(A product of the delusional physical world, the world of Maya)
And Primarily, Secondarily, That There is a Higher Plane Accessible to All, With Ease
(The Spiritual Plane, the Realm of Wisdom, Is Indeed Real & Readily Accessible)
Consider . . .
Consider something different.
Consider perspective and consider the counter intuitive. Consider what you might have missed. Consider what’s hiding in plain sight.
My discussion which follows is based on an imperceptible slow-cook of consideration over a period of years, bolstered by wide reading and more occasion-specific, inspired by a couple of recent exposures to BBC Radio Four’s “In Our Time” program. To any who haven’t been “turned on” to “In Our Time” I’d expect you’re in for a treat if you ever do. I highly recommend it. I’ve grown to love Melvyn Bragg and guests. But that’s well beside any point.
The specific programmes [American sic] I’m referring to are the one on John Calvin and more recently (in the listening order) the one on St. Paul.
This got me thinking stimulated. Made me consider things (and reconsider other things) . . .
All that I say (in this piece) is borne from my experience of life, my active experience of an intellectual busy-head, and from the thrice-read Bible – (in full context for I avoid [like hell] whenever possible the reading of select passages). All this unorthodox consideration is fortified by my general free-lance theological experience, by my half-remembered doctrines of Catholic upbringing, and by my exposure to the unique American illogic of culture-war based radical evangelical protestant politics. This latter is sometimes a painful exposure, bringing little in the way of cathartic benefit. Some dear much-loved ones have succumbed to infection by the cult’s illogic. And the feeling of doing anything particular about it festers as a largely helpless feeling.
But, out of consideration, let’s move back to consideration . . .
You’ve heard, I’m sure, of the Law of Unintended Consequences? It might not even be a real law, I suspect, but it does make sense and can be observed many a time. Consider also that a solution to a problem made in one age can have a tendency to live on as the inertia of tradition for the longest time. It can and does mutate to take on a different kind of reality within the context and problems and challenges of a different age. This, I’m sure, can be readily imagined. I’ll come back to this later, but the devil is like that: in the details.
Well, we’ll consider some basic things about Paul in his context-bound situation before projecting in a sort of extrapolation just such an imagination exercising consideration through the mists of time into a time far, far into the future, the time chummy folk oftimes refer to reflexively as “nowadays”.
First some things about Paul’s positioning. He never met Jesus in the flesh. (Though there is little doubt that he did meet Christ – the everpresent spiritual Christ whom, while being the living Christ, no one can meet in the flesh). [Optional lifeline to the reader: that was a lot of theological leap of faith thrown in there – for effect mostly. You don’t have to buy any of that at all. I’m not selling anything, just considering freely. Excuse me while I kiss the sky!].
But, to continue the blurred line I was going along before that twice parenthetical aside . . .
. . . Paul did not have the benefit of Gospels. Paul, like Jesus, was Jewish. Paul lived in a time of the aftermath. Literally. 70 and all that. (An obscure British History reference that). The expectation zeitgeist of Paul’s time was literally end-time expectation. This was not a 2,000-year left-over carryover that we now toy our fear-mongering minds with. This was reality. It had been said to have been announced. It was certainly expected. Paul was a Pharisee (a law-picking nit-picker) of the establishment of Jewish society. He persecuted break-away cultists. Until he met with the living Christ. He then seemed to genuinely want to share his experiential knowledge, a “gnosis” of this living Christ, with all others. He got involved in grassroots organization efforts. He led. He community organized. He butted heads with original followers of Christ who, like Jesus, remained Jewish and remained in the Jewish tradition. He believed he had something available to and for everybody. He was radical in this. He was like Origen in this manner.
Yet, politics.
I’ll eventually get around to explaining my considered point-of-view.
First, let that word sink in better and more thoroughly: politics.
Then, let me taunt you a second time (in an imaginary French accent): politics.
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Let me do a bit of personal aside time-travel first. Back where I am in the 21st century, I can see that I’m touching a couple of taboo third-rails here at the same time. I understand that it’s hard for people now to calmly consider politics with a judicious stripping away of emotion. For us politics Я emotion! We all know that! Only a total fool would venture to disagree. But I am a genuine y sincere eternal optimist, with a [sic] sense of humor. I ask and hope for such consideration, if not respect. And I can and do push the envelope. I’ll freely touch third rails. Fuck me if I can find some kind of way to bring sex into the conversation too!
So, fool that I am, in talking about religion I’ve brought up the taboo word and the no-no concept of politics into it! What can I possibly be getting at?
First let me get personal with history. You know it’s wrong to judge persons and personas of the past with the standards of the present. I’m aware of this and I try to practice it when practicable and feasible. Yet, like absolutely everything else, ‘tis thinking makes it so! I can’t help to have always in my past given Paul some guilt-by-association. I used to consider him a psychopath, like I’m pretty sure I still know Calvin to have been – as Calvin has put his imprimatur and indelible stamp of dismal pure self-loathing and grim fear and inadvertent damnable politics on everything. Calvin made depravity an institution. Thanks to Calvin witches and demons walked among us and permeated society. No doubt. Augustine, in a like manner, as a forefather, had to have been some kind of psychopath too, with his untenable but very, very popular fixation on depravity and convincing articulation of same. Regarding a third prominent character, Constantine, there should be no doubt about it. Murderous he and his Grendel’s mother of a violent pathological killer of a mother undoubtedly were. Their conquering imperial clout, privilege and institution-making (& sustaining) institutional power is responsible for the most formidable and lasting institution paradigm the physical world has ever seen. (And persecuting and how!). (Acute persecute). [You can agree to disagree with me on that and those points] [That, my friends, you can call my “opinion” and match it against your separate but equal “opinion” in your legacy of privilege as you will][And we’ll never advance.] [Nowhere.] [We’ll get nowhere]. [And as a conservative, you’d like that, wouldn’t you, nowhere man?].
Okay, I’m ready to leave this particular aside. Bile has been extracted. I’m feeling catharthed [sic]. I think I’ve probably stoked up your politics/emotion enough to more than prove or disprove any point. To bring sex back into the equation: Fuck me!
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So I was talking about Paul. About how he was a spiritual experiential sort of human, much like Origen. Both are all about the cosmic spiritual engagement. Both experienced something cosmic and spiritual, zen-like, meditation-driven, quiet peace. But Origen got thrown out of the established Church as a heretic and was tortured to death. The rub is that Origen came later. As a contemporary of Ambrose, influencer of Augustine, Origen came on the scene after there were “writings” and just before there was the empire’s established institution, the legacy work of pathological Constantine. The established institutional budding behemoth, of course, made something out of these writings over a variety of committee meetings, after the likes of Origen and long, long well after Paul were off the scene.
That’s just reality. It can be looked up. You don’t have to like it, follow it, or believe it. Just consider.
Paul’s great contribution, of course, over and above his organizational fortitude and propensity to freely communicate his leadership and organizational prescriptions by missive, was the great opening to the gentiles. A certain respect for the individual’s integrity of faith experience came to be associated with this. Like Shakespeare (who articulately expressed it and brought it to real fictional life [individualism, that is]), Paul is often revered by our advanced freedom-worshiping society as a pioneer in the advancement of the development of the sanctity of individualism. This is the necessary pre-requisite ingredient for all that we as freedom-loving Americans value. It is the basis for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as we post-moderns understand it. Of course, in the course of all this development and (dare I say?) evolution, the Jewish practitioners of the following of Jesus went by the wayside. I cannot emphasize enough that Jesus himself never was anything other than Jewish. Nor was Paul. All that “ ” identity came later. Give all due credit to the label-makers, for they will inherit the power and the glory of the head!
But just what were the implications and occasions of this “opening” to gentiles? It was pretty radical. Remember that everyone who lived while Jesus had lived were literally living in the literal “end times”. Remember that the big distinctive thing about the fiercely monotheistic Jewish religion was that identification as the “Chosen” people. Paul was saying that the whole meaning and nomenclature of the “Chosen” people was done with. It is highly ironic how it came back with a vengeance of nationalism in Jesus’ name (through Paul). Paul was saying that it wasn’t race and cultural identity and the keeping of laws and traditions that counted any more. Of course he had experiential psychic spiritual “gnosis” to back this up.
Don’t miss this point. The entire referential point of “Chosen” “salvation” from the bi-polar loving-Hating God has been moved like so much very critical cheese. From the moment of Jesus’ death (and resurrection as the spiritual ever-living Christ) [an “opinion” you are free to dispute and/or deny] the “chosen” thing is a matter of you choosing to follow and not having been born or acculturated into it. This can’t be emphasized enough.
This really seems a minor point. But it was radical. Those who were without a doubt inside were all now, suddenly, without a doubt, outside. All others (and all previous “insiders” [now “outsiders”] were, of course, invited and qualified to the availability and the possibility of being “inside” again). And Paul said it was a pure and totally unconditional gift. That is good news on the face of it. But the fine print is politics. The devil is in the details and in the fine print and, mostly, in the politics.
I used to think Paul a particularly heinous man for doing what he did. And, after I bring Calvin into the conversation later, it’ll be better expressed – (I hope) — just what I mean by all of this “what he did” stuff. But in the course (and the intercourse) of my theological development I have been blessed to have been involved with the teaching and the osmosis of a prominent Greek and Paul scholar. It turns out that in this later “writing” and “committee” process, there has been much work done to tailor Paul’s legacy into something more serving of the empire and its empire-maintaining institutional cornerstones. If you don’t believe that a few years might make a huge difference in legacy making, I say you’ve lived it and actually seen it happen. Consider, the example of Ronald Reagan. Consider comparing the actual man you knew and experienced between 1980 and 1986 with the legendary Christ-like legend that is peddled just a mere twenty years later. Don’t know what I’m saying? Think I’m crazy? Totally off base? Then you’ve already been effectively duped. As was the legacy of Paul, in a much bigger sense. For there are whole faux letters, there are ghostwritten passages, there are insertions and additions. There were other hands in the pot. I’m not out to give examples but it seems to me that some of the more popular Paulisms (the ones which serve the evangelical strain of the institution best even today) are some of the most susceptible to being “faux”.
But that’s not my whole point. It’s just that in learning this and in learning of this and in witnessing a trust-worthy person’s reverence for the optimistic deep spirit of Paul and in my learning of Origen and of Paul’s shared ideals and spiritual other-worldly essence, I can have changed my opinion. And have. And how! I believe Paul genuinely was more positive and open. I believe Paul believed in a more universal accessibility of cosmic spiritual individual experience than the institution leads us to believe.
But the problem, of course, is the fate of Origen. For he came at a different time. He came along at a time when this optimistic openness to all was no longer allowed. It was D.O.A. in the parlance. What happened is something that falls into the cachet of the law of unintended consequences. Heretics are killed over it. Religion is threatened by too much of the wrong kind of individualism. The “chosen” people of the old religion have been replaced by a new kind of chosen, by an “elect”. While this “insiderness” [sic] is indeed said to be good news available to all, it is in no wise available on any freely accessible terms. The ironies of history and all that.
And here’s where I want to bring Calvin (and his legacy of progeny of today’s fear-mongering culture warriors) into the consideration.
First I’d like to shelve discussion and consideration and delve into another of my lengthy asides. Pretty soon enough I’ll be able to show how this CULT is attempting to force a square peg into a round hole (and calling it “good”).
I said somewhere before that I avoid — (unlike the current plague: which turns out to be political and emotional in nature too and can’t be avoided as a plague should, such avoidance being all too politically correct) – precise citation of scripture. (That was a clear 2020 date-stamp put on this piece there. And who knows what the coming future might hold?) I don’t want to get into offering precise examples of the general rule I’m about to introduce. For reading scripture and utilizing it in a leading way to “prove” things is a sophistic trick of post-modern political evangelists. If you want to see a reasonable facsimile thereof of this technique in operation, just sit through a whole-life insurance salesman’s presentation. It’s a grand polished sales technique designed to lead you to a seemingly indisputable and very, very inevitable logical conclusion.
The point I do want to make is that Jesus himself is much more open and accessible and “spiritual” vis a vis the spiritual vs religion issue. You can always delve in and find your own examples. But a saying that Jesus often communicates is this: “doesn’t it also say?” Just like Jesus used this to undermine the traps and snares of Pharisees and Sadducees so, too, we, all of us, can fend off these selective citations of the post-modern trappists [sic]. For Jesus was consistently more forgiving, open, accepting and accessible than these scripture quota quoters will have you believe. I believe Jesus to be much more like the ever living ever present ever available spiritual Christ that spiritual Paul and spiritual Origen adore.
But that’s just me.
Yet, consider this. It is quite likely that some the favorite “Paul” citations these sophistic salesmen love to exploit are indeed the political fine-print introduced by the “faux Paul” writers years later while in the ‘righteous’ course of developing an institutional legend. Politics and all that.
Let’s fast-forward. The expiration date of the literal and literally expected end times is long, long past any semblance of freshness. It is kept alive in legend form by well-developed presumably well-intentioned fear-mongering and institutionalized political/emotional considerations, traditions. We have gotten here by psychopaths standing on the shoulders of psychopaths. And indeed ‘twas intense psychopathic fear that created the devil. ‘Twas terrific tyrannical fear what gave him a name. The name and the prideful evil indeed became institutionalized and rode the inertia of tradition to infamy to become the perfect I[m]ago Iago for all times, especially for the perpetual all-times of the terrifically tyrannical “end times”. The institution has been thoroughly co-opted by the establishment, empire after empire. And the Empire hath smote! The Empire, indeed, has stricken back and has stricken back. Committees have solidified all writings and interpretations. Legacies live on. Codified. Well endowed. Augustine has come and gone and stamped his special stamp of depravity. Luther has done legendary Paul much further and has opened up individual’s power even more. To make it more open, Luther conveniently and generously did away with “works” as any precondition to anything. Such freedom!
Yet Paul’s “chosen” people trap remains. What was probably sincerely and optimistically looked upon as good news then and now has become an unintended trap. For, to “open” “salvation” to gentiles, the gate must be replaced.
First, though, consider this: consider how fragmented like broken pieces within the kaleidoscope the institutional organized religion we know has actually all become. Time travel forward into the future and consider the aftermath of empire adventurism, active proselytization, evolution of freedom-loving individualism. We have one kaleidoscope, for sure. It is tempting, as we do, to label it all as the one. It is intoxicating tempting and ever so easy to see it all as one whole. But try and count the pieces! I’ll let you count the ways! Take your time. See? You can’t.
What do I mean by the “gate must be replaced?” That seems to be very counter intuitive. But let’s discuss Calvin’s impact and we’ll get to that. Calvin, for one, took the possible psychopathy of Augustine and made it his own personal obsessive revved-up psychopathy on steroids: depravity is Calvin’s most lasting legacy. I would almost call it depravity worship, but that would offend too many. Accordingly, we are deeply born hopelessly depraved. We absolutely need salvation. Each one of us and, more critically importantly, each one of them! All lives matter! ALL lives are depraved. Moreover, there are no works. There is no good in works. There is nothing you can do about it. Just be depraved and hope you are saved. But don’t enjoy it. Don’t enjoy yourself in depravity in the least. Fear it terribly! Be afraid. Be very afraid. Your depravity deserves eternal hell. ‘The wages of sin is death’. There is no doubt. There can be no doubt. But there is good news. There is that “gift” of which Paul spake. Salvation is freely given. To the “elect”. God is an angry God. Angry as hell. (And jealous too. See how the “chosen” concept refuses to die?) But He favors the chosen people. There is that concept again. Because since Jesus’ death and resurrection says the orthodoxy, salvation is a matter of the sacrifice and redemption, the “chosen nation’ has righteously been disinherited. You must be “born again” in “Christ”. The crux is a fix. None of this is really new, but Calvin did articulate well. The real difference Calvin makes is the psychopathic part: his grim obsession with depravity. He really played that one up. He tanned you in the hide with that one. Pure. To make a pun, your ass (i.e. your hide) is “pure a tan”. And he made a lasting impression on an already ‘end-times’ fear-mongered totally insecure people. Total depravity just makes perfect sense in a fear-monger environment. Total insecurity. Total sinfulness. Total fear and loathing. You name it. Totally. And the susceptibility is not, of course, all Calvin’s doing. The 2,000 years of institutionalism and effective control and the ever-increasing unreality of the tension of the permanent continuation of the End Times and emphasis on hell has ratcheted up some serious need of fear. Believe it or not. Or else, don’t believe me. (But you know you believe in fear).
Calvin and his followers were big into the good news and into the benefits of being “elect”. But here’s the real catch. Here’s the trap that no one sees.
Consider this:
To replace the “chosen people” with the “elect saints” while interposing the doctrine of works does not fit. What is the problem? You might never ask. You might never wonder. You might get by, secure that you are saved and never think to know.
But the problem is that the salvation is completely arbitrary. For there is also doctrine of “predestination”. Predestination is something that more or less had to be invented to explain the shift to generality with the lack of value of works. If one’s choice — (free choice I might add! Thanks to that super-charged individualism inherent in the change, free will ALWAYS has to be explained away) – of one’s actions, intentions or accomplishments has no bearing on salvation, we have a problem, Houston. Salvation MUST needs be arbitrary. It can be no other way. Indeed Calvin emphasizes this: God has already pre-saved whom is to be saved. All the rest have hell for recompense. Eternal hell! Fire! Brimstone! Eternal!
Let that sink in. Good people may not have been pre-destined for salvation. A really horrible show-case example of lack of human ethics may have been pre-destined for salvation. This is fine and dandy. Except for the one thing we always forget: even the members of the evangelical protestant political church are subject to the arbitrary. Sure, the men in the church have told them they are saved. Sure, the men there always have their say and their sway. Sure, all the scripture is good news and this assures them. But all of this thoroughly mansplained security and assurance is based NOT upon the joining up to the right group. Instead it is arbitrary. It is possible that one can be saved and secure in the bosom of the “Christian” religion, duly “born again” (in all ways and in all manifestations) to salvation yet still have ARBITRARILY not been pre-destined for salvation. Secure as they pretend to be, secure as they believe themselves to be, secure as they rely on faith to be, they are ALWAYS subject to and never free from this ARBITRARINESS. Jonathan Edwards and all that.
For consider this: faith, too, is a choice. Hence it is literally a “work”. Hence it has no bearing against the arbitrary.
And I can’t emphasis enough the effect of obsession with depravity coupled with fear of eternal hell wrapped up in an enigma of “works”/faith makes for special pathological insecurity.
And I say this all for a reason. It might look like I prattle on and on about this arbitrary stuff. It may even seem I rant with anger like a crazy person because I’ve gone on and capitalized so much. But this is important. It is likely the first time you are hearing anything of this sort. Both my red-state and blue-state friends can equally make this assertion, that they probably haven’t heard anything like it.
But it has implications.
Consider this. We all know that “Christians” are very much concerned with the whole “pagan” world missing out of the “good news”. We all see them very actively at work trying to “save” the world. And we can plainly see with cornucopia of observation that their method of saving seems hateful.
On the other hand, my “Christian” friends look around at the world and they pretty much see a whole lot of hate directed at them.
What gives? Why would this be? How this mutuality of impossibility of vision? Why all this hate? Well this obsession with depravity for sure is not very understanding. But they are genuinely trying to “save” you from eternal hell before the impending “last days” come unannounced. It is the utmost in caring.
The circle and the square don’t reconcile. There is hate and mistrust coming and going. There is plenty to spread around.
But have compassionate pity for your “Christian” friends. Please understand that they are projecting out special emotionally-charged pathology, most likely unknowingly. They have swallowed (with faith) this psychopathic bile about depravity for so long that they don’t have to ever really think about it. It is total depravity of rote. To you it looks like outward-directed hate dished out from a privileged unassailable position. (And to be truthful, they have been trained to appear scripturally sound and indeed unassailable by masters of mass communication, the sophistry of well-regulated, i.e. ‘drilled’, salesmanship. So that part is no accident).
But consider what they really think about themselves. They are sin. They are depraved pieces of shit only “saved” in a very ARBITRARY means. In other words they don’t know. They think they have been broken, as in disciplined, as in breaking a horse. Manly, man. They call this “good”. They doubt their very salvation except for “faith” which is a mere concept. (A “works”). They fear hell for themselves as much as they do for anybody born “agay”. They are projecting. They don’t just hate you They self-hate and don’t know what to do with it. They need compassion and compassionate pity. (Not that it excuses their hateful behavior).
This is all deep denial. Deep denial indeed. And add more layers: seeing themselves as persecuted somehow helps and enhances, salves and festers more in paradoxical depravity wallowing. Any positive image work only makes it deeper and worse.
They have never come to terms with the stark reality of the arbitrary. It has never been explained. They have been cult-indoctrinated into otherness. But at heart there are three things: 1) Total Depravity 2) absolutely Arbitrary fate and 3) eternal totalitarian fate to fear: i.e. hell.
The meanness and hate is inherent.
Please understand. Please have compassion.
THE REAL POINT.
If I stopped just there I would be a hateful killer of hope. I would be the one telling poor Virginia that there is no Santa Claus. It would be a case of “There’s Nothing at the End of the Rainbow.” (Look that song up).
But I’m here to point out the critical flaw that the religious miss. I’m here to say that I’m with the spiritual Paul. Maybe. Certainly I’m with the spiritual Origen. I know that. I also know that organized institutional religion and its cult members could well torture me and kill me as a heretic for this.
But the key is that everything I’ve said about religion and the religious thus far is premised on it being applicable to the physical world. And the physical world is delusion. This is something you’ll get out of zen, meditation, Buddhism, etc. It is something considered heresy and worthy of non-salvation. However, haven’t they already said they believe that nothing is worthy, there are no consequences or works, only predestined salvation that is a total gift from God? Yes they said this. And they believe it which is why they are tormented in hell and by hell every moment of their existence, regardless of their religious beliefs. Must be torture. But the physical world is delusion. Al this is delusional. None of it is real.
The real Kingdom of Heaven lives. It is not “coming.” (But it is too, in a way, waiting for all to get there). It is not dependent upon “end times” or “rapture” or of anything. The gift is freely given. But it is not arbitrary. It is good news indeed like Paul was trying to say. But “they” (his followers) didn’t let him. It is like Origen said. You can experience it for yourself. Meditate! Find the quiet space. Have compassion. Forgive. Be peace. Commune with spiritual. Live spiritual. Exist spiritual. It is actually fact (as we don’t know “fact”). It is positive. It is transcendent. We are not depraved. We actually have a connection to the divine inside. Depravity is the lie of tormented psychopathic people. True freedom is spiritual freedom. You are not subject to this arbitrariness you fear. You are not subject to eternal hell. There is not one life. There is not one end. There is spiritual joy and access to all to the Kingdom of Heaven. There are multiple lifetimes. Karma does apply, but not only to one life. That would make no sense. All are forgiven. All are saved. All are destined for the Kingdom of Heaven. All need awakening. Now, or over however many lifetimes. Love is patient. Love is timeless. Love is spiritual. Now or many chances from now. There is not only one chance. Free yourself instead.
Consider.
Hamesha aur Har Jagah 