Meeting The Masters

 Bruce Charlton had a thought-provoking post recently which struck a chord with me. His point is that the work of Christ was to lead men out of a world of sin and death, an entropic world in which nothing lasts, into a second creation, one without rust or decay or worm or canker in which the good can build on itself forever and is never brought low so that it has to be rebuilt only to fall again. As someone who has much love for Indian forms of religion but is nevertheless firmly a Christian I found this interesting. There is great wisdom and beauty in Hindu and Buddhist teachings and mystical practice but there is something more revealed by Christ which adds an extra dimension to the spiritual life.

The goal of Eastern religion is enlightenment which is aligning one's individual consciousness with universal being. Put simply, it is becoming one with the totality of life. Until the advent of Christ this was the highest spiritual path, and it is still a high path though one which few have taken and even fewer travelled to its conclusion despite numerous claims to the contrary. It entails escaping from the pull of the material and becoming completely spiritual. However, it is exclusive and something important is lost in the process. I know some will argue with me over this but I am talking about practice rather than theory. In effect, if you seek enlightenment you must renounce the material, in fact everything that is not pure spirit and that includes your individual self.

Christ brought a new understanding of the purpose of life. No longer was creation a condition to escape from. To be sure, it was sick and needed healing but it was fundamentally good and offered something which spirit alone did not provide. This was relationship, love, beauty, goodness, all things requiring duality and change. Christ says you do not have to reject creation. You must embrace it but not as it is in its fallen condition. This is what not being of the world means. For Christ it is not the world that is wicked but what it has become. Creation or Nature is good but only when seen in the light of God. Seen in its own light it is at best damaged but more often than not rotten. This, incidentally, is why the polytheistic pagan religions were rejected by early spiritual reformers such as Abraham and Moses. These religions were nature cults that celebrated nature in its fallen aspects which is why sexual licence and child sacrifice lay at their heart. We have seen these two things return over the last 60 years, along with other aspects of paganism, as they always will when the higher religion is dismissed or removed from the centre. Even feminism derives from the loss of proper religion as it comes about when the principle of transcendent spirit is rejected and consciousness brought down to the material level which includes the psychic plane, that being part of the material world. There is much more that could be said on this subject but it would take us away from the main point of the post.

Jesus brought a new Creation. The old creation had been damaged, possibly beyond repair though it may be that eventually it too will be salvaged by a fresh infusion of spirit. After all, anything is possible with God though maybe he cannot break his own laws. However, as things stood, the material world was the realm of Satan, the prince of this world. Jesus offered the redemption of matter and the individual self, both of which would be transformed in and through him and a new realm created which was Heaven. Heaven did not exist before Christ. Heavenly planes of being did but even they, as is said in Buddhist mythology, were not permanent. The denizens of these planes, including gods, could not remain there forever. Entropy operated even there. But in Heaven there is no sin, no darkness, no death. All is pure and holy and in that word is the key to all this. Before Christ there was the sacred which was the spiritual as something beyond the material. But after Christ there was the holy which involves the sanctification of the material, its raising up and incorporating into the spiritual.

Christ turned water into wine. He spiritualised matter. This is the difference between him and earlier spiritual masters. They showed a way to escape matter but he showed the way to transform it.

 It must be the Libran influence in me. Every time I write a post emphasising a certain aspect of a particular subject I feel obliged to look at the opposing side of the question. This only applies to matters that contain a large element of truth to begin with. In much of today's world the corruption, of institutions, of philosophies, of art, of politics etc, has totally overcome any initial kernel of of truth and to seek balance in these cases is to justify and rationalise falsehood.

So, with that in mind, let me say that in one sense Buddhism is the purest of religions for it strips away everything except naked spirit. All the extraneous elements of the spiritual search were seen by the Buddha as obscuring the central reality of existence, the underlying causeless cause of the countless worlds of phenomenal manifestation. He realised that the world was in a condition of constant decay and sought the pristine state of incorruptible being that could never be violated by change or loss or evil. By sheer force of spiritual will coupled with absolute purity of motive and integrity of mind he broke through the many veils overlaying consciousness and entered into the innermost sanctuary of life where darkness and light have not yet been divided. He attained the perfect knowledge that comes from merging individual being with the universal  I AM. His supreme achievement opened a door between the created and uncreated worlds allowing others who were spiritually developed enough to follow in his footsteps. But he was the first to scale this spiritual Everest.

Those who have been to a South Indian temple will know that the outer sections contain halls and courts with carved pillars and statues in which all the important elements of life are represented, both material and spiritual. The decoration is elaborate and profuse showing the almost profligate abundance of life, every aspect of which is celebrated to the consternation of some early European visitors. But in the innermost part of the temple there is a sparsely decorated or even bare cell-like chamber without window or light. This is called the womb chamber and is where the image of the presiding deity stands. There the Murti or earthly embodiment of the god or goddess (Christians would call it an idol forgetting that there are representations of Jesus, Mary and the saints in Christianity too) is tended by the priests and worshipped by the faithful. However,  what many of the ordinary worshippers might not be aware of is that this dark and empty space, void of decoration and without form of any kind, that houses the deity and from which the deity might be said to take its rise represents Purusa which in the Hindu tradition is pure spirit, the essential reality of all things. The Buddha focussed his attention entirely on this, going beyond all the paraphenalia of the temple, all the ritual, even beyond the deity itself, to the very ground that gives birth to creation.

The Buddha was the apostle of enlightenment which is the perfection of wisdom. He introduced this wisdom into the oversoul of humanity, its collective superconsciousness, enabling those who followed him and who were responsive enough to build it into their own minds. When Christ came he introduced humanity to the spiritual quality of love allowing those who attuned themselves to his divine nature to partake of this love themselves. Christ went further than the Buddha because he sanctified matter, including the human self, and original Buddhism did not do this. It left it behind as corrupt. But this is in no way to denigrate Buddhism since the Buddha was the one who struck the first blow against the corruption inherent in the material world since the Fall, opening up a path out of matter into spirit. Christ then came to heal the sickness in matter so it could be reunited with spirit but it is possible that he might not have been able to do this without the Buddha's initial opening of the way to spirit. Might one even see these two great beings working in tandem for the upliftment of humanity? This is not to deny Christ's uniqueness as the Son of God but in order to do his work he needed the spiritual ground to be prepared and this it was not just by the teachings of the Hebrew prophets from the Old Testament but by all the spiritual endeavours of humanity up to that point, the greatest of which was that of the Buddha.

 William James Tychonievich recently had a very interesting post on his From the Narrow Desert blog about the materialistic influence of Buddhism. It's here. This also drew Bruce Charlton's attention and he reacted here. I commented on the first post as below.

"I do believe that the Buddhist rejection of God can easily become a rejection of spirit with spirit being rarified matter rather than matter being condensed spirit which is closer to the truth. You might think there is no fundamental difference between these two concepts but there surely is if you project the qualities of matter onto spirit instead of vice versa. This is why Western atheists can be drawn to Buddhism. They don't have to change much."

While much admiring Buddhism I have long felt there are serious problems with it especially when imported into the West. This goes back to my early days of spiritual exploration when I went to a Buddhist meditation centre in London to be told that there was no such thing as the self. I know that Buddhists will say that the Buddha neither affirmed nor denied the reality of the individual self and that's true enough as far as it goes. But the effective reality of the Buddhist path is that the self is denied. That's undeniable!

I left this centre convinced that their philosophy was mistaken. I understood the idea that there is a supernal state of consciousness beyond the limitations of the ego but this does not mean that the individual human being has no reality. According to the Christian view which goes much more deeply into the question (it really does), the individual soul is the whole point of creation, and note that if Buddhism were correct there would be no point to creation, no meaning in it. It is through the soul's experience in this world in which subject and object have been split apart that it can reach a state, Heaven, that is beyond the condition of pure spiritual oneness in that it is a state of loving relationship both with God, the supreme I AM of the universe, and with other souls. This would not be possible or even desirable in pure Buddhism but is actually a far richer, more meaningful and more creative state than resting in the changeless perfection of Nirvana.

Without God the tendency is to make gods of ourselves. The two approaches to that are those of Satan and the Buddha though in no way am I comparing the two. Satan fell into evil and the exaltation of self while the Buddha went beyond good and evil into the denial of self. But God created the world and saw that it was good. It is to bring to reality the qualities of goodness, beauty and love that God created the world and human beings. We can go back to the primeval uncreated state, which is Buddhism, and we can go forward through creation into Heaven which brings together in holy matrimony the perfection of the One, Spirit, and the beauty of the Many, matter.

I realise that calling Buddhism materialistic, or potentially materialistic, might seem strange when I also say it denies the material world aka creation and retreats into pure spirit. But could it be that its rejection of God means it misconceives both spirit and matter, seeing them as philosophical abstractions rather than concrete realities and life as made up of energies rather than beings? Buddhism transfers the impersonal nature of matter onto spirit but the Christian view sees the nature of spirit as fully, gloriously, magnificently personal and it brings that down into creation as typified in the figure of Christ himself.

Added note: The title of this post is not saying that Buddhism is materialistic but that there are elements of materialistic thinking in it in the sense that for the Buddhist nothing has an abiding centre, everything is in flux and human identity is ultimately non-existent. This is influenced by materialism even if it is a spiritualised version of it.

 I mentioned a couple of expeditions in the previous post about a trip to Sri Lanka. The first was to the ancient Buddhist capital of Polonnaruwa but the second was to an even more sacred site. This was Sri Pada, or Adam's Peak as it is popularly known, which is a mountain in the central highlands of the country that stands at just over 7,300 feet tall and has at its summit a footprint of the Buddha. Or theoretically so. If that is the case the Buddha must have been a big fellow as the footprint is over 5 feet long and 2 and a half feet wide. Besides which there is no record of him having visited Sri Lanka anyway. This has not stopped the mountain from being an important place of pilgrimage but then why should it? In spiritual terms imagination is more powerful than mundane fact because it points, or can point when correctly oriented, to higher truth.

The name Adam's Peak comes from an alternate belief. There is an old story that Ceylon was the location of the Garden of Eden and so this is not the Buddha's footprint but that of our original father Adam marking the first place he stood after being thrown out of Paradise. Perhaps the association with Eden comes from the fact that the area around the mountain is one in which the rubies, sapphires and emeralds that gave ancient Ceylon the name of Ratnadvipa, meaning the Island of Jewels, were to be found. The Hindus have their own version of the tale and identify the mark with Siva while Christians say that St Thomas stood there. This is actually the least unlikely story as St Thomas was the apostle who travelled to South India and might conceivably have come to Sri Lanka even if he probably didn't. Be that as it may, whoever/whatever made this mark on the mountain's peak the reality is that for members of all religions it is a place of great religious significance. 

Adam's Peak from a distance (from Wikipedia)

The idea is that you should start your climb in the early hours of the morning so that you reach the summit at sunrise for a spectacular view. We were staying at a hotel about 30 miles away and got up just after midnight to drive to a little town at the base of the mountain called Dalhousie which is where we were going to start our ascent though I believe there are other routes. It was mid May and the weather can be unpredictable then as it is the start of the monsoon season, the south-western one that is. Sri Lanka gets two monsoons, the south-western and the north east which comes in October/November. But as we started our ascent around 2am the weather was warm and pleasant. The climb was supposed to take around 3 hours and is about 2 and a half miles in length. It doesn't involve any actual climbing but parts are steep. There is a path at the beginning but, as far as I recall and this was 20 years ago so the details are a little blurred, at some point it turns into a stairway of 5,500 steps. Calling it a stairway is perhaps a little generous because it is very rough and ready and you need to be fairly fit to make the climb.

About halfway up there is a Japanese Peace Pagoda and this is where the ascent can get a bit more arduous. It is also where when I did my climb it began to rain. And rain. And continue to rain. We knew this was a possibility and my two companions had brought thin raincoat-like coverings to protect them but I only had a shirt which got soaked within 10 minutes. Having not much option, I decided to take this as one of the tests of pilgrimage and luckily it wasn't cold. There weren't many other people around either and this made the climb more enjoyable as you could imagine yourself to be fully embedded in the natural world. I have read that nowadays the climb can get very busy which, to my way of thinking, takes away the whole point of it.

What is the point? To climb a mountain is, in the religious sense, symbolic of the ascent to God. This ascent can be done with companions at the beginning  but as you progress you become more and more isolated until you are alone. This is right and proper. You cannot know God if you are distracted by anything else. As long as you are attached to any aspect of creation you will not fully encounter the Creator. The meeting with God, to be real, must be wholly personal and this means it is just you and him. Nothing else. Climbing a mountain is an outer representation of going to meet God. As you ascend you are stripped of your worldly accoutrements and so I felt the torrential rain was somehow fitting.

Unfortunately it also meant that when I got to the top I saw nothing like this.

Sunrise on Adam's Peak

We had timed it well enough and got there just before sunrise but the summit was wreathed in cloud and mist with nothing to be seen. Oh well, not all pilgrimages end in enlightenment. We saw the footprint which looked like a natural rock formation to me and you might say the end result wasn't worth the climb. But the climb itself was the reward, the sense of having made an effort to achieve something was the achievement itself and the way up the mountain certainly had its moments of beauty. The descent seemed much quicker than the climb and by the time we reached 'base camp' the rain had stopped. I, in fact, had taken my shirt off about halfway down the mountain, so sodden was it, so you might say I had indeed stripped myself down to the bare essentials as required by the rules of pilgrimage. Things don't always turn out in quite the way expected.

The mountain in good weather

 I haven't written much recently because I was finalising the By No Means Equal book, then I went on holiday and then had other matters to deal with. But most of all because I haven't felt particularly inspired though I use the word inspired in the loosest possible sense. Normally ideas occur to me either by popping into my head or else in response to something I have read or observed but recently the well has run dry. I could write (again) about the disastrous spiritual state of the world in which people are being ushered into thought prisons which become more constricted every day or I could write about the ongoing destruction of pretty much everything, but plenty of other people do that very well and at the moment I just don't feel like it. It's not that I have no hope but I have none that the world will right itself. It's much too far gone for that. It's hit the iceberg and is going down. My hope resides in God and that is where everyone's hope should be. It's not wrong to seek to make a better world and to cry out against the falsehoods and lies. Indeed, we must do this. But this world is a bridge not a destination and that's how we should ultimately regard it.

With all that in mind, I thought I might write about a trip I made in 2001 to Sri Lanka, a country I have visited several times. I was staying in an old colonial bungalow in a district just outside Colombo called Mount Lavinia, supposedly named after a dancing girl a 19th century British Governor of Ceylon fell in love with. I have great fondness for these old bungalows, having lived in one in South India. They may not be exactly beautiful but they are very aesthetically pleasing with their orange tiled roofs and pale yellow outer walls and high ceilings that keep you cool but also give the inner structure a sense of space and even grandeur. And you can't beat a good long verandah where you can sit and have a cold beer in the evening. Although there was now mains water at this bungalow there was also a well on the property and you could drop down a bucket and have a very refreshing wash in the morning if you so chose which I occasionally did.

My hosts had arranged a couple of expeditions and the first was to visit the ancient Buddhist capital of Polonnaruwa. To be honest, modern Buddhism in Sri Lanka is not particularly interesting to the average Westerner but Polonnaruwa, which I believe dates back in its origins to the 10th century, contains what are, in my opinion, among the finest works of Buddhist art.

These are all at the Gal Vihara which is a rock temple created in the 12th century that comprises four statues of the Buddha which have been carved out of the face of an outcrop of granite. The statues go in a line and are of a large seated Buddha, a smaller Buddha sitting inside a cave, a standing Buddha and a reclining Buddha, the last of which extends to 46 feet in length and is one of the largest statues in South Asia. It shows the Buddha in parinirvana which is final nirvana entered into after death. He is lying on his right side and resting his head on a cushion supported by his hand. The beauty of this statue and the peace it exudes are profound. You feel that the craftsmen who created it must themselves have been far advanced on the path to liberation. The delicate folds of the Buddha's gown and the grace of his posture are superbly represented in a material which, in its obdurate resistance, is almost the opposite of those soft and gentle qualities. Look at the flow of his left arm as it rests on his reclining body. Observe the serenity of his face even if it does seem slightly too well-fed!

When I visited the temple it was early morning and there was no one else about. The periods just after sunrise and just before sunset are, especially in the tropics, ones in which the world seems to be holding its breath and inwardly focused, attentive to the slightest whisper from the divine. The air is still and the mind finds it relatively easy to enter into the spacious calm that is the essence of Buddhism. I sat in front of the statue and let myself be absorbed by that calm. I am not a Buddhist but I have the greatest respect for the Buddha and his path. We say that Jesus was the only person born without the stain of sin but there is an innate goodness and purity to the Buddha which inspires reverence.

The standing statue is 23 feet tall. There is some debate about whether this is the Buddha or Ananda, his favourite disciple, due to the crossed arm pose which may signify a devotional attitude. I feel that the former is more likely and that the three main statues show the Buddha in various attitudes of enlightenment, sitting, standing, lying down. Ananda is usually shown shaven headed and does not have the characteristic long ear lobes of the Buddha which this statue does have. Also, why include Ananda when all the other statues are of the Buddha? No, this is surely the Buddha too though for me it is the least spiritually impressive of the three large statues but that is only because the other two are so extraordinary.

The one I was most moved by is the first going from left to right which is the way one approaches them. Here they all are in a row carved into a 170 foot length of rock which rises to about 30 feet high in the middle.

This is the Buddha sitting in classic meditation pose. He is about 15 feet high and sits in an alcove on a throne decorated with lions and thunderbolts. These are obscured in the first picture by the brickwork but they can be clearly seen in the second picture at the bottom. The presence of the thunderbolts or Vajras is interesting because it suggests a Tantric flavour. Sri Lankan Buddhism is Theravada which is early Buddhism before the development of the Mahayana but perhaps there was some influence from the reforming schools, some of which imported non-Buddhist themes and iconography into traditional Buddhism.

I sat for a while in front of the statue like the fellow in the picture above. There was a powerful sense of the wisdom and enlightenment of the Buddha, more than I have felt with any other Buddha figure and I have seen a few. The impassive serenity of the posture and facial features carved out of the pale grey rock streaked with darker colours across the body gave a sense of eternity and the feeling that this would remain even when the universe had crumbled into dust. Maybe not literally but as a state of consciousness it represents the underlying bedrock of being that existed before the awakening of the worlds and that will endure even when all forms of life are called back to their source.

That is the Buddhist view anyway and it is one to which I am deeply sympathetic while actually believing that creation is really an ongoing process and that, though outer forms may be destroyed, it is only so that new forms may be created that better express the higher states of consciousness into which life forms, aka human and other beings, evolve. Maybe the universe does experience what in Hinduism are called Days and Nights of Brahma, periods of manifestation and non-manifestation, but the seeds of the past are always retained during the Nights so that they may grow anew and to greater heights in the next cycle of creation. Nirvana is the Night of Brahma and it is the most profound state of being. But life is not just night. It is day too and Jesus, always depicted with his eyes open as opposed to the Buddha who has his eyes closed, calls us to active life in the glorious sunshine days of Creation.

 My maternal great grandfather was the editor of the Observer newspaper which was first published in 1791 making it the world's oldest Sunday paper. He did well for himself because his father was an Irish labourer who died when he was only two, a sad experience strangely enough shared by my father. My great grandfather left school at 13 and worked first as a messenger and then a clerk which is another coincidence because those were my first two jobs. However, J.L. Garvin went on to distinguish himself in journalism, becoming the Observer editor in 1908 when he was 40 and remaining there until 1942. I never knew him as he died before I was born but his influence was there to be felt when I was growing up and my mother and grandmother often spoke of him.

I say all this because I have just read a couple of articles in the Guardian which is a sister newspaper to the Observer, both journals sharing the same political perspective which traditionally was liberal. But the Guardian has long since become a parody of itself and is now not only one-sided and bigoted but seemingly motivated by hatred of anything good and true. Naturally, it depicts itself as a champion of the poor and marginalised  but it obviously just uses those to pursue its agenda of spiritual destruction and value inversion. I am sure that my ancestor would be turning in his grave if he knew what had happened to it but from where he is now he's probably got more sense than to worry about such earthly things and is looking down with sadness but in the knowledge that this world must go through a thorough cleansing which means all the evil that is present must be brought out and expressed.

The two articles are on completely different subjects. One is about the truckers' protest in Canada. It's here.  For as long as possible the media in the UK ignored this protest. Then, when they couldn't ignore it any longer, they reported on it but described it as the work of extremists, far right, of course. This Guardian article seeks to blacken it in quite extraordinary terms. Freedom is now the concern of fascist neo-Nazis, it seems. Bodily autonomy is fine if you want to kill your unborn child but not if you have doubts about an improperly tested substance with many well-documented problems, and one that doesn't work very well anyway, being injected into you when statistics clearly show you don't even need it as that which it is intended to protect against is not that dangerous for most people in the first place.

The second article is in some ways even more extraordinary. This one is here.  It's all about how Buddhism changed the West for the better and talks about compassion, equality, non-violence, materialism etc. I'm sure that the West has gained some benefits from learning about Buddhism even if there is not too much fundamental in it that the West did not already know from Christianity, albeit in a different form and with a different emphasis. One forgets or doesn't know that the famous image of the Buddha sitting crosslegged in meditation actually derived from Greek statuary as he was originally depicted only by a footprint, early Buddhism being so world-renouncing as to be little concerned with artistic representation. The human spirit being what it is, that could not last and what Buddhist artists did with the Greek influence, which came by way of Alexander the Great's incursions to the East, was all their own genius. But the point is that most people don't know how the West influenced Buddhism from early on, and particularly I would submit with the idea of the Bodhisattva who is clearly not only a Christ-like figure but actually inspired by the spirit of Christ.

I have often said in these pages that I have the greatest respect for Buddhism. I think it is possibly the greatest human achievement, with profound beauty and wisdom. But it is being used nowadays to erode the spiritual influence of Christianity in the West, and let us remind ourselves that Christianity is not a human achievement. It is a divine revelation. Buddhism contains many insights into the human condition and has developed extraordinary tools for exploring and developing consciousness which we can avail ourselves of if we wish. But it is not a replacement for the teachings of Christ which go beyond those of the Buddha in that they reconcile spirit and matter, the individual self and God, in a way that Buddhism does not and cannot. The Buddhist rejection of God is spiritually harmful for the Western psyche as that is a psyche that is supposed to include the individual, albeit in a way that eventually goes beyond itself as itself. For the Westerner it risks creating a false spirituality that is tempting because it does away with God and even, for many moderns, the idea of sin which becomes mere ignorance, a very different thing. This is not what the Buddha taught but it is what Buddhism and Buddhist derived practices often amount to when applied in the West. This article from the Guardian is a perfect example of how Buddhism is being co-opted by leftism and used as an anti-Christian tool. It now seems to be little better than a false spirituality designed to divert those who might be fed up with materialism away from true spiritual understanding into a kind of humanistic, or fake humanistic, substitute, one in which you can pretend to yourself you are spiritual but actually be further away from God than ever because you have replaced him with what amounts to yourself.

 The publisher of my new book Earth is a School is in the process of arranging some potential radio interviews on spiritual channels to promote it. To support this I was asked to provide a list of talking points, and some of the programme hosts have queried my belief that Jesus Christ stands above all other spiritual teachers and that both his work and his person are qualitatively different to anything that went before, or has come after for that matter. Now, I think of myself as a Christian but I understand and can sympathise with this position. I have almost (though never completely) shared it myself in the past. It is very reasonable. The spiritual is the spiritual, is it not? Truth is truth. There can only be one truth, especially if we are talking about mystical realisation.

Well, yes and no. There is, of course, only one Truth but more and more of it can be unveiled. This is what infinite and eternal means. I realise that many would say that the Buddha went beyond all veils, penetrated to the unborn, undying absolute behind the world of relativities and I don't argue with that, but did he lose something in the process? Did he lose his human personality? The fact is that before Jesus all the great sages (and note they were sages not saints) taught that God, spirit, whatever it was, could only be attained by complete detachment from phenomenal being. The resulting state of spiritual realisation brought compassion but it did not bring love for it effectively rejected the individual for the universal. Love needs individuals. It is meaningless in terms of Nirvana. Despite what you might have been told, love is not possible for those who seek liberation for what is liberation if not liberation from identification with the self and not just my self but anyone else's self?

Before the Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension the serious spiritual goal was Nirvana, to escape matter completely, but Christ healed the split between Heaven and Earth, spirit and matter, being and the phenomenal world, and enabled a loving marriage between them rather than a divorce. He returned  the creation (potentially for we, individual souls, still have  to accept his offer) to what it would have been like before the Fall. The idea of the Fall, by the way, exists in Buddhism too though it is not known by that name. But its effects are what prompted Siddhartha to go on his journey, causing him to abandon his wife and child, an action that rather brings out the difference between the two saviours. It is symbolic of his renunciation of the world but it must also be regarded as wrong from the point of view that sees the personal, and therefore personal responsibility, as real.

People can be confused by the assertion that Christ goes further and reveals something more than any other teacher by the fact that most of his teachings are not really that different to those of other spiritual teachers. But why would they be? He did not come to destroy the law or the prophets but to fulfil them. There are, however, some significant differences. For example, the Christian emphasis on the individual and on love. This did not exist, certainly not to the fullest degree, before and it points to the healing of the self rather than its destruction or transcendence or seeing as unreal if you prefer those words though it amounts to the same thing.

But the most important difference was the person of Christ himself. When he says "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life" he gives us a teaching that goes far beyond anything that had come before. The Buddha, who I am taking here as the pre-eminent universal spiritual teacher both before and after Christ which he was, could potentially have said this but he would have been speaking in an abstract sense as in 'the I AM'. Christ, however, was speaking quite literally of himself and to know this, really know it, is to be given a spiritual teaching on a much higher level than any other theory or practise for this is a teaching that speaks to the soul rather than the mind or intellect.

Jesus said he did not come to bring peace but a sword. This is a strange thing for a spiritual teacher to say but it should make us consider whether there might not be something valuable in duality, that bugbear of universalistic spiritual teachings. Is it just something to overcome in consciousness or does it actually contain a truth to which we should pay attention? The spiritual path gives us two options and we can take either. Faced with the fact of the self and the world we can turn aside from both as unreal/false/the result of ignorance or we can incorporate both in an understanding that sees them as currently diseased but curable. The cure is in the love that is embodied in Christ. Is the personal the blot on existence or is it the whole point of existence?

I know that people may tell me that other religions contain teachings that incorporate the value of the personal. I would suggest that all these come from after the time of Christ and are due to him operating through those religions, imparting something of a Christian flavour to them, using the word Christian here to refer to Christ himself not the Christian religion specifically. Therefore salvation may be found in all religions that are open to this influence. But it is Christ that works here, his influence, his being. For religion has evolved and the religion that has its centre in the living personal God is of a higher order than one that prioritises impersonal, abstract being. Union with God goes beyond Nirvana, liberation, enlightenment because it includes all there is to that and adds relationship or love.

The last words of the Buddha were along these lines. "All individual things pass away, work out your salvation with diligence." This is profound advice, albeit somewhat remote. The last  recorded words of Jesus according to St Matthew were "I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." For me this draws out the difference between the two saviours and please note that I do call the Buddha a saviour for such he was in the context of his time and for centuries after, even for many today. Nevertheless, this does not alter the fact that Jesus goes further for he brought a higher truth to this world, the truth of divine love.

I was born a Christian then went away from ordinary Christianity and explored many other spiritual philosophies. I believe that has given me a better understanding of the truths of Christianity itself. I am not saying everyone has to do this but it has benefitted me. My intuition has always been that Christ is qualitatively different to every other teacher but it has not always been easy to articulate how and why. The essence of this, though, is in the word redemption.

I have a final point to make on this subject and it relates to my experience with the Masters. Given the emphasis on the personal in this analysis that seems appropriate. It's possible that the reason I feel obliged to talk about this matter is that ties in with a mistake I myself made at one time.  This is an extract from a conversation I had with the Masters. It was about the need for humility, a virtue, incidentally, that makes no sense if the self is not real anymore than love does.

The Master Jesus and all the Masters of old had preached humility and demonstrated it too. They knew that they were as nothing and that all they were came from the Creator. 

From the Creator. God exists. He is not something to go beyond, rise above, see through, transcend. At the same time, we ourselves also exist. We are not nothing. We are as nothing but that is not being nothing and is only said to remind us that everything does indeed come from the Creator. Buddhism correctly teaches the ephemeral nature of the phenomenal self. But behind this phenomenal self there is a real individual soul. We must certainly die to the phenomenal self but that is not so we are reabsorbed into the whole. It is so that the risen soul may unite in love with God, and this union has been made possible through Christ, his birth, life on Earth and self-sacrifice. It is open to all.

In my last post I responded to a comment about the difference between the teachings of the Buddha and those of Christ by drawing attention to the lack of the idea of God in Buddhism which I consider to be a serious omission that cannot just be glossed over. By pure coincidence, I was looking through some documents on an old computer yesterday and found this passage which must have impressed me enough to keep a copy. It's by Valentin Tomberg and I assume, though am not certain, comes from his classic Meditations on the Tarot, a book I have had on my shelves for 30 years but never got round to reading properly though I have read selections from it. Don't ask me why but it might be because it's nearly 700 tightly packed pages long. I have CDs from that long ago which remain unplayed too. Not something to be proud of, I know. 

I have italised points I find particularly pertinent. 

"Buddha saw that the world is sick —and, considering it incurable, he taught the means to leave it. Christ, also, saw that the world is sick unto death, but he considered it curable and set to work the force for healing the world — that which manifests itself through the Resurrection. Here is the difference between the faith, hope and love of the Master of Nirvana and that of the Master of the Resurrection and the Life. The former said to the world. "You are incurable; here is the means for putting an end to your suffering —to your life." The latter said to the world, "You are curable: here is the remedy for saving your life." Two doctors with the same diagnosis — but a world of difference in the treatment! 

There are two answers to the question, "What is innate human evil?" The one given by the left wing of traditional Wisdom — is "ignorance"; the other - given by the right wing of traditional Wisdom —is the sin of illicit knowledge. The difference consists in that the oriental tradition puts the accent on the cognitive aspect of the fact of discord between human consciousness and cosmic reality, whilst the occidental tradition puts it on the moral aspect of this same fact. The difference between the two traditions is that in the oriental tradition one aspires to divorce in the marriage of the "true Self and the "empirical self, whilst the occidental tradition regards this marriage as indissoluble. The "true Self", according to the occidental tradition, cannot or should not rid itself of the "empirical self by repudiating it. The two are bound by indissoluble links for all eternity and should together accomplish the work of re-establishing the "likeness of God". It is not the freedom of divorce but rather that of reunion which is the ideal of the occidental tradition. 

Now, we occultists, magicians, esotericists and Hermeticists — all those who want to "do" instead of merely waiting, who want "to take their evolution in their own hands" and "to direct it towards an aim"—are confronted with this choice in a much more dramatic way, I should say, than is so for people who are not concerned with esotericism. Our principal danger (if not the only true danger) is that of preferring the role of "builders of the tower of Babel" (no matter whether personally or in a community) to watching over "as gardeners or vine-growers the garden or the vine of the Lord". Truth to tell, the only truly morally founded reason for keeping esotericism "esoteric", i.e. for not bringing it to the broad light of day and popularising it, is the danger of the great misunderstanding of confusing the tower with the tree, as a consequence of which "masons" will be recruited instead of "gardeners". The sixteenth Major Arcanum of the Tarot is therefore a warning addressed to all authors of "systems", where an important role is assigned to a mechanical ingredient — intellectual, practical, occult, political, social and other systems. It invites them to devote themselves to tasks of growth instead of those of construction — to tasks as "cultivators and guardians of the garden".

The transcendental Self is not God. It is in his image and after his likeness, according to the law of analogy or kinship, but it is not identical with God. There are still several degrees on the ladder of analogy which separate it from the summit of the ladder —from God. Therefore, if Avatars are descents of the divine, Buddhas are ascents of the human —they are culminating points of stages of humanism in the process of evolution. The difference between the "revelatory ones" (Avatars and Imams) and the "awakened ones" (Buddhas) is analogous to that between "saints" and "righteous men" in the Judaeo-Christian world. Here "saints" correspond to Avatars in that they represent the revelation of divine grace through them and in them, and "righteous men" correspond to Buddhas in that they bring to evidence the fruits of human endeavour. The work of Jesus Christ differs from that of Avatars in that it signifies the expiatory sacrifice for completely fallen mankind. This means to say that mankind, who before Jesus Christ had only the choice between renunciation and affirmation of the world of birth and death, is put in the position, since the mystery of Calvary, of transforming it —the Christian ideal being "a new heaven and a new earth" (Revelation xxi, 1). The mission of an Avatar, however, is "the liberation of the good" in this fallen world, without even attempting to transform it. It is a matter in the work of Jesus Christ of universal salvation — the work of divine magic and divine alchemy, that of the transformation of the fallen world — and not only of the liberation of the good. The work of Jesus Christ is the divine magical operation of love aiming at universal salvation through the transformation of mankind and of Nature. After Jesus Christ —the God-Man, who was the complete unity not only of spirituality and intellectuality, but also of divine will and human will, and even of divine essence and human essence —the work of the fusion of spirituality and intellectuality can be nothing other than the germination of the Christ seed in human nature and consciousness. In other words, it is a matter of the progress of the Christianisation of mankind, not only in the sense of a growing number of baptised people, but above all in the sense of a qualitative transformation of human nature and consciousness. 

 And just as there are ecstasies and illuminations from the Holy Spirit, so there are intoxications from the spirit of mirage —which is named the "false Holy Spirit" in Christian Hermeticism. Here is a criterion for distinguishing them: if you seek for the joy of artistic creation, spiritual illumination and mystical experience, you will inevitably more and more approach the sphere of the spirit of mirage and become more and more accessible to it; if you seek for truth through artistic creation, spiritual illumination and mystical experience, you will then approach the sphere of the Holy Spirit, and you will open yourself more and more to the Holy Spirit. The revelations of truth issuing from the Holy Spirit bring with them joy and consolation (consolatory spirit = Paraclete), but are only followed by the joy which results from the revealed truth (spirit of truth— —spiritus veritatis; cf. John xvi, 13). whilst the revelations that we have called "mirages" follow the joy —they are born from the joy. (A mirage is not the same thing as a pure and simple illusion —a mirage being a "floating" reflection of a reality—but it is "floating", i.e. outside of the context of objective reality with its moral, causal, temporal and spatial dimensions). This is why the mystics of eastern Christianity do nor tire of warning beginners of the danger that they call "seductive illumination" (prelestnoye prosveshtcheniye in Russian) and insist upon the nakedness of spiritual experience, i.e. on experience of the spiritual world stripped of all form, all colour, all sound and all intellectuality. The intuition alone of divine love with its effect on moral consciousness is —they teach —the sole experience to which one should aspire. What renders such an intellectual mirage all the more dangerous is that it is not, as a general rule, purely and simply a delusion or illusion. It is a mixture of truth and illusion, mixed in an inextricable way. The true serves to prop up the false and the false seems to lend the true a new splendour. It is therefore a mirage and not pure illusion, which would be easier to perceive. Mirages are above all frequent in the case of relationships between persons of the opposite sex who feel drawn to one another. It then often happens that the qualities, and even the identity, of one soul are projected upon another. The conclusion which asserts itself from all that we have said above concerning the sphere of mirages is that practical esotericism demands at least the same prudence as exact science, but the prudence that it demands is of a nature that is not only intellectual but also, and above all, moral. In fact, it encompasses the whole human being with his faculties of reasoning, imagination and will. It is therefore a matter of being prudent. For an illusion stemming from the sphere of mirages can bowl you over, whilst a true revelation from above can take place in the guise of a scarcely perceptible inner whispering. For the sphere of mirages, also, is real — but reality is one thing and truth is another thing. A mirage is certainly real, but it is not true; it is deceiving."

There are really two points being made here, each one of supreme importance for the contemporary spiritual aspirant. The first is that, tempting as it may be because of its profound psychological and spiritual insights, Buddhism belongs on a lower plane of spiritual truth than Christianity which incorporates and then transforms both the created world and the human soul. This can only be done through Christ. The second is that it is motive rather than technique that is key as regards spiritual progress. There are experiences available to the questing soul which it might mistake as spiritually extraordinary but which are nonetheless what Tomberg calls mirages. Not completely false but imitations of reality. Love of God and proper spiritual discernment are two qualities that the aspirant simply cannot do without.

The key point is that the Buddha was a human being who taught the highest a human being could go unaided. But Christ was a divine being, indeed, a Christian would correctly say he was the divine being, who brought something new which was the redemption and transformation of the fallen self rather than its extinction for absorption into Nirvana. However, I would add that the incarnation of Christ affected other spiritual approaches that were open to this new divine energy and the Mahayana was a response to that. So Christ can be present in all religions to a degree even if he is obviously most fully present in Christianity.