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.

Salvation and Enlightenment part 2

Eastern religion is the quest for enlightenment or liberation, the two words amounting to much the same thing. This entails the death of self-identification and a state of consciousness in which the outer world has little or no substantive reality. This is regarded as the zenith of spiritual achievement and at the same time the underlying eternal reality which has always been. Given it transcends time, that makes sense. But are time and the individual self really irrelevant to the spiritual quest or do they have a part to play in that there is a growing process involved and the end result is not just the realisation of something that has always been there? Christianity speaks of a new creation which the saved soul enters through Christ. This is radically different to absorption in eternity. One might call it eternity plus time, the two together making something completely new and more than either on its own.

This is a fallen world. Most religions accept that. The Buddha called it a world of suffering and the Hindu search is for moksha meaning liberation from the need to incarnate in the material world which is an endless process as long as the jiva or individual soul makes new karma which it will do if attached to the outcome of its actions. It may be that the spiritual path before Christ did entail the escape from material bondage through fully transcending identification with the phenomenal part of one's being up to and including the individual self. Hence, enlightenment, nirvana and so on. But Christ brought something new. He defeated the devil, the prince of this world, and thereby redeemed matter. He made a new creation, heaven, and from that moment on there was a higher destiny for the soul than absorption into the all. It could become spiritualised or sanctified which would mean the good in it, love, beauty and goodness itself, all of which are superfluous in strict non-duality where form has no function, would not just be preserved but enhanced. Spirit could transform matter by entering into it instead of matter needing to be left behind for spirit to be known. Christ ascended into heaven with his body which means heaven is not just spirit but spiritualised matter too. It is not a divorce but a marriage.

This does not mean that the Nirvikalpa Samadhi state of Indian mysticism in which subject and object differences cease to exist is not fully real. That does represent contact with the ground of our being. But it is still part of the old creation even if it is the most fundamental, the most primal, part. It is the deepest level of reality but it still exists in nature by which I mean a human being can experience this state through its own efforts unlike salvation which takes us beyond our present spiritual state to a new existence, and which is dependent on grace bestowed by the Creator.

Salvation in contradistinction to Enlightenment does not open our eyes to what already and always is but transforms us into a being which combines the divine and the transfigured individual. The Heaven promised by Christ is very different to the Buddhist and Hindu concepts of heaven which would be better called paradise. The Buddhist and Hindu heavens are transient and below the Nirvana level whereas Heaven is eternal. And, as stated, it cannot be gained by the unsupported efforts of the creature. Entry depends on the grace of God though one must be fully open to this grace which means fully open to him.

Enlightenment is not Heaven. Heaven is a new creation whereas the non-dualistic consciousness called enlightenment is the ground of awareness which is always there albeit overlaid by form. When God saw creation he pronounced it good and, though original creation was spoilt which is why early mystics sought liberation from it, since Christ there is a new creation in which goodness and beauty and love all exist in perfect form, fully transparent to spirit. 

We must understand the difference between the beatific vision which is union with God after death (the degree of union being proportionate to the spiritual condition of the soul at death), and mystical states that can be experienced while on earth. The beatific vision is qualitatively different to the experience of being one with pure consciousness because that is not God but the imprint or image of God within us. The divine image is a living reality but the image is not the actual Person. We can be totally identified with the image within us but that is not oneness with God who is the source of the image. For that we need to go beyond the impersonal which is the spirit of God spread throughout creation to the personal or God in himself.

The identification of the individual self with universal spirit can lead to the erroneous idea that the subject is one with God. In fact, he is one with the root of his own being or God in him not God in himself. This spiritual error can lead to moral and ethical confusion if the subject is not sufficiently aware of the distinction between Creator and created, and many Indian gurus have succumbed to this form of spiritual narcissism though the renowned Ramana Maharishi is not among them. His case was exceptional. He was an ordinary boy who at 16 had a death experience which dramatically altered his consciousness for evermore. He found parallels for his new state in the Hindu tradition, notably that of advaita Vedanta, but he did not come to it through that tradition or any spiritual discipline. He claimed never to have practised sadhana of any kind. The question is what caused his experience? Was it spiritual, psychological or even physical as in a chemical change in his brain? It is not to denigrate his spiritual status to ask this because that was demonstrated in his life afterwards. His personal reaction is a better guide to his high status than his impersonal realisation.

 

Whatever the answer to that question what can definitely be stated is that no experience attainable by mystics in this world necessarily leads to or guarantees salvation and the post-mortem seeing of God face to face which is a spiritual vision that includes and transcends both dualistic and non-dualistic modes of being. No mystic is spiritually saved by his experiences but only by the love of God and faith in Christ, however they may see him because members of non-Christian religions can respond to the spirit of Christ if that appears in their religion which it may do under a form congenial to that religion. Christ appears as he is only in Christianity but his spirit did influence other spiritual approaches after his death to the extent that they were able to respond to it.

 

 Over the past several decades thousands of Westerners have sought mystical transcendence through Eastern religion. The reality is that most people who have followed the gurus and holy men of India and elsewhere in the quest for enlightenment have not got much real benefit from the exercise, and many have even become more spiritually self-absorbed because they have pursued heaven instead of God.

 

It is precisely to correct this that the disciple after mystical transports, which are often given as early encouragement to tread the path, may (if he is lucky) suffer periods or even a whole lifetime of aridity. He must learn to do the right thing for the right reason. He must learn to love God for God's sake not his own. This is the only way to salvation.

Salvation and Enlightenment part 1

 The most distinctive feature of advanced mystical experience is the dissolution of self in which the sense of "I" is subsumed in the totality of what is. To be strictly accurate, this cannot really be categorised as an experience because there is, or seems to be, no self remaining to experience anything. There is simply a pure, universalised consciousness of bliss that shines in the mind and breaks down the barrier between outer and inner so that the duality of self and not-self disappears. It is a state beyond time, space, thought and any divisions of form when everything is taken up into illimitable being. But we do call it an experience because the experiencer always returns. For note this. These experiences are extraordinary but they do not make you a better person when they pass and you reenter the everyday world. And if you think about it, how could they since they have no relevance to life in the normal world with its characteristics of light and dark, good and bad, better and worse. They are above all that, relating as they do to being not becoming.

Two questions arise. If these experiences bear no relation to the world of becoming do they render that world meaningless? Or does the fact that they bear no relation mean they do not represent the ultimate goal of human endeavour as some would claim, but are simply expressions of one side of it and, in that respect, might even be seen as deceptive? That is to say, is life the absolute alone or the absolute and the relative together? The second would surely be more than the first even if the concept of more has no meaning in the light of the first taken on its own terms.

 

When the individual who experiences these transpersonal states tries to interpret them afterwards it is by no means certain he will arrive at the correct understanding. An experience and its interpretation are very different things. In this case, the ineffability of the experience might lead the person to draw the conclusion he has cracked the cosmic code of life. After all, what could be more than something that goes beyond the very idea of more or less, something that is whole and complete and unarguable in its completeness? But if the point of spiritual life was to enter into this supernal state what reason would there be ever to have been born in a world of duality? What need was there for a self in the first place if the goal was just to discard it? To think of life in those terms is to ignore a good part of reality which is obviously more than just pure being or we would not be able to ask the question.

 

Mystic states of oneness, sometimes regarded as pointers to enlightenment if they become permanent, are real. They may be rare for most people and they may not last long even when they are attained, but they certainly exist.  The question is what causes them? Are they a purely spiritual phenomenon or might they be the result of chemical changes in the brain and therefore linked to the physical body which would mean that the death of the body would probably bring them to an end and they would have no bearing on the post-mortem state and fate of the soul.

Mystical states can arise spontaneously or they can come about through spiritual or mental disciplines in the same way as body-building, diet, exercise, training etc, can develop powerful muscles. In India techniques have existed for centuries to manipulate these states into existence and we know they can also be brought about through psychedelic drugs which does rather suggest that chemical changes in the brain might be responsible for changes in consciousness. If we accept that we are spirits in corporeal bodies which are designed to experience the material world then we can see that these bodies might act as filters which block out higher consciousness so we can function in this world. It may well be possible that these filters can be removed under certain extreme circumstances causing mystical experiences to occur, either arising spontaneously through brain changes or else being engineered by technique and discipline.

 

But does this mean the subject is a more spiritual person? His I may have been removed for a spell but in itself it remains what it was. It has not been rendered pure and holy which I would submit is the whole point of the spiritual exercise and which, moreover, is something that can only happen through grace. God gives us a self for us to grow and develop until the point is reached at which we give it back to him and then he restores it, filled with his presence. This is a process not a sudden transformation of being which can take place at any time, and it is not restoring our original nature but creating something totally new which is the divine self, the God-infused self as opposed to re-absorption in the pool of original consciousness from whence we were drawn out at our creation.

 Some Indian gurus teach that enlightenment can be attained through awakening the kundalini energy. To be sure, they will say this is dangerous and should only be undertaken under the supervision of a qualified instructor but what they don't make clear is that kundalini has its roots in the physical body and so the consciousness changes its arousal can instigate are down to material changes not spiritual ones. As a Master in the book Towards the Mysteries in a talk given to Pandit Gopinath Kaviraj, an eminent Hindu scholar of the mid-twentieth century, says "Kundalini is not ‘spiritual’. It is ‘material’". The proper procedure is that it will arise naturally concomitantly with proper spiritual development but it can be forced artificially which is what these renegade gurus (let's call them what they are) teach. They may get results but these are unholy results because not in line with the correct way which is growth within character. Furthermore, being bodily instigated, they will cease with death leaving the subject back where he was or even worse off because he has sought to steal divine fire from God. This may well be the state of many supposedly realised yogis and the like after death. Their occult manipulations will have no bearing on the eventual salvation or otherwise of their soul. They may indeed jeopardise it.

To be continued.

Saiva Siddhanta

 Most people who are interested in Indian spirituality will be familiar with Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualistic philosophy whose principal exponent is Sankara. This is a profound but flawed system of thought which I have written about on several occasions, chiefly to point out its flaws. See posts under the Non-Duality label. Advaita was clearly influenced by Buddhism, even though the two were rivals, and one of the reasons for its popularity in the West is that, like Buddhism though not in quite such a dramatic fashion, it does away with God who is reduced to an existent in the relative world, albeit the prime existent. This makes it seem to the unwary, steeped in/corrupted by modern ways of thinking, a deeper analysis of reality than theistic religion.

Most Westerners also believe that Advaita is the summation of Hindu thought. The Traditionalist school of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon adopted this approach. In fact, that is not the case. In India monistic religion precedes theistic religion which probably arose in reaction to non-duality as its shortcomings became apparent. The qualified Advaita of Ramanuja, which accepts the reality of both the individual soul and God even though the two can be joined in a union of oneness, is one well-known example, and there is also the later and lesser known example of Saiva Siddhanta, the -anta suffix signifying the end of something, the conclusion to which it leads, as in Vedanta which is the end of the Vedas, their culminating point. So Saiva Siddhanta is the final word on knowledge about Siva who in this system stands for the Supreme God.

As a doctrine in codified form Saiva Siddhanta appeared in the 12th century in the south of India with mystical texts that described how the soul, sinful as it is by its own nature, cannot attain liberation except through knowledge of Siva bestowed by his grace on one who loves him. Love is important as it is not in Advaita which is all about knowledge. Souls are intrinsically divine but separate themselves from God through egotism and the impurities or bonds acquired through experience in the material world. Union with the deity is attained through his grace and is absolute in that there is no sense of separation whatsoever, but even in this union the individual self remains thereby drawing a clear distinction between this approach and that of the non-dualist. For the Saiva Siddhanta devotee God always has a transcendent aspect even when he is fully realised as immanent, so even in liberation the Creator/created relationship remains.

God is perceived as the soul of the soul, closer to you than your own self, but he is also infinitely beyond you. This idea is similar to the Christian understanding of the relationship between the soul and God, and the spiritual approach to the deity in this system also has something in common with Christian practice. Siva, which is simply a name for the Supreme First Principle or Primary Person, can only be known through love. This love has four stages. The first is that of the good servant towards his master. The second is like the child towards its parents. These tend to imagine God as external but the following stages see him as within the soul and involve meditation on his perfection. The first is compared to friendship while the final stage which brings full knowledge of and oneness with Siva is likened to the union of lovers.

I have often expressed my conviction that the Incarnation had a spiritual effect worldwide, influencing whoever was able to receive it through inner sensitivity. Naturally, the greatest effect would have been through the spread of the knowledge of Christ by missionaries. But in addition to this Christ entered into non-Christian religions, which may have been culturally resistant to the actual Christian religion, by permeating them with his spiritual being. You can see this with the idea of the Bodhisattva appearing in Mahayana Buddhism in the centuries after Christ, and you can also detect it in the Bhakti movements in both North and South India. I suggest that Saiva Siddhanta is an example of this process. I'm not saying that Saiva Siddhanta is Christianity in disguise. It is what it is, completely itself and outwardly has nothing to do with Christianity. Nor am I saying it is exactly equivalent to or equal to Christianity. But the spiritual essence of it can be compared to the essence of Christianity because Christ has suffused it with his presence and stamped it with the concept of religious love. Christ is only fully present in Christianity but I contend that he is not entirely absent elsewhere to the degree that other religions are able to open themselves up to his universal spirit.

Divisiveness and Unity

 Nowadays you regularly hear condemnation of this or that person or attitude for divisiveness as though to separate was intrinsically bad and to join in unity always good. You must respect those whose views are different to yours or society cannot get along, or so it goes. But here's the truth.  Divisiveness is good. It is even essential if you wish to preserve truth. I don't respect falsehood, I don't respect wickedness, I don't respect anything or anybody that denies the reality of God. To condemn divisiveness is a trick of the devil to get us to accept his degenerate and corrupt agenda.  We must separate good from evil, truth from lies, love from hate. But principally we must separate that which acknowledges God from that which does not. Then other things will follow. You don't love the devil and his works. You don't include them in a fatuous oneness. You reject them utterly as well as the souls that embrace them though with compassion for such souls for while you reject their error and the inner spiritual sinfulness that has led them into error, you still know them as potential sons and daughters of God if they can repent of the sins that have caused them to go astray.

Christ brought a sword, the sword that cleaves truth from lies. In that sense, he was the most divisive person who has ever lived but, at the same time, he also came to heal the division caused by the Satanic introduction of the lie. The devil seeks unity so that he may separate souls from God. Christ divides truth from the lie in order to unite souls with God on a higher plane.

I have posted this under the two tags of equality and non-duality for the former is a secular version of the latter. Both equality and non-duality see all souls as one and basically the same, but they miss the truth that true oneness can only be attained after division has done its work in separating out that which accepts God from that which rejects him. And note that the rejection of God is not just the deliberate refusal of him but also the lack of positive acceptance. There is the active denial of God and there is the more passive ignoring of him, and though the latter may be less spiritually destructive, it is still rejection. The lesson for souls in this world is not for them to realise the unity of everything in it regardless of what it is but to learn to separate good from evil and true from false. Through this separation one grows into true spiritual unity in the reality of God. 

No Self

 Is the highest spiritual state one in which the sense of separation between the soul and God has been so obliterated that there is no separation at all and the soul has, in effect, become God? There remains no self at all. This is the basic theme of Buddhism and certain forms of Hinduism. As it is of the modern derivation of ancient Eastern mysticism which is Oneness spirituality though that is usually an excessive simplification of its inspiring models. There are Christian versions of this too which I suspect are heavily influenced by Zen with a dash of Meister Eckhart and a pinch of Plotinus. In these beliefs (and they are beliefs notwithstanding the fact that there is some kind of experience in which self seems to be dissolved), self is the cause of sin and what needs to be eradicated is not just sin but the very possibility of it. This can seem to be the highest form of mysticism, the one at the apex of the triangle on the base line of which stand all the different religions. But is that really so or is this just a particular mystical experience which may point to an aspect of the soul's relationship with God but by no means covers it in its totality or indicates its intended destiny?

Are we not here just killing the patient in order to save him? Self may be the cause of everything bad but it is also the cause of so much that is good, including goodness itself. And love. God created for a reason and that reason was for the joy of relationship. The no self advocates would deny the purpose of creation. They would return us to the non-manifest state of darkness or limitless light. It makes no difference how you envision it as it is the boiling down of everything to nothing. It is possible to return consciousness to the pool of infinity whence it arose but that is not what God wants and nor is it what Christ offers and why he came to redeem the world from spiritual darkness. Christ came to heal the soul rather than kill it. God and creation is more than just God by himself and no self means no love, no beauty, no goodness, no expression and growth through time. Nothing but resting in eternal peace. That is fine if you have a limited view of spiritual life but there is so much more and to know this so much more the self must not be destroyed but transformed. The no self advocates are turning their back on God in his creative, expressive mode and retreating to a passive form of consciousness which is really just the spiritual womb. But God wants us to be born and to be alive and to partake in his creative glory. He wants us to know day as well as night and then add to the beauty of creation ourselves. This we cannot do if we do not have a self. Then we add precisely nothing.

The Oceanic Feeling

A comment from J.M. Smith on my last post referred to the so-called oceanic feeling. It went as follows:

" For all their talk of individualism, Leftists seem to find selfhood a burden they would like to discard. I think this may explain their attraction to some Buddhist doctrines. I've forgotten who it was, but someone once described this as the "oceanic feeling"--the feeling that one is dissolved in something larger, be it humanity, the cosmos, or a pantheistic god. As you say, Christianity is neither left nor right, but it offers a relationship to God that does not dissolve the self. The self is radically transfigured but it is not destroyed. I might say that Leftists think spirituality is a matter of losing oneself, whereas Christians think spirituality is a matter of finding one's self (largely through destruction of illusions.)"

I replied.

"The oceanic feeling is a real thing but I'm not sure how spiritual in the true sense it is as drugs and even mental illness can bring it about. I see it as consciousness slipping outside the boundaries of the solid core of the rational self and becoming immersed in the universal substance from which individualised consciousness is drawn but that is like the self returning to the spiritual womb rather than growing up and becoming, as you rightly put it, transfigured, thereby retaining its full individuality but expanding that into divine being."

All this prompted me to do a little research into the phrase which I first came across many moons ago in a novel by Arthur Koestler. I thought it came from Freud as a psychological (i.e. non-religious) description of religious experience but when I looked it up it turned out that it was the French writer Romain Rolland who came up with the term (which he introduced to Freud), and he coined it to describe the feelings of being one with the universe and of time being taken up into eternity that he read about in his studies of Indian mysticism, particularly from the life of 19th century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna who frequently experienced spiritual raptures. 

Ramakrishna is a very appealing figure because of his childlike innocence and transparent goodness, and he might be said to be one of the main sources for the Western discovery of Indian mysticism through his disciple Swami Vivekananda. He was certainly a genuine saint in the Indian tradition. However, his experiences have been diagnosed as possibly caused by temporal lobe epilepsy which puts them in a slightly different light to that in which they are normally perceived which is as the ecstacies of an enlightened mystic. It also raises the possibility that the search for higher consciousness in this earthly life, which is what lies behind many Westerners' attraction to Eastern mysticism, may be something of a red herring. Ramakrishna was the first Indian mystic of recent times to be seen as living in a state of heightened spiritual reality. If this state was actually or partially a result of mental illness we have to ask ourselves if the approach to the spiritual path that sees it as a search for higher consciousness might not, in fact, be a mistaken one. This is not to deny the reality of higher states of consciousness but maybe that is not what the spiritual search should be aiming at. Indeed, traditionally higher states of consciousness are regarded as completely incidental to proper spiritual practice and sometimes even positively misleading. We are meant to learn the lessons of this world whilst in this world not try to escape to a higher one, tempting as that might be.

I am not an enthusiast for the theories of Sigmund Freud who seems to me a typical 19th century materialist. Perhaps not typical but operating from the standpoint of 19th century materialism, all the same. When I first heard of the Oedipus complex I thought it complete nonsense which it is. However, some of his work on dreams and the unconscious and the various drives that determine human motivation was valuable at the time even if it is outdated now. And what he apparently thought about the oceanic feeling is also worth considering. He envisaged it as the reversion to a pre-ego state, something experienced by the infant before it becomes aware of self and other. That idea is similar to the one I mention in my reply above which postulates that the mystical sense of oneness in which the ego is blotted out is a reflection of the pre-incarnation state when the soul is bathed in the bliss of non-separation. Thus, it is not where we should be headed but where we are coming from and that means that attempts to recapture it are misguided. No doubt, it will be recapitulated on a higher turn of the spiral once the lessons of incarnation have been learnt but that will mean, as I put it above, retaining full individuality but expanding that into divine being. The oceanic feeling is entirely passive but we are called by God to be co-creators with him and that means able to wield divine powers for the benefit of all creation. The soul submerged in the oceanic feeling remains inert. We are meant to be eagles not fish.

A New Creation

 At the end of my last post I mentioned that what Christ offers to those who follow him is a new Creation - worth capitalising I think. I would like to pursue this thought here. It's hardly a new thought but it has relevance in the context of a general spirituality v. Christianity debate which is pertinent in our time. I have written on several occasions about how the teachings and person (because the two are linked) of Christ go further than any other form of spirituality, including those of the Buddha. This idea of a new Creation gets to the heart of it. The Buddha saw the reality of suffering and showed a way to escape that. The way involved leaving a fallen creation behind. Basically, it entailed rejecting the goods of creation for entry into the non-created or pre-creation state. We tend to overlook the fact that original Buddhism was a monastic religion. This is a valid response to the evils of this world and/or the demands of the spiritual quest but it is not the only one or even the best one. The best is that offered by Christ in which matter and spirit or creation and uncreated divine being are joined together to make something new. Here matter is sanctified rather than rejected. Latter forms of Buddhism approach this idea but they never fully embrace it. Other spiritual traditions incorporate elements of this approach but they all have a fundamental drawback. They lack Christ, and it would be my contention that it is only through Christ that one can fully enter the new Creation. I firmly believe he is present in other religions to the extent that they are open to his spirit but he can never be as fully present as he is in Christianity where he stands revealed as himself.

This difference has never been more important than it is today in the context of the world as it is now. That is because we are in the middle of a battle between good and evil. A general spirituality which seeks to rise above the world will either be neutral in the face of this battle, beyond good and evil as those aiming at spiritual transcendence might put it, or else it will be sucked into evil. In fact, as genuine neutrality is no longer possible, if it ever was, they will inevitably be drawn onto the side of evil. Now, if you don't stand against evil, you stand with it, and if you would stand against evil you can only really do that by standing with Christ. Why can't you be good without Christ? Because he is goodness. It resides in him as the face and form of God. Other forms might approach or echo that but he is the living template. If you understand what the Good is you must see it is centred in him and the more it is separated from him the less good it is.

The new Creation came into being when Christ defeated the Prince of this World which is what he did with his life and death. This is why there was no path to it before his time. It didn't exist. This means that any form of spirituality which originated before Christ does not offer a path to it unless, as I say above, that form has opened itself to the spirit of Christ. This is a controversial position to take in the modern world because the egalitarian dogma has spread into every area of life including religion. Also, because we in the West reacted to human misinterpretations and distortions of Christianity either by turning to atheism or by seeking spiritual nourishment elsewhere. But go back to Christ himself and the Gospels, particularly that of St John, and you will discover a spiritual truth that goes beyond all others, one that does not just offer a way out of the material world but purifies that world so rendering it capable of being lifted up into spirit and becoming something new, a new Adam, a new Jerusalem, a new world.

When Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven it was this new Creation he spoke of. Heaven is not just the oneness of spiritual consciousness. It is that but it goes beyond that because it brings to that oneness the qualities and colours of creation. And it brings relationship to oneness which means it brings love. Love existed before Christ but it did not exist in the same way as it did after him because he made it possible for the self, hitherto a centre of egotism which could only be escaped from, to be holy. No self means no love. Christ made the individual spiritually beautiful and potentially godlike instead of being a disturbance in the placid waters of divine oneness. Heaven is full of individuals because it is the abode of love and this was the new Creation brought by Christ. 

What is Sin?

 I seem to be writing quite a few articles in response to other people's work at the moment. This is another such, inspired by Bruce Charlton's post about why souls might reject Heaven. Because in our time many do. These individuals would probably not put it like that, or even think of it like that, but it is what a person does and what he is that counts not what he says or even what he thinks with the outer mind. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he" as it says in the book of Proverbs. And many people do reject Heaven because they reject the mindset that is required to get there. Like attracts like. You only get to the true heavenly world if there is that in you that corresponds to that world. If you are on some level made of the same stuff, spiritually speaking. In fact, to get to heaven you must already be a subject (it's a kingdom not a state) of that world.

A major factor in the rejection of Heaven is unrepented sin which means identifying yourself with a sin to the extent that you will not or cannot renounce it. You may even no longer accept that it is a sin because it has become part of your sense of self. It has become what you think of as you. 

A commenter on Bruce's post asked the question in the title of this one. He went on to answer it himself and said that sin is loving the physical over the spiritual. That is right as far as it goes though I would change the word loving to desiring. But we can unpack this idea of sin a little more and I suggested in a further comment that sin is not loving the physical over the spiritual so much as loving oneself over God or putting oneself before God. That is not to say one should hate oneself, that also is a sin as we are God's creation, but God comes first.

Bruce Charlton defined sin as not being aligned with God's will and divine creative purpose. This sums it up. We are all sinners to some extent because we are all in thrall to the ego. It is the mismatch between ego and God or the human self and the Divine Self that is the root of sin. As long as the human self seeks its fulfilment in something other than the Divine Self it is a sinner and this might even include  those who seek absorption in impersonal being. They may be sinners of omission rather than active sinners but they have rejected God as a personal being and so they have rejected love. That is a sin of sorts and will have its consequences, even if these are what the individual in this case wants or thinks he does. So he may get what he wants but it is not the best that God has to offer the soul.

What is sin? Fundamentally, I would say it comes down to one thing and that is not loving God. Therefore you can be as virtuous as you like but if you don't love God you are a sinner. To those of an antinomian disposition who might claim that loving God excuses you of all moral obligations or lapses I would say that "If you love me you keep my commandments". The true love of God automatically makes a person behave in a godly fashion or, at least, aspire to behave like that. He may fall short but he always seeks to stand in the light and to reflect that light as best he can. To claim you love God and carry on disobeying his commandments shows that not only do you not love God, you don't even begin to know him.

Spiritualities that Fail the Test

 If your spiritual path has not revealed to you that Satan now struts openly on the world stage perhaps it is time you reassessed it. Here's some of the latest evidence for that. Link. But, as I say, this is just the latest evidence. It has been apparent for some time that all worldly authorities in all fields, all, none are exempt, have succumbed to spiritual evil.

It may be that you are a follower of what my blogging colleague Francis Berger calls System Christianity which subordinates the truth of Christ to the ways of the world. You believe in God or think you do but, when push comes to shove, you believe in good as defined by the worldly powers more. To put it bluntly, you don't have enough real spiritual substance in you. 

Or it may be that you are some kind of non-dualist who essentially sees everything as spirit and so don't acknowledge the reality of good and evil. If so, you are walking in a cloud which may seem very beguiling, soft and comfortable but is in fact a fog of illusion. Non-duality teachings are limited in that they deny the positive reality of creation, rejecting the truth of the individual self for an amorphous oneness that turns them into robotic escapists who, unbeknown to themselves, are actually numbing themselves to the love, beauty and spiritual glory of reality, perhaps because they are afraid of being hurt. There is said to be a place for such souls on the higher planes where they can exist in a kind of self-absorbed bliss and peace but cut off from the reality of God and the rest of creation. They are enclosed within themselves even if they think of it as the Self or Nirvana and must eventually be reborn in the physical world and experience all the desire, pain and sorrow that makes a fully aware and spiritually sensitive human being. Non-duality, far from being the acme of spiritual teaching as often supposed, is really a one-sided (pun intended) view of reality that ignores the whole purpose of creation. This is not to retreat to the pre-manifested state of infantile oneness but to make fully-functioning creative gods of individual human souls.

However, you can only make these gods in the right way through Christ. If you try to make yourself a god by any other way, whether that be through technology like the transhumanists or a spirituality that sees yourself as already God like some of the non-dualists, then you risk following the path of Satan, the first being that wished to be God on his own terms. The contemporary world situation shows more clearly than ever that it is only Christ who can save us from, on the one hand, demonic attack, and, on the other, our own fallen nature. All goodness is summed up in him and it is only through him that we can find a path through the darkness into which this world has descended. If that wasn't apparent before it certainly should be now. This is what is meant by things coming to a point.

The One and the Many

Opposites reflect each other. Two apparently very different creeds are materialism which says that everything derives from matter and spiritual monism which maintains that everything, the world included, is spirit. Although not exclusively confined to these times and places, the first is a modern Western belief and the second an ancient Eastern one. Whilst opposites on the face of it, they actually have quite a lot in common in that both are reductive, boiling everything down to just one thing. At the end of the day neither leave room for the individual, for free will or for love, all of which being intimately connected. And that is why both must be rejected as adequate descriptions of life, what it is and why it is expressed in the way it is through variety, difference, intelligence and selfhood.

A wiser philosophy accepts the reality of both matter or the created world as one might think of it, and spirit. It sees the interaction between the two as bringing to birth something new which is the individual. Individuality and its expression is the reason for creation and the manifested universe. So, to deny or suppress or reject the individual is an anti-spiritual policy, a statement that might shock some of the mystically inclined who see the loss of the sense of a self as a consummation devoutly to be wished. However, the fact is that individuality is good but it can be corrupted and turn in on itself. It is this that is wrong and which defiles creation not the thing itself. Certainly, the individual must learn to go beyond itself and seek a union with God, the Supreme Self, but this is so that its individuality may be fulfilled not negated.

Evolution means increased differentiation. Everything material starts off from being just one thing, pure quantity, but then the evolutionary process starts as spirit is introduced into matter and through the combination of the two quality comes into play. Quality means inequality. That's what it is. The current obsession with equality, though often confused as deriving from a spiritual impulse, actually marks a desire to return to the undifferentiated ground and is, therefore, an involutionary thing, characteristic of a return to the infantile state of oneness with the Mother. We are called to go on to the Father which means becoming more individual not less so but we do this in the context of the reality of God or, as one might just as well say, in the context of reality. For God is reality and reality is God.

Any philosophy that says we are all one and leaves it at that is wrong. Any philosophy that says we are all separate and leaves it at that is also wrong. The truth is we are both. We are full individuals, unique, whole and free, but we are also one in God, and knowing this we become gods ourselves which means creative beings. Materialism would deny us real individuality and spiritual monism also denies us a unique self. Reject both of these philosophies as concoctions of the mind and see the truth as a far subtler thing which embraces everything and bestows on us both freedom and love.

The Esotericist and God

I know many esotericists maintain that theism is at a lower level, spiritually speaking, than non-dualism or monism and that love of God is dualistic and therefore outside the absolute. Setting aside the fact that they often reduce love of God to bhakti which is more like devotionalism, I see this as the typical metaphysical error of the intellectually inclined and have written a lot on the subject - see the non-duality topic on the right of this page. I will not go fully into the whys and wherefores of this here but, briefly, my position is that in a truly non-dualistic world there would be no need for creation or manifestation if you prefer to call it that. If being is the end of it all then why become? That  makes no sense. But it does make sense if the fundamental reality of the universe is a Who not a What and if spirit, the absolute, is enriched by matter or the relative. Mixing in multiplicity with unity brings about a universe that is not just unchanging life but creative, dynamic, active, ever self-renewing and transcending, and also one in which there are many beings which allows for love as opposed to impersonal compassion which is the best you can hope for under non-duality. In such a universe you still have all the truth of spirit but you also have quality (impossible in pure oneness) which gives rise to the good and the beautiful as well as the true. Spirit and matter, being and becoming, life and its expression, are more than just spirit alone. When the two are joined in what we can justifiably call holy matrimony, you have something far greater than simple universal oneness. In this scenario the individual is not seen as the stain on spiritual life as is the case in non-dualism but the whole point of spiritual life. United with God, it (he or she really) becomes the fulfillment of being.

Does eternity simply annihilate time or does time add something to eternity? For non-dualistic philosophies time is an illusion that is dispelled when eternity is known, if, that is, they are faithful to their fundamental premise. The same is true in the case of the individual. God plus Man can be no more than God alone. Such, in my view, are the perils of abstract thinking. In fact, time does add something to eternity and Man does add something to God. Why else would God have created or why is there something rather than nothing if you wish to look at it in philosophical terms? Even if you say God created because of love that is still adding something. Moreover, do you love what is not real? If God loves Man then Man is real and not something swallowed up in oneness as though he had never been and brought nothing to the table. And if you say that God the Creator came out of Universal Being and is a step down from that exalted state, I would ask how such a thing might have come about? Something cannot come from nothing and all effects must exist in their causes. The name of God is I AM. Abstract being is an invention of the philosophers and though mystical states of oneness certainly exist and can be experienced these correspond to divine immanence, God in us, and do not detract from his transcendent selfhood, the real ultimate reality.

Tantra

Last week I went to the Tantra exhibition at the British Museum. Tantra is an Indian esoteric system that is not based on the Vedas, as are most orthodox forms of Hinduism, but instead goes back to pre-Aryan roots though, as is the way with all Indian religion, there are many admixtures along the way to end up with what now exists under that name.

The basis of Tantra is that the universe is made up of the interaction between male and female powers, personified as Siva and Sakti. Siva is Ultimate Reality or pure consciousness and Sakti is his dynamic aspect. She is Cosmic Energy, visualised as a goddess. Effectively, these represent spirit and matter in the system, taking spirit as being and matter as the world in all its forms, the Father and Mother of the Universe. The practitioner aims to unite these two within himself, drawing up the power in matter within his own body to the top of the head where it unites with spirit to produce enlightenment. This is just the bare bones of the philosophy, but the idea is that, rather than rejecting the material world, the follower of Tantra uses it, even embraces it, to reach spiritual insight. All life is one and nothing is to be rejected. Thus, certain practises which are regarded as profane in more conventional religious teachings, such as the consumption of alcohol and participation in sexual activity, are used in a ritualistic way to demonstrate that nothing is impure and all is part of the whole. Sex is understood as symbolic of divine unity and, though this is only taken symbolically on the so-called right-hand path, is engaged in literally on the left-hand path.

One sees a certain logic in this but there are problems. From the Christian perspective, it ignores the fact of the Fall. The material world has been corrupted and can only be redeemed in Christ. Tantra appears to have no understanding of this. Of course, motivation is crucial in any practice but even the best motivation in the world cannot turn error into truth. In fact, the attraction of Tantra for many is the same as the attraction of occultism in general. Power. Whether magical or spiritual, it is often power that the follower of these paths seeks and with such a motivation the temptation to succumb to the demons who lurk in the dark corners of these systems is always present. Demons are actually openly present in Tantra, whether disguised as deities with a wrathful aspect as in some forms of Buddhist Tantra or as the goddess Kali who is depicted as the Great Mother but is clearly demonic in origin. I am not saying that a certain mindset cannot indeed transform the images of these demons to a more spiritual state but that is going against their form, and form and function are not so clearly demarcated or differentiated as some might like to think. Ugliness is not beauty. Violence is not peace. The form of Kali very obviously goes back to a demon that was propitiated by blood, not a good image for the spiritual aspirant to focus on however much you seek to justify it by abstruse symbolism. I can appreciate the wisdom in Tantra in that it fully accepts the created world rather than denying or dismissing it but I would object that it accepts it too much. The profane and the sacred are not the same thing and seeing them as such does not make it so.

There is truth in Tantra. The idea that we need to accept the material world of creation as part of the whole and not dismiss it as illusion as certain forms of Hinduism do is correct. But we should not take it on its own terms. It should always be seen in the light of spirit. The creation should never be set on the same footing as the Creator. The two are not equal. But the created world is a true world and we are part of it and it is part of us. As Christ showed, it should be included in our understanding of spiritual reality. Nonetheless, matter must always be subordinated to spirit as the Virgin Mary offered herself up completely to the Will of God. You don't conquer matter through matter as Tantra might lead one to believe. You conquer it through spirit. Then, once conquered, the beauty within it is revealed and it serves to glorify God.

As an amusing aside, when I went to this exhibition I did not wear a mask. Everyone else was wearing one. I respected the social distancing rules because I didn't want to upset anybody but there is a profound spiritual symbolism in covering your face and I do not want to be a party to that, especially for a disease that is far less deadly for most people than we have been led to believe. I have worn a mask on a couple of occasions so as not to upset other people but both times felt a sense of shame and that I was contributing to the degradation of humanity.  You might think that an over the top reaction but such a practice, once accepted, is hard to stop. One of the other people at the exhibition complained to an attendant that I wasn't wearing a mask but was told that certain people are exempt though no one actually asked me whether I did indeed fit into that category. What I found amusing was that the whole idea of Tantra is that nothing is impure. Tantrics would meditate in graveyards and cover themselves with the ashes of dead bodies. Not wearing a mask should surely, in that sense, be perfectly in tune with the Tantric ethos!

I understand that there is a temptation to spiritual pride in not wearing one of these face coverings. We should be alert to that. We should also respect the concerns of others and, if not wearing a mask in a space where one is now supposed to be wearing one, keep a reasonable distance from others unless that is impossible. Nevertheless, I do see the imposition of masks as an attack on individual freedom. It is of profound spiritual significance and should not be dismissed as just something to keep us safe. One lesson that can be drawn from Tantra is that God is everywhere. That doesn't mean we should abandon common sense because that can be the voice of God too. But it does mean we should learn to be free of fear and have trust in our Creator.

God is not the Absolute

I have made the mistake of equating God and the Absolute in the past when I was under the misapprehension that all spiritual approaches said fundamentally the same thing and differences were largely down to expression. And that the mystics of all ages pointed to the same reality. I have also believed that the intellectual idea of the Absolute described something real. But I don't believe this anymore and, if truth be told, probably never really did, the confusion being more on a mental plane than a spiritual one.

What I mean is that God is not an abstraction but the most concrete in the sense of most real thing there is. The concept of the Absolute is the product of abstract speculation and is, in the striking words of Pascal, the god of the philosophers not of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Absolute is being absorbed into non-being. It is thought taken to its limits and then, unable to go any further, postulating a theoretical void or emptiness beyond itself. It makes no difference if you call this a plenum-void as something is effectively swallowed up in nothing. The Absolute is the result of a mode of cognition restricted to form trying to conceive of what lies beyond itself and coming up with something like dimensionless space, existence without being.

But God is not like that. The Absolute is existence as theory. God is existence as reality. He cannot be objectified as a thing. That is obviously true or he would be part of creation. He is not some thing. But he is not nothing either or even no-thing. He is the eternal Subject, the Great I AM, and note that in this statement the I comes before the AM. Person comes before being. There is no being without a Person to be. Abstract pure existence is a fantasy of the philosophers.

There may be no such thing as the absolute in the philosophical or even metaphysical sense but there is depth and there is mystery. Mystery is what exists beyond the limitations of the world as it is bound by space, time and form as normally conceived. It is the ground of freedom which is the essence of God and which he bestows on us in the form of our individuality. Mystery is also the source of creativity which is God expressing himself in love. Love, creativity, freedom, these are real things and the true essence of God. The Absolute is really just an idea.

Mysticism of Escape

Let's not talk about the coronavirus which, dare I say it, is not important in the greater scheme of things*. Let's talk about more serious matters to do with the reasons for us being here in the first place rather than what may or may not provide the means of exit. Let's talk about that old favourite, the meaning of life.

There is a spiritual approach which seeks to transcend all idea of self, of form and of time and space. Its goal is to rest in complete  'presence', a state in which there is no movement, no change, no anything. This is the spirituality of pure being and is regarded by some as being at the zenith of true knowledge; the finishing point to which all paths must eventually tend.

I see the appeal of such a state for people who have suffered in this world and yearn for peace but I also think there is an element of spiritual escapism in the attitude behind it. Consequently, it is my contention that those who follow it will, after they have experienced a Nirvana-like state for a period, long or short, be impelled by an evolutionary inner urge or drive back into the world of time and space. They will be required to learn all the messy lessons of life they have avoided.

In this type of mysticism a person aims to dissolve his self into the universal sea of life and so be freed from all pain and suffering. Usually it is pursued by those of a contemplative turn of mind who wish to escape the hurly-burly of the created world and who see reality as transcending all form. As it does in its absolute sense but a key teaching of Christianity is that God looked at the world and saw it was good. So a Christian, and really by that I mean anyone who wants to live the life intended by God, does not reject the created world but resolves it by drawing it up into its spiritual origin. The uncreated plus the created is more than just the uncreated alone. Life manifests to become more. What this boils down to in practical terms can be summed up by asking the following question. Is the individual self a transitory thing to be transcended in a higher vision of the One or is it a fundamental reality which, to be sure, does merge into the One but which, when it does, retains its full integrity? Otherwise put, is the purpose of life found in returning to the One and being reabsorbed or is it found in a joyful union of the One and the Many with ceaseless interplay between the two? This interplay is love which can only be known in the latter case though, as a legacy of Christianity which is very much the religion of the latter case, it has been appropriated by devotees of the former, notwithstanding the fact that in their scenario it makes no sense and, indeed, would not even be possible. Love demands the full reality of the person.

Monistic mystics, those who seek to renounce the self completely, are actually looking for a return to the spiritual womb. Might this be, contradictory as it seems, because their real motive is not the desire to love and know and serve the living God but to enjoy a personal bliss, albeit in an impersonal form? They might spend years in meditation to perfect themselves for this but if their inner orientation is off then their meditation might bring them peace and detachment but it will not deepen real understanding. There is a big difference between renouncing the self for a perceived spiritual benefit (though who is this supposed to benefit?) and laying down your life for your friends. One is almost an investment or 'deal' while the other is a gift of self-sacrifice in love. 

The approach criticised here can be associated with quietism which often has the allure of an advanced form of spirituality. The quietist turns his back on the world for absorption in contemplation. But the danger here is moral neutrality and moral neutrality actually enables immorality and must therefore share in the wickedness of the latter. If you don't give a proper recognition to creation, you will be unable to perceive or to stand against evil and will therefore be drawn into it. This is the trap for the monistic mystic.


*Note: Just to be clear, I am talking about the virus itself. Our reaction to it is important in that it is driven by fear and will potentially lead (was this the intention?) to vast numbers of people directly dependent on the state for their survival.

Negative Theology

This post arose out of an email conversation with Bruce Charlton during which he expressed the opinion that negative theology was unsuitable for our times. I agreed though I would say it's especially unsuitable for now as I believe it to have shortcomings which render it of limited use at any time. It certainly makes important points but it also has the defects of its qualities so would always need to be balanced by a more positive attitude to God and the universe.

In negative or apophatic theology God is considered in terms of his unknowability. He is divine darkness rather than light, the inexpressible truth beyond form, the unmanifest Void behind the created world. This approach to God, springing from Neo-Platonism rather than anything Jesus taught, has always been attractive to a certain type of intellectual but, unless it is balanced by an approach that focuses on the positive qualities of God, it can potentially mislead the would-be mystic. The sort of temperament drawn to it might be confirmed in its own weaknesses and take refuge in a reductionist spirituality which ignores the truth in creation and in ourselves as created beings.  We are meant to fully embrace creation though always seeing it in the light of the Creator.

Negative theology can be a useful corrective in a culture which sees God in strong anthropomorphic terms or else one over-fixated on ritual and commandment. It can help to reduce focus on the form of God when that becomes too prominent. But in a basically God-denying society such as ours it can become an escape into abstraction and an evasion of spiritual responsibility. From a certain perspective there is a  profound truth in it but if negative theology were what really mattered then the life story of Christ would have ended at the Crucifixion. However, it went on to the Resurrection and the Ascension, both of which involved the validation of the body which in a negative theology can have no real meaning or purpose. 

The Buddha last words were, ‘Work hard to gain your own salvation’. Sound advice but not very inspiring and somewhat dry. This is negative theology. Christ's last words to his disciples were, "I am with you even unto the end of days". What could be more beautiful and full of love? That's the opposite to negative theology.

If you are tempted in the direction of negative theology, be aware of its shortcomings. Seemingly a philosophy pointing to a high spiritual state, it can actually be a rejection of the goodness in creation and the idea of a personally loving Creator. Its Christian advocates try to fit Jesus into their scheme of things but really they go against what he taught. Jesus’s first miracle was changing water into wine. In their worldview there's no real difference between water and wine so he was wasting his time.

What the negative theologians miss is the importance in spirituality of quality. God is in everything but he is not in everything equally. That is the apparent paradox which they do not resolve but it is easy to resolve if you accept creation as real. And people as real for that matter because people are not really real in a negative theology universe. They are outgrown when you see the truth just as in certain forms of Indian philosophy.

When all is said and done, negative theology, the theology of darkness, is reductionist and, being the polar opposite to materialism, has a lot in common with it. The materialistic atheist and the non-theistic negative theologian both miss that life is not just spirit and not just matter but a creative union of the two together which is much richer than either on its own.

God is not unknowable. We can never comprehend the totality of him but we are made in his image and we certainly can know him when we turn to him in our hearts. He is there, not as impersonal being but as our loving Father. "Show us the Father" said the apostle Philip, to which Jesus replied "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father."

It might be said that I have argued in this piece not against negative theology itself but against the misuse or misunderstanding of negative theology. Possibly so, but the fact is by its very nature this doctrine lends itself to misuse. Unless counterbalanced by a strong awareness of God as Creator and the reality of the human soul and the truth in creation plus an awareness of the hierarchical nature of the divine qualities of goodness, beauty and truth, it can result in the extinction of the self rather than its raising up into spiritual glory which is God’s purpose in creating us as demonstrated at the Ascension. Jesus did not rise up into darkness. He rose into light. This is the purpose of creation. To make darkness into light not to return to darkness.

Nothing Beyond

I want to consider another difference between non-dualistic forms of spirituality and those that see this world as not sufficient in itself and ourselves as incomplete. (Note that in a logically consistent non-dual system this world is perfect when perceived correctly and we are perfect now if only we knew it. That is why enlightenment is potentially open to anyone at any time in such systems). Previous posts have gone into this difference but approached the question from the perspective of individuality which is effectively discarded in non-duality, a fundamental misconception in my view even if based on something real which is the shifting of the centre of identity. However, here I wish to look at the matter from another angle.

There is nothing beyond. There is nothing beyond this world and there is nothing beyond ourselves. Earth is heaven when seen with the eye of vision. We see as God sees when we know ourselves to be pure consciousness. Now, I do not doubt that Earth can appear heavenly in vision or ecstasy or any kind of peak experience but this is not the same as saying it is heaven. The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven, as the poet has it. But still this world is not heaven. There is something much more real behind it, something of which this world is only a dim reflection even if that reflection can partake of the divine in certain modes of awareness. But if non-duality means what it says it does, and if the implications of its claims are understood, then there is no possibility of attaining to a higher state of consciousness than is attainable here and now. The very idea of qualitative difference is meaningless. There may be worlds beyond this one but for a true non-dualist these cannot offer anything more.

Is that not a dispiriting thought? There are not greater and greater vistas of glory. There cannot be if everything is here and now. There is not something more and better than this world or, even if there is, that does not mean our participation, our joy, in it can be any greater. Non-duality means nothing is better, nothing is higher, nothing is more. It is ultimately a sad and sorry philosophy which negates the beauty of life.

Of course, most people who subscribe to this philosophy don't think like this but that's because they have not fully thought through the implication of their belief system. It's all very well, as far as it goes, if you take it simply to mean that the world is not fundamentally separate from us. But when you really think it through, you find that, so keen is it to avoid any kind of separation, it destroys any kind of difference. It may deny this and say that created things are real on their own level but as it effectively regards that level as one of ignorance, this is not much use.

Far better to return to the traditional Western idea of God and creation, both of which are fully real. Non-duality takes the trinity of spirit, soul and body and reduces it to spirit alone but a more comprehensive and inclusive understanding sees them as all having a role to play in the totality of what we (and the universe) are, even if there is a hierarchical ordering to this group. But the fact of hierarchy does not negate the lower levels of the order, all of which combine to make something greater than just the highest on its own. The interaction of spirit and matter produces something more than spirit alone, both for God who can share his life with other free beings, and for us who can enter more and more deeply into the endless mysteries of existence.