Perennial Phil Ch 19 GOD IS NOT MOCKED [4,1912]

Perennial Phil Ch 19 GOD IS NOT MOCKED [4,1912]

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A quick summary:

0] Meaning of the Title: "GOD IS NOT MOCKED": 

It is easy for us as believers to point the finger at those outside the church who mock God. But the most subtle mockery of God, and the most dangerous, comes from those of us sitting in church. 

We are guilty of mockery when we behave with an outward show of spirituality or godliness without an inward engagement or change of heart.

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Why hast thou said, 'I have sinned so much,
And God in His mercy has not punished my sins'?
How many times do I smite thee, and thou knowest not!
Thou art bound in my chains from head to foot.
On thy heart is rust on rust collected
So that thou art blind to divine mysteries.
When a man is stubborn and follows evil practices,
He casts dust in the eyes of his discernment.
Old shame for sin and calling on God quit him;
Dust five layers deep settles on his mirror,
Rust spots begin to gnaw his iron,
The colour of his jewel grows less and less.

Jalal-uddin Rumi

IF there is freedom (and even Determinists consistently act as if they were certain of it) and 

if (as everyone who has qualified himself to talk about the subject has always been con­vinced) there is a spiritual Reality, which it is the final end and purpose of consciousness to know; 

then all life is in the nature of an intelligence test, and 

the higher the level of awareness and the greater the potentialities of the creature, the more searchingly difficult will be the questions asked. 

For, in Bagehot's words, 

'we could not be what we ought to be, 

if we lived in the sort of universe 

    we should expect. . .

• A latent Providence, 
• a confused life, 
• an odd material world, 
• an existence broken short in the midst and on a sudden, 

are not real diffi­culties, but real helps; 

for they, or something like them, are essential conditions of a moral life in a subordinate being.' 

Because we are free, it is possible for us to answer life's questions either well or badly. If we answer them badly, we shall bring down upon ourselves self-stultification.273 274 

Most often this self‑stultification will take subtle and not immediately detectable forms, as when our failure to answer properly makes it impos­sible for us to realize the higher potentialities of our being. 

Sometimes, on the contrary, the self-stultification is manifest on the physical level, and may involve not only individuals as individuals, but entire societies, which go down in catastrophe or sink more slowly into decay. 

The giving of correct answers is rewarded primarily by spiritual growth and progressive realization of latent potentialities, and secondarily (when cir­cumstances make it possible) by the adding of all the rest to the realized kingdom of God. 

Karma exists; but its equiva­lence of act and award is not always obvious and material, as the earlier Buddhist and Hebrew writers ingenuously imagined that it should be. The bad man in prosperity may, all unknown to himself; be darkened and corroded with inward rust, while the good man under afflictions may be in the rewarding process of spiritual growth. 

No, God is not mocked; but also, let us always remember, 

He is not understood.

Pert nella giusthia sempitérna la vista che riceve vostro mondo,

com'occ/zio per lo mar, dentro s'interna,

ckê, benc/lê dalla proda veggia ilfondo,

in pelago nol vede, e non di meno

Ii, ma cela liii l'esser profondo.

('Wherefore, in the eternal justice, 

such sight as your earth receives is engulfed, like the eye in the sea; 

for though by the shore it can see the bottom, in the ocean it cannot see it; 

yet none the less the bottom is there, but the depth hides it.')

 Love is the plummet as well as the astrolabe of God's mys­teries, 

and the pure in heart can see far down into the depths of the divine justice, 

to catch a glimpse, not indeed of the details of the cosmic process, but at least of its principle and nature. 

These insights permit them to say, with Juliana of Norwich, that all shall be well, that, in spite of time, all is well, and that the problem of evil has its solution in the eternity, which men can, if they so desire, experience, but can never describe. 275

But, you urge, if men sin from the necessity of their nature, they are excusable;

you do not explain, however, what you would infer from this fact.

Is it perhaps that God will be prevented from growing angry with them?

Or is it rather that they have deserved that blessedness which consists in the knowledge and love of God?

If you mean the former, I altogether agree that God does not grow angry and that all things happen by his decree.

But I deny that, for this reason, all men ought to be happy.

Surely men may be excusable and nevertheless miss happiness, and be tormented in many ways. A horse is excusable for being a horse and not a man; but nevertheless he must needs be a horse and not a man.

One who goes mad from the bite of a dog is excusable; yet it is right that he should die of suffocation.

So, too, he who cannot rule his passions, nor hold them in check out of respect for the law, while he may be excusable on the ground of weakness, is incapable of enjoying conformity of spirit and knowledge and love of God; and he is lost inevitably.

Spinoza

Horizontally and vertically, in physical and temperamental kind as well as in degree of inborn ability and native goodness, human beings differ profoundly one from another. Why? To what end and for what past causes? 

'Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' 

1. Jesus answered, 'Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.' 
2. The man of science, on the contrary, would say that the responsibility rested with the parents who had caused the blindness of their child either by having the wrong kind of genes, or by con­tracting some avoidable disease. 
3. Hindu or Buddhist believers in reincarnation according to the laws of karma (the destiny which, by their actions, individuals and groups of individuals impose upon themselves, one another and their descendants) would give another answer and say that, owing to what he had done in previous existences, the blind man had predestined himself to choose the sort of parents from whom he would have to inherit blindness.276 

These three answers are not mutually incompatible. The parents are responsible for making the child what, by heredity and upbringing, he turns out to be. The soul or character incarnated in the child is of such a nature, owing to past behaviour, that it is forced to select those particular parents. 

And collaborating with the material and efficient causes is the final cause, the teleological pull from in front. This teleo­logical pull is a pull from the divine Ground of things acting upon that part of the timeless now, which a finite mind must regard as the future. 

Men sin and their parents sin; but the works of God have to be manifested in every sentient being (either by exceptional ways, as in this case of supernormal healing, or in the ordinary course of events)—have to be mani­fested again and again, with the infinite patience of eternity, until at last the creature makes itself lit for the perfect and consummate manifestation of unitive knowledge, of the state of 'not I, but God in me.'

'Karma,' according to the Hindus, 'never dispels ignorance, being under the same category with it. Knowledge alone dispels ignorance, just as light alone dispels darkness.'

In other words, the causal process takes place within time and cannot possibly result in deliverance from time. Such a deliver­ance can only be achieved as a consequence of the intervention of eternity in the temporal domain; and eternity cannot inter­vene unless the individual will makes a creative act of self-denial, thus producing, as it were, a vacuum into which eternity can flow. To suppose that the causal process in time can of itself result in deliverance from time is like supposing that water will rise into a space from which the air has not been previously exhausted.277

The right relation between prayer and conduct is not that conduct is supremely important and prayer may help it, but that prayer is supremely important and conduct tests it.

Archbishop Temple

The aim and purpose of human life is the unitive knowledge of God. 

Among the indispensable means to that end is right conduct, 

and by the degree and kind of virtue achieved, the degree of liberating knowledge may be assessed and its quality evaluated. 

In a word, the tree is known by its fruits; 

God is not mocked. [?]

Religious beliefs and practices are certainly not the only factors determining the behaviour of a given society. 

But, no less certainly, they are among the determining factors. 

At least to some extent, the collective conduct of a nation is a test of the religion prevailing within it, a criterion by which we may legitimately judge the doctrinal validity of that religion and its practical efficiency in helping individuals to advance towards the goal of human existence.

In the past the nations of Christendom persecuted in the name of their faith, fought religious wars and undertook cru­sades against infidels and heretics; 

today they have ceased to be Christian in anything but name, and 

the only religion they profess is some brand of local idolatry, such as nationalism, state-worship, boss-worship and revolutionism.

From these fruits of (among other things) historic Christianity, what infer­ences can we draw as to the nature of the tree? 

The answer has already been given in the section on 'Time and Eternity.' 

If Christians used to be persecutors and are now no longer Christians, the reason is that the Perennial Philosophy incor­porated in their religion was overlaid by wrong beliefs that led inevitably, since God is never mocked [?], to wrong actions. 

These wrong beliefs had one element in common—namely, an over-valuation of happenings in time and an under-valuation of the everlasting, timeless fact of eternity. 

Thus, belief in the supreme importance for salvation of remote historical events resulted in bloody disputes over the interpretation of the not very adequate and often conflicting records. 278 

And belief in the sacredness, nay, the actual divinity, of the ecciesiastico-politico-financial organizations, which developed after the fall of the Roman Empire, not only added bitterness to the all too human struggles for their control, but served to rationalize and justify the worst excesses of those who fought for place, wealth and power within and through the Church. 

But this is not the whole story. The same over-valuation of events in time, which once caused Christians to persecute and fight religious wars, led at last to a widespread indifference to a religion that, in spite of everything, was still in part preoccupied with eter­nity. But nature abhors a vacuum, and into the yawning void of this indifference there flowed the tide of political idolatry. The practical consequences of such idolatry, as we now see, are total war, revolution and tyranny.

Meanwhile, on the credit side of the balance sheet, we find such items as the following: an immense increase in technical and governmental efficiency and an immense increase in scien­tific knowledge—each of them a result of the general shift of Western man's attention from the eternal to the temporal order, 

first within the sphere of Christianity and then, inevi­tably, outside it.

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Perennial Phil Ch 17 SUFFERING [5,2660]

Perennial Phil Ch 17 SUFFERING [5,2660]괴로움 수난

THE Godhead is impassible; for where there is perfection and unity, there can be no suffering. 

The capacity to suffer arises where there is imperfection, disunity and separation from an embracing totality; 

and the capacity is actualized to the extent that imperfection, disunity and separateness are accompanied by an urge towards the intensification of these creaturely conditions. 

For the individual who achieves unity within his own organism [?] and union with the divine Ground, there is an end of suffering. 

The goal of creation [?] is the return of all sentient beings out of separateness and that infatuating urge-to-separateness which results in suffering, 

through unitive knowledge, into the wholeness of eternal Reality.

Definition of impassible (Entry 1 of 2)

1a: incapable of suffering or of experiencing pain

b: inaccessible to injury

2: incapable of feeling : IMPASSIVE

The elements which make up man produce a capacity for pain. The cause of pain is the craving for individual life. Deliverance from craving does away with pain. The way of deliverance is the Eightfold Path.

The Four Noble Truths of Bua'a!Ajs,n

The urge-to-separateness, or craving for independent and indi­vidualized existence, can manifest itself on all the levels of life, from the merely cellular and physiological, through the instinc­tive, to the fully conscious. 

1. It can be the craving of a whole organism for an intensification of its separateness from the environment and the divine Ground. 
2. Or it can be the urge of a part within an organism for an intensification of its own partial life as distinct from (and consequently at the expense of) the life of the organism as a whole. 

1. In the first case we speak of impulse, passion, desire, self-will, sin; 
2. in the second, we describe what is happening as illness, injury, functional or organic disorder. 260  261     

In both cases the craving for separateness results in suffering, 

not only for the craver, but also for the• craver's sentient environment

—other organisms in the exter­nal world, or other organs within the same organism. 

In one way suffering is entirely private; in another, fatally contagious. 

No living creature is able to experience the suffering of another creature. 

But the craving for separateness which, sooner or later, directly or indirectly, results in some form of private and unshareable suffering for the craver, also results, sooner or later, directly or indirectly, in suffering (equally private and unshareable) for others. 

Suffering and moral evil [?] have the same source—a craving for the intensification of the separate­ness which is the primary datum of all creatureliness.

It will be as well to illustrate these generalizations by a few examples. Let us consider first the suffering inflicted by living organisms on themselves and on other living organisms in the mere process of keeping alive. 

The cause of such suffering is the craving for individual existence, expressing itself specifi­cally in the form of hunger. Hunger is entirely natural—a part of every creature's dharmc. 

The suffering it causes alike to the hungry and to those who satisfy their hunger is inseparable from the existence of sentient creatures. 

The existence of sen­tient creatures has a goal and purpose which is ultimately the supreme good of every one of them. 

But meanwhile the suffer­ing of creatures remains a fact and is a necessary part of creatureiness. 

In so far as this is the case, creation is the beginning of the Fall. The consummation of the Fall takes place when creatures seek to intensify their separateness beyond the limits prescribed by the law of their being. 

On the biological level the Fall would seem to have been consummated very frequently during the course of evolutionary history. Every species, ex­cept the human, chose immediate, short-range success by means of specialization. But specialization always leads into blind alleys. It is only by remaining precariously generalized that an organism can advance towards that rational intelligence which is its compensation for not having a body and instincts per­fectly adapted to one particular kind of life in one particular kind of environment. 

Rational intelligence [?] makes possible unparalleled worldly success on the one hand and, on the other, a further advance towards spirituality 

and a return, through unitive knowledge, to the divine Ground.262 

Because the human species refrained from consummating the Fall on the biological level, human individuals now possess the momentous power of choosing either selflessness and union with God, or the intensification of separate selfhood in ways and to a degree, which are entirely beyond the ken of the lower animals. Their capacity for good is infinite, since they can, if they so desire, make room within themselves for divine Reality. 

But at the same time their capacity for evil is, not indeed in­finite (since evil is always ultimately self-destructive and there­fore temporary), but uniquely great.

 Hell is total separation from God, and the devil is the will to that separation. Being rational and free, human beings are capable of being diabolic. This is a feat which no animal can duplicate, for no animal is sufficiently clever, sufficiently purposeful, sufficiently strong-willed or sufficiently moral to be a devil. (We should note that, to be diabolic on the grand scale, one must, like Milton's Satan, exhibit in a high degree all the moral virtues, except only charity and wisdom.)

Man's capacity to crave more violently than any animal for the intensification of his separateness results not only in moral evil and the sufferings which moral evil inflicts, in one way or another, upon the victims of evil and the perpetrators of it, but also in certain characteristically human derangements of the body. 

Animals suffer mainly from contagious diseases, which assume epidemic proportions whenever the urge to reproduc­tion combines with exceptionally favourable circumstances to produce overcrowding, and from diseases due to infestation by parasites.

 (These last are simply a special case of the sufferings that must inevitably arise when many species of creatures co­exist and can only survive at one another's expense.) 

Civilized man has been fairly successful in protecting himself against these plagues, but in their place he has called up a formidable array of degenerative diseases hardly known among the lower animals. 

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Most of these degenerative diseases are due to the fact that civilized human beings do not, on any level of their being, live in harmony 

• [with Tao, or 
• the divine Nature of Things.]

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263 They love to intensify their selfhood through gluttony, 

there­fore eat the wrong food and too much of it; 

they inflict upon themselves chronic anxiety over money and, because they crave excitement, chronic over-stimulation; 

they suffer, during their working hours, from the chronic boredom and frustration im­posed by the sort of jobs that have to be done in order to satisfy the artificially stimulated demand for the fruits of fully mechan­ized mass-production. 

Among the consequences of these wrong uses of the psycho-physical organism are degenerative changes in particular organs, such as the heart, kidneys, pancreas, intestines and arteries. 

Asserting their partial self­hood in a kind of declaration of independence from the organ­ism as a whole, the degenerating organs cause suffering to themselves and their physiological environment. 

In exactly the same way the human individual asserts his own partial selfhood and his separateness from his neighbours, from Nature and from God—with disastrous consequences to himself, his family, his friends and society in general. 

And, reciprocally, a dis­ordered society, professional group or family, living by a false philosophy, influences its members to assert their individual selfhood and separateness, just as the wrong-living and wrong-thinking individual influences his own organs to assert, by some excess or defect of function, their partial selfhood at the expense of the total organism.

The effects of suffering may be morally and spiritually bad, neutral or good, according to the way in which the suffering is endured and reacted to. 

In other words, 

1. it may stimulate in the sufferer a conscious or unconscious craving for the intensi­fication of his separateness; or 
2. it may leave the craving such as it was before the suffering; or, finally, 
3. it may mitigate it and so become a means for advance towards self-abandonment and the love and knowledge of God. 

Which of these three alternatives shall be realized depends, in the last analysis, upon the sufferer's choice This seems to be true even on the sub human level. 264 

The higher animals, at any rate, often seem to resign themselves to pain, sickness and death with a kind of serene acceptance of what the divine Nature of Things has decreed for them. 

But in other cases there is panic fear and struggle, a frenzied resistance to those decrees. 

To some extent, at least, the embodied animal self appears to be free, in the face of suffering, to choose self-abandonment or self-assertion. 

For embodied human selves, this freedom of choice is unquestionable. 

The choice of self-abandonment in suffer­ing makes possible the reception of

 grace—

1. grace on the spirit­ual level, in the form of an accession of the love and knowledge of God, and 
2. grace in the mental and physiological levels, in the form of a diminution of fear, self-concern and even of pain.

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When we conceive the love of suffering, we lose the sensibility of the senses and dead, dead we will live in that garden.[?]

St. Catherine of Siena

He who suffers for love does not suffer, for all suffering is forgot.

Eckhart

In this life there is not purgatory, but only heaven or hell; for he who bears afflictions with patience has paradise, and he who does not has hell.

St. Philip Neri

Many sufferings are the immediate consequence of moral evil [?], and these cannot have any good effects upon the sufferer, so long as the causes of his distress are not eradicated.

Each sin [?]  begetteth a special spiritual suffering. A suffering of this kind is like unto that of hell, for the more you suffer, the worse you become. This happeneth to sinners; the more they suffer through their sins, the more wicked they become; and they fall continually more and more into their sins in order to get free from their suffering.

The Following of Christ

265

The idea of vicarious suffering has too often been formulated in crudely juridical and commercial terms. 상상하여 느끼는, 대신하여 받는

A has committed an offence for which the law decrees a certain punishment;
B voluntarily undergoes the punishment; justice and the law­giver's honour are satisfied; consequently A may go free. 

Or else it is all a matter of debts and repayments. 

A owes C a sum which he cannot pay; 

B steps in with the cash and so prevents C from foreclosing on the mortgage. 

Applied to the facts of man's suffering and his relations to the divine Ground, these conceptions are neither enlightening nor edifying. 

The ortho­dox doctrine of the Atonement 속죄 attributes to God character­istics that would be discreditable even to a human potentate, and 

its model of the universe is not the product of spiritual insight rationalized by philosophic reflection, but rather the projection of a lawyer's phantasy. 

But in spite of these deplor­able crudities in their formulation, the idea of vicarious suffer­ing and the other, closely related idea of the transferability of merit are based upon genuine facts of experience. 

The selfless and God-filled person can and does act as a channel through which grace is able to pass into the unfortunate being who has made himself impervious to the divine by the habitual craving for intensification of his own separateness and selfhood. 

It is because of this that the saints are able to exercise authority, all the greater for being entirely non-compulsive, over their fellow-beings. 

They 'transfer merit' to those who are in need of it; but that which converts the victims of self-will and puts them on the path of liberation is not the merit of the saintly individual—a merit that consists in his having made himself capable of eternal Reality, as a pipe, 

by being cleaned out, is made capable of water; 

it is rather the divine charge he carries, the eternal Reality for which he has become the conduit. 

And similarly, in vicarious suffering, it is not the actual pains experi­enced by the saint which are redemptive—for to believe that God is angry at sin and that his anger cannot be propitiated except by the offer of a certain sum of pain is to blaspheme against the divine Nature. 266  

No, what saves is the gift from beyond the temporal order, 

brought to those imprisoned in selfhood 

by these selfless and God-filled persons, 

who have been ready to accept suffering, in order to help their fellows. 

The Bodhisattva's vow is a promise to forgo the immediate fruits of enlightenment and to accept rebirth and its inevitable concomitants, pain and death, again and again, until such time as, thanks to his labours and the graces of which, being selfless, he is the channel, all sentient beings shall have come to final and complete deliverance.

(in Mahayana Buddhism) a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so through compassion for suffering beings.

I saw a mass of matter of a dull gloomy colour between the North and the East, and was informed that this mass was human beings, in as great misery as they could be, and live; and that I was mixed up with them and henceforth I must not consider myself as a distinct or separate being.

John Woolinan

Why must the righteous and the innocent endure undeserved suffering? 

For anyone who conceives of human individuals as Hume conceived of events and things, as 'loose and separate,' the question admits of no acceptable answer. 

But, in fact, human individuals are not loose and separate, and the only reason why we think they are is our own wrongly interpreted self-interest. 

We want to 'do what we damned well like,' to have 'a good time' and no responsibilities. Consequently, we find it convenient to be misled by the inadequacies of language and to believe (not always, of course, but just when it suits US) that things, persons and events are as completely distinct and separate one from another as the words by means of which we think about them. 

The truth is, of course, that we are all organically related to God, to Nature and to our fellow-men. 

If every human being were constantly and consciously in a proper relationship with his divine, natural and social environ­ments there would be only so much suffering as Creation makes inevitable. 

But actually most human beings are chronically in an improper relation to God, Nature and some at least of their fellows. 267 

The results of these wrong relationships are mani­fest 

1. on the social level as wars, revolutions, exploitation and  disorder;
2. on the natural level, as waste and exhaustion of irreplaceable resources;
3. on the biological level, as degenerative diseases and the deterioration of racial stocks; 
4. on the moral level, as an overweening bumptiousness; and 
5. on the spiritual level, as blindness to divine Reality and complete ignorance of the reason and purpose of human existence. 

In such cir­cumstances it would be extraordinary if the innocent and righteous did not suffer—just as it would be extraordinary if the innocent kidneys and the righteous heart were not to suffer for the sins of a licorous palate and overloaded stomach, sins, we may add, imposed upon those organs by the will of the gluttonous individual to whom they belong, as he himself belongs to a society which other individuals, his contem­poraries and predecessors, have built up into a vast and en­during incarnation of disorder, inflicting suffering upon its members and infecting them with its own ignorance and wickedness. 

The righteous man can escape suffering only by accepting it and passing beyond it; and he can accomplish this only by being converted from righteousness to total selfless­ness and God-centredness, by ceasing to be just a Pharisee, or good citizen, and becoming 'perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' The difficulties in the way of such a transfiguration are, obviously, enormous. But of those who 'speak with authority,' who has ever said that the road to complete deliverance was easy or the gate anything but 'strait and narrow'?

Perennial Phil Ch 18 FAITH [4,1653] 믿음, 신앙 필요없다

Perenial Phil Ch 18 FAITH [4,1653]

THE word 'faith' has a variety of meanings, which it is important to distinguish.

 

1] In some contexts it is used as a synonym for 'trust,' as when we say that we have faith in Dr. X's diagnostic skill or in lawyer Y's integrity. 

Analogous to this is our 'faith' in authority—the belief that what certain persons say about certain subjects is likely, because of their special qualifications, to be true. 

2] On other occasions 'faith' stands for belief in propositions which we have not had occa­sion to verify for ourselves, but which we know that we could verify if we had the inclination, the opportunity and the neces­sary capacities. 

In this sense of the word we have 'faith,' even though we may never have been to Australia, that there is such a creature as a duck-billed platypus; we have 'faith' in the atomic theory, even though we may never have performed the experiments on which that theory rests, and be incapable of understanding the mathematics by which it is supported. 

3] And finally there is the 'faith,' which is a belief in propositions which we know we cannot verify, even if we should desire to do so---propositions such as those of the Athanasian Creed or those which constitute the doctrine of the Immaculate Concep­tion. This kind of 'faith' is defined by the Scholastics as an act of the intellect moved to assent by the will.

Faith in the first three senses of the word plays a very im­portant part, not only in the activities of everyday life, but even in those of pure and applied science. Credo ut itzteiigam —and also, we should add, at agam and at viivam. Faith is a pre-condition of all systematic knowing, all purposive doing and all decent living.

 Societies are held together, not primarily by the fear of the many for the coercive power of the few, but by a widespread faith in the other fellow's decency. Such a faith tends to create its own object, while the widespread mutual mistrust, due, for example, to war or domestic dissen­sion, creates the object of mistrust. 

269 Passing now from the moral to the intellectual sphere, we find faith lying at the root of all organized thinking. 

Science and technology could not exist unless we had faith in the reliability of the universe—unless, in Clerk Maxwell's words, we implicitly believed that the book of Nature is really a book and not a magazine, a coherent work of art and not a hodge-podge of mutually irrelevant snippets. 

To this general faith in the reasonableness and trustworthiness of the world 

the searcher after truth must add two kinds of special faith—

1. faith in the authority of quali­fied experts, sufficient to permit him to take their word for statements which he personally has not verified; and 
2. faith in his own working hypotheses, sufficient to induce him to test his provisional beliefs by means of appropriate action. 

This action may confirm the belief which inspired it. Alternatively it may bring proof that the original working hypothesis was ill founded, in which case it will have to be modified until it becomes conformable to the facts and so passes from the realm of faith to that of knowledge

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The fourth kind of faith is the thing which is commonly called 'religious faith.'

The usage is justifiable, not because the other kinds of faith are not fundamental in religion just as they are in secular affairs, but because this willed assent to propositions which are known to be unverifiable occurs in religion, and only in religion, as a characteristic addition to faith as trust, faith in authority and faith in unverified but veri­fiable propositions. 

This is the kind of faith which, according to Christian theologians, justifies and saves [?]. In its extreme and most uncompromising form, such a doctrine can be very dangerous. Here, for example, is a passage from one of Luther's letters. .

Esto peccator, et pecca fortiter sed fortius crede et gaua'e in Chrirto, qui victor est peccati, mortis et mundi. Peccandum est quam diu sic sumus; vita /iaec non est kabitatio justitiae. 

('Be a sinner and sin strongly; but yet more strongly believe and rejoice in Christ, who is the conqueror of sin, death and the world. So long as we are as we are, there must be sinning; this life is not the dwelling place of righteous­ness.')  270 

   To the danger that faith in the doctrine of justification by faith may serve as an excuse for and even an invitation to sin must be added another danger, namely, that the faith which is supposed to save may be faith in propositions not merely unverifiable, but repugnant to reason and the moral sense, and entirely at variance with the findings of those who have ful­filled the conditions of spiritual insight into the Nature of Things. 

'This is the acme of faith,' says Luther in his De Servo ..4rbitrio, to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so many, is merciful; 

that He is just who, at his own pleasure, has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that He seems to delight in the torture of the wretched and to be more deserving of hate than of love. 

If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God, who shows so much anger and harshness, could be merciful and just, there would be no need of faith.'

 Revelation (which, when it is genuine, is simply the record of the immediate experience of those who are pure enough in heart and poor enough in spirit to be able to see God) says nothing at all of these hideous doctrines, to which the will forces the quite naturally and rightly reluctant intel­lect to give assent. 

Such notions rnare the product, not of the insight of saints, but of the busy phantasy of jurists, who were so far from having transcended selfness and the prejudices of education that they had the folly and presumption to interpret the universe in terms of the Jewish and Roman law with which they happened to be familiar. 'Woe unto you lawyers,' said Christ. The denunciation was prophetic and for all time.

The core and spiritual heart of all the higher religions is the Perennial Philosophy; and 

==

the Perennial Philosophy can be assented to and acted upon without resort to the kind of faith about which Luther was writing in the foregoing passages. 

==

There must, of course, be faith as trust—for confidence in one's fellows is the beginning of charity towards men, and confidence not only in the material, but also the moral and spiritual relia­bility of the universe, is the beginning of charity or love-knowledge in relation to God. 271  

There must also be faith in authority—the authority of those whose selflessness has quali­fied them to know the spiritual Ground of all being by direct acquaintance as well as by report. 

And finally there must be faith in such propositions about Reality as are enunciated by philosophers in the light of genuine revelation—propositions which the believer knows that he can, if he is prepared to fulfil the necessary conditions, verify for himself. 

But, so long as the Perennial Philosophy is accepted in its essential simplicity, there is no need of willed assent to propositions known in advance to be unverifiable. 

Here it is necessary to add that such unverifiable propositions may become verifiable to the extent that intense faith affects the psychic substratum and so creates an existence, whose derived objectivity can actually be discovered 'out there.' 

Let us, however, remember that an existence which derives its objectivity from the mental activity of those who intensely believe in it cannot possibly be the spiritual Ground of the world, and that 

a mind busily engaged in the voluntary and intellectual activity, which is 'religious faith,' cannot possibly be in the state of selflessness and alert passivity which is the necessary condition of the unitive know­ledge of the Ground. 

That is why the Buddhists affirm that 

• 'loving faith leads to heaven; 
• but obedience to the Dharma leads to Nirvana.' [?]

In Hinduism, dharma is the religious and moral law governing individual conduct and is one of the four ends of life.

Faith in the existence and power of any supernatural entity which is less than ultimate spiritual Reality, and 

in any form of worship that falls short of self-naughting, will certainly, if the object of faith is intrinsically good, result in improvement of character, and probably in posthumous sur­vival of the improved personality under 'heavenly' conditions. 

But this personal survival within what is still the temporal order is not the eternal life of timeless union with the Spirit. 

This eternal life 'stands in the knowledge' of the Godhead, [?]

not in faith in anything less than the Godhead.

The immortality attained through the acquisition of any objective condition (e.g., the condition—merited through good works, which have been inspired by love of and faith in, something less than the supreme Godhead—of being united in act to what is worshipped) is liable to end; for it is distinctly stated in the Scriptures that karma is never the cause of emancipation.[?]

Shankara272

Karma is the causal sequence in time, from which we are delivered solely by 'dying to, the temporal self and becoming united with the eternal, which is beyond time and cause. 

For 'as to the notion of a First Cause, or a Causa Sui' (to quote the words of an eminent theologian and philosopher, Dr. F. R. Tennant), 

'we have, on the one hand, to bear in mind that we refute ourselves in trying to establish it by extension of the application of the causal category, 

for causality when univer­salized contains a contradiction; 

and, on the other, to remem­ber that the ultimate Ground simply "is." 

Only when the individual also 'simply is,' by reason of his union through love-knowledge with the Ground, can there be any question of complete and eternal liberation.

Perennial Phil Ch 16 PRAYER [6,2932]

Perennial Phil Ch 16 PRAYER [6,2932]

THE word 'prayer' is applied to at least four distinct procedures—petition, intercession, adoration, contemplation. 

1. Petition is the asking of something for ourselves. 
2. Intercession 중재is the asking of something for other people. 
3. Adoration 동경is the use of intellect, feeling, will and imagination in making acts of devotion directed towards God in his personal aspect or as incarnated in human form. 
4. Contemplation 묵상is that condition of alert passivity in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.

Psychologically, it is all but impossible for a human being to practise contemplation without preparing for it by some kind of adoration and without feeling the need to revert at more or less frequent intervals to intercession and some form at least of petition. 

On the other hand, it is both possible and easy to practise petition apart not only from contemplation, but also from adoration and, in rare cases of extreme and unmiti­gated egotism, even from intercession. 

Petitionary and inter­cessory prayer may be used—and used, what is more, with what would ordinarily be regarded as success—without any but the most perfunctory and superficial reference to God in any of his aspects. 

To acquire the knack of getting his petitions answered, a man does not have to know or love God, or even to know or love the image of God in his own mind. 

All that he requires is a burning sense of the importance of his own ego and its desires, coupled with a firm conviction that there exists, out there in the universe, something not himself which can be wheedled or dragooned into satisfying those desires. 

If I repeat 'My will be done,' with the necessary degree of faith and persistency, the chances are that, sooner or later and some­how or other, I shall get what I want. 

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“Thy will be done” means 'may Gods will be done'. It is the will of God that should be done in the world, not man's will, because God is the one who created the heavens and the earth, man, and everything else in it that has life.

What is the meaning of 'thy will be done' in The Lord's Prayer?

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What does my will be done and They will be done ? mean?

So.. "My will be done" means that the speaker is saying that what he want (his will) is what should happen. "They will be done" means that it will happen.

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261 252    

Whether my will coincides with the will of God, and whether in getting what I want I shall get what is spiritually, morally or even materially good for me, are questions which I cannot answer in advance. 

Only time and eternity will show. 

Meanwhile we shall be well ad­vised to heed the warnings of folk-lore. Those anonymous realists who wrote the world's fairy stories knew a great deal about wishes and their fulfilment. 

They knew, first of all, that in certain circumstances petitions actually get themselves answered; but they also knew that God is not the only answerer and that if one asks for something in the wrong spirit, it may in effect be given—but given with a vengeance and not by a divine Giver. 

Getting what one wants by means of self-regarding petition is a form of hubris거만, which invites its condign and appropriate nemesis. 

As nouns the difference between arrogance and hubris is that 

arrogance is the act or habit of arrogating, or making undue claims in an overbearing manner; that species of pride which consists in exorbitant claims of rank, dignity, estimation, or power, or which exalts the worth or importance of the person to an undue degree; proud contempt of others; lordliness; haughtiness; self-assumption; presumption while 

hubris is excessive pride, presumption or arrogance (originally toward the gods).

--

nemesis. a downfall caused by an inescapable agent.

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Thus, the folk-lore of the North American Indian is full of stories about people who fast and pray egotistically, in order to get more than a reasonable man ought to have, and who, receiving what they ask for, thereby bring about their own downfall. 

From the other side of the world come all the tales of the men and women who make use of some kind of magic to get their petitions answered —always with farcical or catastrophic consequence. Hardly ever do the Three Wishes of our traditional fairy lore lead to anything but a bad end for the successful wisher.

Picture God as saying to you, 'My son, why is it that day by day you rise and pray, and genuflect, and even strike the ground with your forehead, nay, sometimes even shed tears, while you say to Me: "My Father, my God, give me wealth!" 

If I were to give it to you, you would think yourself of some importance, you would fancy you had gained something very great. 

Because you asked for it, you have it. But take care to make good use of it. Before you had it you were humble; now that you have begun to be rich you despise the poor. 

What kind of a good is that which only makes you worse? For worse you are, since you were bad already. And that it would make you worse you knew not; hence you asked it of Me. I gave it you and I proved you; you have found—and you are found out! 

253

Ask of Me better  things than these, greater things than these. Ask of Me spiritual things. Ask of Me Myself.'

St. Augustine

O Lord, I, a beggar, ask of Thee more than a thousand kings may ask of Thee. Each one has something he needs to ask of Thee; I have come to ask Thee to give me Thyself.

Ansari of Herat

In the words of Aquinas, it is legitimate for us to pray for any­thing which it is legitimate for us to desire. There are some things that nobody has the right to desire—such as the fruits of crime or wrong-doing. 

Other things may be legitimately desired by people on one level of spiritual development, but should not be desired (and indeed cease to be desired) by those on another, higher level. 

Thus, St. François de Sales had reached a point where he could say, 'I have hardly any desires, but if I were to be born again I should have none at all. 

We should ask nothing and refuse nothing, but leave ourselves in the arms of divine Providence 신의 섭리without wasting time in any desire, except to will what God wills of us.' 

But meanwhile the third clause of the Lord's Prayer is repeated daily by mil­lions, who have not the slightest intention of letting any will be done, except their own.

The savour of wandering in the ocean of deathless life has rid me of all my asking;As the tree is in the seed, so all diseases are in this asking.

Kabir

Lord, I know not what to ask of thee. Thou only knowest what I need. Thou lovest me better than I know how to love myself. Father, give to thy child that which he himself knows not how to ask. Smite or heal, depress me or raise me up: I adore all thy purposes without knowing them. I am silent; I offer myself up in a sacrifice; I yield myself to Thee; I would have no other desire than to accomplish thy will. Teach me to pray. Pray Thyself in me.

Fénelon

254 

(A dervish was tempted by the devil to cease calling upon Allah, on the ground that Allah never answered, 'Here am I.' The Prophet Khadir appeared to him in a vision with a message from God.)

Was it not I who summoned thee to my service?

Was it not I who made thee busy with my name?

Thy calling 'Allah!' was my 'Here am I.'

Jalal-uddin Rumi

I pray God the Omnipotent to place us in the ranks of his chosen, among the number of those whom He directs to the path of safety; in whom He inspires fervour lest they forget Him; whom He cleanses from all defilement, that nothing may remain in them except Himself; yea, of those whom He indwells com­pletely, that they may adore none beside Him.

Al-G/za,a1i

About intercession, as about so many other subjects, it is William Law who writes most clearly, simply and to the point.

By considering yourself as an advocate with God for your neigh­bours and acquaintances, you would never find it hard to be at peace with them yourself. It would be easy for you to bear with and forgive those, for whom you particularly implored 간청하다the divine mercy and forgiveness.

William Law

Intercession중재is the best arbitrator of all differences, the best pro­moter of true friendship, the best cure and preservative against all unkind tempers, all angry and haughty passions.

William Law

255

You cannot possibly have any ill-temper, or show any unkind behaviour to a man for whose welfare you are so much con­cerned, as to be his advocate with God in private. For you cannot possibly despise and ridicule that man whom your private prayers recommend to the love and favour of God.

William Law

Intercession, then, is at once the means to, and the expression of, the love of one's neighbour. And in the same way adora­tion is the means to, and the expression of, the love of God—a love that finds its consummation in the unitive knowledge of the Godhead which is the fruit of contemplation. It is to these higher forms of communion with God that the authors of the following extracts refer whenever they use the word 'prayer.'

The aim and end of prayer is to revere, to recognize and to adore the sovereign majesty of God, through what He is in Himself rather than what He is in regard to us, and rather to love his goodness by the love of that goodness itself than for what it sends us.

Bourgoing

In prayer he (Charles de Condren) did not stop at the frontiers of his knowledge and his reasoning. He adored God and his mysteries as they are in themselves and not as he understood them.

Amelote

'What God is in Himself,' 'God and his mysteries as they are in themselves'—the phrases have a Kantian ring. But if Kant was right and the Thing in itself is unknowable, Bourgoing, Dc Condren and all the other masters of the spiritual life were engaged in a wild-goose chase. But Kant was right only as regards minds that have not yet come to enlightenment and deliverance. To such minds Reality, whether material, psychic or spiritual, presents itself as it is darkened, tinged and refracted by the medium of their own individual natures. 156 But in those who are pure in heart and poor in spirit there is no distortion of Reality, because there is no separate selfhood to obscure or refract, no painted lantern slide of intellectual beliefs and hal­lowed imagery to give a personal and historical colouring to the 'white radiance of Eternity.' 

For such minds, as Olier says, 'even ideas of the saints, of the Blessed Virgin, and the sight of Jesus Christ in his humanity are impediments in the way of the sight of God in his purity.' The Thing in itself can be per-ceived—but only by one who, in himself, is no-thing.

By prayer I do not understand petition or supplication which, according to the doctrines of the schools, is exercised principally by the understanding, being a signification of what the person desires to receive from God. 

But prayer here specially meant is an offering and giving to God whatsoever He may justly require from us.

Now prayer, in its general notion, may be defined to be an elevation of the mind to God, or more largely and expressly thus: prayer is an actuation of an intellective soul towards God, ex­pressing, or at least implying, an entire dependence on Him as the author and fountain of all good, a will and readiness to give Him his due, which is no less than all love, all obedience, adoration, glory and worship, by humbling and annihilating the self and all creatures in his presence; and lastly, a desire and intention to aspire to an union of spirit with Him.

Hence it appears that prayer is the most perfect and most divine action that a rational soul is capable of. It is of all actions and duties the most indispensably necessary.

Augustine Baker

257

Lord, teach me to seek Thee and reveal Thyself to me when I seek Thee. For I cannot seek Thee except Thou teach me, nor find Thee except Thou reveal Thyself. Let me seek Thee in longing, let me long for Thee in seeking: let me find Thee in love and love Thee in finding.

 Lord, I acknowledge and I thank Thee that Thou hast created me in this Thine image, in order that I may be mindful of Thee, may conceive of Thee and love Thee: but that image has been so consumed and wasted away by vices and obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing that it cannot achieve that for which it was made, except Thou renew it and create it anew. Is the eye of the soul darkened by its infirm­ity, or dazzled by Thy glory? Surely, it is both darkened in itself and dazzled by Thee. Lord, this is the unapproachable light in which Thou dwellest. Truly I see it not, because it is too bright for me; and yet whatever I see, I see through it, as the weak eye sees what it sees through the light of the sun, which in the sun itself it cannot look upon. Oh supreme and unapproachable light, oh holy and blessed truth, how far art Thou from me who am so near to Thee, how far art Thou removed from my vision, though I am so near to Thine! Everywhere Thou art wholly present, and I see Thee not. In Thee I move and in Thee I have my being, and cannot come to Thee, Thou art within me and about me, and I feel Thee not.

St. Ans6lm

Oh Lord, put no trust in me; for I shall surely fail if Thou uphold me not.

St. PAilip Neri

To pretend to devotion without great humility and renunciation of all worldly tempers is to pretend to impossibilities. He that would be devout must first be humble, have a full sense of his own miseries and wants and the vanity of the world, and then his soul will be full of desire after God. A proud, or vain, or worldly-minded man may use a manual of prayers, but he cannot be de­vout, because devotion is the application of an humble heart to God as its only happiness.

William Law

The spirit, in order to work, must have all sensible images, both good and bad, removed. The beginner in a spiritual course com­mences with the use of good sensible images, and it is impossible to begin in a good spiritual course with the exercises of the spirit. 
258 
Those souls who have not a propensity to the interior must abide always in the exercises, in which sensible images are used,and these souls will find the sensible exercises very profitable to themselves and to others, and pleasing to God. And this is the way of the active life. But others, who have the propensity to the interior, do not always remain in the exercises of the senses, but after a time these will give place to the exercises of the spirit, which are independent of the senses and the imagination and con­sist simply in the elevation of the will of the intellective soul to God.... The soul elevates her will towards God, apprehended by the understanding as a spirit, and not as an imaginary thing, the human spirit in this way aspiring to a union with the Divine Spirit.

Augustine Baker

You tell me you do nothing in prayer. But what do you want to do in prayer except what you are doing, which is, presenting and representing your nothingness and misery to God When beggars expose their ulcers and their necessities to our sight, that is the best appeal 호소 항소 애원 they can make. But from what you tell me, you sometimes do nothing of this, but lie there like a shadow or a statue. They put statues in palaces simply to please the prince's eyes. Be content to be that in the presence of God: He will bring the statue to life when He pleases.

St. FrwzçoLc de Sales

I have come to see that I do not limit my mind enough simply to prayer, that I always want to do something myself in it, wherein I do very wrong.. . . I wish most definitely to cut off and separate my mind from all that, and to hold it with all my strength, as much as I can, to the sole regard and simple unity. By allowing the fear of being ineffectual to enter into the state of prayer, and by wishing to accomplish something myself, I spoilt it all.

St. Jeanne Chantal

So long as you seek Buddhahood, specifically exercising yourself for it, there is no attainment for you.[?]

Yung.c/&ia Thsk

29

'How does a man set himself in harmony with the Tao?' 'I am already out of harmony.'

Si/,-t'ou

How shall I grasp it? Do not grasp it. That which remains when there is no more grasping is the Self.

PancAadasi

I order you to remain simply either in God or close to God, without trying to do anything there, and without asking anything of Him, unless He urges it. 

 St. François de Sales

Adoration is an activity of the loving, but still separate, indi­viduality. Contemplation is the state of union with the divine Ground of all being. 

The highest prayer is the most passive. 

뭔가를 바라지 않는 (간절한) 기도, 

"나"라는 것이 없어지는 기도, 

"신성"에 가까와지는 기도

Inevitably; for the less there is of self, the more there is of God. 

That is why the path to passive or infused contempla­tion is so hard and, for many, so painful—a passage through successive or simultaneous Dark Nights, in which the pilgrim 순례자must die [?]

• to the life of sense [?] as an end in itself, 
• to the life of private and even of traditionally hallowed 신성한 thinking and be­lieving, and finally 
• to the deep source of all ignorance and evil, the life of the separate, individualized will.[self?]

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.