Religion: Rolling Your Own

In one sense, my experiences and conjectures are very subjective. But in a different sense, what I write reflects a world of Hindu and Buddhist thought which traces back to the Vedas and the Zoroastrian Avestas.

Now, there are people who will say that all this is rubbish, or, worse than rubbish, it is the contrivance of devils and demons who labor to obscure the truth of Moses, or Jesus, or Mohammad, or Luther, or Calvin.

The Psalms say "The Gods of the Nations are demons... but God created the heavens and the earth."

The Qur'an says "They say ’we believe, we believe’ but later, they return to their demons and say ’we did but jest when we told them we believed."

Some people have the fortune, or misfortune, of growing up at their parents knee, reciting the Nicene Creed, or the Baltimore Catechism, or the Suras of the Quran. So, for those people, everything is rubbish, except for what Maimonides said, or Mohammad said, or Calvin and Luther said.

I did not have the good fortune to grow up with any doctrine or catechism or creed. I had to get Zig-Zag papers and Ploughboy tobacco, and roll my own cigarettes, so to speak. I was not lucky enough to be born as The Marlboro Man.

Various primordial naturalist religions encourage each individual to go on their own walk-about, have their own revelation, and find their own spirit guide. Such religions allow that any individual might at any time access the truth and become an enlightened guru.

Other religions see an Abraham, in the wilderness, in a trance, having a vision, or a Jesus, driven into the wilderness, or an Mohammad, fasting, in a cave, conversing with an angel. But, such visionaries become "the seal of the prophets". No subsequent generation is supposed to have a vision or speak a prophesy, for surely, they are in heresy, deluded, in communion with devils and demons.

Hans Kung pointed out, in On Being A Christian, that some decades before Columbus set sail, in The Council of Florence, the Roman Church adamantly stated that there IS NO SALVATION outside the Roman Catholic Church.

A mere several hundred years later, at Vatican II, Rome does an about face, in the brief encyclical Nostra Aetatis, and says that the Catholic is obligated not simply to tolerate non-Christian faiths, but to SEE WITHIN]G non Christian faiths, the ACTIVE SALVIFIC PRESENCE of God.

Theology creates strange bed-fellows.

Roman Catholic Cardinal Newman, was an Anglican clergymen who converted to the Church of Rome, and went on to achieve some greatness. Newman coined the term "illation" to denote the gradual cumulative effect of years and myriads of experiences, subjectively, upon one individual, to bring him, at a glacial slowness in speed, to some inner conviction. The novel "Brideshead Revisited" is a marvelous fictional illustration of just such a process of illation, at work for years, upon the character of the protagonist Charles Ryder, to gradually lead him to the convictions of Roman Catholic belief.

I suppose one of many conclusions I have come to in my life, so far, is that all the really important convictions are subjective and private, and arise through a process of illation, but, by that very nature of their ontology, are not suitable for marketing to the general public in the form of some catechism, since the general public cannot share in the life-time of myriad experiences which give meaning to the conviction.

Everyone can see the video shot from the peak of Mt. Everest, and see the exact same sunset as Hillory, but only a few are able to climb the mountain, and see with their own eyes.

I am going to post what I have so far, and continue to add and edit, so I will not lose this typing...

One obvious question about the dream I described in my post the other day is "Do you believe it was actually God in the form of Krishna appearing to you through a dream, or do you simply see a dream as a working of your own subconscious?" Well I certainly do not claim that God physically entered my dream in some supernatural fashion. I lean more towards the latter view, that dreams are a subjective form of ones conscious and subconscious activities of problem solving and wish fulfillment.

Karl Barth, the theologian, states somewhere that Biblical scripture is not divine in and of itself, like words inscribed by God’s invisible finger, or dictations from the Holy Spirit, but, rather such scriptures are the personal subjective accounts of individuals who had some experience or insight into the nature of the Divinity.

Obviously, what I write about here are my own subjective experiences, both in the waking state, and in the dreaming state.

From memory, if I try to summarize the two main dreams that I had:

1.) In spatial geometry, if point A is distance X from point B, then point B is that same distance, X, from point A. BUT, in spiritual geometry, though some are close to God, and some are far, yet God is equally close to all those individuals. Hence,God’s being at a great distance, and then approaching near in a vision, is a form of Maya (Illusion) which has some positive, protective purpose.

2.) Maya (Illusion) is necessary. A soul would be undone if it saw the utter reality of being. When Jesus tells Peter that, before the rooster crows twice, Peter will deny Jesus thrice, Peter refuses to believe this. YET, when the moment of denial comes, Peter’s memory is clouded by the protective spell of Maya, so that Peter may exercise his freewill choice with no bias of foreknowledge. For, what Christ did was to speak to Peter of the outcome of Peter’s freewill choice, as seen from the vantage-point of the pre-Eternal NOW, in which all events have already happened.

3.) God needs nothing, lacks nothing, desires nothing, possesses all things, and therefore, prayers and worship are for OUR benefit, and not something that God needs. Our relationship to God is not some "quid pro quo" relationship in which we do something for Him, and He does something for us, or we do NOT do something for Him and he does NOT do something for us.

4.) Even God must incarnate and take physical form in order to participate and taste of being and existence. Those are special times when an avatar has descended. But, when it is said that "two sparrows are sold for a farthing, yet not one falls, but your heavenly Father sees it", we should not imagine God peeking through some celestial telescope, to notice the sparrow fall, but rather, the God is INSIDE the sparrow’s being, and sees the sparrow fall PRECISELY because God is part of that sparrow, and the individuality of that sparrow’s experience.

Some years ago, I worked at night, in a tall building in Manhattan. At break time, I would glance out at all the other buildings. Simultaneously, I could see many individuals and their activity; one woman was knitting, one man was reading a book, another was cooking in the kitchen, another was watching television, and so forth. Suddenly I realized that, if I were God, then my vicarious experience of these people would be magnified infinitely, not simply to the 6 billion upon this earth at this moment, but to all who had ever lived, or would ever live, on this world, and perhaps in other worlds of which we know nothing.