Known unknown unknowns

"If you put aside what you think you know about Jesus and approach the Gospels as though for the first time, something remarkable happens: Jesus emerges as a teacher of the transformation of consciousness."

So says the Amazon book review for The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind--A New Perspective on Christ and His Message, which they automatically recommend me on my 51st birthday.  Better late than never!

But really, I don't need to put aside what I thought I knew.  I already thought I knew Jesus that way, just not ONLY that way. It is not like it has been a complete secret for the last 1500 years. It is just not widely advertised, because most people don't want their consciousness to be transformed. They want quick, cheap forgiveness, and it is hard to beat Jesus on that. 

Be that as it may, it makes me wonder.  Many people are ignorant of many things.  I was ignorant of many things I recently learned about. Obviously then, there are still many things I don't know, and don't even know that I don't know. Things that are utterly beyond my radar. And judging from the past, some of these are probably hiding in plain sight.

Ignorance - it is not just for other people anymore!

Madmen jump too high

I have kept half an eye on the latest arc over at One Cosmos, about the defense of theism. At the same time I have been nibbling Huston Smith's book Forgotten Truth. This is interesting, as Smith clearly does not believe that the personal God is the highest level of being. However, echoing Schuon, he believes that a deep knowledge of the personal God is a pathway to go beyond that level. This is all way too advanced for me, it is something I may need to reflect on if I become a major demigod. Probably won't happen this year either. 

What I do feel sure of is that between undifferentiated materialism and undifferentiated spiritualism is a chasm of galactic dimensions, which you cannot simply vault over with a book on Neo-Advaita or a couple satsang recordings on YouTube. If you go from atheist to nondualist in such a quick upgrade, chances are that you simply cannot stomach the humiliation of bowing down to anyone other than yourself, or the disgrace of having to restrain your fornication, your greed or your vanity just because some bronze-age tribal religion told you to. As long as there is no other god before you, you are fine. You can continue to do whatever you think is OK, as long as it doesn't get you arrested by the police or worse, mocked by your peers.

There are indeed religious traditions that don't center on a personal God or Savior. But they are few and small, mere sects within larger religions. And they prescribe strict moral codes, intricate regulations and personal sacrifices in the (usually long) time leading up to enlightenment, which is even then far from assured in a lifetime. If you think going it alone without a God is some kind of shortcut, you are badly deluded.

In New Age circles, I have met more people than I can remember who said "I am God" or "we are God". But I am still waiting for someone to say "my husband is God". Then I will know something has truly happened in your life.

More on the nature of the Light

It occurs to me that those who meditate on the uncreated Tao that cannot be spoken, and those who innocently venerate a saint, are both seeing the same Light. For the Heavenly Light is alive; it is neither reflected nor refracted in compatible souls, but rather lives and dwells in them, and shines forth from them again with the same freshness as when it first shone into creation.

How many of us would have thought of God on our own, and how well would we have known the Holy One without the Holy Ones? It does happen that the Light breaks into a soul directly from beyond, I believe. But more often it jumps from soul to soul, shifting colors with them, yet remaining the same Light. A disciple is not above his master even if the disciple does greater works. If we disregard one of the least in the Kingdom of Heaven, we may deprive ourselves of a great Light that should have lived and grown in us until it reached the brightness of full day. Sometimes it is just a few words from an unassuming soul, and yet those words carry with them a spirit that sets all things right and becomes a wellspring of life, long after they are forgotten by the one who spoke them.

Humility

This is an important topic, but not one taught in most schools (except the school of life, where there are daily lessons). Christians in particular should be desperately interested in understanding humility, for the Bible says: "God resists the proud, but gives grace unto the humble" (James 4). And nothing worthwhile in a Christian's life is accomplished without grace, not even the basic salvation. If God resists us, it won't be easy to get into the Kingdom of Heaven, whatever that means to each of us.

My current best approximation is that humility is personal realism. Obviously this is different from from the notion that humility is simply low self-esteem. True, for much of our lives this is a good rule of thumb, because we hold ourselves in too high regard (at least in some ways). But gradually the balance shifts. Jesus could say "I am meek and humble in heart" (Matthew 11). It may sound like he is boasting of his humility, a paradox. But he was just telling the truth. We tend to start out proud but not knowing it. Then we are proud but realize it. Eventually we may become humble but are still not humble enough to bear knowing it. To be able to know for sure that we are humble ... Ah, that's something.

Everything is relative except the absolute. So one way to gain humility points is to compare ourselves to people who have accomplished more than we, or those who have accomplished much despite great difficulties. In the middle ages, people studied hagiology, the science of saints. Today we study criminology, even common folks do that just by reading the papers. No wonder people get uppity.

Life is the first draft of our autobiography

Today I got mail: Amazon.com recommends "Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography" by Huston Smith.

That certainly sounds fascinating. In my life it has been the Divine chasing me, strangely enough.

It must be awesome to be able to, around the age of 90, write an autobiography called "Tales of Wonder". I suspect that if I reach that age and write my autobiography, it will be called "The Eternal Newbie."

Words of wisdom, and not by me!

"As long as you study the Truth at only an intellectual level, there is a ceiling, but once you reach the stage of applying this knowledge in a practical way, all limits disappear and your learning will take an infinite variety of forms."

-Ryuoho Okawa: Ten Principles of Universal Wisdom.

The benefit of matter

I don't have much to say about the spirit world.  I have no memories of a life before life, nor have I visited the afterlife, and for this I am rather thankful. So I don't know whether people can be conscious without a body, or in just an ethereal body.  But the spirit world is certainly present even in this life. That's something I know, as it is plain to see. It is not like we exist in a purely material world now!  Rather, we could think of the present world as "spirit world plus inertia".  If we imagine being alive in the spirit world alone, then our mind would immediately manifest its contents.  Kind of like a dream, really.  What we believed would appear before us. But thanks to the dense, slow matter, in this world we move only slowly and with considerable use of energy toward what is in our heart.  But move we do.

You could also say that our spirit part is destiny, and our material part is fate.  Life in this world is fate and destiny.  But if we were only in the spirit world, only our destiny would manifest, for better or for worse.  Much better or much worse, depending on our choices.  (It is believed that angels are in this situation:  Either glory or utter desecration, depending on what they decided once and for all. But we, we are held back, moving only gradually. This viscous quality of earthly life is very handy when we are falling, as we kind of sink downward instead of plummeting to the bottom of Hell at the speed of light. Of course, we are equally held back if ascending.)

Absent spirit, fate would reign supreme, and we would be like animals, blown about by whatever came our way, with no aspiration. Or drifting with the current. Conversely, without fate we would just boundlessly create our own world.  There are some "New Age" people who believe they live in such a world, where everyone can get the green light in every crossing at the same time. They believe they are God, creating their world. You should not hurry toward such a world, but rather prepare yourself, so that you don't accidentally create your own hell. That is sure to happen if you mistake desire for aspiration.  

On the radius of happiness

One may disagree with Kofuku-no-Kagaku in various things, but in this at least they hit the bullseye:  You can't go off and create Utopia until you have thoroughly marinated in happiness yourself.  Even if you are running over with happiness and your family and workplace sparkle with it, you still face an unimaginably harder task to transform society.  Even a small town would be a challenge literally orders of magnitude greater.

It is a grotesque arrogance when someone who has no true understanding of happiness in their own everyday circumstances, still think they are qualified to change society in fundamental ways in order to increase the happiness of the populace.  Go back to first grade!  Find out what actually causes happiness and misery, find it out from hands-on experience, study your own life and those right around you, and learn. Then you can cautiously start talking. When you inspire joy and trust by simply being present, then you can show others the way.

"Knowing" the truth

The Master famously says: "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." 

If we seek the truth because we want to be free, however, this will not happen. Or at least not at once, although we are heading in the right direction.  But the truth is not like a doctor we come to with our symptoms, who then fixes us up and we part amicably. Rather, truth is like someone you fall in love with and marry, and live happily (but not always easily) ever after.  We know truth in the Biblical way, so to speak, the way Adam knew Eve. Or, in our case, rather the other way around. Of this is our freedom born, out of our love for truth and its love for us.

Or so the voice in my head says.

We are all atheists...

...in the sense that there are gods we don't believe in.  For instance, we don't belive in the capricious, lustful gods from the ancient pantheons. By our standards, they are barely even human, much less divine. This is probably no accident:  For only by becoming more human are we able to grasp more of the divine. (The gods of the ancients were probably majestic to them, just realistic enough to connect to.) It is not by coincidence, I believe, that the world's great religions push so strongly on their believers to live a moral life and discipline the mind. It is not only a good thing in itself, but also a precondition to perceive the divine with more clarity. If we were completely in the thrall of our impulses throughout the day, we would be stuck with inferior gods as well, because we can only see so far ahead of where we are.

Actually, some of us have some experience with that.  I not only disbelieve in the capricious gods of the heathens, but also the capricious God of some literalist Christians: The God who hides fake fossils to "test the faith" of his followers. Even the God who tells Adam that the punishment for disobedience is death, only to explain later that actually by "death" he meant an eternity of unbearable pain.

I won't say we all get the God we deserve. That would be bad. But I think there are limits to how far ahead (or up) we can see from where we stand, or if not our life then at least our highest aspiration. 

The fake courage of fake materialists

Occasionally a would-be materialist will mention the courage it takes to live without believing in anything supernatural.  This is amusing because it is not even wrong, just impossible. Courage is supernatural.

If you were a true materialist, you would know that courage can not exist anywhere in the universe, and certainly not in yourself. If only because there is no self.  There is this moving mass of protoplasm, wandering through the world, driven by its DNA to seek out and digest pieces of dead plant or animal matter, kind of like a slime mold but faster.  Further the DNA will occasionally drive this lump of living matter to briefly unite with other lumps to create a new cluster of cells with a combination of their DNA, to repeat the whole process over again.

There can be no courage, no beauty and no hope in a creature propelled merely by the firing of its neurons as dictated by its genes and environment. It does not even have as purpose to survive and procreate - it just so happened that those cell clumps that were programmed to survive and reproduce gave rise to the current fauna, while those whose DNA failed to contain these programs fell by the wayside.

If we zoom in, all we see is atoms combining their electrons to a more stable configuration, then being torn apart by random movements and combining again. If we zoom out, we see a dirty speck of iron circling an average star, dwindling into the background light of a random galaxy on its way through time to inevitable destruction.

So no, if you are still alive, I don't think you have ever been a materialist.  But I suppose roleplaying one can help attract shapely lumps of protoplasm of the appropriate gender.