Desani: If there was only one religion you would only have a partial view [of being/reality]
Co-creator – Rabbinic Judaism
Means by which world has self experience, knows itself – Distillation of Hinduism by G.V. Desani
Sinner who must be saved – Christianity
There is truth in all of the above. The idea that we are partners with the divine as co-creators merges with the idea that we are the means by which the world has self experience; God descends into matter in order to re-emerge a self realized being. That is the story of Jesus. In a sense Jesus is everyman, then. But pride inhibits this unfolding and is the sin from which we must evolve in order to be who we really are. Saved from our sin is to give up our will, humble ourselves before the divine creative spirit. It is expressed as “Take up your cross and follow me.” Give up your will to mine, is what that means. Then our life is no longer ours but “his”, our father’s. God, the creator then lives through us. If the will, our little will, is triumphant, then the self, our little self, won’t humble itself and we will continue as slaves to our passions, or worse, if one believes in demon possession. The path most, in the Western world, are on leads to self-loathing as we struggle in vain to shed this guilt which has been inculcated into us for two thousand years. Instead of understanding it for what it is, a key to redemption, we sublimate it only to have it continuously crop up in every aspect of our lives.
Be like the bamboo leaf on which snow accumulates until the leaf gives way and the snow slips off. It follows its own nature without effort, without willing. There is no will involved whatsoever. The leaf surrenders to the weight of the snow flakes flawlessly; the Beauty of this is ineffable.
Surrender to God is in the Hindu’s Gita. So is love of God (Bhakta) and ritualized worship. Self denial, asceticism, is there too. Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity seem to have appealed in ancient times to a common undercurrent. What they commonly teach distills down to what, in Yoga, is called “inhibition of the citta vritis”. Suppression of the modifications of the mind. That would, of course be Patanjali’s first sutra on the nature and meaning of Yoga in his Yoga Sutras. Inhibition of modifications of the mind, or consciousness, could be viewed as surrender to God and is intended to accelerate the realization that we finite beings point to the infinite, are made in the image of all that is; we are sparks of the divine, it is taught. As David Goldman puts it in his Beethoven essay, the infinite is ever present and appearances always point to it as that is where the infinite, so to speak, hides. So, God is omnireal, omnipresent and there is no finite absent the infinite. This is similar to there being no light absent darkness, no good absent evil, no positive absent the negative. There are contrasting pairs, aspects, of reality everywhere.
Failing to realize these points is a spin off of our diabolical endeavor to build a machine to replace God; call it the “web”, the “interNET”. It is, at least, intended to be all providing (Amazon), Omniscient (Wikipedia, e.g.), and Omnipresent (Google, et al), Omnipotent (the State). It is infinitely malleable; we make it whatever we want and call it good but I think it likely is the opposite. We’ve made a Faustian bargain? And this machine god is ruthless, takes a terrible toll among the impressionable young. Should we encourage the measurement of the value of one’s life on facebook likes, on re-tweets, up and down votes?
Sixty years ago I lived, as a young soldier, in Gablingen Kaserne. It was an old barracks used formerly, during WWII, by the German Wehrmacht. I was a soldier, an Infantryman. Looking back on that, taking its measure from long perspective, I now realize that likely those couple of years were the best of my life. That young soldier would think me crazy for saying this now. He was so full of himself, of longing, of ambition, restlessness, eagerness. He never, or hardly ever, saw himself for what he was. Yes, he’d been brought up right, had good parenting, learned the religious things they taught then, which he mostly rejected being so self absorbed. He didn’t know it but he was like a bird fluttering over the abyss. Now I’m still that bird but the abyss has grown to infinite proportions. If someone had told him the way to understand, simply put, what I have written here and elsewhere is to realize that man confers on God individuality and in return God confers on man universality. That is a simple truth and is, I believe, the true story of Jesus. Put a bit differently, the story of Jesus is intended to teach that man, at least potentially, displays the attributes of God. As co-creator he even has the power to replace God with a machine and worship that. Realizing this is near impossible, because, of course, we are mired in our “sin” which, that young man would never understand, means simply that we cling to our will at all cost. Given this being we manage continuously to corrupt it in ever new and shiny ways. The web tangles us the more in that net.
History is pressing us forward. We are on a journey through unfolding cultural epochs. The transition from one to the next is anything but seamless. The features fractalize, get corrupted, intentions take on a life of their own in spite of whether they were good or bad. They morph, combine, bubble up out of the mire and forever sprout evolving manifestations of themselves. First we lived as artists, artisans, primitavely assemblying our world mainly into questions about who we were, what this was that we found ourselves in. Art asks questions but expects no answers but soon our questions led to primitive answers about purpose and meaning and we merged into the succeding epoch, religion which had the answers putting them above man in a separate realm called heaven with God as custodian. Reality was perfect above, beyond man, and corrupt below. It was an Aristotleian view of the world. That morphed into science – we were only three steps removed from our beginning where the impossible to access answers as to meaning and purpose continues to be beyond us in the sense it perpetually awaits explication in a “grand unifying theory”. One theory creates ever successive opportunities for new and better explanations of how things fit together in an assumed mechanistic universe. Science enhances our material nature and we become ever more enslaved by it thereby but history as cultural epoch comes to us now and further emphasizes the material aspect of being. We theorize that history shows the way logically by steps through a heuristic and dialectic process, a recursive and infinite regress for the betterment of mankind’s lot. As in Religion and Science, in History we similarly have a final synthesis to be reached on a perpetually vanishing horizon that we somehow can never quite reach. This is where we are now. In these epochs consciousness is directed out from us into the world. The West having learned through Christianity to “spread the good word” continues that missionary zeal with endless meddling in other people’s affairs “for their own good” – in short, the historical effort to colonize continues with zeal the evangelists of old would admire. Some even say we are now colonizing ourself. Now, if only we could connect everyone somehow with a live system that is always on we would have achieved history’s wildest dream as everyone merges into The Hive with the necessary loss, of course, of any individuality. In The Hive Sobran says that like an Hive bound insect one loses the need for a soul of one’s own. That’s the cost of being in the collective. In the ancient Vedas it is written that “Knowing your own self (soul) you know the soul of the Universe.” Its of paramount importance to guard your individuality though we are almost to the point of totaly losing ours. Only a few luddites, old people, stand in the way and of course we know how to deal with those. War, famine, divisiveness, not to speak of custom made pandemics and fear, are useful tools in this. There are too many people anyhow.
To recap, the crowning achievement of these cultural epochs was the industrial revolution. The industrial revolutin is evolving into total interconnectivity, interdependence of all mankind when this material machine completely replaces God. Our primitive man would rebel against this intuitively. Modern man can’t be bothered with intuition. Intuition is the enemy of progressivism. But Religion, Science, and History could care less. Reason finally has its triumph as it gloats over its great achievement of destroying man. Thing about a dystopia is everyone is on the same page, everything finally makes sense and is in logical order whatevere it costs. But, there will be another epoch sprouting out of this, to be sure.
Eratosthenes (276-194BC) in Syene Egypt, now Aswan, discovered the circumference of Earth. It was measured in Stadia, based on the size of the then current Greek unit of length. From that was calculated the diameter of the Earth, about 8,000 miles. Now, in astronomical terms that is indeed a tiny thing. We live on a planet that is likely almost impossible to detect outside the solar system. The earth/sun orbits its center of mass which is deep inside the sun. We are barely here, unknown, alone in the abyss of space. What are we doing to earn our keep? Oh, we are kept, make no doubt about it. By what/whom is unknowable to us but we are, it seems, somewhat sentient life forms. Some believe the Earth, too, is sensate. If there is a purpose and meaning we might come to have at least a rudimentary understanding of it. The first step should be to humbly accept what we truly are and that is decidedly not the author of our own inheritance of this tiny dirt ball we call planet Earth. Think about this. Until we came along as sentient life forms there was no beauty, truth, love, understanding, wisdom, or any concomitant of consciousness whatsoever. Most of all, that late comer Humility hadn’t appeared. Our emergence as living beings capable of self understanding was a precursor event for the emergence of these values or faculties. What is unfolding here? What further emergence will these precipitate? Could it be the divine itself? Or, have we perhaps reached our credit limit?
Consiousness is heretofore directed outwards. What would be the consequence of somehow managing to have it – realize it -as returning on itself?
I’m grateful for Paul Kingsnorth whose writings I’ve lately been studying for inspiring me to write this entry.