Perennial Phil Ch 21 IDOLATRY [4,1421]

Perennial Phil Ch 21 IDOLATRY [4,1421]

TO educated persons the more primitive kinds of idolatry have ceased to be attractive. They find it easy to resist the temptation to believe that particular natural objects are gods, or that certain symbols and images are the very forms of divine entities and as such must be worshipped and propitiated. True, much fetishistic superstition survives even today. But though it survives, it is not considered respectable. Like drinking and prostitution, the primitive forms of idolatry are tolerated, but not approved. Their place in the accredited hierarchy of values is among the lowest.

How different is the case with the developed and more modern forms of idolatry! These have achieved not merely survival, but the highest degree of respectability. They are recommended by men of science as an up-to-date substitute for genuine religion and by many professional religious teachers are equated with the worship of God. All this may be de­plorable; but it is not in the least surprising. Our education disparages the more primitive forms of idolatry; but at the same time it disparages 얕보다 , or at the best it ignores, the Perennial Philosophy and the practice of spirituality. In place of mumbo-jumbo at the bottom and of the immanent and transcendent Godhead at the top, it sets up, as objects of admiration, faith and worship, a pantheon of strictly human ideas and ideals. In academic circles and among those who have been subjected to higher education, there are few fetishists and few devout contemplatives; but the enthusiastic devotees of some form of political or social idolatry are as common as blackberries. Significantly enough, I have observed, when making use of university libraries, that books on spiritual religion were taken out much less frequently than was the case in public libraries, patronized in the main by men and women who had not enjoyed the advantages, or suffered under the handicaps, of prolonged academic instruction.287 288 

The many varieties of higher idolatry may be classed under three main heads: 

1. technological, 
2. political and 
3. moral. 

1] Techno­logical idolatry is the most ingenuous and primitive of the three; for its devotees, like those of the lower idolatry, believe that their redemption and liberation depend upon material objects—in this case gadgets. Technological idolatry is the religion whose doctrines are promulgated, explicitly or by implication, in the advertisement pages of our newspapers and magazines—the source, we may add parenthetically, from which millions of men, women and children in the capitalistic countries derive their working philosophy of life. In Soviet Russia too, technological idolatry was strenuously preached, becoming, during the years of that country's industrialization, a kind of state religion. So whole-hearted is the modern faith in technological idols that (despite all the lessons of mechanized warfare) it is impossible to discover in the popular thinking of our time any trace of the ancient and profoundly realistic doc­trine of hubris and inevitable nemesis. There is a very general belief that, where gadgets are concerned, we can get something for nothing—can enjoy all the advantages of an elaborate, top-heavy and constantly advancing technology without having to pay for them by any compensating disadvantages.

2] Only a little less ingenuous are the political idolaters. For the worship of redemptive gadgets these have substituted the worship of redemptive social and economic organizations. Im­pose the right kind of organizations upon human beings, and all their problems, from sin and unhappiness to nationalism and war, will automatically disappear. Most political idolaters are also technological idolaters—and this in spite of the fact that the two pseudo-religions are finally incompatible, since technological progress at its present rate makes nonsense of any political blue-print, however ingeniously drawn, within a matter, not of generations, but of years and sometimes even of months. Further, the human being is, unfortunately, a creature endowed with free will; and if, for any reason, individuals do not choose to make it work, even the best organization will not produce the results it was intended to produce.289

3] The moral idolaters are realists inasmuch as they see that gadgets and organizations are not enough to guarantee the triumph of virtue and the increase of happiness, and that the individuals who compose societies and use machines are the arbiters who finally determine whether there shall be decency in personal relationship, order or disorder in society. Material and organizational instruments are indispensable, and a good tool is preferable to a bad one. But in listless or malicious hands the finest instrument is either useless or a means to evil.

The moralists cease to be realistic and commit idolatry inas­much as they worship, not God, but their own ethical ideals, inasmuch as they treat virtue as an end in itself and not as the necessary condition of the knowledge and love of God—a knowledge and love without which that virtue will never be made perfect or even socially effective.

What follows is an extract from a very remarkable letter written in 1836 by Thomas Arnold to his old pupil and future biographer, A. P. Stanley.

 'Fanaticism is idolatry; and it has the moral evil of idolatry in it; that is, a fanatic worships something which is the creation of his own desire, and thus even his self-devotion in support of it is only an apparent self-devotion; for in fact it is making the parts of his nature or his mind, which he least values, offer sacrifice to that which he most values. 

The moral fault, as it appears to me, is the idolatry—the setting up of some idea which is most kindred to our own minds, and the putting it in the place of Christ, who alone cannot be made an idol and inspire idolatry, because He combines all ideas of perfection and exhibits them in their just harmony and combination. Now in my own mind, by its natural tendency—that is, taking my mind at its best—truth and justice would be the idols I should follow; 

and they would be idols, for they would not supply all the food which the mind wants, and 

whilst worshipping them, reverence and humility and tenderness might very likely be forgotten. 290 

But Christ Himself includes at once truth and justice and all these other qualities too.. . . 

Narrow-mindedness tends to wicked­ness, because it does not extend its watchfulness to every part of our moral nature, and the neglect fosters wickedness in the parts so neglected.'  

As a piece of psychological analysis this is admirable. 

Its only defect is one of omission; for it neglects to take into account those influxes from the eternal order into the temporal, which are called grace or inspiration. 

Grace and inspiration are given when, and to the extent to which, 

a human being gives up self-will and abandons himself, moment by moment, through constant recollectedness and non-attachment, to the will of God. 

As well as the animal and spiritual graces, whose source is the divine Nature of Things, there are human pseudo-graces—such as, for example, the accessions of strength and virtue that follow self-devotion to some form of political or moral idolatry. 

To distinguish the true grace from the false is often difficult; but as time and circumstances reveal the full extent of their consequences on the soul, discrimination be­comes possible even to observers having no special gifts of insight. 

Where the grace is genuinely 'supernatural,' an amelioration in one aspect of the total personality is not paid for by atrophy or deterioration elsewhere. 

The virtue which is accompanied and perfected by the love and knowledge of God is something quite different from the 'righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees' which, for Christ, was among the worst of moral evils. 

Hardness, fanaticism, uncharitableness and spiritual pride—these are the ordinary by-products of a course of stoical self-improvement by means of personal effort, either unassisted or, if assisted, seconded only by the pseudo-graces which are given when the individual devotes himself to the achievement of an end which is not his true end, when the goal is not God, but merely a magnified projection of his own favourite ideas or moral excellences. The idolatrous worship of ethical values in and for themselves defeats its own object and defeats it not only because, as Arnold insists, there is a lack of all-round development, but also and above all because even the highest forms of moral idolatry are God-eclipsing and therefore guarantee the idolater against the enlightening and liberating knowledge of Reality.291

----

Perennial Phil Ch 20 The practice of religion leads people to practise evil [5,2528]

Perennial Phil Ch 20 TANTUM RELIGIO POTUIT SUADERE MALORUM [5,2528]

The practice of religion leads people to practise evil. 

Would you know whence it is that so many false spirits have appeared in the world, who have deceived themselves and others with false fire and false light, laying claim to information, illumin­ation and openings of the divine Life, particularly to do wonders under extraordinary calls from God? It is this: they have turned to God without turning from themselves; would be alive to God before they are dead to their own nature. Now religion in the hands of self, or corrupt nature, serves only to discover vices of a worse kind than in nature left to itself. Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse flame than passions only employed about worldly matters; pride, self-exaltation, hatred and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify actions which nature, left to itself, would be ashamed to own.

William Law

TURNING to God without turning from self'—the formula is absurdly simple; and yet, simple as it is, it explains all the follies and iniquities committed in the name of religion. Those who turn to God without turning from them­selves are tempted to evil in several characteristic and easily recognizable ways.

==

Michael Oakeshott Selected Writings Collection - Google Books resulthttps://books.google.com.au › books

Michael Oakeshott, ‎Luke O'Sullivan · 2014 · ‎Political Science

... 'Turning to God without turning from Self'4 ie pursuing personal ends with religious passion Imposing our 'ideals' with religious conviction and passion ...

Michael Joseph Oakeshott FBA was an English philosopher  Born: 11 December 1901,

==

 They are tempted, first of all, to practise magical rites, by means of which they hope to compel God to answer their petitions and, in general, to serve their private or collective ends. 

All the ugly business of sacrifice, incantation and what Jesus called 'vain repetition' is a product of this wish to treat God as a means to indefinite self-aggrandizement, rather than as an end to be reached through total self-denial. 

 Next, they are tempted to use the name of God to justify what they do in pursuit of place, power and wealth.270280  And because they believe themselves to have divine justification for their actions, they proceed, with a good conscience, to perpetrate abominations, 'which nature, left to itself, would be ashamed to own.'

 Throughout recorded history an incredible sum of mischief has been done by ambitious idealists, self-deluded by their own verbiage and a lust for power into a conviction that they were acting for the highest good of their fellow-men. 

In the past, the justification for such wickedness was 'God' or 'the Church,' or 'the True Faith'; 

today idealists kill and torture and exploit in the name of 'the Revolution,' 'the New Order,' the World of the Common Man,' or simply 'the Future.' 

Finally there are the temptations which arise when the falsely religious begin to acquire the powers which are the fruit of their pious and magical practices. For, let there be no mistake, sacrifice, incantation and 'vain repetition' actually do produce fruits, especially when practised in conjunction with physical austerities. 

Men who turn towards God without turning away from themselves do not, of course, reach God; but if they devote themselves energetically enough to their pseudo-religion, they will get results. 

Some of these results are doubtless the product of auto-suggestion. (It was through 'vain repetition' that Coué got his patients to cure themselves of their diseases.) 

Others are due, apparently, to that 'some­thing not ourselves' in the psychic medium—that something which makes, not necessarily for righteousness, but always for power. 

Whether this something is a piece of second-hand objectivity, projected into the medium by the individual wor­shipper and his fellows and predecessors; whether it is a piece of first-hand objectivity, corresponding, on the psychic level, to the data of the material universe; or whether it is a com­bination of both these things, it is impossible to determine. 

All that need be said in this place is that people who turn towards God without turning from themselves often seem to acquire a knack of getting their petitions answered and some­times develop considerable supernormal powers, such as those of psychic healing and extra-sensory perception. 281

But, it may be asked: Is it necessarily a good thing to be able to get one's petitions answered in the way one wants them to be? And how far is it spiritually profitable to be possessed of these 'miraculous' powers? These are questions which were con­sidered in the chapter on 'Prayer' and will be further discussed in the chapter on 'The Miraculous.'

The Grand Augur, in his ceremonial robes, approached the shambles and thus addressed the pigs. 'How can you object to die? I shall fatten you for three months. I shall discipline my­self for ten days and fast for three. I shall strew fine grass and place you bodily upon a carved sacrificial dish. Does not this satisfy you?'

Then, speaking from the pigs' point of view, he continued: 'It is better perhaps, after all, to live on bran and escape from the shambles.'

'But then,' he added, speaking from his own point of view, to enjoy honour when alive, one would readily die on a war-shield or in the headsman's basket.'

So he rejected the pigs' point of view and adopted his own point of view. In what sense, then, was he different from the pigs?

Chuang Tu

Anyone who sacrifices anything but his own person or his own interests is on exactly the same level as Chuang Tzu's pigs. The pigs seek their own advantage inasmuch as they prefer life and bran to honour and the shambles; the sacrificers seek their own advantage inasmuch as they prefer the magical, God-constraining death of pigs to the death of their own passions and self-will. And what applies to sacrifice, applies equally to incantations, rituals and vain repetitions, when these are used (as they all too frequently are, even in the higher religions) as a form of compulsive magic. Rites and vain repetitions have a legitimate place in religion as aids to recollectedness, reminders of truth momentarily forgotten in the turmoil of worldly dis­tractions. When spoken or performed as a kind of magic, their use is either completely pointless; or else (and this is worse) it may have ego-enhancing results, which do not in any way contribute to the attainment of man's final, end.282

The vestments of Isis are variegated to represent the cosmos;

that of Osiris is white, symbolizing the Intelligible Light beyond the cosmos.

Plutarch

So long as the symbol remains, in the worshippers mind, firmly attached and instrumental to that which is symbolized, the use of such things as white and variegated vestments can do no harm. But if the symbol breaks loose, as it were, and becomes an end in itself, then we have, at the best, a futile aestheticism and sentimentality, at the worst a form of psychologically effective magic.

All externals must yield to love; for they are for the sake of love, and not love for them.

Hans Denk

Ceremonies in themselves are not sin; but whoever supposes that he can attain to life either by baptism or by partaking of bread is still in superstition.

Hans Denk

If you be always handling the letter of the Word, always licking the letter, always chewing upon that, what great thing do you? No marvel you are such starvelings.

John Everard

While the Right Law still prevailed, innumerable were the con­verts who fathomed the depths of the Dharma by merely listen­ing to half a stanza or even to a single phrase of the Buddha's teaching. But as we come to the age of similitude and to these latter days of Buddhism, we are indeed far away from the Sage.283

People find themselves drowning in a sea of letters; they do not know how to get at the one substance which alone is truth. This was what caused the appearance of the Fathers (of Zen Bud­dhism) who, pointing directly at the human mind, told us to see here the ultimate ground of all things and thereby to attain Buddhahood. This is known as a special transmission outside the scriptural teaching. If one is endowed with superior talents or a special sharpness of mind, a gesture or a word will suffice to give one an immediate knowledge of the truth. Hence, since they were advocates of 'special transmission,' Ummon treated the (historical) Buddha with the utmost irreverence and Yakusan forbade his followers even to read the sutras.

Zen is the name given to this branch of Buddhism, which keeps itself away from the Buddha. It is also called the mystical branch, because it does not adhere to the literal meaning of the sutras. It is for this reason that those who blindly follow the steps of Buddha are sure to deride Zen, while those who have no liking for the letter are naturally inclined towards the mystical approach. The followers of the two schools know how to shake the head at each other, but fail to realize that they are after all complementary. Is not Zen one of the six virtues of perfection? If so, how can it conflict with the teachings of the Buddha? In my view, Zen is the outcome of the Buddha's teaching, and the mystical issues from the letters. There is no reason why a man should shun Zen because of the Buddha's teaching; nor need we disregard the letters on account of the mystical teachings of Zen.

Students of scriptural Buddhism run the risk of becoming sticklers for the scriptures, the real meaning of which they fail to understand. By such men ultimate reality is never grasped, and for them Zen would mean salvation. Whereas those who study Zen are too apt to run into the habit of making empty talks and practising sophistry. They fail to understand the significance of letters. To save them, the study of Buddhist scriptures is recom­mended. It is only when these one-sided views are mutually corrected that there is a perfect appreciation of the Buddha's teaching.

Chiang Chih-chi

284

It would be hard to find a better summing up of the conclu­sions, to which any spiritually and psychologically realistic mind must sooner or later come, than the foregoing paragraphs written in the eleventh century by one of the masters of Zen Buddhism.

The extract that follows is a moving protest against the crimes and follies perpetrated in the name of religion by those sixteenth-century Reformers who had turned to God without turning away from themselves and who were therefore far more keenly interested in the temporal aspects of historic Christianity—the ecclesiastical organization, the logic-chop­ping, the letter of Scripture—than in the Spirit who must be worshipped in spirit, the eternal Reality in the selfless know­ledge of whom stands man's eternal life. Its author was Sebas­tian Castelio, who was at one time Calvin's favourite disciple, but who parted company with his master when the latter burned Servetus for heresy against his own heresy. Fortun­ately Castellio was living in Basel when he made his plea for charity and common decency; penned in Geneva, it would have earned him torture and death.

If you, illustrious Prince (the words were addressed to the Duke of Wurtemberg) had informed your subjects that you were coming to visit them at an unnamed time, and had requested them to be prepared in white garments to meet you at your coming, what would you do if on arrival you should find that, instead of robing themselves in white, they had spent their time in violent debate about your person—some insisting that you were in France, others that you were in Spain; some declaring that you would come on horseback, others that you would come by chariot; some holding that you would come with great pomp and others that you would come without any train or following? And what especially would you say if they debated not only with words, but with blows of fist and sword strokes, and if some suc­ceeded in killing and destroying others who differed from them? 'He will come on horseback.' 'No, he will not; it will be by chariot.' 'You lie.' 'I do not; you are the liar.' 'Take that'‑

a blow with the fist. 'Take that'—a sword-thrust through the body. Prince, what would you think of such citizens? Christ asked us to put on the white robes of a pure and holy life; but what occupies our thoughts? We dispute not only of the way to Christ, but of his relation to God the Father, of the Trinity, of predestination, of free will, of the nature of God, of the angels, of the condition of the soul after death—of a multitude of matters that are not essential to salvation; matters, moreover, which can never be known until our hearts are pure; for they are things which must be spiritually perceived.

Sebastian Casteiio

People always get what they ask for; the only trouble is that they never know, until they get it, what it actually is that they have asked for. 

Thus, Protestants might, if they had so desired, have followed the lead of Castellio and Denk; but they pre­ferred Calvin and Luther—preferred them because the doc­trines of justification by faith and of predestination were more exciting than those of the Perennial Philosophy. 

And not only more exciting, but also less exacting; for if they were true, one could be saved without going through that distasteful process of self-naughting, which is the necessary pre-condition of deliverance into the knowledge of eternal Reality. And not only less exacting, but also more satisfying to the intellectual's appetite for clear-cut formulae and the syllogistic demonstra­tions of abstract truths.

 Waiting on God is a bore; but what fun to argue, to score off opponents, to lose one's temper and call it 'righteous indignation,' and at last to pass from contro­versy to blows, from words to what St. Augustine so deli­ciously described as the 'benignant asperity' of persecution and punishment!286

===
Choosing Luther and Calvin instead of the spiritual reformers who were their contemporaries, Protestant Europe got the kind of theology it liked. 

But it also got, along with other unantici­pated by-products, the Thirty Years War, capitalism and the first rudiments of modern Germany.

 'If we wish,' Dean Inge has recently written, 'to find a scapegoat on whose shoulders we may lay the miseries which Germany has brought upon the world. . . I am more and more convinced that the worst evil genius of that country is not Hitler or Bismarck or Frederick the Great, but Martin Luther.... 

It (Lutheranism) worships a God who is neither just nor merciful.... The Law of Nature, which ought to be the court of appeal against unjust authority, is identified (by Luther) with the existing order of society, to which absolute obedience is due.' And so on. 

Right belief is the first branch of the Eightfold Path leading to deliverance; the root and primal cause of bondage is wrong belief, or ignor-ance—an ignorance, let us remember, which is never com­pletely invincible, but always, in the last analysis, a matter of will. If we don't know, it is because we find it more con­venient not to know. Original ignorance is the same thing as original sin.

==

William Ralph Inge KCVO FBA was an English author, Anglican priest, professor of divinity at Cambridge, and dean of St Paul's Cathedral, which provided the appellation by which he was widely known, Dean Inge. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times. Wikipedia

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

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

===

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.

https://draft.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/933322945938724907/919902938746771082

1]

2]

3]

===

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.

===

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. 

====

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.]

====

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.

---

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

---

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.