MANY PATHS, ONE HORIZON
© Kit Constable Maxwell


Chapter 10.

WORLD RELIGIONS

MANY PATHS, ONE HORIZON
The story of mankind's spiritual awakening, and of the part we play in it.
© Kit Constable Maxwell

10. WORLD RELIGIONS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Religion is the great divider of mankind. More grief has proliferated, more blood has been spilt in the name of religion than in any other single cause. But this unenviable history is generally more characteristic of the humans who practise the religions rather than of the religions themselves. The traditional roles of religious cultures have been to unite people in the face of the great unknown and to offer mankind a sanctuary for his troubled spiritual and intellectual aspirations; a vessel for his joys and his griefs. We aspire to greatness; to this end we invent gods, heroes and legends that demonstrate this search for our role model. Humans are incurably mythopoeic - we love to invent myths, and dare to dream they are real....

All religions are man made, and so were all that ever have been. Religions serve the needs of mankind, not of our gods. Human social needs trigger our conscious and unconscious collusion, and this gives rise to cults and religions.

GOD - FACT OR FICTION?
The recurrent weakness of any cult or religion is their inability to tolerate debate, question or interpretation. Free thinkers are quickly condemned as hypocrites and the religion becomes a dictatorship, with followers dependent upon it and afraid of it - and sinners, antichrists and infidels ring-fencing the faithful.

We perform religious rites, ceremonies and sacrifices in obedience to our cultural traditions and the teaching of our great spiritual gurus - Christ, Buddha, Mohammed and many others. None of them were gods, and none ever claimed to be, but their followers, in their enthusiasm, deified their status early on and in so doing demonstrated their failure to fully comprehend the spiritual nature and direction of their teachings.

Freud observed the parallels between a child's insecurity in his new and unpredictable world, giving rise to the hero worship of the parent in whom it sought refuge. To a child, parents are gods. Religions provided this self same refuge from those fearful aspects of life and death that we are unable to comprehend. The all-powerful god, the divine patriarch, the universal father, became our archetypal refuge from the neurosis of unknowing that is the lot of a child... and the child's unquestioning obedience perpetuates this unhealthy relationship.

BIRTH of RELIGIONS & APPARITIONS
Notes to be read in conjunction with diagram above.

Mythopoea draws colourful folk tales of archetypal heroes, kings, wise men, wicked stepmothers and ogres. And of course, the undefiled maiden, the messiah, the saviour....

Visionaries, avatars and saints - Mother Meera, Vassula, and the Marys of Lourdes, Medjugorie and Fatima. And St Christopher, the travellers' guide, an old myth founded on folklore and finally discredited by the Vatican this century.

Weeping Madonna of Civitavecchia - widely hailed as a 'miracle' and found to be the natural action of osmosis, drawing water up into a pottery figure and expelling it through cracks in the glaze.

The Turin Shroud - a 700 year old fraud that people wanted to believe, right up to the 20th Century. Now scientifically discredited as a fake in much the same words as the official report by Bishop Faus to the Vatican in 1395.

Stigmata - St Francis became, in 1224 AD, the first known stigmatic; there are about 150 stigmatics in the modern world, of whom Padre Pio was the best known. His extraordinary and painful experience of the wounds of Christ gained him world-wide attention which, like most other psyche driven phenomena, defy rational explanation. The Vatican banned Padre Pio's teaching as unprovable and outside of established Christian doctrine, and then in the face of outraged public opinion, beatified him..

Ecstatics - are those who experience intense spiritual exaltation outside the realms of their physical bodies, and include St Theresa, assorted saddhus, ascetics and yogis.

Mariolatory - The virgin Mary has become the recipient of much psychological projection throughout history. Often driven by fantasy, she is portrayed as the undefiled maiden, god-woman and spiritual consort, as well as the Mother of God.

Ghosts - Metaphysical energy waves, locked in time and readable by psychics and sensitives. Ghosts are typically repetitive in their manifestations, lacking the resource to be either creative or inventive.

HEROES
People through history have continually elevated their leaders to deity for somewhat less than spiritual reasons. Like the Emperor Hirohito of wartime Japan, whose station was so elevated that none could even look at him with impunity13.

13 After Emperor Hirohito renounced his immortal status following capitulation in 1946, many bewidlered Japanese projected a status of immortality onto General MacArthur instead.

And Stalin, a charismatic mass murderer, and Chairman Mao, a womanising despot whose influence on the Chinese reached near hysterical levels of adoration and devotion. He was loved as a saviour and revered as a god and feared as a tyrant. Such is the nature of humans' unerring potential for inaccurate judgement, where we rally to project upon our heroes qualities of unsustainable wonder and given the chance, build a world religion on the strength of it.

Every experience of god is an inner experience. Our god can't be bought with prayer or penance; I believe we all have to awaken our own god and become one with the great force of eternity that successive tribes, races and cultures have all wanted to call god.

The early social groups on this planet, from primal hominids of 3,600,000 years ago, to Homo Sapiens, around 600,000 years ago, to the hunter gatherer tribes of 40,000 years ago, lived in harmony with their spiritual selves, their primitive consciousness and the developing awareness of their souls. The last survivors of these tribes, our contemporary Kalahari bushmen, whose history goes back 40,000 years to the early stone age, the Aborigines and the isolated Javanese hill tribes exhibit this inner spiritual balance now so curiously absent in our modern world.

Differing colour, creed and culture created the social divisions which demanded tribal unity in the face of alien influences.

Many tribes turned to weaponry in active defence of their people, their property, their beliefs, against the certainty of violation, moral or physical, from less socially evolved neighbours.

The mighty, 4,000 year-old megaliths of Stonehenge

Through the ages a host of priests and chiefs were quick to recognise that the unseen and wrathful face of their gods was their mandate for tribal power. They established vociferous propaganda campaigns against neighbouring tribes for their different, blasphemous beliefs; the people shook their fists and rallied around their leaders and fought the self righteous wars of divine indignation, and died the death of folk heroes and martyrs to their tribal cause. Then as Missionaries, Crusaders and Armies of God they set out to convert all non believers and infidels to their way of religious thinking, using sweet words of love backed up by the sword and the cudgel. And their gods looked on, and said nothing....

ETHNIC CLEANSING
Little has changed to the present day, except that we now call it Ethnic Cleansing.... With knowledge of other cultures came fear for ourselves and our beliefs; no longer the blind acceptance of our unquestioned social and religious stance, but the doubts, the heresies and the excesses of fundamentalism, with holy wars, jihads and crusades.

We are still threatened by the cultural clashes of our world's religions. Moslems fight Jews, Catholics fight Protestants, Hindus fight Moslems, and we all call them Holy Wars. And now we are talking of the 20th century, and we have guns, not clubs....

Just as our social perspectives have changed and matured through the interminable aeons of time since early man, so have our religious needs. We no longer seek to appease the gods with child sacrifices, the hot blood of newly slain infants spilled in what would appear to be, to our civilised minds, a lamentable error of spiritual judgement. Slaves are no longer buried alive, wide eyed and startled, in the temple foundations. Paganism has given way, in very recent history, to the monotheistic religions of Judaism, (from 2,000 BC) to Buddhism, (500 BC) and Christianity, (30 AD) to Islam, (622 AD). The great Indian flowering of Hinduism, (from 2,000 BC), differs but slightly, a polytheistic cult in whose many faces lie the infinite light of the Paramatman, the divine essence of Brahma.

A cursory glance at our world religions show how predictably they accommodate mankind's need to gratify his social and psychic perspectives. These social needs have powered the development of all the great man-made religious myths.

Rather than reflecting the demands of the gods they worship, they reflect the psycho-social needs of the people who practice them.

RELIGIONS COMPARED
The chart that follows compares the four main religions and the primary motivations governing them, like the way we perceive things giving rise to the structures which serve our social perspective .

FUNCTIONS OF HUMAN PERCEPTION POWERING
THE DEVELOPMENT OF WORLD RELIGIONS


HINDU
- Feelings Oneness with the gods of love, of war, of art and the expressible feelings for life. Vegetarian, non kill. Festivals, fakirs and firewalkers.
BUDDHISM - Intuition Meditative response and culture of inner values. Individual nirvana and spiritual transcendence fired by the psychic spark of intuition.
ISLAM - Thinking Auditory input, minarets and the daily call to prayer. Poetic and thinking style of abstract Islamic art and design, and the unseen face of Allah.
CHRISTIANITY - Sensation Crucified saviour. Lots of agony and earthly sensation. Visual and tactile art. Participatory and theatrical sacrifices, willing martyrdom.


Mankind's social needs are still fulfilled by religions, this cannot be doubted; the fervour of the annual Moslem migration where 1,000,000 pilgrims travel to the desert locked city of Mecca, to attend the ten day Haj pilgrimage, and encircle the Kaa'ba, the great black box of spiritual symbolism and kiss the Prophet's sacred meteorite. The faithful then climb the adjacent mountain and throw stone after vengeful stone at the devil's symbolic image in a frenzy of purgative outrage. All this is an unparalleled and unprecedented statement of the religious needs of mankind and his desire for oneness with his spirituality, his god.

And the Christian churches, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant, where mighty cathedrals stand in timeless tribute to the willing hands that toiled for so many centuries to build them. And like Islam, Christianity was the inspiration for an endless stream of the greatest art in existence. Holy words and the verse of ages was intoned with music of sublime delight, ascending in an unending toll to the sorrowful voice of man's lament for his lost soul. Here revealed is the fundamental difference between mankind and every other life form on this planet, the joys and the griefs of intellect.

WILL OF GOD
We still need our religions - nothing has changed. We need our role model, we need to aspire to a moral order, a social charter, a cultural code. But in 2000 years of Christianity, much has changed. We have witnessed every excess of ungodly behaviour in the name of our silent, unspeaking and unmoved god; wars have been fought, empires won (The Papacy, Conquistadors), and lost (Colonial missionaries, Crusades), and we defend our actions, like everyone else, in the name of our god.

Are we performing the will of our god? Christianity, the daughter of Judaism, came into being 2,000 years ago at a time of general illiteracy and was fostered by a poor and politically subjugated society; religions thrive in such situations. The 'Word-of-God' expressed, in common with all other world religions, the unchallengeable authority of its promoters, and Faith was the word used to explain away the inexplicable. The people, some of them, followed this new cult of Christianity, lived for it and died for it. The remainder held true to their Jewish persuasion, the faith of Christ's earthly heritage, and wondered if the world wanted a new religion, born, as it were, off the back of the old one. Martyrdom (in Roman amphitheatres) became fashionable around 200 AD and the message of Christ spread far as a result. Meanwhile the Romans, in their decadence, relished the new sport.

Subsequent Christian history revealed mankind's every excess enshrined in the Word of God. Avarice, immorality, exploitation and persecution. But Christianity survived, and survives still, sometimes resting on the true pillars of Christ's enlightened teaching, and sometimes whipped into line by vociferous bigots wagging accusing fingers and empowering themselves with threats of Satan and the Day of Judgement. But its continued survival is a tribute to the sincerity and truth of this 2000 year old religion.

PISCEAN RELIGION
What is wrong with Christianity? There is nothing wrong with Christianity, but humanity and Christianity have grown apart, become estranged. The religions of the Piscean age served the needs of the uneducated, non-questioning majority of its supporters. Religion has stood still, as religions do, but mankind hasn't. Western mankind, men and women, are now blessed with education and intellect which is accelerating faster than at any time in history. We are growing at an unstoppable rate, and we must respect that gift and cherish it.

We learned our social code, and respect the greatest of Christ's teachings to 'love our neighbour'. We accept the Christian stance on moral righteousness. But I suggest these are social attributes, not spiritual ones, and for decades we have been subjugating our intellectual gifts to the demands of an outmoded religious dogma. Priests have been suspended for talking of 'the symbolism of the Mass'... or that greatest of biological contradictions, the Virgin Mother. Nobody mentions the soul or its needs, we are all too busy arguing some very ungodly principles, often ringing of clerical chauvinism, and missing the spiritual point of our very existence.

RELIGIOUS GOAL
Christians spend an inordinate amount of time arguing the sometimes obscure meaning of parables, or miracles, or the merits of birth control, or celibacy, or marriage for priests, or the ordination of women. The Pope recently renewed the ban on Astrology, once itself a sacred art. More recently, in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, this fervent pontiff revealed the great distance between his traditional perspectives, born out of centuries of unquestioned papal authority, and the rapidly changing needs of his now educated flock. The encyclical reiterates the papal stance on Roman Catholic matters; no birth control, no divorce, no women priests, no clerical marriage - all of which suggest an untimely renewal of the excesses of papal empowerment, typical of the death throes of any timeworn dictatorships. Shouts of papal infallibility fall on deaf ears in our intellectual age. Followers of a cult which denies the individual's right of conscience and moral destiny will not last long in this Aquarian epoch.

It is clear that the development of our soul, our interface with true enlightenment, should be our one religious goal; but our Western religions have always promoted the concept of an external god, outside and beyond our humble perspective, and have consistently failed to awaken the god force within, the spark of the divine that is our totality and our destiny.

Religions today generally serve an increasingly social role and a decreasingly spiritual one. Our changing social priorities have robbed us of one of our great cultural traditions, the weekly celebration of our ancestral beliefs. The Islamic call-to-prayer, the Jewish Kabbalah readings, the Christian Sunday Mass, all bind tight the knot of family unity. And we are much the poorer for its world-wide decline

But lament for past glories does not rekindle devotion to a culture that is wanting for spiritual percipience. A developing intellect will always clash with traditional perspectives, and we live in an age of tremendous intellectual change. Farmer's boys now train as bankers, housekeepers spawn research chemists and atomic physicists, each driven far from their social origins by their new commercial vocations.

SANCTUARY
Religions bring us tantalisingly close to a rich spiritual encounter - encouraged by the timeless splendour of our traditional rituals. But they seldom engage that inner fire that unites us with our own divinity. We project upon our religions impossible demands and seek externally that which lies within. We worship our religion but forget to nourish our soul. Only we can awaken our inner enlightenment - Buddha taught us this long ago - and in an age fired by an intellectual perspective, rather than by a disciplinarian one, nothing less will suffice.

While the religious concept of our gods has changed through history, the needs of our soul remain constant and continually in need of succour, whether through religion or not. Religions are not the only route to our god, and god is not the property of our religions, but of humanity. Churches and their priests sometimes forget that. Different people have different religious callings. Our religious rituals serve an irreplaceable need, albeit a social one. The solemnity of baptism, the sanctity of marriage, the spiritual dignity of death. Religions nourish and sustain us at times of grief, times of chaos and times of inner confusion. They are a sanctuary for our prayers and exhortations, our only available response to the unfathomable mysteries of life and those powerful experiences of feeling that cannot be ordered or controlled; qualities which awaken such deep feelings for life and spiritual love. In these and more reside the many good experiences of our spiritual encounter of divinity.

There is no better way of communicating with our inner, spiritual self than through patronising our religious calling. We need our religions and we need our rituals - but we need to acknowledge their limitations, and not to project upon them something that they are not. It is only to ourselves that we must answer for the nature of our own spiritual destiny, and only we who will judge the veracity of our spiritual endeavours. Embracing our religions may further our psycho-spiritual goals; becoming a compliant servant of an unquestionable religious discipline, dominated by those who would derive some sense of power from their elevated clerical status, will clearly have the reverse effect.

Religions may demand an undying devotion to their god, but this commitment is valueless until we have learned to quantify our concept of god - if we are searching for the lost father, a social saviour or spiritual redeemer, then we are falling into the role of the dependant child trying to find someone worthy of his ill-considered projections.

Spiritual empowerment is all about taking responsibility for ourselves and our spiritual beliefs.

Next Page  

 


 

Table of Contents - click on any chapter to open it
Section
Title
Page
i
Prologue                   Click here...
v
ii.
Preface
viii
1.
Space and Matter
1
2.
Evolution of Life
5
3.
Birth of Awareness
14
4.
Spiritual Goals
28
5.
Psychology
43
6.
Evolution and Astrology
52
7.
Astrology and Fate
59
8.
Light, Love and Feeling
68
9.
Primal Scream
75
10.
World Religions This page
82
11.
Ethics of Caring
96
12.
Thought Conditioning
102
13.
Miracles and Prayer
108
14.
Shadow and the Unconscious
116
15.
Journey in Spirit
124
16.
Pantheism and Matter
131
Appendix I
Glossary of Terms
136
Appendix II
Bibliography
139
Appendix III
Acknowledgements
144