Perennial Phil Ch 15 SILENCE [4,1108]

Perennial Phil Ch 15 SILENCE [4,1108]

The Father uttered one Word; that Word is His Son, and He utters Him for ever in everlasting silence; and in silence the soul has to hear it.

St. John of the Cross

The spiritual life is nothing else but the working of the Spirit of God within us, and therefore our own silence must be a great part of our preparation for it, and much speaking or delight in it will be often no small hindrance of that good which we can only have from hearing what the Spirit and voice of God speaketh within us. . .. Rhetoric and fine language about the things of the spirit is a vainer babble than in other matters; and he that thinks to grow in true goodness by hearing or speaking flaming words or striking expressions, as is now much the way of the world, may have a great deal of talk, but will have little of his conversa­tion in heaven.

William Law

He who knows does not speak;
He who speaks does not know.

Lao Tru

UNRESTRAINED and indiscriminate talk is morally evil and spiritually dangerous. 

'But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.' Matthew 12:36–37 -

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 idle words - empty rhetoric or insincere or exaggerated talk

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What does it mean that we will give an account to God?

The reference to us giving an account of ourselves to God means 

- that moment of judgment isn't something pronounced against us from on high, the judgment we pronounce on ourselves will be an expression of our own full awareness of who we are, who we have been, and what we have done with our lives.18 Jan 2017

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This may seem a very hard saying. And yet if we pass in review the words we have given vent to in the. course of the average day, we shall find that the greater number of them may be classified under three main heads: 

• words inspired by malice and uncharitableness towards our neighbours; 
• words inspired by greed, sensuality and self-love; 
• words inspired by pure imbecility and uttered without rhyme or reason, 
• but merely for the sake of making a distract­ing noise. 

 utter foolishness

--

These are idle words; and we shall find, if we look into the matter, that they tend to outnumber the words that are dictated by reason, charity or necessity. And if the unspoken words of our mind's endless, idiot monologue are counted, the majority for idleness becomes, for most of us, overwhelmingly large.247248 

All these idle words, the silly no less than the self-regarding and the uncharitable, are impediments in the way of the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, a dance of dust and flies obscuring the inward and the outward Light. The guard of the tongue (which is also, of course, a guard of the mind) is not only one of the most difficult and searching of all mortifica-tions; it is also the most fruitful.

When the hen has laid, she must needs cackle. And what does she get by it? Straightway comes the chough 붉은 부리까마귀 and robs her of her eggs, and devours all that of which she should have brought forth her live birds. And just so that wicked chough, the devil, beareth away from the cackling anchoresses, and swalloweth up all the goods they have brought forth, and which ought, as birds, to bear them up towards heaven, if it had not been cackled.

Moderniqed from the Ancren Riwle
You cannot practise too rigid a fast from the charms of worldly talk.

Fénelon

What need of so much news from abroad, when all that concerns either life or death is all transacting and at work within us?

William Law

249

My dear Mother, heed well the precepts of the saints, who have all warned those who would become holy to speak little of them­selves and their own affairs.

St. François de Sales

(in a letter to St. Jeanne tie C/iantal)

A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker. A man is not considered a good man because he is a good talker.

Chuang Tu

The dog barks; the Caravan passes.

Arabic Proverb

It was not from want of will that I have refrained from writing to you, for truly do I wish you all good; but because it seemed to me that enough has been said already to effect all that is need­ful, and that what is wanting (if indeed anything be wanting) is not writing or speaking—whereof ordinarily there is more than enough--but silence and work. For whereas speaking distracts, silence and work collect the thoughts and strengthen the spirit. As soon therefore as a person understands what has been said to him for his good, there is no further need to hear or to discuss; but to set himself in earnest to practise what he has learnt with silence and attention, in humility, charity and contempt of self.

St. John of the Cross

Molinos (and doubtless he was not the first to use this classifica­tion) distinguished three degrees of silence—

• silence of the mouth, 
• silence of the mind and 
• silence of the will. 

• To refrain from idle talk is hard; 
• to quiet the gibbering of memory and imagination is much harder; 
• hardest of all is to still the voices of craving and aversion within the will.

The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. 

• Physical noise, 
• mental noise and 
• noise of desire
• —we hold history's record for all of them. 

And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. 

That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the'radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes.

 And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. 

It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, con­tinually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. 

And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego's central core of wish and desire.

 Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose—to pre­vent the will from ever achieving silence.

Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass-production is universal craving. 

Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving—to extend and intensify, that is to say, the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its divine Ground.

Perennial Phil Ch 14 IMMORTALITY AND SURVIVAL [3,1512]

Perennial Phil Ch 14 IMMORTALITY AND SURVIVAL [3,1512]
불명 존속

IMMORTALITY is participation in the eternal now of the divine Ground;

survival is persistence in one of the forms of time. 

Immortality is the result of total deliverance. 

Sur­vival is the lot of those who are partially delivered into some heaven, 

or who are not delivered at all, but find themselves, by the law of their own untranscended nature, compelled to choose some purgatorial or embodied servitude even more painful than the one they have just left.

Goodness and virtue make men know and love, believe and delight in their immortality. When the soul is purged and en­lightened by true sanctity, it is more capable of those divine irradiations, whereby it feels itself in conjunction with God. It knows that almighty Love, by which it lives, is stronger than death. It knows that God will never forsake His own life, which He has quickened in the soul. Those breathings and gaspings after an eternal participation of Him are but the energy of His own breath within us.

John Smith, the Platonist

I have maintained ere this and I still maintain that I already pos­sess all that is granted to me in eternity. For God in the fullness of his Godhead dwells eternally in his image—the soul.

Eckhart

Troubled or still, water is always water. What difference can embodiment or disembodiment make to the Liberated? Whether calm or in tempest, the sameness of the Ocean suffers no change. 

Yogavasistha

242 243

To the question 'Where does the soul go, when the body dies?' Jacob Boehme answered: 'There is no necessity for it to go anywhere.'

The word Tathagata (one of the names of the Buddha) signifies one who does not go to anywhere and does not come from any­where; and therefore is he called Tathagata (Thus-gone), holy and fully enlightened.

Diamond Sutra

Seeing Him alone, one transcends death; there is no other way.

Svetasvatara Upanishad

God, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life....

Book of Common Prayer

I died a mineral and became a plant.

I died a plant and rose an animal.

I died an animal and I was man.

Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

Yet once more I shall die as man, to soar

With the blessed angels; but even from angelhood

I must pass on. All except God perishes.

When I have sacrificed my angel soul,

I shall become that which no mind ever conceived.

O, let me not exist! for Non-Existence proclaims,

'To Him we shall return.'

Jalal-uddin Rumi

===

나는 광물로 죽어 식물이 되었다. 

나는 식물로 죽고 동물을 살아났다. 

나는 동물로 죽었고 나는 인간이 되었다.

내가 왜 두려워해야 할까? 내가 죽는다고 못했던 때가 언제 있었나? 

그러나 다시 한 번 나는 인간으로 죽어 축복받은 천사들과 함께 날아오르리라. 그러나 나는 천사의 신분에서 부터도 넘어야 한다. 하나님 외에는 다 멸망한다.

 내가 내 천사 영혼을 희생했을 때, 나는 아무 생각도 해본 적이 없는 사람이 될 것입니다. 

오, 내가 존재하지 않게 하소서! 

비존재(Non-Existence)는 '우리는 그에게로 돌아갈 것이다'라고 선언한다.

===

세진: 여기서 "하나님"은 보통 의미의 God이 아니다.

There is a general agreement, East and West, that life in a body provides uniquely good opportunities for achieving salvation or deliverance. Catholic and Mahayana Buddhist doctrine is alike in insisting that the soul in its disembodied state after death cannot acquire merit, but merely suffers in purgatory the consequences of its past acts. 

But whereas Catholic orthodoxy declares that there is no possibility of progress in the next world, and that the degree of the soul's beatitude is determined solely by what it has done and thought in its earthly life, the eschatologists of the Orient affirm that there are certain posthu­mous conditions in which meritorious souls are capable of advancing from a heaven of happy personal survival to genuine immortality in union with the timeless, eternal Godhead. 

And, of course, there is also the possibility (indeed, for most indi­viduals, the necessity) of returning to some form of embodied life, in which the advance towards complete beatification, or deliverance through enlightenment, can be continued. Mean­while, the fact that one has been born in a human body is one of the things for which, says Shankara, one should daily give thanks to God.244 

The spiritual creature which we are has need of a body, without which it could nowise attain that knowledge which it obtains as the only approach to those things, by knowledge of which it is made blessed.

St. Bernard

Having achieved human birth, a rare and blessed incarnation, the wise man, leaving all vanity to those who are vain, should strive to know God, and Him only, before life passes into death.

Srimad Bliagavatam

Good men spiritualize their bodies; had men incarnate their souls.

Benjamin Whickcote

245

More precisely, 

• good men spiritualize their mind-bodies; 
• bad men incarnate and mentalize their spirits. 

The completely spiritualized mind-body is a Tathagata, who doesn't go any­where when he dies, for the good reason that he is already, actually and consciously, where everyone has always poten­tially been without knowing. 

The person who has not, in this life, gone into Thusness, into the eternal principle of all states of being, goes at death into some particular state, either purga­torial or paradisal. 

In the Hindu scriptures and their commentaries several different kinds of posthumous salvation are distinguished. 

The 'thus-gone' soul is completely delivered into complete union with the divine Ground; but it is also possible to achieve other kinds of mulcti, or liberation, even while retaining a form of purified I-consciousness. 

The nature of any individual's deliverance after death depends upon three factors: 

1. the degree of holiness achieved by him while in the body, 
2. the particular aspect of the divine Reality to which he gave his primary allegiance, and 
3. the particular path he chose to follow. 

Similarly, in the Divine Comedy, Paradise has its various circles; but whereas in the oriental eschatologies the saved soul can go out of even sublimated individuality, out of survival even in some kind of celestial time, to a complete deliverance into the eternal, Dante's souls remain for ever where (after passing through the unmeritorious sufferings of purgatory) they find themselves as the result of their single incarnation in a body. 

Orthodox Christian doctrine does not admit the possibility, either in the posthumous state or in some other embodiment, of any further growth towards the ultimate perfection of a total union with the Godhead. But in the Hindu and Buddhist versions of the Perennial Philosophy the divine mercy is matched by the divine patience: both are infinite. For oriental theologians there is no eternal damna­tion; there are only purgatories and then an indefinite series of second chances to go forward towards not only man's, but the whole creation's final end—total reunion with the Ground of all being.

----

Preoccupation with posthumous deliverance is not one of the means to such deliverance, and may easily, indeed, become an obstacle in the way of advance towards it. 

There is not the slightest reason to suppose that ardent spiritualists are more likely to be saved than those who have never attended a séance or familiarized themselves with the literature, speculative or evidential. My intention here is not to add to that literature, but rather to give the baldest summary of what has been written about the subject of survival within the various religious traditions.  246 

In oriental discussions of the subject, that which survives death is not the personality. Buddhism accepts the doctrine of reincarnation; but it is not a soul that passes on (Buddhism denies the existence of a soul); it is the character.

'What we choose to make of our mental and physical constitution in the course of our life on earth affects the psychic medium within which individual minds lead a part at least of their amphibious existence, and this modification of the medium results, after the body's death, in the initiation of a new existence either in a heaven, or a purgatory, or another body.

In the Vedanta cosmology there is, over and above the Atman or spiritual Self, identical with the divine Ground, 

something in the nature of a soul that reincarnates in a gross or subtle body, or manifests itself in some incorporeal state. 

This soul is not the personality of the defunct, but rather the particularized I-consciousness out of which a personality arises.

Either one of these conceptions of survival is logically self-consistent and can be made to 'save the appearances'—in other words, to fit the odd and obscure facts of psychical research. 

The only personalities with which we have any direct acquaint­ance are incarnate beings, compounds Of a body and some un­known x. But if x plus a body equals a personality, then, obviously, it is impossible for x minus a body to equal the same thing. The apparently personal entities which psychical research sometimes seems to discover can only be regarded as temporary pseudo-personalities compounded of x and the medium's body.

These two conceptions are not mutually exclusive, and sur­vival may be the joint product of a persistent consciousness and a modification of the psychic medium. 

If this is so, it is possible for a given human being to survive in more than one posthumous form. 

His 'soul'—the non-personal ground and principle of past and future personalities—may go marching on in one mode of being, while the traces left by his thoughts and volitions in the psychic medium may become the origin of new individualized existences, having quite other modes of being.

Perennial Phil Ch 13 SALVATION, DELIVERANCE, ENLIGHTENMENT [9,4060]

Perennial Phil Ch 13 SALVATION, DELIVERANCE, ENLIGHTENMENT [9,4060]

SALVATION—but from what? 

Deliverance—out of which particular situation into what other situation? 

Men have given many answers to these questions, and because human temperaments are of such profoundly different kinds, because social situations are so various and fashions of thought and feeling so compelling while they last, the answers are many and mutually incompatible.

There is first of all material salvationism. In its simplest form this is merely the will to live expressing itself in a formu­lated desire to escape from circumstances that menace life. 

In practice, the effective fulfilment of such a wish depends on two things: the application of intelligence to particular economic and political problems, and the creation and maintenance of an atmosphere of goodwill, in which intelligence can do its work to the best advantage. 

But men are not content to be merely kind and clever within the limits of a concrete situation. They aspire to relate their actions, and the thoughts and feelings accompanying those actions, to general principles and a philo­sophy on the cosmic scale. 

When this directing and explana­tory philosophy is not the Perennial Philosophy or one of the historical theologies more or less closely connected with the Perennial Philosophy, it takes the form of a pseudo-religion, a system of organized idolatry. Thus, the simple wish not to starve, the well-founded conviction that it is very difficult to be good or wise or happy when one is desperately hungry, comes to be elaborated, under the influence of the metaphysic of Inevitable Progress, into prophetic Utopianism; the desire to escape from oppression and exploitation comes to be ex­plained and guided by a belief in apocalyptic revolutionism, combined, not always in theory, but invariably in practice, with the Moloch-worship of the nation as the highest of all goods. In all these cases salvation is regarded as a deliverance, by means of a variety of political and economic devices, out of the miseries and evils associated with bad material conditions into another set of future material conditions so much better than the present that, somehow or other, they will cause everybody to be perfectly happy, wise and virtuous. 230 231  

Officially promul­gated in all the totalitarian countries, whether of the right or the left, this confession of faith is still only semi-official in the nominally Christian world of capitalistic democracy, where it is drummed into the popular mind, not by the representatives of state or church, but by those most influential of popular moralists and philosophers, the writers of advertising copy (the only authors in all the history of literature whose works are read every day by every member of the population).

In the theologies of the various religions, salvation is also regarded as a deliverance out of folly, evil and misery into happiness, goodness and wisdom.

 But political and economic means are held to be subsidiary to the cultivation of personal holiness, to the acquiring of personal merit and to the main­tenance of personal faith in some divine principle or person having power, in one way or another, to forgive and sanctify the individual soul. 

Moreover, the end to be achieved is not regarded as existing in some Utopian future period, beginning, say, in the twenty-second century or perhaps even a little earlier, if our favourite politicians remain in power and make the right laws; the end exists 'in heaven.' 

This last phrase has two very different meanings. 

For what is probably the major­ity of those who profess the great historical religions, it signifies and has always signified a happy posthumous condition of indefinite personal survival, conceived of as a reward for good behaviour and correct belief and a compensation for the miseries inseparable from life in a body. 232 But for those who, within the various religious traditions, have accepted the Perennial Philo­sophy as a theory and have done their best to live it out in prac­tice, 'heaven' is something else. 

They aspire to be delivered out of separate selfhood in time and into eternity as realized in the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground. Since the Ground can and ought to be unitively known in the present life (whose ultimate end and purpose is nothing but this knowledge), 'heaven' is not an exclusively posthumous condition. 

He only is completely 'saved' who is delivered here and now. 

As to the means to salvation, these are simultaneously ethical, intel­lectual and spiritual and have been summed up with admirable clarity and economy in the Buddha's Eightfold Path. 

===

Com­plete deliverance is conditional on the following: 

1. first, Right Belief in the all too obvious truth that the cause of pain and evil is craving for separative, egocentred existence, with its corollary that there can be no deliverance from evil, whether personal or collective, except by getting rid of such craving and the obsession of 'I,' 'me,' 'mine'; 
2. second, Right Will, the will to deliver oneself and others; 
3. third, Right Speech, directed by compassion and charity towards all sentient beings; 
4. fourth, Right Action, with the aim of creating and maintaining peace and goodwill; 
5. fifth, Right Means of Livelihood, or the choice only of such professions as are not harmful, in their exercise, to any human being or, if possible, any living creature; 
6. sixth, Right Effort towards Self-control; 
7. seventh, Right Attention or Recollectedness, to be practised in all the circumstances of life, so that we may never do evil by mere thoughtlessness, because 'we know not what we do'; and, 
8. eighth, Right Con­templation, the unitive knowledge of the Ground, to which recollectedness and the ethical self-naughting prescribed in the first six branches of the Path give access. 

Such then are the means which it is within the power of the human being to employ in order to achieve man's final end and be 'saved.' 

Of the means which are employed by the divine Ground for help­ing human beings to reach their goal, the Buddha of the Pali scriptures (a teacher whose dislike of 'footless questions' is no less intense than that of the severest experimental physicist of the twentieth century) declines to speak. 

All he is prepared to talk about is 'sorrow [suffering?] and the ending of sorrow'—the huge brute fact of pain and evil and the other, no less empirical fact that there is a method by which the individual can free himself  from evil and do something to diminish the sum of evil in the world around him.  233 

It is only in Mahayana Buddhism that the mysterie& of grace are discussed with anything like the fullness of treatment accorded to the subject in the speculations of Hindu and especially Christian theology. 

The primitive, Hinayana teaching on deliverance is simply an elaboration of the Buddha's last recorded words:

 'Decay is inherent in all component things. Work out your own salvation with dili­gence.' As in the well-known passage quoted below, all the stress is upon personal effort.

Therefore, Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be ye a refuge to yourselves. Betake yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the Truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, Ananda, who either now or after I am dead shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, shall not look for refuge to anyone beside themselves--it is they who shall reach the very topmost Height. But they must be anxious to learn.

What follows is a passage freely translated from the Chan-dogya Upanishad. The truth which this little myth is meant to illustrate is that there are as many conceptions of salvation as there are degrees of spiritual knowledge and that the kind of liberation (or enslavement) actually achieved by any individual soul depends upon the extent to which that soul chooses to dissipate its essentially voluntary ignorance.

That Self who is free from impurities, from old age and death, from grief and thirst and hunger, whose desire is true and whose desires come true that Self is to be sought after and enquired about, that Self is to be realized.234

The Devas (gods or angels) and the Asuras (demons or titans) both heard of this Truth. They thought: 'Let us seek after and realize this Self, so that we can obtain all worlds and the fulfil­ment of all desires.'

Thereupon Indra from the Devas and Virochana from the Asuras approached Prajapati, the famous teacher. They lived with him as pupils for thirty-two years. Then Prajapati asked them: 'For what reason have you both lived here all this time?'

They replied: 'We have heard that one who realizes the Self obtains all the worlds and all his desires. We have lived here because we want to be taught the Self.'

Prajapati said to them: 'The person who is seen in the eye—that is the Self. That is immortal, that is fearless and that is Brahman.'

'Sir,' enquired the disciples, 'who is seen reflected in water or in a mirror?'

'He, the Atman,' was the reply. 'He indeed is seen in all these.' Then Prajapati added: 'Look at yourselves in the water, and whatever you do not understand, come and tell me.'

Indra and Virochana pored over their reflections in the water, and when they were asked what they had seen of the Self, they replied: 'Sir, we see the Self; we see even the hair and nails.'

Then Prajapati ordered them to put on their finest clothes and look again at their 'selves' in the water. This they did and when asked again what they had seen, they answered: 'We see the Self, exactly like ourselves, well adorned and in our finest clothes.'

Then said Prajapati: 'The Self is indeed seen in these. That Self is immortal and fearless, and that is Brahman.' And the pupils went away, pleased at heart.

But looking after them, Prajapati lamented thus: 'Both of them departed without analysing or discriminating, and without comprehending the true Self. Whoever follows this false doc­trine of the Self must perish.'

Satisfied that he had found the Self, Virochana returned to the Asuras and began to teach them that the bodily self alone is to be worshipped, that the body alone is to be served, and that he who worships the ego and serves the body gains both worlds, this and the next. And this in effect is the doctrine of the Asuras.23

But Indra, on his way back to the Devas, realized the useless­ness of this knowledge. 'As this Self,' he reflected, 'seems to be well adorned when the body is well adorned, well dressed when the body is well dressed, so too will it be blind if the body is blind, lame if the body is lame, deformed if the body is de­formed. Nay more, this same Self will die when the body dies. I see no good in such knowledge.' So Indra returned to Praja-pati for further instruction. Prajapati compelled him to live with him for another span of thirty-two years; after which he began to instruct him, step by step, as it were.

Prajapati said: 'He who moves about in dreams, enjoying and glorified—he is the Self. That is immortal and fearless, and that is Brahman.'

Pleased at heart, Indra again departed. But before he had rejoined the other angelic beings, he realized the uselessness of that knowledge also. 'True it is,' he thought within himself, 'that this new Self is not blind if the body is blind, not lame, nor hurt, if the body is lame or hurt. But even in dreams the Self is conscious of many sufferings. So I see no good in this teaching.'

Accordingly he went back to Prajapati for more instruction, and Prajapati made him live with him for thirty-two years more.

At the end of that time Prajapati taught him thus: 'When a per­son is asleep, resting in perfect tranquillity, dreaming no dreams, then he realizes the Self. That is immortal and fearless, and that is Brahman.'

Satisfied, Indra went away. But even before he had reached home, he felt the uselessness of this knowledge also. "When one is asleep,' he thought, 'one does not know oneself as "This is I." One is not in fact conscious of any existence. That state is almost annihilation. I see no good in this knowledge either.'

So Indra went back once again to be taught. Prajapati made him stay with him for five years more. At the end of that time Prajapati taught him

the highest truth of the Self.

===

'This body,' he said, 'is mortal, for ever in the clutch of death.

But within it resides the Self, immortal, and without form. 

This Self, when associated in consciousness with the body, is subject to pleasure and pain; and so long as this association continues, no man can find freedom from pains and pleasures.

But when the association comes to an end, there is an end also of pain and pleasure. Rising above physical consciousness, knowing the Self as distinct from the sense-organs and the mind, knowing Him in his true light, one rejoices and one is free.'

From the Chandogya Upanishad

Having realized his own self as the SeIf, a man becomes selfless; and in virtue of selflessness he is to be conceived as unconditioned. This is the highest mystery, betokening emancipation; through selflessness he has no part in pleasure or pain, but attains abso­luteness.

Maitrayana Upanishad

We should mark and know of a very truth that all manner of virtue and goodness, and even that Eternal Good, which is God Himself, can never make a man virtuous, good or happy so long as it is outside the soul, that is, so long as the man is holding con­verse with outward things through his senses and reason, and does not withdraw into himself and learn to understand his own life, who and what he is.

Theologia Germanica

Indeed, the saving truth has never been preached by the Buddha, seeing that one has to realize it within oneself.

Sutralamkara

In what does salvation consist? Not in any historic faith or know­ledge of anything absent or distant, not in any variety of restraints, rules and methods of practising virtue, not in any formality of opinion about faith and works, repentance, forgiveness of sins, or justification and sanctification, not in any truth or righteousness that you can have from yourself, from the best of men and books,

but solely and wholly from the life of God, or Christ of God,  quickened and born again in you,

in other words in the restoration and perfect union of the first twofold life in humanity.

William Law

Law is using here the phraseology of Boehme and those other 'Spiritual Reformers,' whom the orthodox Protestants, Lutheran, Calvinistic and Anglican, agreed (it was one of the very few points they were able to agree on) either to ignore or to persecute. 

But it is clear that what he and they call the new birth of God within the soul is essentially the same fact of experience as that which the Hindus, two thousand and more years before, described as the realization of the Self as within and yet transcendentally other than the individual ego.

Not by the slothful, nor the fool, the undisceming, is that Nir­vana to be reached, which is the untying of all knots.

Iti-vuttaka

This seems sufficiently self-evident. 

But most of us take pleasure in being lazy, cannot be bothered to be constantly recollected and yet passionately desire to be saved from the results of sloth and unawareness. 

Consequently there has been a widespread wish for and belief in Saviours who will step into our lives, above all at the hour of their termination, and, like Alexander, cut the Gordian knots which we have been too lazy to untie. But God is not mocked. 

The nature of things is such that the unitive knowledge of the Ground which is contingent upon the achievement of a total selflessness cannot possibly be realized, even with outside help, by those who are not yet selfless. 

The salvation obtained by belief in the saving power of Amida, say, or Jesus is not the total deliverance described in the Upanishads, the Buddhist scriptures and the writings of the Christian mystics. It is something 44T not merely in degree, but in kind.  238

Talk asmuch philosophy as you please, worship as many gods as you like, observe all ceremonies, sing devoted praises to any number of divine beings—liberation never comes, even at the end of a hundred aeons, without the realization of the Oneness of Self.

Shankara

This Self is not realizable by study nor even by intelligence and learning. The Self reveals its essence only to him who applies himself to the Self.

He who has not given up the ways of vice, who cannot control himself, who is not at peace within, whose mind is distracted, can never realize the Self, though full of all the learning in the world.

Katha Upanishad

Nirvana is where there is no birth, no extinction; it is seeing into the state of Suchness, absolutely transcending all the cate­gories constructed by mind; for it is the Tathagata's inner consciousness.

Lankavazara Sutra

The false or at best imperfect salvations described in the Chandogya Upanishad are of three kinds. 

1] There is first the pseudo-salvation associated with the belief that matter is the ultimate Reality. Virochana, the demonic being who is the apotheosis of power-loving, extraverted somatotonia, finds it perfectly natural to identify himself with his body, and he goes back to the other Titans to seek a purely material salvation. 

Incarnated in the present century, Virochana would have been an ardent Communist, Fascist or nationalist. Indra sees through material salvationism and is then offered dream-salvation, 

deliverance out of bodily existence into the inter­mediate world between matter and spirit—that fascinatingly odd and exciting psychic universe, out of which miracles and foreknowledge,' 

spirit communications' and extra-sensory per­ceptions make their startling irruptions into ordinary life. 

2] But this freer kind of individualized existence is still all too personal and egocentric to satisfy a soul conscious of its own incompleteness and eager to be made whole. Indra accordingly goes further and is tempted to accept the undifferentiated conscious­ness of deep sleep, of false samadhi and quietistic trance, as the final deliverance.239 But he refuses, in Brahmananda's words, to mistake tamas for sattvas, sloth and sub-consciousness for poise and super-consciousness. And so, by discrimination, he comes to the realization of the Self, which is the enlightenment of the darkness that is ignorance and the deliverance from the mortal consequences of that ignorance.

The illusory salvations, against which we are warned in the other extracts, are of a different kind. The emphasis here is upon idolatry and superstition—above all the idolatrous wor­ship of the analytical reason and its notions, and the super­stitious belief in rites, dogmas and confessions of faith as being somehow magically efficacious in themselves. 

Many Christians, as Law implies, have been guilty of these idolatries and super­stitions. For them, complete deliverance into union with the divine Ground is impossible, either in this world or posthu­mously. The best they can hope for is a meritorious but still egocentric life in the body and some sort of happy posthu­mous 'longevity,' as the Chinese call it, some form of survival, paradisal perhaps, but still involved in time, separateness and multiplicity.

3] The beatitude into which the enlightened soul is delivered is something quite different from pleasure. What, then, is its nature? The quotations which follow provide at least a partial answer. 

Blessedness depends on non-attachment and selfless­ness, therefore can be enjoyed without satiety and without revulsion; is a participation in eternity, and therefore remains itself without diminution or fluctuation.

Henceforth in the real Brahman, he (the liberated spirit) becomes perfected and another. His fruit is the untying of bonds. With­out desires, he attains to bliss eternal and immeasurable, and therein abides.

Maitrayana Upanishad

240

God is to be enjoyed, creatures only used as means to That which is to be enjoyed.

St. Augustine

There is this difference between spiritual and corporal pleasures, that corporal ones beget a desire before we have obtained them and, after we have obtained them, a disgust; but spiritual pleasures, on the contrary, are not cared for when we have them not, but are desired when we have them.

St. Gregory the Great

When a man is in one of these two states (beatitude or dark night of the soul) all is right with him, and he is as safe in hell as in heaven. And so long as a man is on earth, it is possible for him to pass often-times from the one to the other—nay, even within the space of a day and night, and all without his own doing. But when a man is in neither of these two states, he holds converse with the creatures, and wavereth hither and thither and knoweth not what manner of man he is.

Theologia Germanica

Much of the literature of Sufism is poetical. Sometimes this poetry is rather strained and extravagant, sometimes beautiful with a luminous simplicity, sometimes darkly and almost dis­quietingly enigmatic. To this last class belong the utterances of that Moslem saint of the tenth century, Niffari the Egyptian. This is what he wrote on the subject of salvation.

God made me behold the sea, and I saw the ships sinking and the planks floating; then the planks too were submerged. And God said to me, 'Those who voyage are not saved.' And He said to me, 'Those who, instead of voyaging, cast themselves into the sea, take a risk.' And He said to me, 'Those who voyage and take no risk shall perish.' And He said to me, 'The surface of the sea is a gleam that cannot be reached. And the bottom is a darkness impenetrable. And between the two are great fishes, which are to be feared.'   241

The allegory is fairly clear. 

The ships that bear the individual voyagers across the sea of life are sects and churches, collec­tions of dogmas and religious organizations. The planks which also sink at last are all good works falling short of total self-surrender and all faith less absolute than the unitive knowledge of God. 

Liberation into eternity is the result of 'throwing oneself into the sea'; in the language of the Gospels, one must lose one's life in order to save it. 

But throwing oneself into the sea is a risky business—not so risky, of course, as travelling in a vast Queen Mary, fitted up with the very latest in dog­matic conveniences and liturgical decorations, and bound either for Davy Jones's locker or at best, the wrong port, but still quite dangerous enough. 

For the surface of the sea—the divine Ground as it is manifested in the world of time and multiplicity—gleams with a reflected radiance that can no more be seized than the image of beauty in a mirror; 

while the bottom, the Ground as it is eternally in itself, seems merely darkness to the analytic mind, 

as it peers down into the depths; and when the analytic mind decides to join the will in the final necessary plunge into self-naughting it must run the gauntlet, as it sinks down, of those devouring pseudo-salvations de­scribed in the Chandogya Upanishad

—dream-salvation into that fascinating psychic world, where the ego still survives, but with a happier and more untrammelled kind of life, or else the sleep-salvation of false swnadki, of unity in sub-consciousness instead of unity in super-consciousness.

Niffari's estimate of any individual's chances of achieving man's final end does not err on the side of excessive optimism. But then no saint or founder of a religion, no exponent of the Perennial Philosophy, has ever been optimistic. 'Many are called, but few are chosen.' Those who do not choose to be chosen cannot hope for anything better than some form of partial salvation under conditions that will permit them to advance towards complete deliverance.

===============================================

'This body,' he said, 'is mortal, for ever in the clutch of death.

But within it resides the Self, immortal, and without form. 

This Self, when associated in consciousness with the body, is subject to pleasure and pain; and so long as this association continues, no man can find freedom from pains and pleasures.

But when the association comes to an end, there is an end also of pain and pleasure. Rising above physical consciousness, knowing the Self as distinct from the sense-organs and the mind, knowing Him in his true light, one rejoices and one is free.'

From the Chandogya Upanishad

---

Having realized his own self as the SeIf, a man becomes selfless; and in virtue of selflessness he is to be conceived as unconditioned. This is the highest mystery, betokening emancipation; through selflessness he has no part in pleasure or pain, but attains abso­luteness.

Maitrayana Upanishad

---

Indeed, the saving truth has never been preached by the Buddha, seeing that one has to realize it within oneself.

Sutralamkara

---

In what does salvation consist? Not in any historic faith or know­ledge of anything absent or distant, not in any variety of restraints, rules and methods of practising virtue, not in any formality of opinion about faith and works, repentance, forgiveness of sins, or justification and sanctification, not in any truth or righteousness that you can have from yourself, from the best of men and books,

but solely and wholly from the life of God, or Christ of God,  quickened and born again in you,

in other words in the restoration and perfect union of the first twofold life in humanity.

William Law

---
Law is using here the phraseology of Boehme and those other 'Spiritual Reformers,' whom the orthodox Protestants, Lutheran, Calvinistic and Anglican, agreed (it was one of the very few points they were able to agree on) either to ignore or to persecute. 

But it is clear that what he and they call the new birth of God within the soul is essentially the same fact of experience as that which the Hindus, two thousand and more years before, described as the realization of the Self as within and yet transcendentally other than the individual ego.
----

Not by the slothful, nor the fool, the undisceming, is that Nir­vana to be reached, which is the untying of all knots.

Iti-vuttaka

This seems sufficiently self-evident. 

But most of us take pleasure in being lazy, cannot be bothered to be constantly recollected and yet passionately desire to be saved from the results of sloth and unawareness. 

Consequently there has been a widespread wish for and belief in Saviours who will step into our lives, above all at the hour of their termination, and, like Alexander, cut the Gordian knots which we have been too lazy to untie. But God is not mocked. 

The nature of things is such that the unitive knowledge of the Ground which is contingent upon the achievement of a total selflessness cannot possibly be realized, even with outside help, by those who are not yet selfless. 

===

The salvation obtained by belief in the saving power of Amida, say, or Jesus is not the total deliverance described in the Upanishads, the Buddhist scriptures and the writings of the Christian mystics. It is something 44T not merely in degree, but in kind.  238

Talk asmuch philosophy as you please, worship as many gods as you like, observe all ceremonies, sing devoted praises to any number of divine beings—liberation never comes, even at the end of a hundred aeons, without the realization of the Oneness of Self.

Shankara

This Self is not realizable by study nor even by intelligence and learning. The Self reveals its essence only to him who applies himself to the Self.

He who has not given up the ways of vice, who cannot control himself, who is not at peace within, whose mind is distracted, can never realize the Self, though full of all the learning in the world.

Katha Upanishad

Nirvana is where there is no birth, no extinction; it is seeing into the state of Suchness, absolutely transcending all the cate­gories constructed by mind; for it is the Tathagata's inner consciousness.

Lankavazara Sutra

The false or at best imperfect salvations described in the Chandogya Upanishad are of three kinds. 

1] There is first the pseudo-salvation associated with the belief that matter is the ultimate Reality. Virochana, the demonic being who is the apotheosis of power-loving, extraverted somatotonia, finds it perfectly natural to identify himself with his body, and he goes back to the other Titans to seek a purely material salvation. 

Incarnated in the present century, Virochana would have been an ardent Communist, Fascist or nationalist. Indra sees through material salvationism and is then offered dream-salvation, 

deliverance out of bodily existence into the inter­mediate world between matter and spirit—that fascinatingly odd and exciting psychic universe, out of which miracles and foreknowledge,' 

spirit communications' and extra-sensory per­ceptions make their startling irruptions into ordinary life. 

2] But this freer kind of individualized existence is still all too personal and egocentric to satisfy a soul conscious of its own incompleteness and eager to be made whole. Indra accordingly goes further and is tempted to accept the undifferentiated conscious­ness of deep sleep, of false samadhi and quietistic trance, as the final deliverance.239 But he refuses, in Brahmananda's words, to mistake tamas for sattvas, sloth and sub-consciousness for poise and super-consciousness. And so, by discrimination, he comes to the realization of the Self, which is the enlightenment of the darkness that is ignorance and the deliverance from the mortal consequences of that ignorance.

The illusory salvations, against which we are warned in the other extracts, are of a different kind. The emphasis here is upon idolatry and superstition—above all the idolatrous wor­ship of the analytical reason and its notions, and the super­stitious belief in rites, dogmas and confessions of faith as being somehow magically efficacious in themselves. 

Many Christians, as Law implies, have been guilty of these idolatries and super­stitions. For them, complete deliverance into union with the divine Ground is impossible, either in this world or posthu­mously. The best they can hope for is a meritorious but still egocentric life in the body and some sort of happy posthu­mous 'longevity,' as the Chinese call it, some form of survival, paradisal perhaps, but still involved in time, separateness and multiplicity.

3] The beatitude into which the enlightened soul is delivered is something quite different from pleasure. What, then, is its nature? The quotations which follow provide at least a partial answer. 

Blessedness depends on non-attachment and selfless­ness, therefore can be enjoyed without satiety and without revulsion; is a participation in eternity, and therefore remains itself without diminution or fluctuation.

Henceforth in the real Brahman, he (the liberated spirit) becomes perfected and another. His fruit is the untying of bonds. With­out desires, he attains to bliss eternal and immeasurable, and therein abides.

Maitrayana Upanishad

240

God is to be enjoyed, creatures only used as means to That which is to be enjoyed.

St. Augustine

There is this difference between spiritual and corporal pleasures, that corporal ones beget a desire before we have obtained them and, after we have obtained them, a disgust; but spiritual pleasures, on the contrary, are not cared for when we have them not, but are desired when we have them.

St. Gregory the Great

When a man is in one of these two states (beatitude or dark night of the soul) all is right with him, and he is as safe in hell as in heaven. And so long as a man is on earth, it is possible for him to pass often-times from the one to the other—nay, even within the space of a day and night, and all without his own doing. But when a man is in neither of these two states, he holds converse with the creatures, and wavereth hither and thither and knoweth not what manner of man he is.

Theologia Germanica

Much of the literature of Sufism is poetical. Sometimes this poetry is rather strained and extravagant, sometimes beautiful with a luminous simplicity, sometimes darkly and almost dis­quietingly enigmatic. To this last class belong the utterances of that Moslem saint of the tenth century, Niffari the Egyptian. This is what he wrote on the subject of salvation.

God made me behold the sea, and I saw the ships sinking and the planks floating; then the planks too were submerged. And God said to me, 'Those who voyage are not saved.' And He said to me, 'Those who, instead of voyaging, cast themselves into the sea, take a risk.' And He said to me, 'Those who voyage and take no risk shall perish.' And He said to me, 'The surface of the sea is a gleam that cannot be reached. And the bottom is a darkness impenetrable. And between the two are great fishes, which are to be feared.'   241

The allegory is fairly clear. 

The ships that bear the individual voyagers across the sea of life are sects and churches, collec­tions of dogmas and religious organizations. The planks which also sink at last are all good works falling short of total self-surrender and all faith less absolute than the unitive knowledge of God. 

Liberation into eternity is the result of 'throwing oneself into the sea'; in the language of the Gospels, one must lose one's life in order to save it. 

But throwing oneself into the sea is a risky business—not so risky, of course, as travelling in a vast Queen Mary, fitted up with the very latest in dog­matic conveniences and liturgical decorations, and bound either for Davy Jones's locker or at best, the wrong port, but still quite dangerous enough. 

For the surface of the sea—the divine Ground as it is manifested in the world of time and multiplicity—gleams with a reflected radiance that can no more be seized than the image of beauty in a mirror; 

while the bottom, the Ground as it is eternally in itself, seems merely darkness to the analytic mind, 

as it peers down into the depths; and when the analytic mind decides to join the will in the final necessary plunge into self-naughting it must run the gauntlet, as it sinks down, of those devouring pseudo-salvations de­scribed in the Chandogya Upanishad

—dream-salvation into that fascinating psychic world, where the ego still survives, but with a happier and more untrammelled kind of life, or else the sleep-salvation of false swnadki, of unity in sub-consciousness instead of unity in super-consciousness.

Niffari's estimate of any individual's chances of achieving man's final end does not err on the side of excessive optimism. But then no saint or founder of a religion, no exponent of the Perennial Philosophy, has ever been optimistic. 'Many are called, but few are chosen.' Those who do not choose to be chosen cannot hope for anything better than some form of partial salvation under conditions that will permit them to advance towards complete deliverance.

9

Perennial Phil Ch 12 TIME AND ETERNITY [11,6279] God, Providence; Fate, eternity-philosophy, the Quakers

Perennial Phil Ch 12 TIME AND ETERNITY [11,6279]

THE universe is an everlasting succession of events; but its ground, according to the Perennial Philosophy, is the time­less now of the divine Spirit. 

A classical statement of the relationship between time and eternity may be found in the later chapters of the Consolations of Philosophy, where Boethius summarizes the conceptions of his predecessors, notably of Plotinus.

It is one thing to be carried through an endless life, another thing to embrace the whole presence of an endless life together, which is manifestly proper to the divine Mind.
The temporal world seems to emulate in part that which it can­not fully obtain or express, tying itself to whatever presence there is in this exiguous and fleeting moment—a presence which, since it carries a certain image of that abiding Presence, gives to what­ever may partake of it the quality of seeming to have being. But because it could not stay, it undertook an infinite journey of time; and so it came to pass that, by going, it continued that life, whose plenitude it could not comprehend by staying.

Boethius

Since God hadi always an eternal and present state, His know­ledge, surpassing time's notions, remaineth in the simplicity of His presence and, comprehending the infinite of what is past and to come, considereth all things as though they were in the act of being accomplished.

Boethius

Knowledge of what is happening now does not determine the event. What is ordinarily called God's foreknowledge is in reality a timeless now-knowledge, which is compatible with the freedom of the human creature's will in time.

212  213

The manifest world and whatever is moved in any sort take their causes, order and forms from the stability of the divine Mind. This hath determined manifold ways for doing things; which ways being considered in the purity of God's understanding are named Providence; but being referred to those things which He moveth and disposeth are called Fate.... Providence is the very divine Reason itself, which disposeth all things. But Fate is a disposition inherent in changeable things, by which Providence connecteth all things in their due order.

For Providence equally embraceth all things together, though diverse, though infinite; but Fate puts into motion all things, distributed by places, forms and times; so that the unfolding of the temporal order, being united in the foresight of the divine Mind, is Providence, and the same uniting, being digested and unfolded in time, is called Fate.
As a workman conceiving the form of anything in his mind, taketh his work in hand and executeth by order of time that which he had simply and in a moment foreseen, so God by his Provi­dence disposeth whatever is to be done with simplicity and stabil­ity, and by Fate effecteth by manifold ways and in the order of time those very things which He disposeth. . . . All that is under Fate is also subject to Providence. But some things which are under Providence are above the course of Fate. For they are those things which, being stably fixed in virtue of their nearness to the first divinity, exceed the order of Fate's mobility.

Boethius

The concept of a clock enfolds all succession in time. In the con­cept the sixth hour is not earlier than the seventh or eighth, although the clock never strikes the hour, save when the concept biddeth.

Nicholas of Cusa

From Hobbes onwards, the enemies of the Perennial Philo­sophy have denied the existence of an eternal now. According to these thinkers, time and change are fundamental; there is no other reality. Moreover, future events are completely inde­terminate, and even God can have no knowledge of them.

214  

Consequently God cannot be described as Alpha and Omega-­merely as Alpha and Lambda, or whatever other intermediate letter of the temporal alphabet is now in process of being spelled out. But the anecdotal evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research and the statistical evidence accumulated during many thousands of laboratory tests for extra-sensory perception point inescapably to the conclusion that even human minds are capable of foreknowledge. And if a finite conscious­ness can know what card is going to be turned up three seconds from now, or what shipwreck is going to take place next week, then there is nothing impossible or even intrinsically improb­able in the idea of an infinite consciousness that can know now events indefinitely remote in what, for us, is future time. The 'specious present' in which human beings live may be, and perhaps always is, something more than a brief section of tran­sition from known past to unknown future, regarded, because of the vividness of memory, as the instant we call 'now'; it may and perhaps always does contain a portion of the immedi­ate and even of the relatively distant future. For the Godhead, the specious present may be precisely that interminabiis vitae tota simul et perpetua possessio,the end of all life together and everlasting possession , of which Boethius speaks.

The existence of the eternal now is sometimes denied on the ground that a temporal order cannot co-exist with another order which is non-temporal; and that it is impossible for a changing substance to be united with a changeless substance. This objection, it is obvious, would be valid if the non-temporal order were of a mechanical nature, or if the changeless sub­stance were possessed of spatial and material qualities. But according to the Perennial Philosophy, the eternal now is a consciousness; the divine Ground is spirit; the being of Brahman is chit, or knowledge. That a temporal world should be known and, in being known, sustained and perpetually created by an eternal consciousness is an idea which contains nothing self-contradictory. 215

Finally we come to the arguments directed against those who have asserted that the eternal Ground can be unitively known by human minds. 

This claim is regarded as absurd because it involves the assertion, 'At one time I am eternal, at another time I am in time.' 

But this statement is absurd only if man is a being of a twofold nature, capable of living on only one level. 

But if, as the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy have always maintained, man is not only a body and a psyche, but also a spirit, 

and if he can at will live either on the merely human plane or else in harmony and even in union with the divine Ground of his being, then the statement makes perfectly good sense. 

The body is always in time, the spirit is always timeless and the psyche is an amphibious creature compelled by the laws of man's being to associate itself to some extent with its body, but capable, if it so desires, of experiencing and being identified with its spirit and, through its spirit, with the divine Ground. 

The spirit remains always what it eternally is; but man is so constituted that his psyche cannot always remain identified with the spirit. In the statement, 'At one time I am eternal, at another time I am in time,' the word 'I' stands for the psyche, which passes from time to eternity when it is identified with the spirit and passes again from eternity to time, either voluntarily or by involuntary necessity, when it chooses or is compelled to identify itself with the body.
==

• 'The Sufi,' says Jalal-uddin Rumi, 'is the son of time present.' Spiritual progress is a spiral advance. 
• We start as infants in the animal eternity of life in the moment, without anxiety for the future or regret for the past; 
• we grow up into the specifically human condition of those who look before and after, who live to a great extent, not in the present but in memory and anticipation, not spontaneously but by rule and with prudence, in repentance and fear and hope; 
• and we can continue, if we so desire, up and on in a returning sweep towards a point corresponding to our starting place in animality, but incommensurably above it.

==

• Jalal-uddin Rumi는 '수피 족은 현재의 시간의 아들'이라고 말합니다. 영적 진보는 나선형 전진입니다. 
• 우리는 미래에 대한 불안이나 과거에 대한 후회 없이 순간이라는 동물적 영원 속에서 유아로 시작합니다. 
• 우리는 현재가 아니라 기억과 기대 속에서, 자발적으로가 아니라 규칙에 따라 신중하게, 회개와 두려움과 희망 속에서 크게 사는 사람들의 특별한 인간적 조건으로 성장합니다. 
• 그리고 우리는 우리가 원한다면 동물성에서 우리의 출발점에 해당하지만 비교할 수 없을 정도로 그 위에 있는 지점을 향해 계속해서 되돌아갈 수 있습니다.

==

 Once more life is lived in the moment—the life now, not of a sub-human creature, but of a being in whom charity has cast out fear, vision has taken the place of hope, selflessness has put a stop to the posi­tive egotism of complacent reminiscence and the negative egotism of remorse. 

The present moment is the only aperture  through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which charity can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time. 

That is why the Sufi and, along with him, every other practising exponent of the Perennial Philo­sophy is, or tries to be, a son of time present.216  

Past and future veil God from our sight;
Burn up both of them with fire. How long
Wilt thou be partitioned by these segments, like a reed?

So long as a reed is partitioned, it is not privy to secrets, Nor is it vocal in response to lip and breathing.

Jalal-uddin Rumi

This emptying of the memory, though the advantages of it are not so great as those of the state of union, yet merely because it delivers souls from much sorrow, grief and sadness, besides im­perfections and sins, is in reality a great good.

Sr. John of the Cross

In the idealistic cosmology of Mahayana Buddhism memory plays the part of a rather maleficent demiurge. 

'When the triple world is surveyed by the Bodhisattva, he perceives that its existence is due to memory that has been accumulated since the beginningless past, but wrongly interpreted' (Lankavatara Sutra). 

The word here translated as 'memory' means literally 'perfuming.' The mind-body carries with it the ineradicable smell of all that has been thought and done, desired and felt, throughout its racial and personal past. The Chinese translate the Sanskrit term by two symbols, signifying 'habit-energy.' The world is what (in our eyes) it is, because of all the con­sciously or unconsciously and physiologically remembered habits formed by our ancestors or by ourselves, either in our present life or in previous existences. These remembered bad habits cause us to believe that multiplicity is the sole reality and that the idea of 'I,' 'me,' 'mine' represents the ultimate truth. 

Nirvana consists in 'seeing into the abode of reality as  it is and not reality quoad nos, as it seems to us.217 Obviously, this cannot be achieved so long as there is an 'us,' to which reality can be relative. 

Hence the need, stressed by every exponent of the Perennial Philosophy, for mortification, for dying to self. And this must be a mortification not only of the appetites, the feelings and the will, but also of the reasoning powers, of consciousness itself and of that which makes our consciousness what it is—our personal memory and our in­herited habit-energies. To achieve complete deliverance, con­version from sin is not enough; there must also be a conversion of the mind, aparawitti, as the Mahayanists call it, or revulsion in the very depths of consciousness. As the result of this revulsion, the habit-energies of accumulated memory are de­stroyed and, along with them, the sense of being a separate ego. Reality is no longer perceived quoad nos (for the good reason that there is no longer a nos to perceive it), but as it is in itself. In Blake's words, 'If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would be seen as it is, infinite.' By those who are pure in heart and poor in spirit, sarnsara and nirvana, appear­ance and reality, time and eternity are experienced as one and the same.

Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time. And not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections; not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.

Eckhart

Rejoice in God all the time, says St. Paul. He rejoices all the time who rejoices above time and free from time. Three things prevent a man from knowing God. The first is time, the second is corporeality, the third is multiplicity. That God may come in, these things must go out—except thou have them in a higher, better way: multitude summed up to one in thee.

Eckhart

218 
Whenever God is thought of as being wholly in time, there is a tendency to regard Him as a 'numinous' rather than a moral being, 

a God of mere unmitigated Power rather than a God of Power, Wisdom and Love, 

an inscrutable and danger­ous potentate to be propitiated by sacrifices, 

not a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit. 

All this is only natural; for time is a perpetual perishing and a God who is wholly in time is a God who destroys as fast as He creates. 

Nature is as incompre­hensibly appalling as it is lovely and bountiful. 

If the Divine does not transcend the temporal order in which it is immanent, and if the human spirit does not transcend its time-bound soul, then there is no possibility of 'justifying the ways of God to man.' 

God as manifested in the universe is the irresistible Being who speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, and 

whose emblems are Behemoth and Leviathan, the war horse and the eagle. 

It is this same Being who is described in the apocalyptic eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita. '0 Supreme Spirit,' says Arjuna, addressing himself to the Krishna whom he now knows to be the incarnation of the Godhead, 

'I long to see your Isvara-form'—that is to say, his form as God of the world, Nature, the temporal order. 

Krishna answers, 'You shall behold the whole universe, with all things animate and inanimate, within this body of mine.' Arjuna's reaction to the revelation is one of amazement and fear.  

Ah, my God, I see all gods within your body;

Each in his degree, the multitude of creatures;

See Lord Brahma seated upon his lotus,

See all the sages and the holy serpents.
Universal Form, I see you without limit,

Infinite of eyes, arms, mouths and bellies

—See, and find no end, midst or beginning.

There follows a long passage, enlarging on the omnipotence and all-comprehensiveness of God in his Isvara-form. 

Then the quality of the vision changes, 

and Arjuna realizes, with fear and trembling, 

that the God of the universe is a God of destruction as well as of creation.219

Now with frightful tusks your mouths are gnashing, Flaring like the fires of Doomsday morning—North, south, east and west seem all confounded—Lord of devas, world's abode, have mercy!...

Swift as many rivers streaming to the ocean, Rush the heroes to your fiery gullets, Moth-like to meet the flame of their destruction. Headlong these plunge into you and perish.

Tell me who you are, and were from the beginning,
You of aspect grim. 0 God of gods, be gracious.
Take my homage, Lord. From me your ways are hidden.

'Tell roe who you are.' The answer is clear and unequivocal.

I am come as Time, the waster of the peoples, Ready for the hour that ripens to their ruin.

But the God who comes so terribly as Time also exists time­lessly as the Godhead, as Brahman, whose essence is Sat, Chit, Ananda, Being, Awareness, Bliss; 

and within and beyond man's time-tortured psyche is his spirit, 'uncreated and uncreatable,' as Eckhart says, the Atman which is akin to or even identical with Brahman. 

The Gita, like all other formulations of the Perennial Philosophy, justifies God's ways to man by affirming —and the affirmation is based upon observation and immediate experience that man can, if he so desires, die to his separate temporal selfness and so come to union with timeless Spirit. 

It affirms, too, that the Avatar becomes incarnate in order to assist human beings to achieve this union. 

This he does in three ways—

• by teaching the true doctrine in a world blinded by voluntary ignorance; 
• by inviting souls to a 'carnal love' of his humanity, not indeed as an end in itself, but as the means to spiritual love-knowledge of Spirit; and 
• finally by serving as a channel of grace.220 

God who is Spirit can only be worshipped in spirit and for his own sake; 

but God in time is normally worshipped by material means with a view to achieving temporal ends. 

God. in time is manifestly the destroyer as well as the creator; and because this is so, it has seemed proper to worship him by methods which are as terrible as the destructions he himself inflicts. 

Hence, in India, the blood sacrifices to Kali, in her aspect as Nature-the-Destroyer; hence those offerings of chil­dren to 'the Moloclis,' denounced by the Hebrew prophets; hence the human sacrifices practised, for example, by the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Druids, the Aztecs. 

In all such cases the divinity addressed was a god in time, or a per­sonification of Nature, which is nothing else but Time itself; the devourer of its own offspring; and in all cases the purpose of the rite was to obtain a future benefit or to avoid one of the enormous evils which Time and Nature for ever hold in store. 

For this it was thought to be worth while to pay a high price in that currency of suffering, which the Destroyer so evidently valued. The importance of the temporal end justified the use of means that were intrinsically terrible, because intrin­sically time-like. 

Sublimated traces of these ancient patterns of thought and behaviour are still to be found in certain theories of the Atonement, and in the conception of the Mass as a perpetually repeated sacrifice of the God-Man.

In the modern world the gods to whom human sacrifice is offered are personifications, not of Nature, but of man's own, home-made political ideals.

These, of course, all refer to events in time—actual events in the past or the present, fancied events in the future. And here it should be noted that the philosophy which affirms the existence and the immediate realizableness of eternity is related to one kind of political theory and practice; 

the philosophy which affirms that what goes on in time is the only reality, results in a different kind of theory and justifies quite another kind of political practice. 

This has been clearly recognized by Marxist writers,' who point out that when Christianity is mainly preoccupied with events in time, it is a 'revolutionary religion,' and that 

when, under mystical influences, it stresses the Eternal Gospel, of which the historical or pseudo-historical facts recorded in Scripture 

are but symbols, it becomes politically 'static' and 'reactionary.'221

This Marxjan account of the matter is somewhat over­simplified. It is not quite true to say that all theologies and philosophies whose primary concern is with time, rather than eternity, are necessarily revolutionary. 

The aim of all revolu­tions is to make the future radically different from and better than the past. But some time-obsessed philosophies are primarily concerned with the past, not the future, and their politics are entirely a matter of preserving or restoring the status quo and getting back to the good old days. 

But the retrospective time-worshippers have one thing in common with the revolutionary devotees of the bigger and better future; 

they are prepared to use unlimited violence to achieve their ends. It is here that we discover the essential difference between the politics of eternity-philosophers and the politics of time-philosophers. 

For the latter, the ultimate good is to be found in the temporal world—in a future, where everyone will be happy because all are doing and, thinking something either entirely new and unprecedented or, alternatively, some­thing old, traditional and hallowed. 

And because the ultimate good lies in time, they feel justified in making use of any temporal means for achieving it. 

The Inquisition burns and tortures in order to perpetuate a creed, a ritual and an ecclesi-astico-politico-financial organization regarded as necessary to men's eternal salvation. 

Bible-worshipping Protestants fighit long and savage wars, in order to make the world safe for what they fondly imagine to be the genuinely antique Christianity of apostolic times. 

Jacobins and Bolsheviks are ready to sacri­fice millions of human lives for the sake of a political and economic future gorgeously unlike the present. 

* See, for example, Professor J. B. S. Haldane's The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences.

222 

And now all Europe and most of Asia has had to be sacrificed to a crystal-gazer's vision of perpetual Co-Prosperity and the Thousand-Year Reich. From the records of history it seems to be abund­antly clear that most of the religions and philosophies which take time too seriously are correlated with political theories that inculcate and justify the use of large-scale violence. The only exceptions are those simple Epicurean faiths, in which the reac­tion to an all too real time is 'Eat, drink and be merry, for to­morrow we die.' This is not a very noble, nor even a very realistic kind of morality. But it seems to make a good deal more sense than the revolutionary ethic: 'Die (and kill), for tomorrow someone else will eat, drink and be merry.' In practice, of course, the prospect even of somebody else's future merriment is extremely precarious. For the process of whole­sale dying and killing creates material, social and psychological conditions that practically guarantee the revolution against the achievement of its beneficent ends.

For those whose philosophy does not compel them to take time with an excessive seriousness the ultimate good is to be sought neither in the revolutionary's progressive social apoca­lypse, nor in the reactionary's revived and perpetuated past, but in an eternal divine now which those who sufficiently desire this good can realize as a fact of immediate experience. 

The mere act of dying is not in itself a passport to eternity; 

nor can wholesale killing do anything to bring deliverance either to the slayers or the slain or their posterity. 

The peace that passes all understanding is the fruit of liberation into eternity; 

but in its ordinary everyday form peace is also the root of liberation. 

For where there are violent passions and compelling distrac­tions, this ultimate good can never be realized. That is one of the reasons why the policy correlated with eternity-philosophies is tolerant and non-violent. 

The other reason is that the eter­nity, whose realization is the ultimate good, is a kingdom of heaven within. 

Thou art That; and though That is immortal and impassible, the killing and torturing of individual 'thous' is a matter of cosmic significance, inasmuch as it interferes with the normal and natural relationship between individual souls and the divine eternal Ground of all being. 

Every violence is, over and above everything else, a sacrilegious rebellion against the divine order.  223
===
Passing now from theory to historical fact, we find that the religions, whose theology has been least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently the least violent and the most humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Moham­medanism (all of them obsessed with time), Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism, which has gone hand in hand with the political and economic oppression of the coloured peoples. 

For four hundred years, from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, most of the Chris­tian nations of Europe have spent a good part of their time and energy in attacking, conquering and exploiting their non-Christian neighbours in other continents. In the course of these centuries many individual churchmen did their best to mitigate the consequences of such iniquities; but none of the major Christian churches officially condemned them. 

The first collective protest against the slave system, introduced by the English and the Spaniards into the New World, was made in 1688 by the Quaker Meeting of Germantown. This fact is highly significant.

 Of all Christian sects in the seventeenth century, the Quakers were the least obsessed with history, the least addicted to the idolatry of things in time. They believed that the inner light was in all human beings and that salvation came to those who lived in conformity with that light and was not dependent on the profession of belief in historical or pseudo-historical events, nor on the performance of certain rites, nor on the support of a particular ecclesiastical organiza­tion. Moreover, their eternity-philosophy preserved them from the materialistic apocalypticism of that progress-worship which in recent times has justified every kind of iniquity from war and revolution to sweated labour, slavery and the exploitation of savages and children—has justified them on the ground that the supreme good is in future time and that any temporal means, however intrinsically horrible, may be used to achieve that good. 

Because Quaker theology was a form of eternity-philosophy, Quaker political theory rejected war and persecu­tion as means to ideal ends, denounced slavery and proclaimed racial equality. Members of other denominations had done good work for the African victims of the white man's rapacity. 

===

One thinks, for example, of St. Peter Claver at Cartagena. But this heroically charitable 'slave of the slaves' never raised his voice against the institution of slavery or the criminal trade by which it was sustained; nor, so far as the extant documents reveal, did he ever, like John Woolman, attempt to persuade the slave-owners to free their human chattels. The reason, presumably, was that Claver was a Jesuit, vowed to perfect obedience and constrained by his theology to regard a certain political and ecclesiastical organization as being the mystical body of Christ. The heads of this organization had not pro­nounced against slavery or the slave trade. Who was he, Pedro Claver, to express a thought not officially approved by his superiors?

===

Another practical corollary of the great historical eternity-philosophies, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, is a morality inculcating kindness to animals. Judaism and orthodox Chris­tianity taught that animals might be used as things, for the realization of man's temporal ends. Even St. Francis' attitude towards the brute creation was not entirely unequivocal. True, he converted a wolf and preached sermons to birds; but when Brother Juniper hacked the feet off a living pig in order to satisfy a sick man's craving for fried trotters, the saint merely blamed his disciple's intemperate zeal in damaging a valuable piece of private property.

It was not until the nineteenth cen­tury, when orthodox Christianity had lost much of its power over European minds, that the idea that it might be a good thing to behave humanely towards animals began to make headway. 

This new morality was correlated with the new interest in Nature, which had been stimulated by the romantic poets and the men of science. Because it was not founded upon an eternity-philosophy, a doctrine of divinity dwelling in all living creatures, the modern movement in favour of kindness to animals was and is perfectly compatible with intolerance, persecution and systematic cruelty towards human beings. Young Nazis are taught to be gentle with dogs and cats, ruth­less with Jews. That is because Nazism is a typical time-philosophy, which regards the ultimate good as existing, not in eternity, but in the future. Jews are, ex kypot/zesi, obstacles in the way of the realization of the supreme good; dogs and cats are not. The rest follows logically. 225

Selfishness and partiality are very inhuman and base qualities even in the things of this world; but in the doctrines of religion they are of a baser nature. Now, this is the greatest evil that the division of the church has brought forth; it raises in every com­munion a selfish, partial orthodoxy, which consists in courage­ously defending all that it has, and condemning all that it has not.         

And thus every champion is trained up in defence of their own truth, their own learning and their own church, and he has the most merit, the most honour, who likes everything, defends everything, among themselves, and leaves nothing uncensored in those that are of a different communion.

Now, how can truth and goodness and union and religion be more struck at than by such defenders of it? If you ask why the great Bishop of Meaux wrote so many learned books against all parts of the Reformation, it is because he was born in France and bred up in the bosom of Mother Church. Had he been born in England, had Oxford or Cambridge been his Alma Mater, he might have rivalled our great Bishop Stillingfleet, and would have wrote as many learned folios against the Church of Rome as he has done.

- And yet I will venture to say that if each Church could produce but one man apiece that had the piety of an apostle and the impartial love of the first Christians in the first Church at Jerusalem, that a Pro­testant and a Papist of this stamp would not want half a sheet of paper to hold their articles of union, nor be half an hour before they were of one religion.

- If, therefore, it should be said that churches are divided, estranged and made unfriendly to one another by a learning, a logic, a history, a criticism in the hands of partiality, it would be saying that which each particular church too much proves to be true.

- Ask wily even the best amongst the Catholics are very shy of owning the validity of the orders of our Church; it is because they are afraid of removing any odium from the Reformation.

- Ask why no Protestants anywhere touch upon the benefit or necessity of celibacy in those who are separ­ated from worldly business to preach the gospel; it is because that would be seeming to lessen the Roman error of not suffering marriage in her clergy.

- Ask why even the most worthy and pious among the clergy of the Established Church are afraid to assert the sufficiency of the Divine Light, the necessity of seeking only the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit; it is because the Quakers, who have broke off from the church, have made this doctrine their corner-stone. If we loved truth as such, if we sought for it for its own sake, if we loved our neighbour as our­selves, if we desired nothing by our religion but to be acceptable to God, if we equally desired the salvation of all men, if we were afraid of error only because of its harmful nature to us and our fellow-creatures, then nothing of this spirit could have any place in us.

There is therefore a catholic spirit, a communion of saints in the love of God and all goodness, which no one can learn from that which is called orthodoxy in particular churches, but is only to be had by a total dying to all worldly views, by a pure love of God, and by such an unction from above as delivers the mind from all selfishness and makes it love truth and goodness with an equality of affection in every man, whether he is Christian, Jew or Gentile.

- He that would obtain this divine and catholic spirit in this disordered, divided state of things, and live in a divided part of the church without partaking of its division, must have these three truths deeply fixed in his mind.

First, that universal love, which gives the whole strength of the heart to God, and makes us love every man as we love ourselves, is the noblest, the most divine, the Godlike state of the soul, and is the utmost per­fection to which the most perfect religion can raise us; and that no religion does any man any good but so far as it brings this per‑fection of love into him. This truth will show us that true ortho­doxy can nowhere be found but in a pure disinterested love of God and our neighbour.

Second, that in this present divided state of the church, truth itself is torn and divided asunder; and that, therefore, he can be the only true catholic who has more of truth and less of error than is hedged in by any divided part. This truth will enable us to live in a divided part unhurt by its division, and keep us in a true liberty and fitness to be edified and assisted by all the good that we hear or see in any other part of the church.

Thirdly, he must always have in mind this great truth, that it is the glory of the Divine Justice to have no respect of parties or persons, but to stand equally disposed to that which is right and wrong as well in the Jew as in the Gentile. He therefore that would like as God likes, and condemn as God condemns, must have neither the eyes of the Papist nor the Protestant; he must like no truth the less because Ignatius Loyola or John Bunyan were very zealous for it, nor have the less aversion to any error, because Dr. Trapp or George Fox had brought it forth.

William Law

Dr. Trapp was the author of a religious tract entitled 'On the Nature, Folly, Sin and Danger of Being Righteous Overmuch.' One of Law's controversial pieces was an answer to this work.

Benares is to the East, Mecca to the West; but explore your own heart, for there are both Rama and Allah.

Kabir

Like the bee gathering honey from different flowers, the wise man accepts the essence of different Scriptures and sees only the good in all religions.

From the Srimad Bhagavatam

228 

His Sacred Majesty the King does reverence to men of all sects, whether ascetics or householders, by gifts and various forms of reverence. His Sacred Majesty, however, cares not so much for gifts or external reverence as that there should be a growth in the essence of the matter in all sects.

The growth of the essence of the matter assumes various forms, but the root of it is restraint of speech, to wit, a man must not do reverence to his own sect or disparage that of another without reason. Depreciation should be for specific reasons only; for the sects of other people all deserve reverence for one reason or another.... He who does reverence to his own sect, while disparaging the sects of others wholly from attachment to his own, with intent to enhance the glory of his own sect, in reality by such conduct inflicts the severest injury on his own sect. Concord therefore is meritorious, to wit, hearkening and hearkening willingly to the Law of Piety, as accepted by other people.

Edict of Asoka

It would be difficult, alas, to find any edict of a Christian king to match Asoka's. In the West the good old rule, the simple plan, was glorification of one's own sect, disparagement and even persecution of all others. Recently, however, govern­ments have changed their policy. Proselytizing and persecut­ing zeal is reserved for the political pseudo-religions, such as Communism, Fascism and nationalism; and unless they are thought to stand in the way of advance towards the temporal ends professed by such pseudo-religions, the various mani­festations of the Perennial Philosophy are treated with a contemptuously tolerant indifference.

The children of God are very dear but very queer, very nice but very narrow.

Sadiu Sundar Singh

Such was the conclusion to which the most celebrated of Indian converts was forced after some years of association with his fellow Christians. There are many honourable exceptions, of course; but the rule even among learned Protestants and Catholics is a certain blandly bumptious provincialism which, if it did not constitute such a grave offence against charity and truth, would be just uproariously funny.  229

A hundred years ago, hardly anything was known of Sanskrit, Pali or Chinese. The ignorance of European scholars was sufficient reason for their provincialism. Today, when more or less adequate trans­lations are available in plenty, there is not only no reason for it, there is no excuse. And yet most European and American authors of books about religion and metaphysics write as though nobody had ever thought about these subjects, except the Jews, the Greeks and the Christians of the Mediterranean basin and western Europe. This display of what, in the twen­tieth century, is an entirely voluntary and deliberate ignorance is not only absurd and discreditable; it is also socially danger­ous. Like any other form of imperialism, theological imperial­ism is a menace to permanent world peace. The reign of violence will never come to an end until, 

• first, most human beings accept the same, true philosophy of life; until, 
• second, this Perennial Philosophy is recognized as the highest factor common to all the world religions; until, 
• third, the adherents of every religion renounce the idolatrous time-philosophies, with which, in their own particular faith, the Perennial Philo­sophy of eternity has been overlaid; until, 
• fourth, there is a world-wide rejection of all the political pseudo-religions, which place man's supreme good in future time and therefore justify and commend the commission of every sort of present iniquity as a means to that end. 

If these conditions are not fulfilled, no amount of political planning, no economic blue-prints however ingeniously drawn, can prevent the recrudescence of war and revolution.