There have been a number of human beings in the history of the world to have, through meditation, prayer, or other avenues, come to a realization of identity or union with God or the absolute. Only in Christianity has this realization been made out to be the sole possession of a particular human individual. In the following excerpt, Ken Wilber analyzes this development and describes it as a loss for all Christians.
What are your thoughts?
"Every structure of consciousness is suspicious of all higher structures, structures lying within and beyond it, structures that are in fact its own inherent potential, but structures that require a frightening death and rebirth to unfold in each case. And societies, it seems, can be arranged along a continuum of tolerance for those structures that exist higher than the structure of its own principles of social organization and cohesion. The very success, and the constant threats, to the mythic-military Christian empire put tolerance -- never a strong point in mythic structures -- virtually out of the question. Any outspoken person who evidenced a structure of consciousness higher than the mythic-rational was, correctly enough, viewed as a political threat and condemned, in effect, for treason.
The condemnation was often pandemic: the structures of Reason (and science) were condemned because they demanded evidence (reason was therefore allowed only in service of Dogma). The psychic level of nature-nation mysticism was condemned because it brought God "too much into" this world, it "dragged God down" from His celestial throne and the Heavenly City above. Subtle-level mysticism was condemned, or at best barely tolerated, because it brought the soul up too close to God. And the Church became absolutely apoplectic if anybody expressed a causal-level intuition of supreme identity with Godhead -- the Inquisition would burn Giordano Bruno at the stake and condemn the theses of Meister Eckhart on such grounds.
But that was an old story for causal-level Realizers at the hands of mythic believers, starting with Jesus of Nazareth, whose own causal-level realization ("I and the Father are One") would not be treated kindly. "Why do you stone me?" Jesus asks. "Is it for good works?" The pious reply: "No, it is not for good works; it is because you, being a man, make yourself out God." His reply that we are all sons (and daughters) of God was lost on the crowd, and that realization led him, as it would al-Hallaj and Bruno and Origen and a long line of subsequent Realizers, to a grisly death for both political and religious reasons -- it was simultaneously a threat to the state and to the old religion.
Church dogma handled the case of the extraordinary Realizer from Nazareth in a very ingenious way, using all the powers of rationality to prop up the myth. It was true, they granted, that Jesus was one with God (or, as they would later put it, God is one substance with Three Persons -- Tertullian's trinitas -- and the Person of Jesus has two Natures: Divine and Human.) But let the causal-level Ascension stop there. No other person shall be allowed this Realization, even though, as everybody plainly knew at the time, Jesus never made a single remark suggesting that he alone had or could have this Realization, and he explicitly forbade his followers to use the term "Messiah" in reference to him.
But, as many commentators have pointed out, if the Nazarene had in fact realized a Godhead that belongs to all, equally and fully, then there was no way he could be made the sole property of an exclusive mythology. Put bluntly, there was no way to market him. So Jesus was made, not the suffering servant of all humankind, which is all he ever claimed, but the Sole Son of Jehovah, literally. In other words, he was tucked downward and seamlessly into the prevailing mythology, and seen as yet another intervention in history to save a new group of chosen peoples: those who embraced the Church, the one true way and only salvation for all souls (which meant: the only way for imperial-political cohesion of the mythic empire.)
The realization of the Nazarene was thus placed on a pedestal and made an utterly unique property of the Church (and not directly a property of the Soul). It should be remembered that at this stage in development, the moral and political spheres (church and state) had not yet been fully differentiated (which is true for all mythological structures -- the head of state gains legitimacy, we saw, by claiming mythogenic status, by claiming to be specially connected to, descended from, or one with the gods/goddesses: Cleopatra is Isis). As Tillich explains, "This meant that the person who breaks the canonic law of doctrines is not only a heretic, one who disagrees with the fundamental doctrines of the church, but he is also a criminal against the state. Since the heretic undermines not only the church but also the state, he must be not only excommunicated but also delivered into the hands of civil authorities to be punished as a criminal."
The Church would produce many great philosophers (reason), and manygreat psychic and subtle mystics, but no matter how much these realizers tried to downplay the myths, no matter how much they allegorized them or as-iffed them or interpreted them away, there was always the one fundamental dogma that hung like a weight around their attempts to transcend, that crashed down on their shoulders and pinned them to the ground and never budged an inch: the utterly unique and nonreproducible realization of Jesus.
The Ascension itself was immediately mythologized, following the very old mythic motif of the three-day-dead-and-resurrected lunar consort of the Earth goddess (in the pagan rituals, as well as in the Christianized version, one would "eat the flesh" and "drink the blood" of the consort, thus to participate in its resurrected powers). Individual Christians who shared the proper mythic belief (or faith) would therefore also be resurrected, after death, on Judgment Day, in another world, where their bodies would be reassembled. ("Um, excuse me, isn't that my fourth metacarpal you've got there?") to sit forever with Jehovah, His Son, and Company. There was no way for individuals to find enlightenment, or ascension in this life, on this earth. Any and all who claimed otherwise were both heretics and criminals.
Again, I have no quarrel with that phase-specific mythic-rational structure and the interpretation that it (necessarily) gave to the Realization of the Adept from Nazareth. It was a crucial component of social integration and cultural meaning at that point in development, and it apparently served its purposes quite well. The problem, rather, was the degree to which and the fury with which this Realization was so thoroughly reduced to mythic levels. Rarely has a causal-level realization been translated so dramatically downward. Rarely has such a powerful realization been allowed to produce so few same-level realizations in its followers.
Not Buddha, not Shankara, not Lao Tzu; not Valentinus, not Numenius, not Apollonius; not Dogen, not Fa-Tsang, not Chih-i; not Garab Dorje, not Tsongkapa, not Padmasambhava -- none would be so thoroughly reduced. It is simply astonishing. Myths would, of course, grow up around all of these realizers, precisely for those who relate to reality in that degree; but their final teaching, causal/nondual, was available to all who embraced the practice, engaged the injunctions, went beyond myth and reason and psychic and subtle, and discovered the Empty Ground in their own case. And to any student who awakened to discover that he or she was actually One with the infinite Ground, in formless identity, the reply came back, in all cases: 'Congratulations! You finally discovered who you are!'
The reply that came back from the Church was: you shall now be toast."
~ Ken Wilber, SES
Best wishes,
Balder
What are your thoughts?
"Every structure of consciousness is suspicious of all higher structures, structures lying within and beyond it, structures that are in fact its own inherent potential, but structures that require a frightening death and rebirth to unfold in each case. And societies, it seems, can be arranged along a continuum of tolerance for those structures that exist higher than the structure of its own principles of social organization and cohesion. The very success, and the constant threats, to the mythic-military Christian empire put tolerance -- never a strong point in mythic structures -- virtually out of the question. Any outspoken person who evidenced a structure of consciousness higher than the mythic-rational was, correctly enough, viewed as a political threat and condemned, in effect, for treason.
The condemnation was often pandemic: the structures of Reason (and science) were condemned because they demanded evidence (reason was therefore allowed only in service of Dogma). The psychic level of nature-nation mysticism was condemned because it brought God "too much into" this world, it "dragged God down" from His celestial throne and the Heavenly City above. Subtle-level mysticism was condemned, or at best barely tolerated, because it brought the soul up too close to God. And the Church became absolutely apoplectic if anybody expressed a causal-level intuition of supreme identity with Godhead -- the Inquisition would burn Giordano Bruno at the stake and condemn the theses of Meister Eckhart on such grounds.
But that was an old story for causal-level Realizers at the hands of mythic believers, starting with Jesus of Nazareth, whose own causal-level realization ("I and the Father are One") would not be treated kindly. "Why do you stone me?" Jesus asks. "Is it for good works?" The pious reply: "No, it is not for good works; it is because you, being a man, make yourself out God." His reply that we are all sons (and daughters) of God was lost on the crowd, and that realization led him, as it would al-Hallaj and Bruno and Origen and a long line of subsequent Realizers, to a grisly death for both political and religious reasons -- it was simultaneously a threat to the state and to the old religion.
Church dogma handled the case of the extraordinary Realizer from Nazareth in a very ingenious way, using all the powers of rationality to prop up the myth. It was true, they granted, that Jesus was one with God (or, as they would later put it, God is one substance with Three Persons -- Tertullian's trinitas -- and the Person of Jesus has two Natures: Divine and Human.) But let the causal-level Ascension stop there. No other person shall be allowed this Realization, even though, as everybody plainly knew at the time, Jesus never made a single remark suggesting that he alone had or could have this Realization, and he explicitly forbade his followers to use the term "Messiah" in reference to him.
But, as many commentators have pointed out, if the Nazarene had in fact realized a Godhead that belongs to all, equally and fully, then there was no way he could be made the sole property of an exclusive mythology. Put bluntly, there was no way to market him. So Jesus was made, not the suffering servant of all humankind, which is all he ever claimed, but the Sole Son of Jehovah, literally. In other words, he was tucked downward and seamlessly into the prevailing mythology, and seen as yet another intervention in history to save a new group of chosen peoples: those who embraced the Church, the one true way and only salvation for all souls (which meant: the only way for imperial-political cohesion of the mythic empire.)
The realization of the Nazarene was thus placed on a pedestal and made an utterly unique property of the Church (and not directly a property of the Soul). It should be remembered that at this stage in development, the moral and political spheres (church and state) had not yet been fully differentiated (which is true for all mythological structures -- the head of state gains legitimacy, we saw, by claiming mythogenic status, by claiming to be specially connected to, descended from, or one with the gods/goddesses: Cleopatra is Isis). As Tillich explains, "This meant that the person who breaks the canonic law of doctrines is not only a heretic, one who disagrees with the fundamental doctrines of the church, but he is also a criminal against the state. Since the heretic undermines not only the church but also the state, he must be not only excommunicated but also delivered into the hands of civil authorities to be punished as a criminal."
The Church would produce many great philosophers (reason), and manygreat psychic and subtle mystics, but no matter how much these realizers tried to downplay the myths, no matter how much they allegorized them or as-iffed them or interpreted them away, there was always the one fundamental dogma that hung like a weight around their attempts to transcend, that crashed down on their shoulders and pinned them to the ground and never budged an inch: the utterly unique and nonreproducible realization of Jesus.
The Ascension itself was immediately mythologized, following the very old mythic motif of the three-day-dead-and-resurrected lunar consort of the Earth goddess (in the pagan rituals, as well as in the Christianized version, one would "eat the flesh" and "drink the blood" of the consort, thus to participate in its resurrected powers). Individual Christians who shared the proper mythic belief (or faith) would therefore also be resurrected, after death, on Judgment Day, in another world, where their bodies would be reassembled. ("Um, excuse me, isn't that my fourth metacarpal you've got there?") to sit forever with Jehovah, His Son, and Company. There was no way for individuals to find enlightenment, or ascension in this life, on this earth. Any and all who claimed otherwise were both heretics and criminals.
Again, I have no quarrel with that phase-specific mythic-rational structure and the interpretation that it (necessarily) gave to the Realization of the Adept from Nazareth. It was a crucial component of social integration and cultural meaning at that point in development, and it apparently served its purposes quite well. The problem, rather, was the degree to which and the fury with which this Realization was so thoroughly reduced to mythic levels. Rarely has a causal-level realization been translated so dramatically downward. Rarely has such a powerful realization been allowed to produce so few same-level realizations in its followers.
Not Buddha, not Shankara, not Lao Tzu; not Valentinus, not Numenius, not Apollonius; not Dogen, not Fa-Tsang, not Chih-i; not Garab Dorje, not Tsongkapa, not Padmasambhava -- none would be so thoroughly reduced. It is simply astonishing. Myths would, of course, grow up around all of these realizers, precisely for those who relate to reality in that degree; but their final teaching, causal/nondual, was available to all who embraced the practice, engaged the injunctions, went beyond myth and reason and psychic and subtle, and discovered the Empty Ground in their own case. And to any student who awakened to discover that he or she was actually One with the infinite Ground, in formless identity, the reply came back, in all cases: 'Congratulations! You finally discovered who you are!'
The reply that came back from the Church was: you shall now be toast."
~ Ken Wilber, SES
Best wishes,
Balder
