Eugene I wrote: ↑Sun Mar 21, 2021 12:12 am
If your interpretation is denying even all of that above, it would be so alien to the Christian faith based on the Bible and any prior Christian tradition that I don't think you would have any success finding anyone to agree with it.
...
There is nothing like that in Buddhism, where the Buddha's nature you what you really ARE, it's not something "other" than you which you need to communicate with, subdue to, love or relate to in any other way. And nobody expects anything from you, whether you realize your Buddha's nature or not is entirely your own problem, but if you need help to realize it, the masters of the tradition will gladly help you with no expectations from you whatsoever.
I'll start by saying that we are entering a territory where we're speaking of a sprout of very delicate and fragile nature. The true understanding of man's essential nature is not something that we can derive from the intellect - it's a living experience that
in itself explains what the intellect is. In this sense, any quarrels on these topics simply trample underfoot what is trying to make its way. For this reason I'll not try to argument anything but simply point attention to few things.
This has relation to Nietzsche too. His soul was an example where these delicate beginning were working with
tremendous force. That was the genius that inspired his intellect. Yet Nietzsche was living at the boundary of two epochs of spiritual development. His heart was bursting with the mighty impulses that were coming from his deeper nature. Unfortunately he couldn't make the bridge between what was working in him in this way and the intellect. The intellect asymptotically approached this deeper reality but couldn't find the means to go beyond itself. This struggle in Nietzsche was so strong that it gradually led to his breakdown. In the terms of spiritual science, he couldn't find the gate of transition between the intellectual consciousness and what is called Imaginative consciousness.
The above is not meant as criticism of Nietzsche. We should be moving into a more 'meta' look on reality. Today it's still customary to look at someone's philosophy with very little attention to the soul from which the thoughts emerged. But we'll never solve life's enigmas in this way. We move one step closer to reality when we understand the philosophical thoughts
in relation to the soul structure from which they emerged. In this sense we understand Nietzsche only when we see his philosophy in the light of his unique soul's experience. His philosophy is very deep, yes, and speaks of the most urgent problems of humanity. Yet we should learn not only from his thoughts but from his soul's experience. Only in this way Nietzsche's fate will make a positive contribution to humanity's development. In certain sense it was
necessary that someone had gone through a tragic fate like this. And this tragedy, this sacrifice, won't have been in vain, only if it serves as a living example. The path is narrow and there are many junctions that lead astray. So we can only feel the
deepest gratitude for Nietzsche's soul for giving the whole humanity a living example of what happens when the Christ impulse can't find its expression as spiritual reality but remains only as the hidden inspirer of a grand philosophy of the intellect struggling to transcend itself through itself.
Eugene I wrote: ↑Sun Mar 21, 2021 2:44 am
But as I said to Cleric above, your interpretation of Christianity is so radically different and alien to any tradition that good luck finding anyone to agree with it, I don't think you will find many.
Here again things should be understood rightly. If our highest ideal is Truth, the fact that not many people understand it, should in no way diminish our strivings. Actually, even if we are the only person on Earth to live and comprehend that Truth, it should in no way shaken its validity. This shall sound contradictory only for those souls that still view truth as a kind of democratic consensus. But I believe that thanks to your Buddhist experience you have the means to understand that this is not so. You know Buddha nature. You know that it's nonsensical to claim that this deep spiritual experience has anything to do with social consensus. It is exactly the opposite - it's what we reach into when we free ourselves from all forms of relative social consensuses. This will never be believed or understood by those who can't break away their cognition from the well-trodden patterns of the socially acceptable. These people, when they ask if something is true, turn their attention
outwards. The certainty for them is a function of the amount of people that support the same belief. This is not the truth I'm talking about, neither the truth that you know from Buddha nature. Even if the whole world were to call you crazy you would still know that they do that only because of fierce rejection of a
real experience that you know as immediate fact. Of course, if one is susceptible to society's opinion this resistance could very well shaken your own direct perception and make you say "Well, maybe I'm wrong" and begin to cloud the perception with thoughts of doubt.
The
apparent conflict between the Buddha impulse and the Christ impulse is harmoniously resolved when we succeed to encompass the development of humanity at large as a
process. Our own life is very clear example of a process, especially if we are able to reexperience our development through childhood. There's no doubt that at some early stages, certain cognitive abilities are not yet manifested, just as, for example, reproductive functions (and their accompanying feelings and thoughts) are not yet manifested. It's not so outrageous to envision similar process on a larger scale. It can be said that materialists are more true to the facts in this respect. They are forced by the facts to imagine that the intellect appeared only at a certain stage of evolution. Why they imagine that the intellect is also the last and ultimate stage of cognition is another story.
Spiritual impulses follow one another like plant leaves unfolding one by one. Every one adding something new to the existing structure. It's true that sometimes the new is bound to shaken the old forms but the fact remains that the old is
fully and livingly comprehensible from the standpoint of the new.
Historically the Buddha impulse precedes the Christ impulse. I don't know if you've been following our discussion with Santeri in another thread but we've talked about these things, although from a different angle. The Christ impulse doesn't invalidate the Buddha impulse. It's not like saying "Buddha got it wrong". Not at all. The eightfold path not only is not being invalidated but it hasn't even reached its full significance yet! But it's also true that this path will remain
barren if it doesn't receive the
seed, the ground for which Buddha was preparing.
What's this about? What seed? At the time of Buddha the seed has not yet been planted into the Earth, so to speak. That's what gives Buddha's teaching its specific soul mood. Through earnest and tireless work on self-perfection, the soul becomes more and more free from egoistic desires, confused thoughts and wrongful deeds. This necessarily leads us to the Cosmic Womb - the boundless sea of the Cosmic Feminine, the Cosmic Soul, or pure awareness as it is modernly called. This was the absolute maximum that the soul could reach while in a body at that time. The Spirit was not yet something that could say "I" within this boundless sea.
This changes after the Christ event, in which so to speak the seed falls into the ground of the Earth. To be sure very few people at that time realized the actual Cosmic events that were unfolding behind the curtains of Maya. Only the Initiates in certain gnostic schools were aware of these things. These schools continued as a
secret stream of esoteric Christianity, which has passed only from mouth to ear, so to speak. Only souls Karmically predisposed for this could find their way into the secrets. What about all the rest of humanity? Was it to become left out of this Mystery? No, and that's why exoteric Christianity took form. For the vast majority of humanity the Christ event simply became a religion - a God to be worshipped. And this was necessary. Yes, it's a compromise, but necessary one - and most importantly -
temporary.
In our age the secret stream is no longer secret because man of today has reached the cognitive maturity to
comprehend the real nature of the Christ event. And this comprehension is not only to serve for satisfaction of some vague spiritual curiosity but it should connect man to the true sources of what moral life is - not in the form of external commandments but from inner realization of one's true essential nature.
I'll try to give the following example: you say
"Buddha's nature is what you really ARE, it's not something "other" than you which you need to communicate with, subdue to, love or relate to in any other way". That's good. But think about yourself long before you approached Buddhism. If you really penetrated deep into it I'm certain that there are many things that changed in you, many of the veils of Maya fell off. Now try to imagine your old and naive self if it could conceive of your current enlightened self. Try to appreciate how many things, how many illusions the old self had to separate from itself, as old snake skins, in order to reach to what you experience now. Now imagine this:
Old self: "I'm the Buddha nature! It makes no sense to imagine something external from me, something that I should relate to."
Buddha self: "That's only partially correct. You are still entangled in many illusions. What I am can't fit into your current conceptions. Even though we share the same essence, for all practical purposes we're different beings. If I were at your place I wouldn't do many of the things that you do and I would do other things that you currently can't even imagine."
I'm not specialist in Buddhism but the above hints of the fundamental mood of
humility that is necessary if one is to find his deeper nature. This goes even deeper when the Christ impulse is considered. What's that impulse about?
These things can never fit into few paragraphs of text so whatever it's said can be no more that a tiny spark. Through the Christ event was added the ability to experience thoughts as causally creative spiritual activity. Post-Christ Buddhism had to increasingly deal with this problem. This was a problem that Buddha himself didn't have to deal - it was non-existent back then. When this is not understood, modern Buddhism falls into one-sidedness because it
assumes that thinking has always been the same through all epochs, and assumes that Buddha's teaching addresses this. Now, in order to restore Buddha's teaching in its apparent original form, all forms of spiritual activity must be extinguished - they are seen as part of the illusion. But, as discussed with Santeri elsewhere, thinking didn't have the form it has today. In the past people experienced words but couldn't
identify with the actual spiritual process that was speaking forth the words. So Buddha was perfectly correct in his teaching, that the words must be quieted down. If the spiritual process of thinking was experienced in his time he would never suggested that it should also be extinguished. It is exactly through this process than we have the thin and fragile thread that links us to the world of the Spirit - the missing part, the Cosmic Masculine that should bring the balance and fertilize the pure awareness.
Adyashanti says it himself - the void is not empty. It's living bubbling sea of potential. Yet it's the Feminine one-sidedness that makes us experience this potential as something in itself, as a great inexplicable mystery. What is called non-duality today receives its peculiar character not because the Cosmic Duality has been integrated but because with all strength one suppresses the Cosmic Masculine and experiences only the Cosmic Feminine - the undivided flow. Then the non-dualists say "There! It's all one, no more separation, flowing together with the Cosmic instinct". Yes, there's no more separation because the non integrated part was
driven out of consciousness, veiled in the shadows.
The Christ impulse allows the soul to reconnect to the Creative Cosmos. The mystic speaks of the bubbling sea of potential, about the dreaming Cosmos, but this forever remains as something inexplicable, instinctive, deeply mysterious that thinking can never comprehend. That's another reason to abolish all thinking. When the thread of spiritual activity is followed it leads the soul to the 'other side' of the sea of potential. There we find the creative forces which shape and move this potential. These creative forces are of the same character as these that we experience when we shape our thinking - they are self-conscious Spirit. We find the world of the creative Word - the Logos. For the mystic there's no comprehensible reason for the existence of planets, plants, animals, the shape of the human body, why we have a head, trunk, limbs. All this is considered part of the great inexplicable mystery - it's just the peculiar way the Cosmic Dream works. This is different for the Christian Initiate. In the world of the creative beings everything can be traced as living ideas. Everything that we see as flat mineral projection can be traced to its ideal spiritual life.
Here lies the greatest and hardest step that one must take in order to reach the inner experience of Christ nature. Buddha nature leads us to the edge of
personal life. We dismantle the veils of the personality so that we can act in freedom. Christ nature is what we find when we follow the thread of the spiritual activity
beyond that edge. Beyond that edge we find
Cosmic life and this is the greatest difficulty for modern man. To dismantle the personality is hard but yet comprehensible. We can intuitively imagine that it should be possible to become empty of contents. But to imagine that this emptiness can be filled by higher order content is difficult - we simply don't know how to conceive of this content!
Now the dialog transforms:
Man: "I'm the Christ, I'm the living creative Logos that speaks forth the words in my mind and creates the worlds"
Christ: "That's only partially true. You are still entangled in many illusions. What I am can't fit into your current conceptions. Even though we share the same essence, for all practical purposes we're different beings. If I were at your place I wouldn't do many of the things that you do and I would do other things that you currently can't even imagine. The most important thing is that I'm a Macrocosmic being - I live consciously in every being."
The last part is the real issue today. It's relatively easy to imagine merging with the instinctive wholeness, the common Buddha nature. One doesn't need to deal with the integration of the ego into higher order of things because the unity is achieved simply by deconstructing the ego - there's nothing to integrate because we've reduced everything to the undivided Soul flow. But if we are to seek true integration of the Cosmic Masculine, and not simply to discard it and merge with the Cosmic Feminine, we need new methods. That's what the Christ impulse adds to evolving humanity. We have to keep our individual spiritual activity and at the same time integrate with the Macrocosm. Even only saying this show how much more difficult of a task this is! The Christ nature is not something that we attain in a one time event. It's an ongoing process. The Christ being is the one Macrocosmic "I" of humanity. We attain Buddha nature by being humble and realizing that there are many things that make us different from our pure Buddha nature. Then we set to work and gradually sacrifice our weak and illusionary nature for the clarity of our Buddha nature. And as you say, we ARE this higher Buddha nature. All that we do is not in order to please some separate being but entirely so that
we can become one with it. This work continues further with the Christ nature with the big difference that we are now working for becoming our
higher active and creative self. Yes, we ARE this higher self, yet as long as we are seeking our lower self's interests we are also different from it. Since this higher self is
one for all humanity, this also explains why moral life proceeds as something natural, as clear understanding of the way living creation works. For the Buddhist moral life is not yet fully revealed. It reaches the level of compassion and no harm. The objective reason is that merging with Buddha nature doesn't tell us what to do. It only tells us what makes us different from that nature. We find compassion and other lofty virtues as natural necessities if we want to find our Buddha nature - we simply can't approach it if we are still entangled in various vices - our identification with the vices 'by definition' makes us different from Buddha nature. In the same way we find even higher moral impulses through our Christ nature. The reason is that we not only merge with the sea of neutral Cosmic potential but we continue to the world of creative beings, that shape the potential. Now we understand many things about the
telos of the Cosmos. We find that everything that happens corresponds to specific living and self-conscious idea-beings. Our integration in this world in itself presents us with the moral impulses of our Earthly life. These moral impulses will always seem artificial and external for Buddha nature - they simply have no existence in the tranquil sea of the Cosmic Feminine. But the Christian Initiate finds them as direct perception and understanding of the structure and development of the living creative Cosmos, just as Buddha nature finds compassion as integral consequence of its direct experience.
And I also acknowledge that the deeper (esoteric) aspects can't be found in any of the churches - actually they are one of the greatest resisting factors to the deeper penetration into this Mystery. There Karma and reincarnation are not even considered. To speak of the Christ as a God imposing external commands on men, would be the same as to say that when one attains to his Buddha nature he comes in contact with a being that stands externally to him. This doesn't mean that there're no conditions (which can be seen as external rules) to attain to the Christ nature. This holds also in Buddhism - there're conditions (which again can be seen as external laws) that must be met if one is to attain to his Buddha nature.
