Learning Experiences

Why does our knowledge of love’s fullness have to be so painful to obtain? Why doesn’t God completely reveal to us our full nature?

By giving His power, the power of the word, to man, God destroyed His absolute power to reveal Himself and the secrets of creation. But before man appeared on the scene, the secrets had been told in mammon – in the temporal – which reflects them oppositely and truly, as though in a mirror, itself material, a form that is real is seen, albeit its “mirror-image” is not its reality in being. Thus, truth-bearer must make unto himself a friend of mammon, “unrighteous” as mammon is, and he must reveal the working of the flesh, offensive and error-provoking though his words may be.

Being part of the material realm limits us in coming to full knowledge of the reality and fullness of God. If we want LIFE, we must deal with the limitations and consequences thereof. The Apostle Paul says as much in his letter to the Romans:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits in eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Rom. 8:18-21) 

According to Paul here, we were not created by God already perfect, then fell, and now are in the process of regaining paradise. Rather, we have been subjected to futility from the beginning by our creator! Why? In hope that we will come to know the freedom of being children of God (being set free from slavery to mere mammon). It is the only way we can know love for ourselves. In other words, the Eden story isn’t a time-based story; it is rather an eternal happening, goading and guiding us into a better future. The story is a “trap” God sets for us, striving for the “beginning,” which in eternity is also our “completion.”

And here Preston Harold sounds like a modern day Paul:

Mammon is the mirror, and perforce the mirror lies – for it, itself, is not what it reflects in its being or as its being. God, First Cause, love, life itself, is not matter as revealed in mammon; God…is revealed through mammon’s examination to be “spirit,” or a type of “energy” unknown and unknowable in physical terms…. The reality underlying the world of appearances cannot be reduced to physical terms, it is only indirectly knowable as reflected in mammon’s mirror, and as it is intuitively experienced by man…. But in mammon’s mirror, in evil, or in pure matter, or in life’s temporal history with all its evil-doing, the image of good and its working may be beheld. This is to say, there is evidence that life is building into man a factor that will in time deliver him from evil without robbing him of its desirable aspects, and that this factor is in truth the saving grace of life.

Amen! Until next time, peace.

Dilemma of the Group-ego

Jesus said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26) Preston Harlod explains:

…the more lost man’s consciousness becomes in the sands of humanity’s ego-groups and Group-egos, the more his Authority-Ego leads him to hate his life in this world and any concept of himself or another that makes him a group-component or appendix or product even of his own family – thus, he must renounce any tie that binds him to Group-ego before he can become One, himself, truth to his own being.

Jesus said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.” (Matt. 15:24) Preston Harold again:

“Israel,” the consciousness outgrown from that which was born in Eden, carried on in the ark, is a multitude of selves to which the Authority-Ego comes as saving grace – and “Israel’s” salvation depends upon being freed of the bonds of Group-ego.

In what ways does Group-ego hold us back from becoming fully human? Harold ruminates in depth:

…Group-ego is found in all nationalities and races, expressing itself most vehemently in those most anti-semitic. Group-ego was merely elaborated in Christianity, and was further elaborated in Nietzche’s concept of super-race, coming finally to rest in Karl Marx’s mass-ego ideal wherein man in classless society must sacrifice his individuality to the State, to the Super-ideology, rather than to the idea of the Chosen-race, super-religion, or super-race complex.

The Greeks and Romans suffered Group-ego. The Athenian was first a creature of the State, Athenian democracy his god, and the Roman followed in his footsteps. Therefore, both embraced ziggurat concepts, towers of Babel, the structure of their society replacing God. But in the first and “almost perfect democracy” there was no part “for women, foreigners or slaves…” Euripides, the poet, had condemned slavery, calling it “that thing of evil,” and “the Stoics denounced it.” But something other than slavery also worked to undermine Athenian civilization. The need of Athens was that each of her citizens take full responsibility; but in “the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security, a comfortable life, and they lost all – security and comfort and freedom.”

Group-ego and responsibility are incompatible. Group-ego leads to the expression of parasitic consciousness.

I have no doubt that you, reader, will find many parallels with Athens in today’s United States. Ben Franklin once stated, “Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” History is on his side.

We are almost finished with Chapter 4!  Our next post will be the last of the chapter, exploring what helps to set us free from the constraints of Group-ego. Until then, peace…

Beginning to Break the Messianic Mold

Continuing with Chapter 2, how does a human being become free?  How does one realize the divine order within him/herself?  What steps must be taken?

According to Harold, Jesus understood that as long as mankind looked for the advent of some one or a series of Messiahs to solve his problems, he could not realize his own potential.  So how was Jesus to destroy this idea of the Messiah that mankind longed after and hoped for?  Here is Harold’s view…

Jesus seized the opportunity to complete the Judaic Scriptures.  This was his mission – and in fulfilling it He also lead men toward a high moral ethic vested in love.  Why did he do it?  In completing the Scriptures, He could destroy the Messianic tradition… Jesus broke it.  This study concludes that He knew what He was doing, knew that He was breaking the Messianic mold, and that to break it through completing the Scriptures, thus freeing mankind from the curse of Messianic expectation and Messianic delusion, was His mission.

Among the prevailing Messianic concepts and even the Greek intellectualism of Jesus’ day, unfortunately nothing could destroy humankind’s innate compulsion to search beyond their own consciousness for saving grace…

[Jesus] saw that because Messianic hope was universal, springing eternally in man’s heart, it must be a valid hope, but misdirected when man holds the concept that governing-truth or God’s Messiah is foreign to his own individual being.  Jesus discovered its residence in man, found the key to unlock His own unconscious, and said that man must seek this inner kingdom if he hopes to find God’s saving grace and the sufficiency in life he craves; He then made Himself a symbol of the Authority within it, the Christ of God in man. His own words support this concept…

…And it is these words we will look at in our next post. Until then, peace…

The Education of Jesus

We now move into Chapter 2, titled “The Messianic Mission of Jesus.”  The chapter begins with an exploration of the cultural and world context from which Jesus’ thought and ethic grew…

Schweitzer says, “The ideal would be that Jesus should have preached religious truth in a form independent of any connection with any particular period and such that it could be taken over simply and easily by each succeeding generation of man. That, however, He did not do, and there is no doubt a reason for it.”

A look at the world in the time of Jesus may reveal the reason, for more assuredly  He did not ignore its thought patterns.  The question is – how much of the world and of its prevailing beliefs did he know?

One must pause here to consider the multi-cultural influences that permeated the Middle East at the time of Jesus.  The trade route of the Silk Road was the conduit for ideas in all realms of human experience, and the Middle East sat right at it’s crossroads.

 From the Asia Society’s website: “The religious beliefs of people along the Silk Road at the beginning of the 1st century BCE were very different from what they would later become. The peoples of the Silk Road in its early decades followed many different religions. In the Middle East, many people worshiped the gods and goddesses of the Greco-Roman pagan pantheon. Others were followers of the old religion of Egypt, especially the cult of Isis and Osiris. Jewish merchants and other settlers had spread beyond the borders of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judea and had established their own places of worship in towns and cities throughout the region. Elsewherein the Middle East, and especially in Persia and Central Asia, many people were adherents of Zoroastrianism, a religion founded by the Persian sage Zoroaster in the 6th century BCE. It posited a struggle between good and evil, light and darkness; its use of fire as the symbol of the purifying power of good was probably borrowed from the Brahmanic religion of ancient India. The Greek colonies of Central Asia that had been left behind after the collapse of the empire of Alexander the Great had, by the 1st century BCE, largely converted from Greco-Roman paganism to Buddhism, a religion that would soon use the Silk Road to spread far and wide. In India, on side routes of the Silk Road that crossed the passes to the Indus Valley and beyond, the older religion of Brahmanism had given way to Hinduism and Buddhism; the former never spread far beyond India and Southeast Asia, while the latter eventually became worldwide in extent.”

Preston Harold sees the possibilities here:

In truth there is no way to define the type and limits of Jesus’ education.  After the report of his visit to the temple at twelve years of age, with His parents, it is said, “And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them…”  Here the record breaks off and takes up again with the ministry of John the Baptist.  Within the years lost to the record, Jesus coud have traveled to the ends of civilization and back; studying along the way – or in neighboring cities He coud have studied the cultures and philosophies of East and West.  In the Gospels there is a statement that could be interpreted as an indication that Jesus was away for many years: when he goes to His native place to teach and heal, people do not seem to know for sure who He is – which is to say, they ask, “Is this not the son of the joiner?”  Strange question to ask, even to express incredulity, had Jesus lived there since childhood and been away but a short time.  Because the townspeople know His family so well, they are offended at His brilliance even though they are astounded at His teaching.

He goes on to say:

There is a similarity, however, between (Jesus’) words and those of other philosophers.  Renan attributes this to “secret channels and…that kind of sympathy which exists among the various portions of humanity…conformable to the instincts and wants of the heart in a given age.”  Is this indicated, considering all that surrounded Jesus and His inquisitive, discerning mind?… In many ways His approach resembles that of Socrates, who, as Robert de Ropp describes him, followed the bidding of his “inner voice” endeavoring at all times “to lead men to truth by questioning.  And the truth he valued most highly related not to externals but to the laws that govern man’s inner being.”  In discussing ancient Greece, Edith Hamilton points to Plato’s philosophy: “Freedom is no matter of laws and constitutions; only he is free who realizes the divine order within himself, the true standard by which a man can steer and measure himself.” (emphasis mine)

And here we have the impetus to jump into how Jesus saw his Messianic role, which we will explore more in depth beginning with the next post.  Until then, peace…