. After death you will go to a place, an environment, that reflects your inner state. The subjective mind and the objective world reflect each other in the post-mortem state, the spiritual world. If you have hatred within you, you cannot go to a place of love

This is why we are enjoined to take Christ into our hearts. Not merely believe in him, but actually build him into our being. This does start with belief but must progress to a form of identification. That does not mean you are Christ, that is blasphemy, but Christ is in you. Controversially for a Christian, this can work with other deity figures depending on how much spiritual light they carry, but none carries so much light, and pure light unmixed with other stuff as is the case with other deity figures, as Christ who is the image of God in human form to a greater degree than anything or anyone else. God has appeared in many images to humanity at various stages of its existence but only in Christ is he revealed as fully as is possible in this world.

So, love your enemies because love cleanses the soul and hatred makes it sick. But loving your enemies does not mean accepting evil, and if you use the excuse of love to ignore or, worse, justify evil then you are betraying love which, ultimately, is love of the Good.

Today in the name of love what is ugly is called beautiful, what is unnatural is called natural and what denies spirit is regarded as as healthy in its own way as what fully accepts it. If you really love then what you love first and foremost is God who is the author of love, and if you love God then you condemn what rejects or insults God. You don't let that condemnation affect you on a personal level because then it drags you down, but nor do you succumb to the dangerous illusion that universal, unconditional love means loving everything equally. There is good and there is evil. To love your enemy does not mean accepting evil which must be identified and unsentimentally condemned.

The Living Image of the Eternal

Truth is beyond form and expression but for religion to be comprehensible it must be grounded in form. Religious forms can take many varieties which approximate to that which they are trying to express to a greater or lesser degree. Some forms capture something of the reality behind them while others distort it, sometimes unacceptably so. The question then arises. What is the best form, the one that comes nearest to revealing the truth that lies behind all genuine religion?

Before answering that, we must accept that different forms suit different people. That is to say, people of different temperaments and from different cultural backgrounds. It would be unrealistic to think that the whole world should follow one particular form any more than that they should speak one language, and it is probably not a good idea either as different forms can express different aspects of truth. None express the whole, even all together can't express more than a tiny fraction of the whole, but they can complement each other by their particular focal points. This may not be necessary from the purely spiritual perspective, but it can be helpful.

No doubt everyone thinks his own religion is best, and it may be for him. On the other hand, it may not. It may simply be a religion one is born into or one that suits one's strengths or weaknesses or prejudices or preconceptions. Over the course of my spiritual life (pompous phrase, but it can't be helped in this context), which is now some 47 years, I have investigated many, I am tempted to say most, spiritual paths. Not as a follower but by reading about them and exploring their forms and practices. It's fascinating to see how human beings have approached the numinous. So many similarities and so many differences. While recognising the validity of many, I have my favourites but there are also some I think are inspired from lower levels, either originally or through infiltration over the years. Some are even a mix of the true and the false. Quite a few are, in fact.

However, there is one clear winner, (I know it's not a competition, but in a way, it is). Obviously, that is Christianity and not so much because of the religion or religions that have arisen in Christ's name but because of him. Christ is the face and form of God, God revealed in a human being, God embodied. And, while we're at it, let us point out that the image of God himself is another form that encapsulates hidden truth. As God the Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth, this image draws the mind and heart up to the realm of pure spiritual light in a way that lesser images do not. The very word 'God' brings together amorphous ideas and feelings and intuitions in the human head and heart, and moulds them into something tangible, something that the mind can latch onto, to which it can respond and with which it can engage.

Jesus Christ is the perfect spiritual form, the one above all others. First of all, because he is a living person, and spiritual reality is personal before it is impersonal - the opposite to what the sophisticated believe. And secondly, because he is the only spiritual figure totally without flaw, without sin as it is said. He reflects the spiritual world without any corrupt influence of this world. You can say that about no one and nothing else. Certainly, there are many other inspiring spiritual figures and philosophies from before the time of Christ and after him. But he is without peer and incomparable in his truthfulness. I do not doubt that non-Christian spiritual approaches can bring their followers to God, and, for that matter, many ostensible Christian ones might fail in that, but Christ is and remains the Way,  the Truth and the Life. He is the revelation of what this excellent essay calls the single, supreme, eternal creator deity or first principle, born into the Jewish race but come for all people.

A New Age Religion

Over the last 100 years people have looked all over the place for spiritual enlightenment, often adopting various forms of what has become known as New Age spirituality which was regarded as a more advanced form of religious understanding with greater insights than conventional approaches. It is true that, as the last post pointed out, the churches have fallen away from the purity of truth because they have become infected by secularism, but the fact remains that the real New Age religion is Christianity and we only fail to recognise this because we are so used to it. Read the Gospels, particularly that of St John, and you will see why this is so. Christ brought something entirely new to the world which was the chance of entrance to a new creation in which the material or outer was made fully transparent to the spiritual or inner. He made possible the union of Heaven and Earth, and this was expressed symbolically by the New Jerusalem, a city built by God though with the aid of man, all of whose real creativity goes into the construction. The fact that the original garden of Eden becomes the heavenly city of Jerusalem shows we are not just returning to the paradisiacal perfection of eternity but, through time, forging something entirely new.

The New Age religions of the 20th century were really just jumbles of ancient beliefs mashed up together and presented as new. But there was nothing new about any of it. They included bits of ancient paganism with a smattering of Eastern mysticism, a touch of occultism and a seasoning of psychically received messages from the inner planes, some worthwhile, most not, but none of this was new as such. It did point to the immanence of God which was a good corrective to the conventional Christian idea of God as largely transcendent, but it was also heavily influenced by what you might call the Babylonian Mystery religion which is one of the oldest false paths around, going right back to the Fall of Man and the attempt to become a god independently of God. New Age religion was not demonic as such but it had the potential to become so because it was focused more on gaining experience in the psychic and spiritual worlds than on sanctifying the soul. The demons can give mystical highs or the semblance of them but they cannot convey the sense of the holy, and it is holiness not spirituality that opens the door to the real New Age when Man will enter into full communion with God.

Christians and the Esoteric

 It is often said that there is nothing esoteric in Christianity. Everything is public and out in the open, and there are no hidden secrets divulged only to higher level initiates. It is true that Christ did exteriorise the mysteries, enacting literally what had taken place symbolically in those ancient rites and so potentially making rebirth into spirit available to everyone who believed in him, though what belief in Christ really means in this context is something to ponder. But time moves on and what was applicable at one moment in history may be less so later on.

Spirituality means escaping the iron grip of matter. Not because matter is evil but because it is matter, i.e. not spirit or, at least, not spirit in its pristine, undisguised form. As one escapes matter one moves up through the levels of manifested reality which, in human terms, means through the levels of the physical nature, the emotions, thought and personal identity. Each one of these levels must be conquered but all are incorporated into the whole. We descend from the pure consciousness of the spiritual world into matter to learn the lessons of matter and acquire its virtues which are the qualities associated with action and doing, relating and feeling, and knowing and understanding, qualities one can only acquire through experience in a dualistic world of subject and object. In the process of our immersion in matter we can forget who we are and identify with the 'bodies' or modes of being through which we temporarily operate in order to gain the ability to become gods, free agents with creative power motivated by love. It is this false identification that is the problem so the fault does not lie with matter, which is merely the medium through which spirit expresses and comes to know itself, but our identification with it.

What does this have to do with the esoteric? Simply this. At an earlier phase of development the majority of human beings were focused in the physical and emotional worlds. Few people had developed mentally to a high level, but that is no longer the case. Many people have now reached a relatively high degree of intellectual development and these people need to understand. They cannot just proceed on faith. Their ability to believe must be coupled with understanding for them to flourish and grow spiritually, and for their belief actually to be rooted in the whole of their being. The esoteric is really just about knowledge. It is not spiritual in the spiritual sense but intellectual. And yet for modern man to be spiritual in the spiritual sense he needs intellectual support.

A follower of Christ in our day must combine a degree of esoteric understanding with faith. If he neglects this his faith will be shallow even if it is intense. His spiritual development will be limited and his entry into the mind of Christ will be partial. This is in line with the growth of human consciousness. The old ways may suffice for some but for those who would not just follow Christ but actually start to become like him then knowledge must supplement faith even if it remains the case that true knowledge actually arises from real faith. "Credo ut intelligam".

The esoteric is not there to replace faith in Christ. It is not a higher level of spirituality but a means of deepening faith and taking it from something that is exterior to the inner man, in the sense that it is located in thought and feeling, to something that is more like knowing through being. It elevates faith to a higher plane where the boundaries between faith and knowledge start to dissolve. If faith is of the heart, as it should be, then the esoteric is of the head and we need both to be spiritually whole. Indeed, only when we have both do we really have either one of them in the proper sense.

Saving the West

There are many online writings lamenting the destruction of the West and blaming the usual suspects of mass immigration, liberalism, feminism and materialism, and their by-products of sentimentality, self-hatred and so on. Some regret this but accept it as inevitable, others want to fight it and think it can be turned around while a few just shrug their shoulders and cultivate their garden which seems to them to be the only option left in a crumbling cultural wasteland. I sympathise with all these approaches but would like to ask a question here. What is the West for? Because only if we know what it is for can we know if it is worth saving. 

Any civilisation worth that name must be organised around spiritual principles. From ancient Egypt to Greece to India, and even Rome when it began, God or the gods were at the centre of life, formed the culture and gave meaning to the civilisation. For the West that organising principle was Christianity which was the greatest expression of spiritual understanding there has been. In fact, all the other expressions might be said to be from the outside looking in. Only Christianity really comes from the inside. That, of course, is the meaning of revelation. Christianity or, better put, Christ is the greatest revelation of and from the spiritual world. There really is no doubt about this. Christ is the only religious personality utterly without flaw or limitation.

The West existed for the expression of Christianity. That is what gave it its greatness. Not uniquely for there were many tributaries but the main river into which all these tributaries fed was Christianity. Some people think the West is defined by science and has reached its greatest state following that pursuit but even science arose in a Christian context with natural philosophers seeking to understand God's creation. And whether it has reached its apogee pursuing science or sunk to a spiritual nadir is a question worth pondering.

When the West started to abandon Christianity it lost sight of itself. Now, we can go into the reasons for that abandonment and say that some of them were actually based in truth because they were to do with the development of consciousness and an increased mental polarisation and intellectual comprehension of the creation. The outer expression of Christ's teachings followed by the West might be said to have been suitable for an earlier phase of consciousness, less so for the new phase. But the core remained eternally valid for the core is Christ himself. It is not true that a better grasp of the world leads to atheism. A superficial understanding may but not a deeper one. A little knowledge has proved to be a very dangerous thing for the West but it is not only this superficial knowledge that has caused the West to abandon God and Christ. This is fundamentally a moral problem. The creature has got too big for its boots. Its newly acquired powers have gone to its head for it has taken these to itself and decided they are aspects of its own self and belong to that self by right.

I regret the ongoing destruction of the West but it has brought this on itself through its own hubris. When it rejected Christ it signed its own death warrant and we live in the playing out of that process. I suppose that it could theoretically rediscover Christ but that looks very unlikely, so much have we succumbed to our own egotism and proved unable to resist the demonic influences which hasten the process of our downfall. Individually, we can and should turn back to reality which means for the West to Christ, but collectively things do not look promising. So be it. The West is only worth saving if it rededicates itself to Christ. Note I do not say spirituality which can mean a whole host of things, some positive, some just self-indulgent and shallow. Without the rediscovery of Christ we can fight the symptoms and secondary causes of decline as listed above all we like but it will not lead to any kind of true renaissance.

I Am a Christian but...

 I'm not only a Christian. There is part of me that is pagan, particularly Greek, Celtic and Norse, and part that is Hindu and part Buddhist. Part of me is an ancient Egyptian living in the space between the bright blue sky and hot yellow sand and part a Chinese sage secluded in misty hills, and there are other parts too. Anywhere there is beauty and wisdom is somewhere to which I feel that, in some measure, I belong. 

All this is true and all of it matters to me. I would not be without any of it which, I suppose, is a privilege of our otherwise spiritually benighted times in which we have easy access to the whole of history. Nonetheless, although I respond to and have absorbed many different influences, they are all assimilated into and subsumed by a fundamental Christianity. It is against Christ that everything is measured, and where there is any contradiction between him and it, he conquers. Other tributaries can flow into the Christian river but the source of that river is Christ and its flow is directed towards the Kingdom of Heaven where he is king.

Like many people of my generation who engaged in the spiritual search I went away from conventional Christianity to explore other traditions, though that was always on the outside looking in as my main path was as described in my first book from which the title of this blog was borrowed. I learnt much from these encounters and they deepened my understanding of the spiritual world. They also helped me engage with Christianity on a more profound level when I returned to it as in the familiar words of T.S. Eliot in his poem "Little Gidding".

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

So, although I now regard myself as a Christian in a fuller sense than I ever was, my appreciation of the spiritual path has certainly been enhanced by other approaches to it. I think we can all benefit from this though I wouldn't say it is in anyway necessary. I am aware of the old jibe that interest in comparative religion makes you comparatively religious, but what I am talking about is not comparative religion but a serious exploration of the richness of spiritual life in its many guises.  God has revealed himself fully only once but he has left traces of himself in many places. 

Today is Good Friday but Easter is Coming

 I hope it's not sacrilegious to say that sometimes it feels as though the disciples of the world are going through a kind of Gethsemane experience at the moment. Most people will not feel this but those who are responsive to the spiritual level will be aware of the gathering darkness. The bad news is that Gethsemane precedes Good Friday. The good news is that Good Friday precedes Easter Sunday. There is undoubtedly more darkness to come but if we allow it this can be a cleansing, purifying darkness for our souls that prepares them for the light.

Many of the incidents in Jesus's life can be seen as experiences that come to the soul as it progresses on the spiritual path, and the most significant are those that come at the end of his life. Abandoned by friends and, seemingly, even God the soul is thrown back entirely on itself. Its spiritual gifts, if it had them, are withdrawn, its earthly renown, if it had it, is lost. It is no one and nothing with only faith and the intuitive sense of truth to support it. This is the final purification that strips the soul of any worldliness and self-regard that may still be clinging to it so that it becomes light enough to enter the spiritual world. For these are like heavy weights that hold the soul down and will prevent it rising until they are cast off.

This is on the individual level. But patterns repeat themselves at all stages of the path and in all spheres, both on the individual and the group level, and the whole world is experiencing something similar. There is a sorting out of that part of humanity that has the potential to rise and that part which may be held over for future development. We are being presented with a choice which in the simplest terms amounts to God or this world. But note that many people might think they are opting for God when in fact they are in the worldly camp. One of the tests of the present time is that it is no longer sufficient merely to give your allegiance to an earthly institution. All are corrupted and you have to see the reality behind the institution as far more important than the thing itself. Which, of course, means you have to be able to perceive something of this reality.

There is no getting around the fact that the spiritual life can only be known by those who undergo worldly death and this death must be undergone willingly. Before the soul can become united with God it must die to the world and be stripped of itself. Look at the times to come as part of that process for we all, however spiritual or religious we may consider ourselves to be, are sinners and what that means is our centre is our self. We may have relatively good selves or relatively bad selves but until we know, really know, that "we are as nothing and all we are comes from the Creator" the tendency to sin, which means act from the centre of self, remains. The whole of the spiritual life is about replacing self with God at the centre of our being. Good Friday is the start of that process and Easter Sunday the glorious conclusion.

Why is Christianity Better than Islam?

 I was asked this question recently by a young man, some of whose friends had decided that if they were going to follow a religion then Islam seemed a more attractive proposition than Christianity as it had a greater sense of where it stood on issues and didn't prevaricate or sentimentalise which Christianity in its official forms now does. On the face of it, it's hard to disagree with this view. Islam is fixed in its beliefs and doesn't seek to accommodate itself to the secular world which modern Christianity usually does as its leaders, seeing they are losing spiritual power, seek to justify their existence by pandering to social changes. Also, Islam has not become feminised which Christianity along with the whole Western world unfortunately has, and this appeals to younger men who see in feminism a civilisation destroying influence. Why do I say unfortunately? Because a feminised religion or culture prioritises feelings and being nice over truth, social concern over supernatural reality, equality over hierarchy and soft furnishings over the sword. That is to say, the energy that nurtures and comforts over the energy that builds and preserves. You need both but one must lead and it must be the latter.

However, whilst it is true that many Christian churches have succumbed to the world and lost touch with the spiritual, replacing it with the anodyne charms of secular humanism, Islam never had much connection with the spiritual to begin with. It has a fixed view of God based on a primitive conception of the deity and is unable to open itself up to higher dimensions of being*. Its virtue that it doesn't change is also a major weakness. It is stuck in the past, unable to evolve as consciousness does. This inflexibility might be regarded as a positive but the rights and wrongs of inflexibility depend on what refuses to change. Islam might have been a healthy corrective for polytheistic pagans in a 7th century of warring tribes (though Christianity would probably have done a better job even then), but it has nothing to say to a 21st century consciousness unless a person wants to throw away the positive evolutionary gains of the last thousand, and especially last 400, years.

But the best answer to this question is to rephrase it and ask why is Christ better than Muhammad? Even a casual look at the lives of these two teachers shows there is an enormous gulf between them in terms of spiritual understanding. They both spoke of the one God but for Jesus he was a loving father while for Muhammad he was more like the Old Testament Jehovah, an over-promoted tribal deity who demanded servile allegiance. Partly because of this, Christianity is based on love while Islam is based on law. Further, Christianity is grounded in freedom whereas Islam demands obedience. This is illustrated in the postures for prayer of the two religions. A Christian kneels in humility but his back is straight. The full prostration of a Muslim in prayer also shows humility but it is more that of a slave before its master than a free individual.

I have not even spoken of the fact that Jesus was the Son of God who healed the spiritual damage caused by the Fall while Muhammad, even in the eyes of his own followers, was no more than a prophet and one who basically just mixed and matched from Jewish and Christian sources. He brought nothing new while Jesus showed us the way to become sons of God ourselves - see John 14:12 "Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these." At best, Muhammad was a messenger but Jesus in his person even more than in his teachings was a window into heaven. In fact, not just a window but a doorway.

Mentioning heaven brings us to another critical difference. Is the Muslim paradise the same as the Christian heaven? I don't see how anyone can seriously believe that since the one is the perfection of earthly existence while the other is the total transformation of being. When you understand that the next world has many planes of existence you see that the paradise of Islam is what is known as the wish fulfilment plane where all your desires are fulfilled but only to the extent that allows for the exteriorisation of your earthly wishes without the impediment of matter. So your mind can creates palaces and gardens insofar as you conceive of such things but this is still no more than this world brought to what you think of as an ideal state. You are still limited by the narrowness of your own vision whereas in the true heaven you are freed from the boundaries of your circumscribed self, and this is what Christ offers. The Islamic paradise gives the lower self what it wants but Heaven is entry into the glorified existence of higher being. There is no doubt that many Christians will go to a place that is a Christian version of paradise on the astral plane, as the psychic world is sometimes known, but that is due to their deficiencies not those of their religion. The fact is Jesus and Muhammed promised their followers entirely different destinations.

I freely admit there may be some bias here. I was born in a Christian country and culture not a Muslim one. But that doesn't mean any of the points here are incorrect. Moreover, the universalist humanitarian prejudices of contemporary Western culture incline many people to go the other way and hold Christianity to higher standards than other religions, seeing the former in the light of its negative aspects (which are all the fault of human beings not its own) and the latter more positively. Obviously, Islam has virtues but unless it has a radical reformation in line with the developments in consciousness over the last several hundred years I would say it is spiritually regressive. Christianity too needs to grow spiritually but it can grow from its roots and I don't believe Islam can.

* I'm ignoring Sufism in this essay which is outside the mainstream of Islam and often regarded with suspicion by fellow Muslims who are not Sufis. Besides, Sufism is the product of Hindu metaphysics and Christian mysticism just as much as Islamic theology though I don't deny it has also fed back in to its parents.

A Christmas Meditation

 The older I get the more obvious it becomes that Jesus Christ really is the Way, the Truth and the Life.* When I was younger I felt this but was under the fashionable impression (or illusion) that all religions said more or less the same thing and were just different ways of bringing man to God if one practiced them seriously enough. I still do think that God and the messengers he sends work through many outlets but in all others he is to a greater or lesser extent hidden. Only in Jesus Christ is he revealed. Jesus is the light shining directly except that it is in a human form. In all other spiritual approaches the light is behind a veil of some sort and obscured in some way.

The Incarnation gave everything in the world that could receive it an irradiation of light from above, a spiritual boost.  Thus, beyond the obvious impact of Christianity, the light of Christ operating from the spiritual world and filtering down through the mental to the material affected all genuine forms of spirituality and revitalised them to the degree that they were open to that light. It is no accident that the Mahayana form of Buddhism with the Bodhisattva figure postdates Christ, and even Hinduism acquired extra spiritual force from Christ's arrival in this world and the spiritual power he released. This statement would be rejected by Hindus and Buddhists but I make it because it seems to me to be the simple truth. It doesn't diminish other religions to say that they stand in the shadow of Christ. They remain what they are which are vehicles given by God, or those that act on his behalf (since God delegates), to helps souls in this world become better aware of their source, but in them all there is still a shadow over the fullness of truth. That shadow was dispersed by Christ. Other religions are effective in their own way but they are incomplete. Only in Christ is the truth made complete.

Apart from the figure of Christ, in which all spiritual truth is embodied and through which it stands revealed more clearly than anywhere else, and his gift of salvation to those who incline their hearts to him (not simply believe, as James 2 says, even the demons believe), there are two principal teachings in Christianity which take it further than any other form of religion. These have to do with the reality of the individual and the fact that God is Love. They are obviously connected. You might say that other religions include these but they don't in the same fully comprehensive way. Regarding love, Buddhism has its impersonal compassion but that is a mild thing compared to love especially in the context of the denial of the reality of the person. Even Hindu bhakti is not the same as agape in that it is an emotional or devotional thing, and love in the Christian sense is not an emotion but an act or condition of being.

My assertion that Christianity contains more of spiritual truth than any other religion might be dismissed as a simple product of the fact that I was born in a world formed and influenced by Christianity, and a Muslim might say the same about Islam, were it not for the fact that any unbiased mind should be able to see that in Christ there is a quality of goodness and purity and sheer holiness just not present elsewhere, not in any other prophet, saint, sage or even god. The light he brought illumined the whole world and spread even where his teachings were not outwardly known. It radiated out on a subtle or immaterial level to be picked up by those sensitive enough to respond to it and then interpreted according to their understanding. It is also, as he himself said, through him, and only through him, that all men now reach God even if they do so through another religion than Christianity which can happen if they pick up the spirit of Christ as it has infiltrated, if I can use that word, into that particular religion. Clearly, the spirit of Christ is more present and more discernible in Christianity though it can be veiled there as well, especially nowadays when all institutions  have fallen away from their core mission and been assimilated into the secular humanism of the materialistic and atheistic System.

The truth of Christ is also why Christmas is important. The first Christmas was the time when the light of God entered the world. That this light was for the whole world is demonstrated by the visit of the three Magi from the East, representing the pinnacle of previous spiritual knowledge, who came to pay their respects to the infant Jesus as the saviour of the world. They were not Jews but they came because they knew that the light embodied in this baby was universal. It repaired the damage done in the past and offered to all men the chance to free themselves from the bondage of matter not by effectively abandoning the relative world of individual beings, of love and beauty and goodness, all of which can only exist in a world of multiplicity and form, for the absolute of pure spirit as taught by the Buddha, but by reconciling spirit and matter, the One and the Many, through the holy mystery of love. This did not require rejecting suffering as the Buddha had done by rejecting the self that suffered, but fully accepting suffering and offering it up as a sacrifice to God. In this way the fallen self was redeemed and made holy instead of being jettisoned as a burden on existence. Thus was the purpose of creation fulfilled rather than being negated.

So, Christmas marks the time when God's reason for creating man is revealed and its fulfilment made possible. And the holy purity of the new born baby reminds us that Christianity goes beyond other spiritual approaches in that it alone fully validates the person, the person that other religions reject as the source of ignorance and a blot on the pure whiteness of naked existence. In Buddhism the person is a barrier to enlightenment and in Islam it exists but as little more than a slave which must submit and obey. Of course, even in Christianity the separate self must be given up, but what is given up is the false self, the self that by the barriers of its self-centredness blocks out God. The true God-given individuality remains and is then revealed as a shining being of light, a unique son of God born of the holy marriage between Spirit and Matter. And the possibility that we can become this being of light is what Christmas is all about.

* This is a slightly revised version of a piece I wrote 7 years ago. Now, of course, I am even older than I was then and the first sentence is even more the case than it was then.

When God Becomes Caesar

 If the religion that was the subject of the last post were just a religion it would still be a somewhat crude simplification of more profound spiritual teachings promulgated by a charismatic medium with a powerful sense of self, but it would not be a problem for those outside the circle of the faithful. But it is not just a religion. It aims to encompass every aspect of life leaving nothing to the individual human being whose only task is to submit. As a result, there is no separation between religion and politics. There is not a religious version of this religion and a political one. These are two aspects of the same thing. Christ said "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's" drawing a clear distinction between the spiritual and temporal aspects of life, but for this religion God is Caesar and the effect of that is to reduce the human to nothing, stripping him of proper agency, creative potential and freedom.

This religion must dominate every single aspect of the life of its believers, not just the spiritual, not just the political but the social too. It even forbids certain forms of artistic expression which you might think a good idea seeing where complete freedom in that regard has got us to in the West over the last century, but the result in this case has been spiritually crippling not ennobling. To be sure, there is some beautiful architecture and design and poetry produced by the adherents of this religion but these are often produced in spite of it not inspired by it. The fact that it is forbidden to show the human form is very revealing. It demonstrates that humanity is effectively banned. For the Christian, God is revealed in the human form but in this religion he remains totally transcendent and cannot be approached except in a servile way.

The faithful in this religion are under instruction to convert everyone to their cause and not to rest until they have done so. They are even authorised to lie and deceive to this end as long as that is to the unbeliever. That is regarded as a virtuous act and history shows that they will go along with their hosts when in a minority only to enforce their will when their numbers are sufficient. It is naive to ignore this reality but that is just what the West has been doing. 

What is the solution to this problem, since a problem it is and one that will get worse? From the point of view of the West it is to recognise the reality of the situation. These believers believe in their religion and they will obey its diktats so we should know what these are. For the believers themselves the only way forward is religious reform. Their focus on prayer is commendable but they have to abandon those aspects of their religion that may have been appropriate 1300 years ago but are not now. Actually, I doubt they were even then but anyway humanity has evolved. If you have any understanding of the way God works you will see that his aim is to bring us up, not to crystallise us in ways of the past but to spiritualise our understanding. Therefore, these believers need to pay much more attention to the mystical path of their religion, to Sufism, for God has sent them this in an attempt to remedy foundational mistakes.The letter kills but the spirit gives life. This is the primary lesson the followers of this religion need to learn.

If the modern world demonstrates the tragic results of banishing God from the world and giving all power and authority to man then this religion has precisely the opposite problem. That may tempt some people to see it as solution to the problems of modernity. In fact, as opposites reflect each other, it is equally flawed, just in a different way. The only real solution is to see God and man as partners working together creatively though with God, of course, as the senior partner. And where do we see this brought to perfection? In Christ who remains the template for genuine spiritual understanding.