© Copyright 2004 by William
Mistele. All rights reserved.
On Christianity and Judaism
Introduction
This essay is in response to
a Jew who wrote me. He pointed out that
I seem to appreciate the limitations of religions while respecting the
universal wisdom underlying them. He
then asked if I could describe some of the genuine spiritual wisdom in Judaism
since he found that the Jewish religious practitioners he had observed were
narrow-minded and without inspiration.
To respond, I have to compare Judaism and
Christianity, seeking to view the weaknesses in each as well as their strengths. These two religions are inextricably
intertwined at least for Christians. My limitation is that I have to work
backwards going through two thousand years of Christianity before I can even come
close to understanding Judaism. But
having me comment on Christianity is like placing the shark in the movie Finding Nemo in charge of a support group
for fish. The shark by nature will have other
agendas than offering support and encouragement.
Furthermore, fundamentalist Christian preachers
often use fear and terror to control their congregations. Sometimes they engage in psychic rape--they
torment and twist individuals’ emotions seeking to scar them for life to insure
their power over the congregation.
Stephen King’s life long tribute in his
stories to horror and terror will never be a match for a good fundamentalist
preacher who feasts on the terrified souls of his congregation by dangling them
on a thin thread over an eternal abyss of fire and brimstone. Trying to be fair
and balanced after having observed “psychic rape” is not an easy thing to do.
I was raised a fundamentalist Baptist. The
North American Baptist convention broke off from the Southern Baptist
convention over the issue of slavery.
When the good Baptists down south read the Bible it was perfectly clear
to them that God intended slavery as a permanent human institution. Quite clearly and accurately, the Bible
authorizes slavery. And after all, this
is a state’s rights issue and the southern states were dependent on slavery to
maintain their economy—and if God likes anything, he likes productivity.
And God doesn’t like people mixing races
when they marry and in the exact same way that God is against stem cell
research and abortion even in the third tri semester and even if it threatens
the life of the woman; as he is against gay marriage as he is against feminism
and woman’s equality, women preachers, etc.
It is perfectly clear to them when they read the Bible and it will
always be perfectly clear to them—that is the nature of a fundamentalist mind
set. It just knows that it is right—it’s
the tradition; its the faith of the fathers.
I notice, however, that pretty much the
exact same mind set (if not social doctrines) can be found among Buddhists,
Taoists, Hindus, native Americans, Hawaiians, etc. The Christians and Jews have no monopoly on
fundamentalism.
Buddhists didn’t even teach their nuns to
read and write but the Catholics did (they did something right). Taoists like to keep their traditions secret,
in the family or the monastery—screw the masses. Hindu swamis, who do their yoga well, are so
overwhelmed with a bliss more enticing than heroin that they could care less
for the suffering of humanity.
At one point, I felt that the last two
thousand years of Christianity had completely avoided the real spiritual issues
and purposes at the heart of Christianity.
I used to argue with divinity students that the “Old Testament,” as the
Christians refer to it, has in fact more water running from its tap than
anything in the “New Testament.” The Old
Testament prophets were unique among world cultures—for a thousand years Jewish
prophets held a power over temporal rulers and the entire culture that is found
in no other tradition.
The only similar prophetic religion on earth
that I can see is the Hopi Indians whose culture directly derives from their
attempt to fulfill a spiritual quest. If
the culture gets off course, five different spiritual groups in their society
were authorized to act to restrict or even destroy their own people. It just was not a divine authority completely
responsible for originating the religion as with
According to modern science, Jewish
Levites still have distinctive genetic markers compared to other Jews. And Jews of course are distinctive
genetically compared to everyone else.
The Dalai Lama asked some Rabbis how they
could maintain such powerful traditions for thousands of years. The Dalai Lama wanted to know because Tibetan
Buddhism only really flourished in
The Rabbis replied it is in the family
tradition and the family rituals that keep us together. This may indicate in part why all those
gentiles are so incredibly jealous of Jews—because without a home you still
have your blood and your traditions. It
is just incredible.
Imagine trying to establish a pure bloodline
such as the Germans were trying to do using their Germanic legends and
myths. But then they have right there
throughout their society a racial heritage 3,800 years old that is extremely
pure genetically and which indeed has profound divine origins. There is just no comparison and no
competition. The Jews were terribly
threatening and utterly inexplicable in terms of anything other cultures could
come up with.
I sometimes imagine it like this. God, Divine Providence, akasha, whatever,
wanted for its own purposes to establish on earth a monotheistic religion,
something to honor in part the yang, or masculine principle, something that was
without form or image as is akasha.
So Ra arises in
Now we come to Christianity. If I were a Jew I think I would have to be
impressed by how clever Christ, his gospel writers, and the Apostle Paul were
in seeking to use and then destroy Judaism. Christ, for example, was absolutely
brilliant first in taking the mysteries and revealing them as stories for
ordinary people.
Except a grain of seed fall to the ground
and die it can not bring forth new life: this is the integration of the essence
of the pagan and the Christian mysteries.
Hardly any masters on earth bother to speak directly to the masses since
they feel so special and are so elitist but Christ was not. I have not met any masters currently on earth
who are so articulate in expressing universal principles through simple
stories. Among world teachers, Christ
had unique gifts regardless of one’s religious or metaphysical perspective.
And second, Christ times his death so it
became symbolic of a Passover sacrifice.
This guy knew exactly what he was doing: altering Judaism to replace
animal sacrifice with a one time upgrade to a human sacrifice. He foreshadows his resurrection and his death
is taken as dying for the sins of the world.
Christ (or more so Paul) is throwing away
the Messianic establishment of the
If the high priest in
Maybe Christ would have replied, “I am one
with God the way a drop of water is one with the sea.” Or, “the way a circle in
two planes is one with a sphere in three planes.” Or, the way a man can say he
is one with the will of his father in fulfilling the task set before him.” Or, “My authority is by proxy—I have full power
of attorney to speak and act on God’s behalf.”
Or maybe he would have said, “In the
beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and
nothing was created without it and I am this Word made living flesh and now
standing before you.” Or, perhaps “I am a portion of the Word and its direct
activity manifest in human form in a specific historical setting to fulfill a
specific historical purpose.” But we
will never know what Christ might have said.
In so many ways and times with Christ and with God, you have to ask the
question before you get an answer.
In the heart charka is a petal of a psychic lotus
according to my understanding and experience with the Hindu system that when
activated grants an individual the ability to feel one with God. We all have brains but we don’t necessarily
use our brains. We all have psychic
abilities but we don’t necessarily draw upon them. But they are there.
In this case, though, you have to overcome
Vishnu’s knot to experience the oneness with God. This direct experience of
oneness is certainly not a part of Judaism.
The Jewish prophets operated quite well without relying on yoga. But such oneness with deity if not God is
certainly a very common experience among advanced yogis.
Vishnu’s knot is in part a psychological
blockage. The individual’s energy can
not move directly through his heart the way water can not run through a closed
tap. The energy moves around the heart
like a leaky faucet with drops of water trickling down into the sink. Conversion experiences suffer from Vishnu’s
knot because the religious practitioner does not have a means for repeating and
deepening the original experience.
The original source of inspiration remains
hidden—it does not flow freely—it leaks, it trickles. You only get an aftertaste
and never again that first moment of being swept away, of “falling in love.” The individual is then left with having to convert
or witness the conversion of others to relive the experience in a vicarious or
second hand way.
In this sense, an individual may intend to
and want to use his heart to be compassionate but the feelings, natural
empathy, and energy are not there. For
example, an individual may very much want to care for others but in practice remains
repulsed by and even hateful of those who are not like himself.
Putting yoga aside, from the point of view
of a hermetic magician, the higher spirits of the solar sphere, in my experience
anyway, unlike all the other spirits in our solar system, are, from within
themselves, one with God. They are so
empty, so pure, so like a mirror, that they can fully reflect a portion of
God’s presence directly within themselves.
Gabriel says in the New Testament, “I am
Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God.” (And here is Gabriel again, not
only later on talking to Mohammad but right here aiding and abetting these
early Christians). Gabriel presides over
the sphere of Yesod, the spiritual aura of the moon.
In Yesod are the rhythms of time, of
nature, of birth and death, of renewal, of the changing of the seasons and the
birth of new light. Gabriel encompasses
in his consciousness all of space and time and is the perfection of
understanding and inner intuitive and immediate vision of how every purpose
will be fulfilled in due season.
But these solar spirits are more—they
reflect God within themselves. For this
reason, they are wild and creative like no other beings in our solar system. And so their light, their songs, wrapped up
in the vibration of photons, has been shining to the ends of the universe for
four billion years.
They provide a unique and specific vision of
what God is accomplishing within them. By contrast, the spirits of Moses, of the
Mercury sphere, are ferociously determined and incredibly pure in bearing
witness to the truth and desiring to communicate it. They have this immense capacity to solve
every problem regarding matter and spirit as well as science and magic.
The solar spirits, by contrast, do not
bear witness to the truth (reveal the laws handed down to them by God). Rather, they are the truth—its manifestation,
its harmony, its beauty, its radiance, its work, its very being and essence.
The Gnostics felt that Christ was
overshadowed by one of these great solar beings. And this is why the early Christians were
rabid about destroying every vestige of Gnosticism, of spiritual wisdom or any
form of direct knowing of God from their ranks.
For the Gnostics, Christ was only a human being yet one who was divinely
inspired.
In the novel and movie, The Last Temptation of Christ, the devil
disguises himself as an angel and tells Christ who is dying on the cross that
God is pleased with him and that Christ has suffered enough. Christ comes down from the cross and lives
for decades with a few women in peace.
But one day Christ overhears the Apostle
Paul preaching. Christ explains to Paul
that he did not really die on the cross.
And Paul says in effect, “I am really glad I met you. Because now I realize more than ever that my
message of Christ crucified and risen is what gives people hope.” (My words:)
“And your wishy washy pie in the sky message about how the poor, outcast,
downtrodden, and persecuted are somehow blessed in God’s eyes can never give
genuine hope.”
The Gnostics did not understand the basics
of human motivation. No where in pagan
mythology or experience does the Creator come down in human form and sacrifice
himself for all of mankind. There is blood price to be paid and a de facto
demonstration: The message is God is within each of us and all men, not just
Jews, Greeks, or Romans, are our brothers.
Buddhists would understand this message but have no inclination, not
until this century anyway, to use it to transform the world around them.
But the early church went to the opposite
extreme from the Gnostics. To counter
this heresy, they made Christ so much a part of the trinity that he lost any
humanity. You can not have a human being
without choice and, given the doctrine of the trinity, the only choice Christ
could have made was to incarnate. He
could not have done other than God’s will because in fact by definition he was
God.
However, when Christ says, “Not my will but
Thy will be done,” that certainly implies a personal will and also that a
choice is being made. And if there was a
choice then he could also have said, “I am going to pass on this one God
because I know with you all things are possible. And I really feel my best calling is as a
teacher. I am truly needed as a shepherd
to guide those who wish to follow a spiritual path. If I depart now, the religion that follows
after me will torture and kill millions of innocents in my name and enslave far
more to false doctrines devoid of spiritual life and light. They will take my teachings to authorize the
control of empires.”
And so consenting to this prophetically
accurate argument God might very well have fathered another son or daughter to
die for the sins of the world. After
all, God is not limited when it comes to creativity. But this conception of freedom the church is
incapable of considering and so it writes theology not to seek and express the
truth but only in order to combat heresy.
You can not get away with saying you are
one with God in Judaism. But in magic,
it is a basic exercise to imagine and practice joining with God until you feel
a complete and overwhelming conviction that you have accomplished it. It’s an exercise like running the hundred
yard dash is physical exercise. You do
not go around running the hundred yard dash every minute of the day but you
practice for it so that you can do it when you need to.
In a Christian marriage encounter group,
one of the wives said in regard to her life’s purpose that “I want to be one
with God.” There it is: even a twentieth
century Christian woman can intuitively pick up on this concept even though it
was perfectly clear to me this woman had not the faintest intention of doing a
single thing to become one with God. It
remained just a wish.
The
Apostle John had to write the book of Revelations since after reviewing his
gospel he noticed that nothing that Christ did was not already in the Old Testament. John realized that a reader of his gospel could
conclude that Christ was just another prophet, one rather spiritually oriented,
but actually not directed toward fulfilling the prophecies concerning the
establishment of
So John had to write Revelations to reveal
the cosmic Christ—that divine and powerful spiritual aspect we did not witness
in the historical person or historical actions.
Ok. Fine. Good. But
what is the connection between the cosmic Christ and the historical Christ of
the Gospels?
Maybe you can tie the two together by
faith. But something serious is missing
here. As John put it, “I was caught up
in the spirit.” And there it is: one of
the things missing in two thousand years of Christianity is being “caught up in
the spirit,” that is, a prophetic tradition.
Christians say, “Well, you know, we have a
different dispensation. Prophets were
for the Old Testament times. We have
grace and the Holy Spirit.” But in fact
the early Church had all sorts of prophets.
They were coming out of the walls, out of no where. So what happened?
The Old Testament in fact had schools for
prophets. And then you get guys like
Daniel who goes out on his own initiative and fasts and prays until he gets an
angel sent by God to grant him a vision in answer to his prayers. Daniel had method. But then again, he was the descendant of
Jacob. Daniel had spiritual guts.
Spiritual method is missing from
Christianity. When I say method, I don’t mean you punch in a few numbers the
way you do with a calculator and get an output.
Method is more like building a farm in the
wilderness. You have to cut down the
trees and remove the stones. You have to
set up drainage, build wells, and irrigation.
Then you have to plant, tend, and harvest. And on top of all of that you have to placate
and make peace with the natives who are on occasion hostile with someone
interfering directly with their hunter gatherer culture.
That is method. It takes incredibly hard work, ferocious
determination, and careful planning. If
you don’t learn to farm, you don’t develop civilization. You remain back in the
stone age spiritually speaking.
Christianity
is a stone age religion with a hunter gatherer level of spirituality. You get hungry for inspiration you go out and
get a bite or two and then you come back. Better, you have a revival—a revival is like
throwing a drop of water into a hot pan.
You get an instant sizzle and a flash.
But it will not even make you a cup of afternoon coffee or tea. Its there and then it is gone. Nothing worked at, nothing accomplished. In Christianity, there is no storehouse of
spiritual wisdom, insight, and inspiration to draw upon during a winter of the
soul.
Christ said, “How can you understand the
things of the spiritual world if you can not understand the things I say about
this world?” He was not about to grant the keys for originating a spiritual
civilization through genuine knowledge and power when no one was grasping the
basics of what he was saying.
You do not get saints in the Catholic Church
being produced by a prophetic tradition.
They appear in spite of the church.
The church in cases would recognize them only in order to co-opt them
into joining the mainstream. Give
The
But the Roman Church shut down Celtic
Christianity in the next century because these saints were in the habit of
using spiritual power. Forget that Pope
Leo single-handedly without support turned about a massive army on the verge of
sacking
(Christianity may be a Stone
Age religion spiritually, with a few exceptions, but that is not to say it is
not effective politically. Christ must
have known that the religion he was going to establish would inevitably defeat
the
“Go with the Roman a second mile” would
inevitably produce a sense of wonder from any Centurion who heard about
it. The rumor would travel up the line
to the Roman Senate. It might take a few
centuries but those in power would get around to noticing that Christians are a
lot more hard working and motivated and honest than anything the pagan temples were
producing. They might start to say like
one Greek governor, “I can’t go on persecuting these Christians. They are the only ones around who can read
and write. I need them alive to be my accountants
and tax collectors.
And if you are real hard put to
reorganize and revamp your corrupt empire and you are Caesar you might say,
“Lets make Christianity the state religion so that now we have one faith, one
doctrine, and one effective test of political loyalty.”)
Back to inner experience. The book of Revelations got into to the New
Testament because Augustine argued that it was symbolic. The book was too politically hot to be
allowed a literal interpretation. When I
read the book of Revelations I thought to myself, “This is stuff that should
never be allowed to happen.” Prophecies
are often negotiable.
Jonah prophesized the destruction of
Abraham had a “dark vision” revealed to him
by God about the future suffering of his descendents in
But you don’t get “dark visions” for
nothing. God was putting right in front
of Abraham an opportunity to revise and reshape the future but Abraham failed
to seize upon this opportunity. And so
enters Moses with miracles galore to liberate an enslaved people.
None of this needed to happen. Abraham could have said simply to God, “Tell
me what I need to do so that my children do not end up as slaves in
Not long ago I was sitting in a Christian
church listening to a minister ask the congregation why God chose Jacob to
found
This is what happens when ministers don’t
understand the basic aspects of storytelling, when they study Paul’s writing
and not the Gospels. Christians like to
twist the Old Testament so that everything in it points toward the coming of
Christ. But there is absolutely nothing
in the story of Jacob that is analogous to Christ. There is absolutely no reference to God’s
sovereignty in this story.
Its a fabulous story: a guy wrestles with
some sort of entity. This is the hook. How did Jacob meet, see, come upon this being?
In a good story, you leave some things to the reader’s imagination.
We ask ourselves, “How will this turn
out?” Jacob persists and won’t let
go. The entity says, “Dawn is coming,”
and so he touches the thigh of Jacob.
Jacob however persists under great duress and pain. Then we have a climax—an answer to the
question, “How will this turn out?” The entity says, “What do you want?” Jacob
says, “I want a blessing.” Ok, says the
entity, “What is your name?” “Jacob,” he
replies. “Your name is no longer Jacob
but
I do know how you can get more clear than
that about why God chose Jacob to be the founder of
Christians can not stand this idea because
for them God does it all. We human
beings have no part to play in salvation.
But that is exactly the opposite of what the story says. The story says God entertains and interacts
with human beings to enable them to discover their own will and their own power
and their own mode of interaction with God—which is precisely what Jacob did.
A Rabbi who used to write for the Jerusalem
Post pointed out that the Jewish God is not the same as the Christian God. For the Jews, they put their own lives at
risk before the Passover by putting blood over the doors. They thus participated in the act of
liberation.
Which brings me to a cute story the
Christians also hate to talk about. When
Peter was leaving
Make a note of this story for your English
teachers to see if they can top it--this utterance by Christ is the most sarcastic
statement ever made in all of world literature.
Christ is calling Peter not just a wimp but a wimp for of all time and for
all ages of the world.
The
Christians never got this: God wants friends who will stand by His side, who
will understand and fight for His purposes, and represent His interests on
earth.” But the Jewish prophets got it
over and over again for a thousand years—they put their lives at risk. They acted out of pure faith. They spoke with and interacted with God and
at times demanded visions and explanations from him directly without
intersession and they got it.
So Peter was a coward not once but
twice. But so was the Apostle Paul. A prophet warned him in the book of Acts not to go to
So Paul gets in front of the Jewish leaders
in
No. He cops out. He fudges.
He lies. He plays one group off
against the other by saying I am being persecuted for proclaiming the
resurrection of the dead knowing that the two Jewish groups would then start
fighting among themselves over this statement. But this is not a description of
Paul’s primary message. It’s a political
ploy to avoid being a martyr. To be a
martyr in good faith you have to stand up for the truth and Paul was standing in
the penalty box on this one.
Shortly later before governor Titus, Paul
does state his true mission by reviewing his vision concerning Christ on the
road to
But Paul did not go to
Now
why would a guy on a divine mission need to bribe anybody much less look for an
external validation for his spiritual work?
Paul lost touch with that still inner voice of his spiritual intuition
and conscience.
Sometime when you are amid your most
glorious moments of activity and accomplishment you have to stop, be still, and
listen from within as a check on the values and purpose underlying your
choices. The early church was not so
good at this.
A bishop in the first century proclaimed,
“Do not seek God on your own. Just
believe what I tell you,” and so was coined by that bishop the word “orthodox.” No more inner voice here. No more prophets. No more being “caught up by the spirit.”
The Christians hate Balaam and revile him
in their writing. He was the gentile
non-Jewish prophet in the Old Testament who could interact more easily with God
than Moses. Hey, no mediator here. Christians hate the idea of an individual
being able to interact directly with God without the intercession of Christ. It’s like someone opening a Burger King on
the corner and then someone else opens a McDonalds next door. Christians hate
spiritual competition—they would rather stop selling hamburgers altogether if
selling them meant they had to compete with someone across the street.
Considering the story of Balaam, there is
no one guarding the gates to God’s presence.
If Balaam can interact directly with God, so can anyone. But Balaam simply never accepted a divine
mission though he was quite qualified whereas Moses did accept and act on a
Divine mission.
This conflict exists perhaps in all
religions to varying degrees—the prophetic/intuitive/originating/direct
experience orientation and its opposite: the rule making, “it has to be done
this way,” we must follow the examples set for us—which is the hardening of
once original experience into a
traditional, vicarious, second hand, and derived authority based approach.
Let’s summarize that:
First hand experience versus
second hand experience.
Direct experience versus
vicarious experience.
Experience arising out of
personal discovery versus
faith in someone else’s
experience.
Faith versus belief.
Inner connection to God versus
outer confirmation.
Being guided by the spirit versus
conforming to the rules
of a community.
Intuitive understanding versus
doctrinal dictates.
Inner conviction versus outer authority.
The gospel stories that speak directly to each individual’s
heart versus Paul’s exposition
that speaks to the mind
(but after all, Paul most likely never
read the gospels)
This same conflict is seen between
the law and the prophets in the Old Testament.
The prophet will say your lawful and correct priestly sacrifices are
absolutely disgusting to God because your heart is not in it and your actions
betray His purposes.
Or for Christians, Christ is the
demonstration that God is near. He is
found within your own heart which is “be still and know that I am God.” This versus “If you want to join our loving
community, you must subscribe to the doctrines of our church.” But on a practical level, how can any
religion deal with much less respect such direct, original, non-derivative
experience with God?
So
here I am sitting on top of two thousand years of Catholic tradition and five
hundred years among Protestants.
Protestants have perhaps the only religion in the history of the planet
that has no spiritual practices—there is nothing that persists more than thirty
minutes that carries with it a discovery process, an inner capacity to reflect,
to intuit, to encounter, observe, sense, feel, intuit something within
yourself.
Billy Graham recommends not praying for
longer than a minute. This is the advice
of an extrovert. Neurological brain
scans indicate that extroverts like to move directly from emotion to
action. They have no innate brain
capacity to reflect on or explore their feelings. Protestant Christianity is the perfection of
a religion for extroverts.
And if Christian do something relating to
contemplation or meditation, they will not develop it and hand it down so it
can be refined and enhanced. The whole
concept of improving or upgrading one’s spirituality runs contrary to “its
free, you can’t do anything to earn grace.”
And the Catholic theologians themselves such
as Father Keating (the originator of centering prayer) will point out that over
their reign in history they stopped doing any kind of meditation or
contemplation that was similar to the competing heretics or other religions in
order to maintain and emphasize the Christian monopoly. So maybe two thousand years is not a lot of
time in terms of reviving, renewing, or rediscovering what a religion is really
about.
My disappointment and dissatisfaction with
evangelical Christianity was so great that I made a deal with God that I would
study the great religions before returning and trying to understand the
incarnation of Christ. It was pretty
obvious to me that whatever the Christian church has been doing for two
thousand years it was not producing much in the way of spiritual insight.
An evangelical friend of mine mentioned how
he liked the Monty Python comedic version of the Holy Grail. I pointed out to him the Holy Grail stories
were an attempt to renew a dead religion.
They suggested a spiritual quest involving a personalized discovery
process through engaging the spiritual universe right here amid our world—“of
taking the ordinary of things of daily life and turning them into something sacred.”
According to one story, Islam exists as a
religion because Mohammad asked some Christians what they could tell him about
God. Their response was pretty much what
you would expect Billy Graham or any evangelist to say: We don’t really know God
except through Christ. Seeking God was
Old Testament stuff. We have a different
dispensation. So Mohammad, a descendant
of Abraham, went off by himself and had a talk with Gabriel and that produced
the Koran.
Religion requires a minimal amount of
transcendence—some sort of perspective larger, bigger, and more insightful than
what is offered by the dominant culture.
Martin Luther had enough insight to realize that selling indulgences for
sin is a not good thing. When asked by
what authority he objected to the church’s actions he was in a pinch. So he said that it is my conscience replying
on the scripture that forms the basis of my ethical decisions.
The Protestant evangelist, Billy Graham,
role models himself after the Apostle Paul.
Paul’s version of “being born
again” goes something like this: “I had a vision of Christ on the road to
For Paul, Christ was a sacrifice
fulfilling the demands of the law acting like the serpent on the pole that
cured whoever looked upon it who had been bitten during the infestation of
snakes when Moses was in the desert. For
Paul, there is only an external vision and experience of Christ and not an
internal one.
Every time Billy Graham or Jerry Farwell
opens their mouths to speak I hear what they are saying and it is this: Do not
seek God. Do not contemplate, enter, or
work with the spiritual universe. You
can’t know God other than through imitating the Apostle Paul whom for practical
purposes we follow and not Christ. Because
Christ in fact didn’t give us a spiritual set of practices and so we are never
going to ask for them, experiment with them, or pursue them.
Join a church like our church and do as we
do: be cheerleaders for capitalism or else convert others so they too can be
cheerleaders for capitalism working hard and raising their families with an
occasional mistress on the side, ops, we didn’t mean to say that out loud but
you know how we Christians are, full of contradictions anyway, get used to it.
Billy Graham and Jerry Farwell too get a lot
of their support from hard core Republicans.
Good Christian radio announcers like to say that the Republican
candidates or platforms are more in line with Christian values than the
Democrats. But every form of economy or
political perspective has its karma.
Capitalism produces suffering which the
capitalists fail to recognize or take responsibility for. The corporations leave huge toxic dumps to
kill the children of the future. They
pollute the air and the earth and the sea.
They create virtual economic concentration camps in ghettoes and they
hide their murder of innocents behind sealed court documents.
Talk to two men in jail. Ask, “How long you in for?” One may reply, “I robbed a liquor store and I
am in for life because three strikes and you are out.” Ask the other, “How long you in for?” “Two and half years. As CEO, I stole the life savings of eight
thousand people by raiding their pension funds but I had no previous
convictions.” This is unchecked
capitalism.
If your nation is fighting with other
nations for survival, as was
The remedy for capitalism however requires not
an overthrowing of the capitalist class by the worker class but rather individuals
who are completely selfless, unselfish, and unbiased, without an ideological
agenda, who will stand up for the poor and the suffering.
It requires people like Ralph Nader who
obviously was extremely effective as a proponent of corporate reform. Unfortunately, he is not as skilled as a
politician since he is now promoting an ideological agenda rather than a case
by case demand for responsibility.
Capitalism like feminism is good.
Feminism, having killed romance, just requires that that we now invent a
new kind of “romance.” Capitalism
requires an “invention” of individuals who will insure corporate responsibility.
This demand for responsibility or genuine “Christian
values” preachers like Billy Graham and Jerry Farwell will never understand
because these preachers have no transcendence.
Their spiritual values arise from within their culture and are not from
any eternal, akashic, or spiritual point of view.
Billy Graham and Jerry Farewell are the
Dallas Cowboy’s sexy cheerleaders for capitalism shaking their asses to glorify
the Protestant work ethic. They are
connected no doubt to God but not to a sacred presence of God, not a
transcendent God who is more than the foundation of their ethics and morality.
Their faith, however, is strong enough to
rally vast numbers of people to their banner.
They have charisma but they do not have an inner stillness that knows
God from within. Their Christian values
are corporate values. They are like Paul
who sold his divine mission down the drain because he was so needy to have his
work validated by some external authority.
Evangelical Christians are pro life. Actually there real agenda is anti-sex for
young people. They do not want
information about how to prevent pregnancy distributed or taught. They are for abstinence.
Newt Gingrich and Tom Livingston, good
solid Republicans, both resigned as speakers of the House in their zeal to
impeach
Jimmy Swaggart is the television
evangelist who I just saw on TV last night.
He once ranted against another minister’s ethics. So the minister caught Swaggart who was not
only propositioning a prostitute.
Swaggart wanted both the prostitute and her daughter at the same time.
One
of the Baptist ministers down the block from me divorced his wife to marry his
babysitter. Another Baptist minister a
few townships over committed suicide in part because of an affair with his
church’s secretary. And members of Billy
Graham’s original crusade team were caught having a sex orgy in a hotel amid
their crusades.
Let me see if I have this right. Evangelicals want to withhold information
about preventing pregnancy from teenagers who can get through algebra but who
often haven’t a clue as to how to prevent pregnancy? Are you Evangelicals fucking out of your
minds asking for abstinence from teenagers when your own political and
spiritual leaders can not control their dicks?
The fundamentalist mind set is analogous to
what is sometimes said about the fascist mind set: it has gears missing. It runs in high performance mode and then it
goes blank and just stops for a while before kicking in again later on. The fundamentalist mind set has no self
reflective, real world capacity to distinguish between when it is doing good
and when it is doing evil.
I heard a Baptist minister a few months ago
say to the congregations, “Let us now pray to God that the governor of our
state sign the bill into law that limits abortion.” I said to my mother sitting next to me, “Why
doesn’t he pray to reduce the number of abortions rather than to further the
political agenda of a specific party?”
Like I say, the real agenda is anti
sex. Fundamentalists can not stand
others acting in a way that they do not.
Not teaching information about sex creates more abortions, not
less. Why not just say it? “We are anti sex” and call it ‘Anti Sex Pride.’” There you go.
That is more honest.
I will readily admit that an abortion is a
horrible thing. But a religious group
trying to control others’ choices is far worse.
It has been so through all of history.
But putting all the questions of agendas and political strategies to the
side, it is the desire to control in the heart rather than an understanding
that encompasses everyone’s interests that is at fault. There is nothing a matter with making tough
choices. The problem is using power
without the love that is the source of all power.
There are I suggest two kinds of “born
again” Christians. There are those who
come forward in a Billy Graham rally and get funneled into the Protestant work
ethic with a set of family values equivalent to corporate values. This is not a bad thing. With drugs and teenage pregnancy and crime we
need more of these “born again” Christians produced by Youth for Christ and so
forth to keep our nation on track. Why
not?
Go into an evangelical Christian church with
a dynamic minister or go back in time and listen to Martin Luther preach and
you will hear what I am saying—their message is “Get your life in order, take
responsibility for your actions, work hard, and God will bless you.” With all due respect, this is not Christ but
one of the divine powers within Judaism with its primary directive: be
fruitful, multiply, and have dominion over the earth. Like I say, it’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing.
(In fairness, Protestant Christianity has
the best use of the cosmic letter K--of faith and conviction—among all the
religions on earth. In Protestant Christianity
each individual through faith is directly connected to God who will bless that
individual’s work in life. This makes
for a fabulous work ethic and thus the Protestant Ethic in some individuals is
extremely powerful and incredibly inspired in that one aspect of faith and
conviction. It also is often terribly
abused as well when the power is used to manipulate and degrade others.)
But every conversion entails a being
“caught up in the spirit,” a turning around of one’s perspective on life, an
attempt at a higher source of inspiration and divine guidance. In a high grade conversion, regardless of
whether or not the individual’s conversion results in joining the Republican Party,
the individual is “overshadowed” or connects in some way (is born of the
spirit) to the light of God. This light
or spiritual consciousness or attunement I have seen in full force only in three
individual’s heart hearts.
However, this light makes these individuals
very vulnerable because they now feel and think in terms of genuine
compassion—a sea of compassion—that is alive and flowing within them. But they are surrounded by other religious
individuals who are motivated by fear of hell, fear of failure, fear of debt,
fear of not being socially accepted, fear of violating social taboos, fear of
sensuality, etc. So this light is often
put out. Little in Protestant
Christianity allows for its expression.
Don’t try to reconcile the Protestant
Ethic with love and compassion, empathy and caring or social responsibility:
these nurturing qualities have no correlation with faith and conviction since
these hard working Protestants often repress their feelings in order to
maintain their focus on productivity.
And indeed it is extremely difficult to work very hard and then have any
kind of sympathy for the suffering of others.
I can’t emphasize this motivational disparity too much. There is just that gut reaction in the
Protestant Ethic that others should be working extremely hard just like me if
they want to reap the benefits of having dominion over the earth.
So continuing my analogy, Billy Graham or an
evangelical minister might want to give an invitation at the end of his sermon
for those who wish to come forward and be born again. It might go like this:
“For those who wish the conversion of the
Apostle Paul and his church that is a gentile version of Judaism without the
law--I want you to come forward and stand to my right. This “born again” will produce in you a
willingness to work hard, be moral, become a member of our loving church
communities [by the way, as you sign our registration card you can check the
little box if you want to receive free information from the Republican party]
and to put aside your sinful ways and make something valuable of your
life.”
“And for those of you who wish to convert not
to the gentile version of Judaism but to having the light and compassion of Christ
overflowing from your heart stand here on my left. This is the more difficult path because you
will not be welcome into any of our churches.
Instead, I suggest those of you who come forward in this group create
your own church. You will feel vulnerable
and be confused by your direct awareness that all men and women on earth, not just
our elitist Christian communities, are now your brothers and sisters.
“You will not want to convert others and
make money like us who are only the slaves and servants of God and running a
good race to a goal line which we all will cross when Christ returns. No, you are the lovers of God seeking first
to love Him and unite with Him even as Christ loved God with all your heart,
soul, mind, and strength, seeking first this experience, this inspiration, and
this realization and seeking to see and find it as it is hidden within the
heart of every human being.
“You will suffer not a little death of a
little bit of selfishness in being born of spirit. No, you will suffer the big, complete death,
a genuine spiritual death in which you become nothing and completely empty of
yourself so that God may appear within you.
Do this and you will have no need for a second coming of Christ because
you will indeed already have found and entered the kingdom of God within your
hearts.”
But Billy Graham and Jerry Farwell and
Jimmy Swaggart will never offer this invitation—for this Christ of inner life
and transformation is their enemy.
Love is an inner union, heart to
heart. You get it in mother Teresa who
seeks Christ in disguise in every person.
Your Protestants are not married to Christ or God as lovers. They are worshipers of the Apostle Paul. They seek to preach and to convert but not to
love.
Well, what about Corinthians Chapter 13? some
preachers will proclaim. This is the
greatest treatise on love in the Western world, they will say. That’s absolute crap. This treatise is written by a man who clearly
was never in love with a woman. It
speaks nothing of inspiration, of an inner connection, of a willingness to seek
the beloved’s heart, of the desire to join, to celebrate oneness.
What the Apostle Paul has written is a
prenuptial agreement designed by a lawyer to spell out the nuts and bolts of
what is expected and required in the legal ensuing marriage as a contractual
obligation between to people.
Now it is nice to be reminded of the basic
responsibilities of love but only a fool would attempt the sacrifices a
relationship requires without some sort of inner connection to the other
person. You simply can’t maintain the
responsibility without the deep, inner sharing of lives and this Paul knows
nothing about that, at least, he doesn’t even hint of it here.
The only treatise on love in the entire
Bible is, from the point of view of Christianity, the story of Christ’s life, a
living and not a written word. The story
speaks to the heart and imagination and not to the rational mind. In the gospels we see humility and inner
stillness in service to a divine mission, a mission that exists for the benefit
of all humanity.
The first task of any religion is to
produce in its practitioners a sense of wonder, awe, and mystery. One of Billy Graham’s counselors told me that
she quit Christianity (becoming a Christian refugee) turning to druidism
because as she rode her bicycle back from the crusade stadium to her home she
discovered she could not reconcile the beauty of nature with this religion.
The energies of nature and beneath nature
are the training ground for entering the realms of spirit. Peter walked upon the sea according to the
New Testament as a result of his own request to walk as Christ was walking upon
the water. But Peter’s faith failed him
and that lack of faith threw the entire history of Christianity into an
antagonism with nature. Give Peter
credit—he was bold but also acknowledge his weakness--he could not sustain his
courage because in the depths of his heart he was a spiritual wimp.
Unlike Peter, I meditate on the sea, the
sky, the stars, the moon, the planets, and the spirits within them. I don’t walk on water but I appreciate beauty
when I see it and my sense of wonder has lead me directly into contact with the
beings created by God who underlie the physical universe.
I will admit, though, that we didn’t know
much about nature much less the galaxies or the cosmos until this century. We didn’t know about the biosphere, the ozone
layer, or nuclear winter until recently.
And the man who has discovered the must exploding stars in the universe? An amateur astronomer, a Baptist minister in
fact, from
He has the images of several thousand
galaxies in his memory so that when he looks out at night from the telescope in
his backyard he notices immediately if there is a new bright star
appearing. Good for him. That man has got to have a sense of
wonder. The most beautiful thing I have
ever seen, more beautiful than Monica Bellucci or Michelle Pfeiffer, is M100, a
spiral galaxy. You can almost see the
billions of stars that circle its center.
The generation before me grew up with the
wonder of horses having been replaced by cars and railroads and having
witnessed the flight of birds surpassed by the flight of airplanes. Some of them could disassemble and reassemble
a car engine blindfolded. They fell in
love with the freedom and the power these things granted them.
In sixth grade, I knew the names and
profiles of all the missiles in the
I live among a people who create
temperatures hotter than the sun. Who
create and track subatomic particles that have not existed for billions of
years. Who create new life forms that have
never existed in nature. Who rewrite
DNA. Who travel to other planets. Who seek knowledge and mastery over nature in
every aspect. And then they tell me they
are unworthy and unable to enter the spiritual worlds and learn to create as
God creates.
It seems to me that if we have
individuals able to accumulate fortunes of tens of billions of dollars, who are
working to develop practical fusion reactors, to cure cancer, to produce cheap,
economical space travel for tourists and so forth then there might be a few
also willing to weigh the depth, breath, and height of the spiritual universe
and check in with God on behalf of human destiny. I just don’t seem to run into them.
The thing that set me off was that when I
was in second grade in elementary school we were hiding under our desks at
school practicing a response to a nuclear attack—which was well understood:
whole cities swallowed up in fire. And
then we would go to our Christian churches and be told how God, (not Oppenheimer,
Einstein, or General Leslie Groves, Roosevelt or Truman or some president or
premier) was going to put his enemies in a lake of fire for eternity.
And then none of these churches, not one,
prayed to God to assist mankind in preventing nuclear war. Now what kind of transcendence or community
of absolute wimps, wimps like unto the Apostle Paul or the Apostle Peter, would
fail to direct God’s attention to the most pressing issue confronting the human
species? That was cowardice and
dereliction of duty in the face of the enemy.
That was insane complacency—“its God’s responsibility, not ours.”
That is when I began to notice, right there
in second grade, that the religious establishment had no transcendence, no ties
to the sacred, no spiritual power, and its faith--its direct ties to God--was
being used only to make money and not to transform the world. Sure, Senator Ted Kennedy could describe
nuclear war as “unthinkable.” But I
could not. I dreamed about it occurring
every single week during my youth.
Of course, these followers of Peter and Paul
consider human beings to be complete wimps.
We can not save ourselves. Only
God can save us. It would seem to me if
we design nuclear weapons, build them, and deploy them then we are completely
responsible for them.
People write me and ask about what
motivates me to study magic. They
sometimes think in terms of individuals like
And there are time when injustice rises to
the level where there are no other solutions other than turning to magic, that
is, to direct contact with the Creator--not the creator of the Christian church
(who sent Christ to die for the sins of mankind), not the creator of Judaism
(who established a nation that would “strive with God for a blessing” as did
Jacob), but the Creator of two hundred billion galaxies, whose wonder is
exhibited every morning at dawn, in every wave breaking on the shore of every
sea, in every tree, every touch of the wind, the light of every star and
moon—His glory is proclaimed, his creativity is sustained, his wonder is
without end—who can fail to see it, to feel it, to taste it?
I was having a chat one day with the first
of seventy-eight spirits of the sphere of Mercury whose name is Vehuiah. These are the angels who assisted Moses. They stand on the edge of the Mystery of
God’s presence and, among other things, praise and glorify His name. (I might add that when these beings praise
and glorify the name of God this is real magic and real ritual and not just
singing a few inspired hymns amid the congregation.)
If you have any problem and are in need of a
miracle or two, plagues, storms raised or abated, water from rocks, the design
of an ark that can slay enemies with streams of fire, the walls of a city
knocked down, etc. these are the guys who will get the job done.
Vehuiah asked me with that
profound “Jewish” awareness of the formlessness of God,
What is like unto God?
What breath can express His
presence?
Whose voice can sing His
songs?
What created thing reflects
His Essence?
What image captures His form?
What priest or sage can
measure His mystery?
What prophet or mage can
comprehend His plans?
Is there an artist anywhere
in the universe,
A sculpture whose hands are
so skilled
He can create beauty like
unto the beauty
God creates on a billion
billion worlds?
Can the creature who is
mortal or any created being
Ever understand the Creator
who remains unseen?
Now I am writer and
experiences like this I give to the characters in my stories. That’s where they belong—not here in the
twentieth century but in some mythological landscape where it is easier to
imagine them occurring than it is in our world of Christian and Western history. And so my character, He’ad’ra, in my story
and screenplay, The Fall of Atlantis,
replies to these questions put to him not by Vehuiah but in this story by God.
He’ad’ra, knowing that God reveals Himself
not through one but through ten different spheres of emanation, shifts the
discussion from the sphere of Hod (of intellection, science and magic) to the
sphere of Tipareth (of oneness, all-embracing love, of service and mission):
These are not my questions. I do not wish to speak after the
way
of metaphor or by using analogy. I do not desire
philosophy or to experience
vicariously. The encounter I
require is face to face. It begins with love, proceeds towards
union, and then results in a sacred mission.
And God asks (with wild passion), And how
does one unite with God?
And He’ad’ra replies, As in any act of
love, the union is heart
to heart and the result is feeling and
being fully alive.
But such inner unions are
rather expensive and dangerous as He’ad’ra and his soon to be destroyed civilization
of Atlantis found out.
There are a lot of things I
don’t get about Judaism and Christianity.
A dumb, inferior gentile like me can not understand a high priest going
into a temple once a year to enter God’s presence and attain forgiveness for
the sins of the entire people of the nation.
I know a little bit about ritual. Rituals and ritual magic, for that matter,
generate a spiritual charge of energy that is specific and limited. Its purposes too are specific and
limited. An elaborate ritualized Taoist
salute generates a charge that places energy into a collective spiritual
account of a specific monastery. You can
draw freely on the group energy but you don’t want to waste it since the
account can be overdrawn.
Or, a thought form can be created by a
magical group to find a parking space or get through LA traffic. Why not?
You want to make money, get love, develop clairvoyance—you can do a
ritual and repeat it until you get what you want. It is nice sometimes to focus on what you
want specifically with a profound conviction and powerful mental clarity. It helps make things happen. A thought form for securing the forgiveness
of a specific people is still a ritual with specific limitations.
Five generations of Christians in my line of
fathers each had a profound faith in God.
They felt directly connected to God and they felt He would guide and
bless their lives. So now when I go into
a Protestant church I can sense sitting behind me not a Christian angel but one
of those Mosaic angels of the sphere of Mercury, one not unlike Vehuiah.
The faith of my fathers was not in
Christ. Their churches were again as
Paul understood the early church to be—a new form of Jewish synagogues but
without the law. I have never observed
psychically the energy of Christ or his spirit in the sixty or so Protestant
churches I have been in. They talk about
Christ. They invoke his name. But they
do not share his heart.
You want Christ energy, you have to go
outside the Christian building to some Christian organization perhaps like
maybe the salvation army or a group working with young people or feeding the
poor—people working directly as the good Samaritan helping another in
need. There you might find Christ, but
not inside Paul’s Protestant churches.
They are still under the guidance and inspiration of the angels of the
sphere of Hod/Mercury.
So here I am, when I enter a Christian
church, an angel is quietly sitting in the pew behind me. With perfect persistence he whispers in my
ear, “Is there a miracle you would like to accomplish? Perhaps a pillar of fire by night or a sea
divided?” The faith of five generations
of fathers produced that ease of spiritual contact: that’s ritual—five
generations of men developing a thought form and spiritual evocation--the kind occultists
like
Working for generations day after day and
night after night and you produce in the here and now a spiritual consciousness
and power that existed thousand of years before. This angel is specific and has a name and is
very Jewish at least in its presentation. He haunts the children and grandchildren of
this family bloodline waiting patiently to see if someone has a need for his
specific skills and abilities.
By contrast, a universal thought form such
as a cosmic letter in the Quabbalah (the occult version of the Spoken Word of
God) is a way of working directly with universal and cosmic energies. It is not specific or limited though it can
be so shaped if a group wished to do so.
In this case, the group could do so by altering the letter in some way,
as in e.g. using the Jewish, Greek, Hindu, Tibetan, or Chinese alphabets with
their traditional religious images and meanings. .
You practice the first letter of this
magical language in a Jewish Quabbalah setting and you get a collective Jewish
awareness, energy, and consciousness as an output. You practice the cosmic letter “A” imagining
your consciousness is like the sky containing all things within it with perfect
clarity, enlightenment, cosmic wisdom, so that the mind is experienced as
clear, open, and luminous then you get a more universal and cosmic output.
This is not a realization or spiritual
virtue dependent on any specific religion.
It relates to the nature of the spiritual universe predating the
origination of life on earth. It is not
ritual. It is direct, intuitive
awareness.
To be honest, I can not understand how God
so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to die a hideous death on
a cross to placate a righteous God.
What kind of God is this who demands human sacrifice? Other than as a symbol with the implication
that you have to give your all, a hundred per cent, to fulfill your God given
mission in life, other than saying, “Except a seed of grain fall to the earth
and die, it can not being forth new life;”
Other than saying, “The spirit of God, a formless and timeless
awareness, must be born directly within you, without this you can not enter—be
aware of, sense, intuitive, or even
faintly grasp—the kingdom of God.”
Perhaps
God’s reply to my version of Christ’s request to God to remain on earth as a
teacher could have been: “They will get a teacher and a shepherd for a
spiritual path when they ask, seek, or discover one and not before. I need a little initiative here on humanities
part before I give away power like the kind I gave to Jacob. He wrestled with me. That’s what I expect and nothing less.”
Maybe someday some Jewish Rabbi will explain
to me this thing about sacrifice, but I just don’t get it. And maybe someday a Christian will explain to
me why Christ’s sacrifice, of giving up his life, is a greater sacrifice than
what God asked of Abraham—to sacrifice his own son—sacrificing your son is a
greater spiritual challenge than sacrificing yourself. That is, Christ sacrificed himself in
obedience to God but Abraham was willing to go further and sacrifice his own
son. God doesn’t get credit for
sacrificing his son because he isn’t on the scene, that is, he is not here in
human form whereas Abraham was.
Maybe I have died too many times already
both psychologically and spiritually, an inner death, a death of spiritual
initiation, so that I just don’t get this outer death thing, this desire to be
a martyr a la the Apostle Paul thing, this imitations of Christ thing. I just don’t get it in the same way that Christians
will never get or understand Christ’s words when he says, “Why hast thou
forsaken me?” Who but Christ would know
if he was forsaken by God—that means, no Holy Spirit, no inner union, no
oneness, no I AM. Forsaken is
forsaken. Its not a mistake or a neat
and tidy ritual thing.
This is not a “cloud passing over Christ”
as some ministers like to say because a righteous God can not look upon
sin. Shit, I can look upon sin and the
worst evil. What’s God’s problem
here?
No, this was an infinite abyss of
separation occurring and if the good preachers want to imitate Christ maybe
they should also probe this experience: of being abandoned by God amid your
spiritual mission and life’s journey.
Let them taste that before they try to
speak of the atonement of Christ or before they display their crosses on their
places of worship. The spiritual death
is greater than the physical death as infinity is greater than the number
one. If a Christians want to follow
Christ, comprehend the selflessness—the voidness of self—that goes with that
kind of death: this Peter, Paul, and John too never even came close to
understanding.
As I mentioned, the spirits of the solar
sphere know and embody: to reflect God
in yourself, to be united with God from within, you have to be perfectly empty,
more pure and clear than a mirror, and yet utterly receptive and open. “Why hast thou forsaken me?” Here is a man on
the verge of death who is totally abandoned by God. There is nothing left. It is all gone. There is no longer any attachment. A true Buddhist
master would understand this emptiness for it is the perfection of
Buddhism.
What
the Gnostics didn’t grasp was the abandonment, the emptiness, the becoming
nothing that is the heart and the very beginning of genuine initiation. If Christ was overshadowed according to the
Gnostics by a great solar spirit then perhaps the spirit withdrew in order to
allow Christ to become as they are: so empty that he could qualify and be like
unto them: a being united and one with God.
Maybe John was after this experience when he
says in his Revelations that the
angels searched the heavens and the earth for the space of a half hour for one
who was worthy to open the seven seals.
When you are this empty, nothing can be hidden from you—because you are
already one with everything that exists.
Again, to be united with God from within
you have to be still, you have to be empty, and you have to be nothing so that
you become a place where the Divine presence can manifest without distortion. Peter was afraid of finding this kind of spiritual
power within him as was Paul who was so greedy to have his work in life
validated and approved by external authorities. They did not want the spiritual power because
the price for it was too great for them to pay. Connection to God is always unique, original,
and without precedence. It is not a
function of tradition: it creates tradition.
But a dumb, inferior gentile like me can
understand “They shall beat their swords into plow shears….they shall not learn
war anymore” in combination with “blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall
be called the children of God.” Peacemakers
make peace—they don’t go around speaking platitudes like “Christ is the answer”
when what is required is understanding others’ hearts from the core of their
being.
This I strive to understand. This method is in the Hindu epic, the Mahabarata, where
To put an end to war takes a strong heart,
a strong akashic awareness, a strong will, and the ability to unite love, wisdom,
justice, and power as one within your consciousness. This challenge Christians will never
comprehend. They are like Peter and
Paul: absolute cowards when it comes to being still and knowing God from
within—the price is too great
The Jews suffered the holocaust, a
holocaust that could have been prevented if they had produced one single
well-trained magician among their ranks.
But they did not. And yet the
holocaust remains as itself a true and genuine prophecy of what was about to
befall all of humanity, the entire world--in a post nuclear holocaust. The holocaust was a warning to us all just as
Isaiah walked naked for three years in prophecy not to Israel but to what would
befall the princes of Egypt and as Jonah’s body was scared and marked in the
belly of a great fish in order to prophecy effectively to an arrogant and pagan
Assyria.
Again, God showed Abraham a “dark vision” of
the future of his heirs in
Like the angel Gabriel, you encompass all
of space and time in your heart and you intervene when necessary to elevate
suffering. This is working with
akasha. This is turning on the tap of
water that flows from God’s presence. This
is eating of the fruits of the tree that is for the healing of the
nations.
The prophets were for all nations, all
people, and for all time—establish justice upon the earth and peace among the
nations. That was their message. This is something the popes, evangelists, the
Christians, and I think also the Jews simply do not comprehend. This is not a bleeding heart liberal’s good
intentions. Here is a universal message
and a cosmic vision charged with the power to accomplish it right in front of the
world.
The words, “They shall be their swords
into plow shears….” Those words are on
the wall across the street from the United Nation’s building. Where are those who wrestle with God to
accomplish them?
Well, this dumb, inferior gentile—It has
shaped my life and made me who I am (which I will admit was not always for the
better—there is a cost that goes with confronting your karma in full force so
you can try to lay hold of a vision.
Visions don’t come cheap and buying into them, trying to live them is
very expensive emotionally, spiritually, morally, in every way.)
Any religion has the task of taking selfish people and
attempting to make them unselfish. To do
this, it often must make the congregation feel special, elite in fact, so that
on occasion they feel so good that they can do something for others that does
not directly benefit themselves.
In this sense, in a practical sense,
religion is two more things: it is a party and it is family. It is a party because you get these diverse
individuals who would never otherwise be talking to each other getting together
to celebrate the ceremonies of their faith that draw them close to what they
consider to be sacred.
This is party. It is getting together and acknowledging the
presence of something more powerful than themselves which nonetheless they feel
connected to through their rites and practices.
When it is done well, you come out feeling you have the energy and the
motivation to get through the next week.
And it is a family: you make friends and
associate closely with other individuals with whom you hopefully or supposedly
have an inner bond of faith or of some primary religious experience, again,
something that makes you feel special and no doubt above other people who do
not share this experience.
Three per cent of the population of the
I imagine
that if a Jew were to go out into the desert and spend six hours every week in
stillness and contemplation demanding of God not one archangel as Mohammad got
but one for each sephiroth. What if this
Jew said to God, I am going to do this every week for the rest of my life. When I die, the burden will be on you God to
account for why You did not respond to my request.
I tell you God would take notice and be
impressed. (And one way or the other He
would probably respond, “No one is guarding the gates to My Presence. I am here.
I have always been here. Anyone
can find Me if he or she looks….and I tell you, I have been waiting a long time
for My children to return to Me and seek again My blessing upon their lives—‘to
establish the work of their hands.’”)
I did something like this but I am only a
dumb, inferior gentile. What did I
get? I sat so still on a rock out there
in the
The wind would stir from one direction,
fade, and return again from another direction.
The moisture in the air would rise and then fall and then rise again
with a temperature change. The light
would grow bright and then dark. Ray
Elkins once said that God made deserts so big and so vast so that human beings
could not love them or hate them but instead would have a place to go in order
to seek His presence.
What did I get? Besides visions of the way and means to work
for avoiding a nuclear war, one day, with the help of a few cups of coffee and
a Tylenol, for the space of three hours I felt I was aware of everything in the
universe, including each and every particle of dust among all two hundred
billion galaxies. It was God’s way of
saying to me, “This is what I can do. I
expect the same from you. If you seek my
Heart, to feel as I feel, to see as I see, and to create as I create, I will
pour out my blessing upon your life and your work.”
This vision according to Bardon is part of
Quabbalah, the cosmic letter “E” on the akashic level. Its standard Quabbalah,
but on a cosmic, not a Jewish racial level.
You can find it in part in the aura as well of some of the earthzone and
planetary spirits Bardon describes. A
Jew has a genetic advantage over an inferior, dumb gentile like me when it
comes to petitioning God for a vision that is real time, real world, and
results oriented.
(For another version of this essay in story
form, see my Moses and Aaron and Jacob poems, my The Fall of Atlantis
screenplay [forthcoming along with Three Wise Men story] St. Columba story, and
Balaam story for exploration of direct experience and its advantages and
disadvantages relating to Judaism and Christianity. See also my essays on The Presence of God
that explores God’s manifestation in each of the ten sephiroth.)
I can easily imagine my good
Christian friends raising their brows, giving me that “questioning my sincerity
look” as if I have fallen from grace by introducing psychic and magical
perspectives into a theological discussion.
But come off it.
Right now as I am writing
If
This problem of nuclear proliferation has
been on the table for the last thirty years.
It is not going to go away.
Ignore it and it will require no prophet to tell you that at least four
million people will be vaporized by some terrorist in the near future. And then every nation on earth will have an
excuse to institute a virtual police state.
This problem has no solution through normal
diplomatic channels. The UN lacks
effective executive authority and who would ever want to give it to them? You have to invent a solution. Perhaps a
group of unselfish and profoundly inspired and equally skilled individuals that
is willing to say, “During my watch, no nuclear wars.”
If an Arab state attacks
My only point is that a science of a nuclear
technology requires a spiritual wisdom of the same degree of sophistication. It is only a wimp like Peter and Paul who
would blindly quote like Billy Graham that “Christ is the answer” without
lifting a finger to prevent a “dark vision” from occurring.
“Blessed are the peacemakers.” I would like to see some people make peace on
this planet rather than asking after the fact, “How could God let this happen?”
Its time for a few men and women of good will to put aside the idiotic
narrow—mindedness of their religions and demonstrate that they are the children
of God.
Summary
Each generation has to renew
its religious experiences and validate them through some sort of real and challenging
discovery process. Lose this and you may
spread your faith and solidify your religion but you kill your connection to
God and turn the sacred into a sales pitch for the contemporary cultural values
which your leaders naturally want to embrace such as slavery, capitalism,
racism, anti abortion, etc.
Though always subject to charlatans and con
men—you can absolutely count on that-- allow for a spiritual discovery
process. If you can’t upgrade your
religion, you end up like the Arabs who are trying to return to their golden
age back in the twelfth century or like the Catholic Church which keep wanting
to return to the theocratic power it held in the third century
Allow for some sort of spiritual practices
to develop and flourish. The spiritual
universe is as vast and mysterious of the physical universe which
astrophysicists will readily admit they still don’t know what composes
ninety-five per cent of the matter in the universe—it’s still missing.
All spiritual practice requires a basis:
being practical, down to earth, solid, grounded, and able to see the world
clearly as it is right now. If you don’t
have that, you are not going anywhere in your spiritual voyages that drugs
won’t take you faster.
Remain experience oriented so that the
community understand and celebrates its inner bond rather than its external
beliefs as the primary basis for its community.
Otherwise, every church becomes a separatist and elitist experience.
Every practitioner should be a prophet but
they should test their dreams and visions in the acid of common sense, every
day experience, history, intelligence, and a thorough understanding of the
common cons and self-deceptions, inflation and deflation of ego, elitism,
arrogance, rigidities, and narrow-mindedness that befall all spiritual
practitioners. That is, keep a spiritual journal and record of your dreams,
hopes, ideals, and your personal journey toward them. And share this at some point.
Christianity and Judaism are inextricably
entwined. A good Christian theologian might liken the relationship to brothers
like Esau and Jacob whereby Jacob stole Esau’s birthright and blessing. Or worse, as my grandmother would say, never
take a pregnant woman to a Catholic hospital. They will sacrifice the mother
for the child. Christian theologians
might feel that Judaism existed only to give birth to Christianity and it died
spiritually with that birth.
(From a technical magical point of view,
both Judaism and Christianity as religions are almost bankrupt and totally
unaware of the spheres of Yesod and Netzach—that is, of an inner peace that
passes all understanding, an inner oneness with the universe of Yesod; and a
artistic, enchanting, ecstatic and passionate love that fully engages the
attraction that exists between opposites that is Netzach.)
I think of Judaism like the woman in the
movie Titanic. Forget about Christianity—the Christians are
content with the insurance policy (which nonetheless is of considerable value)
and not the real thing (that is, they do not seek God). But this woman has this incredibly valuable
jewel (unique among the nations) but she hides it reserving its beauty only for
her self in privacy.
But the story is not finished--in the end,
does she throw it into the ocean or does she return her gift to the world so
that it can be shared and celebrated by everyone else as well? Can she put aside her shallow, selfish,
fundamentalist narrow—mindedness (that is, can she let go of her self-pity, her
vulnerability, and the memory of the love she once had) to give to the world
what